I’ve never been much interested in sociology – though I do see the interest and importance of it. But being involved for so long in theological debates has made me more interested in it.
Consider this recent interaction of mine with Dr. Lydia McGrew, at her blog Extra Thoughts.
Now, I am in a sense changing the subject in my comments. That is on me. She posted about the (alleged) terrible errors of Dr. Michael Licona, and I’m chiming in and correcting what are to me clearly false assumptions she’s making about some famous New Testament passages.
She has been much concerned that Licona has been espousing, or sometimes nearly espousing, non-evangelical views about the NT, and moreover views that might give some advantage to evangelical nemesis Dr. Bart Ehrman. She will not be distracted from her goal by such matters as rightly understanding Mark 2 and John 10.
Not that there isn’t anything interesting in this dust-up about just how and in what way the fourth Gospel is historically accurate. I’m just not convinced that an alarm needs to be sounded.
Back to the NT, of course, she no doubt is convinced that she does rightly understand those passages I commented on. Thus, she refuses to lift a finger to engage my wholly non-speculative, text-based points about those texts (in the comments below her post), which lead away from reading them as teaching “the deity of Christ.” (Never mind that this abstract phrase might mean many things – let’s just say for now that if it is true, then Jesus is divine in the way that the one God is divine.)
Why is she so unwilling to hear simple arguments about the meaning of the NT? Here, I speculate. First, it has been my experience that those interested in apologetics often read mostly like-minded folks, except for the necessary reading of a few nemeses. (Biblical unitarians don’t qualify as a nemeses, as we’re perceived to be too little a threat, so most apologetics types ignore our work completely.) It is very possible that she has literally never encountered these points about John 10 and Mark 2 anywhere in her studies. Not knowing, off the cuff, what to say, she’d rather move on. It is important to see that mainstream Protestant theology since at least the late 19th c. has been eager to dismiss the unitarian minority report, as it cuts directly at the heart of their defining narrative, that they are the folks who derive their doctrines from clear, obvious NT teaching. The bottom line is that it is very easy to be an educated evangelical nowadays and only have this vague notion of some silly “rationalists” called “Arius” and then later”Socinus” who (for reasons no one can fathom, unless it is just that they refuse to believe what they can’t understand) denied the Trinity – and really of little else in the history of non-trinitarian theologies.
Second, it is human nature to be complacent and unworried – even smug – when one’s view is a majority view, or at least, a majority view with the right crowd, the good guys. I think that within at least American evangelicalism, it is probably a majority view that Mark in chapter 2 is telling us that Jesus can forgive sins because he is God, and that in John 10 Jesus claims to be God or to be “equal to” God. I’ve been there myself. It took quite a lot for me to be willing to re-open these issues. One of those things was knowledge of real, obvious, born again, Jesus-following Christians, who go with the NT when it conflicts with catholic traditions – even ones beloved by the heirs of the Magisterial Reformation. I was totally ignorant of such people until perhaps around 1999 or so – and then I only knew about a few early modern examples. I met the first one in real life… I think maybe it was 2009? The received wisdom among evangelicals would be that anyone who claimed to be a Christian and yet does not agree that “Jesus is God” or that “God is a Trinity” must be either a cultist or a crank or a (theological) “liberal.” Not true! But that’s what I formerly accepted as obvious.
Third, Christian philosophers, especially ones with technical, non-historical specialties, are often loathe to engage directly with the Bible. Even though they sometimes see the low standards of argument in systematic theology and in related fields, they would rather leave these matters to the experts and hope for the best. Partly, this is just not what most of us have been trained to do. It seems better to just dismiss any less popular reading as obviously wrong; that such could be correct may strike one as like a conspiracy theory. Now, I can see why philosophers poorly grounded in the history of philosophy may want, even need to pass the buck here. But by the year 2000, I had spent quite a lot of energy reading the works of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Hume, Reid, Locke, Berkeley, Plotinus, the Stoics, etc. that I could not justify just taking, say, evangelical theologians’ and apologists’ word for what the NT writings actually say. I took a long, hard look at them, listening to more than recent American evangelicals.
And that was no supererogatory act on my part. These writings were given to all followers of Jesus, not only to the scholarly elite. I was just doing what fidelity to divine revelation demanded. Let’s be good Protestants and good Bereans, and always be willing to re-examine claims in light of the NT sources. Sometimes we need to take a break from that defensive apologetic stance.
I would think that in principle, Dr. McGrew agrees, and indeed, in that very post she avers from over-reading incidents like Jesus walking on the water (i.e. inferring from this that Jesus is there asserted to be Yahweh himself). In this, she admirably (and in my view correctly) goes against current evangelical scholarly fashion.
Fashion must yield to the known facts about the texts. Perhaps when the smug dissipates, she’ll take a look at Mark 2 in light of Mark’s actual language there and what Matthew does with it, and at John 10:31-33 in light of what immediately follows.
As to this encounter, she sees fit to dismiss my arguments with this: “Pausing to argue with someone who denies the deity of Jesus would take time away from other projects…”
Of course, who cares whether or not she wrestles with me. What’s overdue, is some wrestling with the NT, and squarely facing how it conflicts with some later catholic traditions.
I have commented on this “denial” rhetoric before. But here, this is not mere rhetoric. She does, I take it, peg me as a mere denier of the obvious. This reflects a lamentable ignorance of the long history of views like mine in Christian history, from the second to the 21st centuries. Dismissing current day “biblical unitarian” views, or various other historical unitarian theologies as “denying the deity of Christ” or even “denying the Trinity” is foolish, like calling all non-Calvinists “deniers of God’s sovereignty,” or calling all Protestants “Pope-deniers,” or all non-Molinists “Middle Knowledge deniers.” There are positive, fairly well thought-through bases for such views, and it is just a mistake to construe them as merely reactionary or bitter-ender denialism.
I say all this without casting stones, because as I said before, I was equally, if not more smug in the late 1990s; I specifically remember passing an old Congregationalist unitarian church in Providence (now a UU church) and explaining to my wife that those were just some silly oddballs who denied the deity of Christ, or words to that effect. I couldn’t have cared less what they thought about Christian theology. I’d just as soon inquire into the opinions of Oprah or Bishop Spong.
As I’ve said before, it was reading Clarke on the NT that got my attention. I quickly saw that in many ways he had a much better handle on NT theology than I did. But what kept my attention, was seeing, over time, how very non-trinitarian the NT is.
I need to do a podcast some time for those who are basically unaware of this long minority report in mainstream Christian traditions.
Dr. Lydia McGrew: I would recommend starting with this, and then reading this. Don’t be afraid to take the red pill. 🙂
