Countercultism

The Problem

On the face of it, the sheer diversity and fluidity of false pieties present a moving target for the Christian apologist. Even the major religions like Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam evince a wide variety of divisions and subdivisions. And that is even before you toss in all the cults, large and small, that pop up anywhere at any time. How can a Christian apologist form a united front against such a varied and protean array of alternatives?

But despite their superficial diversity, it is possible to classify impious pieties according to a few leading ideas. And that, in turn, offers an opening for apologetics inasmuch as it lays bare the general conditions under which a given alternative is either true or false.

I would suggest that impious piety can be broken down into three different taxonomic divisions, so that—by process of elimination—you can disqualify all of the contenders in a three-round process. This classification scheme does not, in fact, disprove the alternatives. Rather, it lays out the basic lines of attack. It is still up to the apologist to do the detail work. But it helps him to know what he's pushing up against.

Table 1
Revealed Religion
Adventism
Christianity
Christian Science
Gnosticism
Hinduism
Islam
Judaism
Mormonism
Mysticism
Occultism
Roman Catholicism
Russellism
Swedenborgianism

Natural Religion
Buddhism
Confucianism
Deism
Taoism
Ufology

(Strictly speaking, ufology is a secular creed, but it's a surrogate religion—satisfying the same psychological need and homologous traditional religious structures [e.g., ETs take over the role of patron saints, guardian angels, or omniscient and omnipotent saviors].)

Now, what do I mean by this distinction? Revealed religions are religions which profess, rightly or wrongly, to base their claim on some form or multiple-form of supernatural guidance or divine revelation. Revelation supplies the truth-condition, and failure to satisfy that condition falsifies the faith in question.

There is a broad distinction between revealed religions and natural religions. A natural religion will base its claim on something other than revelation, viz., tradition, reason, insight, intuition, observation, experience, science, &c. This raises two questions: (i) Is the criterion a valid criterion? And (ii) does the criterion validate the faith in question?

Let us take Buddhism as a case of a natural religion. Buddhism is based on personal insight and tradition. In particular, it pivots on a tradition that codifies the personal insight of the Buddha. So in broaching the truth or falsity of Buddhism, there are two lines of attack.

How do we know what Buddha taught? Is Buddhist tradition reliable? How do we know that Buddhist tradition is reliable? How much time elapsed between the death of Buddha and the earliest written sources? What about rival traditions?

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that Buddhist tradition is reliable, if Buddha didn't lay claim to divine insight, then how does he know what he's talking about? Isn't he just another fallible, short-lived and shortsighted mortal like you and me? So why should I believe that he had any special insight or wisdom to impart on the ultimate meaning of life?

For purposes of illustration, I've singled out Buddhism. But we could pose the same question about Confucius or L. Ron Hubbard or Elijah Muhammad. Each of them was just another sinful, uninspired man. What do they know that I don't know?

Another question we could ask is, If Buddhism was a reform movement, how does reforming a false religion (Hinduism) entail the truth of the reform movement? The weakness with a merely reactionary stance is that the opposing position still supplies the point of reference. Even if you're right in what you deny, that doesn't make you right in what you affirm. Because there is only one right answer to any given question, and an infinite variety of wrong ones, reforming an error doesn't automatically turn a falsehood into the Gospel truth.

In Gulliver's Travels, Swift tells a parable about two rival religious sects. One party believes that you should only crack open a hard-boiled egg on the small end, but the other on the large end. The point of the satire is that a reader would regard both sides as equally ludicrous.

That leaves the category of revealed religion. The key question is how we validate or invalidate a revelation claim. One way of approaching that answer is to shift to a second classification scheme.

Table 2
Christian heresy
Adventism
Christian Science
Gnosticism
Islam
Mormonism
Neoplatonism
Rabbinic Judaism
Roman Catholicism
Russellism
Swedenborgianism

By a Christian heresy, I don't mean a heresy that is Christian (which would be oxymoronic), but a heresy of some Christian derivation. It is a heresy in reaction to Christianity, or a heresy which tries to trade on the good name of Christ or build on the Bible.

The acid test is consistency with Scripture. A given heresy may claim to supplement Scripture, or subtract from Scripture, or interpret Scripture according to an esoteric sense, but however a Christian heresy positions itself in relation to Scripture, it needs to be consistent with Scripture if it claims any measure of Biblical warrant for its position.

So it comes down to an exegetical question: does a given heresy contradict the Bible? If so, how and where? The question is simple, but the answer is complex because it involves us in some detailed exegesis, and because different Christian heresies involve different exegetical errors.

However, a Christian apologist need not reinvent the wheel each and every time. In the case of the older cults and historic heresies, there is already a preexisting polemical literature to draw upon, and the newer cults are usually a rehash of old heresies.

Yet this still leaves us with a number of chess pieces as yet remaining on the board. And that, in turn, brings us to the third classification scheme.

Table 3
Personal Absolutism
Judaism
Christianity
Islam

Impersonal Absolutism
Buddhism
Confucianism
Hinduism
Neoplatonism
Taoism

Personal Inabsolutism
Animism
Folk Buddhism
Folk Hinduism
Mormonism
Occultism
Ufology

A claim to supernatural guidance is only as good as your view of the supernatural. In ontology, the "absolute" is the ultimate ground of being. In the traditional monotheistic religions, the absolute is personal. (cf. J. Frame, Apologetics to the Glory of God [P&R, 1994], 34-40.)

In Oriental philosophy, the absolute is ordinarily impersonal—be it atheistic or pantheistic. And in primitive or folk forms of religion, the ground of being is personal, but not absolute or ultimate, for it consists of finite agents— agents which are limited in wisdom and power. There is also a sense in which personal inabsolutism reduces to impersonal absolutism inasmuch as finite agents are subordinate to a blind cosmic process.

In Buddhist ontology, which stands at the antirealist end of the spectrum, the ground of being is the ground of nonbeing or nothingness—whatever exactly that amounts to. Buddhist ontology is pure process and plurality. But if there are no unities or continuities, then how can anything either be or be known? There is no being, only becoming, which is, in turn, reducible to nonbeing. Both the subject and object of knowledge are in a constant state of flux. There is no stabilizing principle, like the divine decree; no sure word of God; no universals, but only bare and blurry particulars. The same could be said of Mormon metaphysics.

Impersonal absolutism and personal inabsolutism both entail an irrational worldview inasmuch as the ground of being is either irrational or fallible—and even the fallible agents are reducible to a blind cosmic process. At bottom, there's no functional difference between atheism and pantheism. If, on the one hand, the divine is held to be utterly transcendent, then we have the practical equivalent of atheism, for such a divine entity is unknowable and otiose. If, on the other hand, the divine is held to be utterly immanent, then the divine entity is indistinguishable from the inanimate order or a mental projection.

In either case, you have no basis for divine revelation or divine action inasmuch as the act of divine self-revelation presupposes an personal agent, and not some sort of divine entity that is either above or below the threshold of intelligible personality.

However, the popular forms of Hinduism and Buddhism incline to polytheism rather than atheism or pantheism. What about those?

These are also inadequate to sustain a doctrine of revelation, for finite gods (or aliens) would be fallible, shortsighted, and—for all we know—quite devious. In paganism the gods are often as devious as any human crook.

Even if Krishna existed, he would be an unreliable guide, for he would not be omniscient, omnipotent or especially truthful. He, too, would be at the mercy of impersonal forces beyond his ken and control. He would not be above telling lies.

In addition, the methods of obtaining occult knowledge are unreliable. For example, the Vedic sages received their "revelations" by getting high on mushrooms. But this makes them no more trustworthy than Timothy Leary or John Lennon. And commerce with the dark side is inherently untrustworthy.

On the face of it, Islam subscribes to a personal absolute. And that's because Allah is a rip-off of Judeo-Christian tradition. But in Islamic theology, there can be no analogy between the Creator and the creature. In that event, the attributes predicated of Allah reduce to sheer equivocation. That being so, Islam is ultimately committed to an impersonal absolute, for Allah is just as unintelligible as the Plotinian One. (Cf. D. Burrell, "The Unknowability of God in al-Ghazali," Religious Studies [1987], 23:171-82; F. Shehadi, Ghazali's Unique and Unknowable God [Leiden: Brill, 1964].)