To begin with, Rauser's a bully. He attacks soft targets. He routinely picks on Christian laymen who lack his sophistication.
In addition, he's duplicitous. Rauser's problem isn't doubt. Rauser is very dogmatic. He's convinced the Bible teaches moral and factual falsehood–including Jesus. Doubt isn't the same thing as denial. Rauser is pulling a bait-switch scam. Randal Rauser openly denies biblical teaching. And he's made it his mission in life to destroy faith in Scripture so that he can replace it with his progressive substitute for Christianity.
I have little sympathy for Christian college profs. or seminary profs. who suffer from an intellectual crisis of faith. At that stage in their education and intellectual development, they should have worked through the stock intellectual objections to Christianity. I'm more sympathetic to emotional doubt if their crisis is due to personal tragedy. Even then, they need some theodicies to fall back on.
Side note: if you want to be taken seriously on a serious topic, maybe take a shower, shave, comb your hair put on something other than a ratty tshirt, and film your serious comments somewhere other than your mom's basement? lol
ReplyDeleteWhen I was at Calvin College, I had a history professor (World History 1) who clearly relished in shattering students' faith. He dedicated two classes in the semester to the "history of Israel" where he stated that the exodus, the conquest, and most of the Old Testament was ahistorical. Israel's religion was rooted in polytheism. There are two things that really stood out to me:
ReplyDelete-this is a Christian school. A friend of mine who knew him well pressed him on what he meant by "the Incarnation" and he ended up articulating a doctrine that was not the Incarnation- Jesus was an enlightened man or something. I have no idea if he was even a theist in the traditional sense.
-No alternatives were even mentioned as having academic standing. And not just conservative approaches, but more moderate approaches such as reflected in Dever or in the general consensus that Israel's tradition reflects an echo of a memory of certain ancestors being slaves in Egypt.
This was directed to freshmen, and it was obvious that he took great delight in sending students into crises of faith. I ended up emailing the class with a list of resources on alternative perspectives on the issue. One student came up to me afterwards to say how important knowing that these alternatives existed was to him.
This isn't about doubt, it's unbelief. Doubt is understood properly as a spiritual illness, one of the many manifestations of concupiscence encountered by the Christian in his regenerate existence. For men like Rauser, doubt is part of the purpose- it is an essential stage in the deconstruction of traditional patterns of belief.