Showing posts with label Andy Bannister. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Andy Bannister. Show all posts
Saturday, May 23, 2020
Wednesday, October 30, 2019
Thursday, August 15, 2019
Wednesday, March 27, 2019
COMMON MUSLIM MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF CHRISTIANITY
Having looked at ways Christians sometimes misunderstand Islam, I shifted to talking about the three major misunderstandings that many Muslims have about Christians, and I think these are deeper and more significant.
I began by tackling the fact that many Muslims tend assume that all Westerners are Christian. That means Muslims often look at the things that are wrong in the West (e.g. sexual immorality, violence etc.) and think that those things are ‘Christian.’ So we disentangled that a little bit. At the same time, many Muslims fail to appreciate that for Christians, conversion is apersonal decision. You are not a Christian because you were born in a Christian country, or born to Christian parents; rather you have to have a personal point of deciding to follow Christ to be a Christian. So that gave me the opportunity to share what commitment to Christ looks like.
The second Muslim misunderstanding of Christianity is that they misunderstand the Bible. They frequently think that it has been corrupted and changed. However, I showed the Muslims in Edinburgh that that idea is not actually in the Qur’an (which strongly affirms the Bible in many verses)—rather it is an idea that developed about 200 years later in Islam, arising during the debates between Muslims and Christians in the 2nd century of Islam. In fact, if Muslims took their own Qur’an seriously, it would challenges them to take the Bible seriously. I also talked the audience through a lot of the recent critical work on the early manuscripts of the Qur’an, which reveal the many textual variants and scribal changes in the early text. Many Muslims assume they have a “perfect text” with no difficult textual issues—I gently deconstructed that assumption.
And third and finally, I spoke about how Muslims often misunderstand Jesus. Many Muslims think that Christians have taken a mere man and elevated him to a position of deity. I said that that actually fails to understand the words of Jesus himself: the reason that Christians believe what we do about Jesus because of his own words and actions. Many of Jesus’s words would have been blasphemous if he wasn’t God (such as forgiving sin, for example). All of Jesus’s claims about himself culminate in Jesus’s trial before Caiaphas the High Priest, where Jesus was outrightly accused of blasphemy and asked, “Are you the Son of God?” Rather than say, “no”, Jesus quoted Daniel chapter 7, about the Son of Man coming on the clouds of glory, which is an incredible passage which claims divinity. When Caiaphas heard this, he tore his robe, and cried, “Blasphemy!” and sentenced Jesus to death. So, Jesus’s whole life and ministry was about this claim that he is more than a man, and of course the authorities knew what he was claiming and crucified him for it. Now if Jesus has stayed dead that would have been that, but he rose from the dead three days later, the divine vindication of the claims Jesus had made.
A LIVELY Q&A
It was an incredible privilege to be standing in front of an almost entirely Muslim audience, unpacking the scriptures and sharing about Jesus. After the talk, we launched straight into the Q&A and it was very friendly, but pretty lively! Many of the Muslim audience had never heard any of this stuff, more than one of them saying they’d never heard a Christian explain and defend what Christians believed.
Perhaps the topic that drew the most the questions were the critical issues on the Qur’an. Muslims are fond of pointing to textual variants in biblical manuscripts, but I simply pointed out that all ancient texts have variants in their manuscripts, including the Qur’an (I have 3,000 or more on my computer, easily accessible and browsable through the Qur’an Gateway software package). The question is not “does a text have variants?” but “has the scholarship been done to ensure we can trust the text we have today?” Christians have always been open and honest about our manuscripts and indeed it is Christians who have built the best tools for studying biblical manuscripts. By contrast, Muslims have tended to ignore or hide the issues in early Qur’an manuscripts, which is why we are only finally now seeing good computer databases of early Qur’an manuscript variants made available. When I put some of these textual variants up on PowerPoint slides in Edinburgh, there were at times almost audible gasps from the audience who had never seen these kind of problems in their earliest manuscripts.
https://www.solas-cpc.org/an-evening-with-edinburgh-university-islamic-society/
Monday, December 24, 2018
Tuesday, November 06, 2018
Monday, November 05, 2018
God and good
I watched a recent debate between Peter Singer and Andy Bannister.
A few general observations:
1. The debate was somewhat frustrating inasmuch as the underlying issue is the difference between atheism and Christianity. The difference between Christian bioethics and secular bioethics is parasitic on that underlying division. In a way it would be more useful to debate atheism directly. However, exposing the serrated austerity of secular bioethics is useful. When the consequences of atheism are spotlighted, that's a reason to reevaluate atheism itself.
2. Singer has certain cards in his deck. He's an atheist. This life is all you get. Life has no ultimate purpose. Humans monkeys with big brains. (He didn't say that in the debate, but that's his Darwinian viewpoint.) The brain produces the mind. Although human intelligence overtakes animal intelligence, human babies are less intelligent than adult chimpanzees.
Given the hand he dealt himself, there are only so many ways he can play it. I expect he regards complaints about the harshness of his position as childish and irrelevant. No point complaining about the barbed consequences of his position if that's the reality of the situation. If God doesn't exist, then that takes best options off the table. Raising idealistic objections to his position ignores the bleak, unyielding facts of our evanescent existence in a Godless universe. As with captives in a concentration camp, the razor wire is a fixture of our existence, whether we like it or not.
3. Up to a point, Singer is right–if atheism is right. But even on his own grounds, Singer's own position is an ad hoc compromise between idealism and nihilism. It's more consistent for an atheist to be a hedonistic nihilist. If there's no God, no afterlife, then it boils down to naked power and ruthless self-interest.
Singer never provided an adequate explanation for his claim that he's not a naturalist when it comes to ethics. And his philanthropy is a sugar-coated cyanide capsulate to make the toxic philosophy more palatable and go down smoother.
One can't help noticing that Singer is now an old man. By his own standards, he's siphoning off scarce medical resources that could better be spent on the younger generation who have so much more to live for.
4. Singer repeats the same blunder as Hitchens regarding the atonement. The purpose of the atonement is not to eradicate evil or suffering but to make it possible for God to justly forgive sin. The eradication of evil and suffering awaits the Parousia.
5. Regarding the Euthyphro dilemma, That's is a challenge to divine command theory. Of course, divine command theorists have responses.
However, a Christian can sidestep that objection by shifting to natural law theory. Human duties are grounded in how God made us. The same rules don't apply to lions, not because the rules are arbitrary, but because lions are different kinds of creatures.
Human duties correspond to human nature. And a human nature that's designed. The notion that some actions are contrary to how things are supposed to be is a teleological principle. But atheism banishes teleological explanations from nature. The Blind Watchmaker and all that. No ultimate purpose for anything.
Tuesday, March 20, 2018
Thursday, February 01, 2018
Fairies at the bottom of the garden
Randal Rauser is obsessed with Andy Bannister. A couple of preliminary observations before I delve into the details:
1. I think part of the disagreement is due to the fact that Rauser is a "progressive Christian" while Bannister is far more evangelical. Biblical revelation isn't Rauser's benchmark. He only believes what he can justify philosophically.
2. There's also the function of Bannister's tweets. Obviously, he's not attempting to provide a philosophically nuanced definition in a tweet. It may be that Bannister uses provocative tweets as conversation-starters. A way of getting a rise out of atheists in order to initiate a dialogue.
Many Christians feel guilty about their failure to witness to neighbors and strangers. But one problem is they don't know how to get the conversation going. One way is to wear a cap or shirt with a provocative religious message. That will prompt some unbelievers to quiz you about the message. In that case it's the unbeliever who initiates the dialogue, and you take it from there. It may be that Bannister's tweets are ice-breakers in that regard.
Monday, January 08, 2018
Performance variants
Bart Erhman pretentiously instructs people to read the Gospels horizontally as well as vertically. Don't just read through one Gospel at a time, but compare them side-by-side.
Of course, that's hardly a novel approach. There are published Gospel harmonies that do just that.
For Erhman, this exposes discrepancies between the Gospels. Some scholars explain these "discrepancies" by appeal to redaction criticism.
In this interview, Andy Bannister discusses the oral nature of the Koran. Around the 30-36 min. mark he describes the nature of "performance variants," and then applies that to the Gospels. These are not redactional variants, but reflect the living voice of Christ:
Piggybacking on his argument, I'd like to make an additional point. It's common for scholars to remark that since Jesus was an itinerate preacher, we'd expect him to repeat himself at different times and places. And by the same token, we'd expect performance variants. There'd be minor verbal changes as he adapted his message to a particular audience at a particular time and place. Different synonyms. Adding a word here, subtracting a word there. Even when talking about the same thing or retelling the same story, speakers naturally reword things. Spontaneous variations.
Yet there's a related, but neglected consideration. We shouldn't expect performance variants to confined to the same speech at a different time and place, but to the same speech at the same time and place.
It's generally acknowledged that the speeches, sermons, and dialogues in the Gospels and Acts are condensed. One stereotypical difference between the spoken word and the written word is that speech is a redundant medium.
That parallels the difference between readers and listeners. A reader can process the material at his own pace whereas a listener hears what is said at the speaker's pace. Likewise, if a reader doesn't follow a sentence the first time he sees it, he can stop, go back, and reread it.
By contrast, a listener can't pause the speaker. If an idea is spoken only once, it may get past the listener too fast to register. If a listener doesn't understand a statement, and he puzzles over what it means, he can't simultaneously pay attention to the rest of what the speaker says. For the speaker just keeps on talking.
As a result, a skillful speaker will repeat himself in the same speech to make it easier for listeners to process the message. He may repeat some phrases verbatim as well as paraphrasing the same idea.
It's likely that Jesus expressed the same idea in different words in the course of the same discourse. The original discourse probably had performance variations. Not just wording things differently when he spoke to a different audience at a different time and place, but to the same audience at the same time and place.
If two or more people jotted down in journals what they heard Jesus say, they could, in principle, quote him verbatim, yet there'd still be verbal variations in their respective excerpts because they're quoting different parts of the same discourse. Where Jesus uses similar words to express the same idea. So there's no presumption that synoptic variants are redactional variants rather than performance variants.
That doesn't rule out redaction in some cases. But we shouldn't default to that.
Wednesday, December 27, 2017
Wednesday, December 13, 2017
Thursday, November 02, 2017
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Autumnal Christianity
Is Christianity dying? Or is Spring just around the corner?
http://www.andybannister.net/is-christianity-dying/
http://www.andybannister.net/is-christianity-dying/
Wednesday, October 18, 2017
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