5 Purpose Driven or Reason Driven?
Purpose Driven or Reason Driven?
Some time ago, I was invited on a radio program to discuss the book The Reason-Driven Life by Robert M. Price, professor of theology and scriptural studies at the Johnnie Colemon
Theological Seminary. Price had once been a leader in one of the chapters of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and had studied at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He specifically mentions on his website that Billy Graham was the commencement speaker at his graduation. Yet in his early twenties, he began to reassess his faith and to suspect that Christianity did not have either the historical credentials or the intellectual cogency its defenders claimed. After doing doctoral work in theology at Drew University, he pastored a church for some time before enrolling in another PhD program at Drew, this time in New Testament studies. He read scholars such as Jacques Derrida, Don Cupitt, and others like them. Finally, he resigned his pastorate. One of his biographical information sheets states he now attends an Episcopal church "and keeps his mouth shut." Those who know him describe him as a quickwitted, funny, and brilliant individual, and these descriptions seem to be supported by his writings.
I had not previously read much by him, except for a few debate transcripts and some papers he had written. But I picked up his book because I wondered what it was that made it so persuasive to the two hosts of the radio program. I read the book from cover to cover, trying hard not to be too surprised by what I was reading—but indeed I was. Surprised not once, not twice, but repeatedly.
My principal surprise lay in the fact that I can't think of a single substantive argument in his book that I have not either read or heard in my dialogues with various people. In fact,
Winston Churchill's statement to his research assistant, Ashley, kept coming to mind as I read it: "Give me the facts,
Ashley, and I will twist them the way I want to suit my argument."1
I realize that one cannot judge another's motives with any certainty. But I have to admit that it appears to me that in the throes of Price's skepticism, he pursued the very disciplines he would need in order to attack the story of the gospel. How impressive it is that "unbelievers" can find a following and still make a good living from the belief they once held. After all, I don't find such passionate books written against the existence of the tooth fairy. I am tempted to say sarcastically that the ultimate proof of God's omnipotence may well be that he doesn't even have to exist in order to make a materially abundant life for his detractors. In the days of my graduate studies, I had a classmate who was a convinced atheist. I asked him what on earth drove him to study theology when he held the Scriptures in such low esteem. "There are big bucks in the God racket," he replied.
For someone to be a professor of theolog-y when he doesn't believe in either Theos (Greek for "God") or the Logos
("the word") leaves one rather mystified. It would be tantamount to asking President Mahmoud Ahma-dinejad of Iran to hold the chair of American cultural studies at a university. Perhaps all the years of study and preparation have to provide some sort of living, even if the subject matter being taught is demeaned more and more with each passing year. I, for one, can't imagine spending my time in such a venture of
unbelief, but I suppose rationalization is the handmaiden of personal passion.
Price writes purportedly to take to task The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. First and foremost, he tries to demonstrate that belief in God is based in nothing more than fiction. "So grow up, Christian, and smell the roses of reason rather than be shackled by the hollow unreason of spiritual doublespeak," he says, so to speak. He attacks Warren's ideas as nothing more than the use and abuse of Scripture. Even its cover design of Price's book matches the design of Warren's book—but as is already evident, it will not sell as many copies, not by any stretch of imagination.
However, it is important to underscore that Price's book is not simply a response to Warren. And I want to make absolutely clear that it is not my purpose to defend one book against another. But in very clear terms, Price shows that his attack is not primarily against Rick Warren's book but unequivocally against all Christian belief that subscribes to the person of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. He has simply used Warren's book as his means, because he says it lends itself to the hostility he feels against what he says he once believed.
Any author knows that nothing is easier than taking one chapter at a time from a book and writing a response to each chapter because half the work has already been done for you.
All one needs to do is vent on each chapter, sometimes handing out a token bouquet to soften the attack and then go for the sting.
Price sets the stage early. He makes a valiant attempt to disavow any hatred or hostility—a rather humorous attempt that reminds me of the old adage, "When someone says it's
not about the money, you can be sure it is about the money."
So whether or not Price has a hostile mind-set, the reader can decide.
These are some of Price's early thoughts in his book:
Price writes, "I view myself as a would-be philosopher, with leanings toward Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida.
I'm not in a hurry to find a label that will fit just right…"2 These words of such irenic splendor and kindness follow what was written a few pages before: "I fear Freud was right about bornagain Christianity: it is at least highly conducive of 'obsessional neurosis.'"3
He saves his most appreciative words for those Christians who do not take their Christianity seriously, not surprisingly, as he feels they are the truly rational ones. He makes me think of a gynecologist who tells his patient, "Yes, you have all the signs of pregnancy, but, thank God, you aren't. Because if you were pregnant, I would have to change my original diagnosis, and if you weren't under the impression that you were pregnant, I wouldn't be able to make a living."
I had to chuckle at the comment of a psychologist when I shared some of Price's thoughts with her. She said, "I can tell you more about this man than he has told you about himself." I wondered what a comic scene it would be for two people, each believing the other had a neurosis, to be in a discussion. I am sure Monty Python could make a killing on an imaginary conversation like that. But that, I'm afraid, is what a discussion is reduced to by such hostile language—when one pretends to be beneficent while adding poison to the darts.
I read Price's book because I was asked to respond to it on a radio show hosted by two atheists. However, I read many such books. For every one book I read where the author may
be sympathetic to my belief, I read a vast number written by those who are hostile to my belief. I have always taken my
Christian faith seriously and make it a point to read any competing perspective carefully. When I studied at Cambridge,
I chose to take every course offered by the former Anglican priest-turned-atheist Don Cupitt (mentioned earlier as an author Price enjoyed). It made for several uncomfortable classes, but I wanted to hear it right from a mouth of a man who had stood on both sides. Price is such a man. So let me give him the full benefit of belief when he says that he honestly couldn't square reason with his Christian commitment. But for those who, like Price, say that Christianity has failed to give them the intellectual confidence to believe it, let me start at the beginning, where he starts, and check out the philosophy behind The Reason-Driven Life.
I'll begin with a brief examination of a few statements that explain his rationale for writing. Then we'll look at the reasons he gives for why he walked away from the faith and, finally, I'll respond to his principal assertion that the reason-driven life is in contradiction to the Christian way of thinking.
ON BIDDING GOD FAREWELL
First, I think it is important to quote parts of the foreword to The Reason-Driven Life by Julia Sweeney. Her credentials are that she is a comedienne on Saturday Night Live and has written a couple of books.
I began to think that even Jesus, if he existed, would have to agree that the Bible itself was a house built on sand.
Ultimately, I had to discard my faith…I didn't take the time
to go over the Christian viewpoint again and decipher what made those religious ideas so compelling, so insidious, and so seductive. I didn't have the scholarly background or the patience to look into each seemingly harmless evangelical belief and find out where it came from and why it deserves to be thoroughly trashed! But Bob Price has that background!4
That gives the reader just enough insight to know how the reason-driven life of this stripe works, at least for some. A bitter experience left this "follower" feeling abandoned. So there was a departure from the faith. Years later, a scholar comes along and takes Christianity apart, and there is a shout in the gallery from those who had already jumped ship,
"Hurray! I knew I was right and that those who continue to believe are the fools!" Read Sweeney's words again. It's ironic isn't it, that the very metaphor she borrowed for an unfounded belief comes from the person she doesn't believe in? Had she carried Jesus' parable of building one's house on the sand
(Matthew 7:24 – 27) to the full extent of what he is teaching, she would have found that he knew that people like her existed, people who doubt what he says and foolishly build their houses on nothing, houses that cannot withstand the storms of life because they have no foundation.
I sincerely ask you to be the judge of whether this pathetically simplistic approach is reasonable. It is actually a will in search of a reason to support it. Does she really assume that just because she didn't scrutinize the Bible's teaching, nobody else has? Does she think that if any rational person did examine it, he or she wouldn't maintain faith? And any time someone suggests that Jesus might never have existed, you
can be certain that this is what they want to believe rather than what the historical data indicates. Price and Sweeney would do well to save their cheering until they have talked to some of the people whose cultures have reaped the reason-driven implications that follow from the belief that man is the measure of all things.
I want to say also that there is something quite remarkable about such iconoclasts who mock the Christian faith. In contrast to their disrespect for Christianity, their deference to any other belief, especially one that has an Eastern sound to it, is very much evident. How reverential they are when quoting from the Vedas or the Buddhist scriptures, almost fawning at their beauty, while trying to make the Bible look absurd. This duplicity—ignoring the fanciful and sometimes bizarre tales that are so replete in Eastern texts that even Gandhi once said he was embarrassed by them—is in itself a revelation of distorted reasoning. But before I move too far ahead, let me discuss the basics on which thinkers such as Price empty out their ammunition.
THE UNREASON OF OVERGENERALIZATION
Repeatedly you will find that those who attack the theist utterly fail to distinguish between the specifics of belief, making all belief sound stupid. Here, for example, are a few lines from Price:
The great danger of…fundamentalist Christianity…is an alien imposition of a self-concept and life agenda from without, no different in principle than the discredited
Communist attempt to mint a new species of "Soviet
Man."… Fundamentalists or evangelicals…are afraid of being damned to hell. That's why many of them embraced the faith in the first place…Such dear souls, terrorized into belief, heave a sigh of relief once they believe themselves safely within the fold.5
Unfortunately, I must admit that this caricature of some Christians and of some of what passes for Christian worship is not completely off the mark. But are such gibes, where the extremes of some are portrayed as a realistic description of all evangelicals, really intended to bring reason into the discussion or just to be disrespectful to evangelical believers and to their beliefs? Price cleverly makes use of his past to convince the reader that he had a front-row seat and an innersanctum experience, so now he can hang it all out to dry.
I have news for such a critic. I could tell even more pathetic stories than these, having seen the "underbelly" of Christendom in numerous cultures. I have seen the abuse of power, money, ego, sexuality, and much more on the front lines of Christianity. But by the same token, would I be fair to refer to atheists such as Nazis, Maoists, Stalinists, and Pol Potists in one breath because they have all had atheism as their worldview? What does such overgeneralization accomplish, other than to show unreason at work in the name of reason? It is a vacuum cleaner mentality that sucks up everything in sight without distinction.
Price is also clever in denying that he himself is an atheist.
He doesn't know what tag to give himself. Why so? Here's how he says it: " 'Atheist,' though I do not disclaim it, is not my description of first choice because it merely indicates what I
no longer believe, not what else I have since come to believe. It says what I don't stand for anymore. But I would rather be known for what I do stand for."6
To quote Churchill again, referring to Germany's attack on Russia, "We are in the presence of a crime without a name."7
Perhaps we do not have a crime here, but we certainly have verbal guns blazing and a full-fledged attack explicitly on Christian theism and implicitly on any belief in a personal, moral, transcendent first cause, an attack that is still searching for a tag to give itself. (This ought not to surprise us. Sam
Harris doesn't like the tag "atheist" either.) But Harris does organize and attend atheist conferences. Existentialists didn't like their tag, and postmodernists don't like their tag. This is a brilliant strategy, because when there is no category, the position can't be critiqued. This is the metaphysical version of quantum: If you know where a particle of reason is, you don't know what it is doing; and if you know what it is doing, you don't know where it is.
I want to come back now to Price's caricature of the reason that most people respond to the gospel. In my case, I do not recall a single thought of hell as an eternal destiny awaiting me. What is more, I do not recall that any of my friends, of whatever background, came to Christ because of the mention of hell. Among the many with whom I shared Christ in India as a young believer were those diametrically different in their thinking. The first, from a high Brahmin background, was a President's Gold Medal winner in one of India's most prestigious Institutes of Technology. He went on to do his postgraduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Later, he joined Atomic Energy of Canada. Very few could match the brilliance of this man, especially in the
pure sciences. Nor would many stand today in biblical knowledge against this man. Never once, after I saw him give his life to Christ, have he and I discussed hell as a motivation in our salvation. Not even once.
Another was an accomplished musician who entertained in the nightclubs of India's major cities. He had taken the road to drugs and all that such a world brings with it. Even as he came to one of our Bible studies at my invitation, he saw in the gospel what his heart and mind yearned for, and he began his journey of following Christ.
I mention these two because today both are in Christian ministry, one in Canada and the other in India. It was not the fear of hell that brought either them or me to Christ. In my case it was the hell I had made out of my own life without the help of any spiritual inclination whatsoever that made me commit my life to Christ. Those who either accuse others of coming to Christ only because they live in the narrow world of Western commercialized evangelism or use the dark days of a politicized
Christianity as an excuse to deny the gospel simply don't understand it or its work in history.
Many could tell stories of their own here, and I'm quite certain that some have come to Christ initially out of fear for their eternal souls. But it is wrong to generalize conversion and claim that all who belong to Christ do so out of fear for their immortal souls.
I also find it amazing that Price compares Soviet-style "man making" and mass evangelism. Does anyone need to remind him that the entire Soviet experiment was given impetus by Stalin's absolute disavowal of God and his self-determined
"right" to define man in his own terms? Stalin logically deduced that if there were no God, man became God, and rather
than allow Western capitalism to define man, he would make certain it would be Russian-style Communism (according to his interpretation) that would do the defining. Stalin's last gesture before he died was to shake a clenched fist toward the heavens as he hallucinated and then fall back on his pillow. Like Price, he too believed that man was the measure of all things. He was
The Man. That was the reason-driven life as his reason drove him to believe.
TAKING REASON TO THE LAWS THAT BIND IT
What are the laws of logic? Simply put, there are four basic laws, each with many subdivisions that address many more formal and informal fallacies that are footnotes to a discussion of logic.
1. the law of identity: If A, then not B.
2. the law of noncontradiction: A and B must exclude each other unless there are qualifiers.
3. the law of rational inference: If A, then what necessarily follows.
4. the law of the undistributed middle: Just because two things have one thing in common does not mean they therefore have everything in common.
Please note that by their definition, even the laws of logic must have transcendent reality—that is, they must be based in reality and recognized as unassailably true, regardless of who believes it or doesn't or of their cultural perspective—as their logical starting points; otherwise, the arguments that stem from them cannot be logical, and there can be no true basis or
beginning point for any argument, leaving us, as the ancient philosopher Heraclitus taught, with "flux, nothing but flux."
Alfred North Whitehead, Michael Polanyi, Stanley Jaki—all philosophers of science—held to some form of theism as the assumed framework for law and order and for the predictability of cause and effect in the universe. Whitehead's comment in which he refers to the great progress within the sciences in medieval times is worth noting:
It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher.
Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality. Remember that I am not talking of the explicit belief of a few individuals. What I mean is the impress on the European mind arising from the unquestioned faith of centuries.8
The atheist Frederick Nietzsche, one of Price's mentors, said that if there is no transcending reality, words are nothing more than manufactured ideas, endlessly reflecting themselves and each other within a hall of mirrors, becoming more distorted with each reflection. Recognizing this, he came to admit that he was pious enough that "even he still worships at the altar where God's name is 'truth.'"9
Nietzsche and the existentialists/nihilists were far more honest about where their atheism led than the doublespeak of Price and Sweeney, who want to have total finitude while granting themselves transcending privileges. It is for this very reason that the sciences have been denied any prerogative on
ethics, even though some scientists desperately seek to bring it under their purview.
If the opinions and beliefs espoused in The ReasonDriven Life are evaluated against the laws of logic, the law of rational inference (that if something is true, what must necessarily follow) kills any discussion of morality other than from the perspective of its various humanistic coverings, each of which has its own "reason" and qualifiers. Here is Price on ethics and meaning:
I believe we live in a morally neutral universe, that the moral laws and grids of meaning through which we see it are artificial impositions by our various ancestors…
There is no already-determined meaning somewhere else, in the mind of some God viewed as a kind of heavenly Bureau of Weights and Standards. Where else could meaning be but in the eye of the beholder? And that is in you. That is in me.10
To pass off this paragraph as reason driven strains credulity. Note the consummate contradiction in just this one paragraph:
It is the great privilege and challenge of the human race to work out the best rules we can, the best standards of good and evil we can muster, and to strive to impose them upon the universe…But we must carve out a moral space where our culture and civilization can live. We are part of Chaos, and we begin, little by little, to impose our own order and meaning upon it.11
Is he serious? Is this his logic of escape—from the totalitarianism of religion to the totalitarianism of secularism?
Can he really mean what he says—that he did not write this book with any intention of changing the minds of his readers, when he holds to this methodological plan of morality? The sheer lunacy of the moral reasoning here is so terrifying that even secular philosophers must groan.
It was no one less than the philosopher Iris Murdoch who wrote of this vortex of self aggrandizement and its destiny:
How recognizable, how familiar to us, is the man so beautifully portrayed in the Grundlegung, who confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgment of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason…This man is with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy. The raison d'être of this attractive but misleading creature is not far to seek. He is the offspring of the age of science, confidently rational and yet increasingly aware of his alienation from the material universe which his discoveries reveal…His alienation is without cure…It is not such a very long step from Kant to Nietzsche, and from Nietzsche to existentialism and the Anglo-Saxon ethical doctrines which in some ways closely resemble it. In fact, Kant's man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer.12
Make no mistake, Price's desire to live not by negations but only by affirmations is a pipe dream that has resulted in
nightmares for humanity. The problem with this philosophy is not that individuals may choose the noble and the virtuous but that there is no compelling reason for them to do so if their only desire is to be the last one left standing. Any doubt on this point is to live in denial of reason, not in support of it.
THE UNREASON OF MISINTERPRETATION
To take every argument of Robert Price's hermeneutic to task would require a book of its own. And yet, nothing would ultimately be accomplished because the philosophical underpinnings in his arguments on the nature of interpretation reveal such a deep prejudice on his part. I could imagine conversing with C. S. Lewis about Price's kind of Bible bashing. I suspect Lewis would blow smoke rings from his pipe and with a wry smile say, "Write children's stories instead— you will meet a more honest heart in search of truth."
Chesterton insisted that he learned more from observing a nursery than he ever did in studying philosophy. Jesus shocked his audience when he said that a child was a better representative of the kingdom of heaven than any one of his learned skeptics. Why is this so? Is it because children are gullible and unsophisticated in understanding? Not so, for I have been asked tougher, more honest questions by children than by most adults. It is because children are open to the truth and are not looking for reasons to believe a lie.
So let me get to the substantive part of Price's criticism of the Bible, pointing out that none of his arguments are new.
Commentators and scholars have wrestled for centuries with teachings in the Bible that may seem at odds, numbers that sometimes do not seem to add up, and other objections to the
biblical text. One need only read books introducing the Old and New Testaments to find page after page dealing with challenges to the text that higher or lower critics have brought to its study.
Coming from the East, I have often thought it strange that Western-trained, Western-raised, Western-bathed thinking has been responsible for volumes of books evaluating what is principally an Eastern book. For years I looked in vain for someone from the East who had dealt with the hermeneutics of the biblical text. In recent times, one or two have surfaced, but, by and large, dismantling the texts of the Bible has been a Western preoccupation. So it is not at all surprising that the attack on conservative theology has been followed by an attack on almost anything conservative here in the West.
In contrast, because the measuring line for "conservative" in the East is an authoritarian line drawn by "interpreters of the law," vitriolic language there is usually reserved for expressing strong resistance to those who sanction any scrutiny of the indigenous texts rather than aimed at those who support the text. People like Price understand very well the difference between the response he can expect from Christians to higher critical theories and the response he will get from Islamic scholars to any challenge to the Qur'an. Even more to the point, the tactics employed by the radical conservatives in Eastern thought are no different from the tactics of the radical liberals in the West. Islamic radicals silence the opposition with the threat of ostracism, personal injury, and death. While radical liberals in the West don't resort to death threats or personal injury, they do threaten ostracism and loss of public respect and acceptance in the ranks of their sophisticated schools, journals, and—increasingly—job opportunities. It is a
different kind of violence.
I know of a fine school in Atlanta, for years a bastion of Christian education at the highest academic level, where one person of liberal thinking was appointed to the board and immediately began to demand a liberalization process in the school. The trustees resisted his demands, wanting to retain the Christian worldview that was the foundation of the school.
So he contacted the Ivy League schools to which the majority of the school's graduates applied for their college education, and they, in turn, threatened that they would not admit future graduates unless the school changed its worldview and policies.
No, it is not a death threat, but it is death to the Christian or conservative aspirations and pursuits of higher education for many young lives. Some of the brightest, smartest kids happen to be Christians as well. There is compulsion in the extreme forms of both conservative and liberal thinking. While the nonextremist liberal may describe all conservatives as bearing out a psychologized, Freudian diagnosis on religion, the extreme liberal treats his ideology as sacrosanct to the point of hostility toward all who do not share that view. They also play God, but with rabid secular extremes.
I mention this to point out something basic. Resistance in the West toward the supernatural in general and the Christian faith in particular has taken a bigoted turn, accompanied by irrational responses. Francis Crick's postulation that a spaceship from another planet may have brought spores to seed the earth is accepted as a more scientifically satisfying explanation for the origin of the universe than the words "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." The attack on the Bible is not primarily for scholarly reasons but for
ideological reasons, and the ramifications of reading the Bible apart from an understanding of the culture within which it was written can easily lead to misinterpretation.
It would be easier to respond to Price's allegations point by point, the same way he has attacked the Scriptures, but I will restrict myself to a few philosophical points. To those who wish to go further with the arguments, I point you to the books and blogs of scholars such as Ben Witherington and Darrell
Bock. There you will be able to read their specific responses to those who have attacked the gospel narrative. (Chief among the names making the news in this regard is Bart Ehrman, another former evangelical who has taken to attacking the Scriptures and appearing on talk shows where gleeful humorists or skeptics cheer him on, thinking they have heard the truth.)
THE BIBLE THROUGH EASTERN EYES
The Old and New Testaments, with their many writers and single focus, stand unique with respect to any other texts that claim to be revealed and authoritative. For example, the Qur'an has a single author and claims to be perfect in every word, never altered and never needing correction. It asserts itself as the sole and sufficient miracle of Muhammad. It is verbally inspired, verbally transmitted, and verbally preserved in the original text. That is the claim of Islam. Muhammad is considered to supersede every other prophet or authority in regard to any claim to divine revelation—the last, the greatest, and the ultimate revelator of Allah.
Yet when scholars in the field of textual origins and language examine these claims, they discover that numerous
variant readings have existed over the years but were dismissed as flawed and destroyed. Excavations at a mosque in Yemen in the 1990s uncovered numerous variants, but before any real study could be done, those who had raised questions about the texts were either silenced or had disappeared. This is how Islam deals with questions. Why doesn't Robert Price write the same kind of books about Muslims and the Qur'an that he writes about Christians and the Bible? Why doesn't he deliver robust, animated talks to university audiences about the fallacies of Islam? Why doesn't he plan a tour in the Middle East to debunk the Qur'an? We all know the answer: rabid Islamists would have him silenced.
Price quotes the Mahabharata, part of the Hindu sacred texts, The Iliad, and the Bible in the same sentence because all three tell a story about two brothers. But he betrays how
Western and restricted his context is because he doesn't seem to understand how very different each of these stories are culturally. He dismissively mentions the story in the Bible of the prodigal son saying, "Like all ancient stories of two estranged brothers, [it] can be read as a psychological allegory for the two estranged sides of a single personality."13 I had to read this line several times, thinking he couldn't be serious. But then he footnoted it with the Freudian psychologist Bruno
Bettelheim's book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, drawing from the section titled
"Tales of Two Brothers."
Anyone who interprets the story of the prodigal son within such a framework defies a response. Of course this framework can be applied in a helpful manner to certain situations, and that is a different manner. But I am absolutely sure that Jesus' intention when he told the story was not as
Price has inferred by his interpretation. I urge any who are interested to read the discussion of the parable in The Cross and the Prodigal by Kenneth E. Bailey, a brilliant scholar in Middle Eastern Studies. It was seeing Rembrandt's painting
"The Return of the Prodigal Son," first on a poster on a friend's door and then while visiting the Hermitage Museum in Saint
Petersburg, Russia, that changed the life of the renowned Henri Nouwen. As he sat in front of the painting by Rembrandt and gazed at it for hours, he felt a strong confirmation of the decision he had made to leave Harvard Divinity School, where he was a highly respected professor, and move to Toronto,
Canada, to work with mentally challenged young people at Daybreak, a L'Arche community.
At my office in Atlanta, we have a small chapel. Inside the chapel is a painting ("The Forgiving Father") by an artist from India, Frank Wesley. In my opinion, Wesley's painting is much more reflective of the reality of the story than the more famous painting by Rembrandt. In Wesley's painting, I am struck by the details of the boy's condition, terribly scorched by the fierce heat of the open spaces in a parched land. Reduced to little more than a skeleton by his circumstances, he is barely able to stand on his own. The father, wrapped in a clean, white dhothi (an Indian garment worn especially in the summer) is supporting the young lad in his arms. My wife pointed out that the horizontal position of the father's arms around his boy juxtaposed with their bodies forms a cross. Only an Easterner would have so subtly rendered that motif.
My wife and I met an amazingly talented sculptor of bronzes. One of his small works took him many years to complete and be able to share with others, as it was tooclose to a reflection of hisown spiritual journey. It is the depiction of a
man holding on to a bottle, lying on his side on the ground, desolate and lost. The sculptor said that to him, the most important words in the Bible came from the story of the prodigal son: "And when he had come to himself." He said his sculpture reflected his own life, because it wasn't until he had reached the bottom that he "came to himself," recognizing his own shortcomings and failures, and was able to get to his feet and begin his journey upward. His message to the world through this bronze sculpture is that it is not until one recognizes the spiritual and moral depravity of his own heart that he will turn his steps toward home and God.
For Price to resort to Bettelheim's theorizing on the prodigal son is as far afield from the truth as the prodigal was from his father and home. Helmut Thielicke may have captured the true focus of the story when he said it should really be called "The Waiting Father."
You can tell a man by his heroes, and so far we see the names of Freud, Nietzsche, and Derrida having great impact on Price. He should beware: the more you read what he has written, the more his own Freudian slip shows.
Not only does Price not understand the cultural contexts of these texts, he doesn't recognize the difference between the Code of Hammurabi and other "ethical documents of old"—all of which lay out a code of cultural existence—and the Ten
Commandments of the Old Testament. The Mahabharatha is well loved in India and is the revered origin of the folktales from which India gleans its ethos. But a Hindu would not think of holding the Mahabharatha on the same level as the Vedas.
In the same way, these other codes of conduct, acknowledged as rules written by men for other men to follow, cannot be compared with the Ten Commandments, which were written by
God for men to follow. I have no doubt that Price knows this, but it doesn't serve his purpose to admit that he is comparing as equal in authority texts that are very different in origin.
This kind of dishonest use of facts or elimination of details that don't support his storyline reminds me of a lecture I took from Don Cupitt at Cambridge University, in which he was trying to establish that all theology is really anthropology. As an example of what he was saying, he railed against Hinduism where, he said, all power is patrilineal—through the male— which explained why India is a culture in which women were held to be inferior to men. When I raised my hand to interrupt him his expression revealed that he wished I were not in his class. I disagreed with the position he had taken and pointed out that the transference of divine power in Hinduism is actually matrilineal, through the female goddess Shakti. He paused, looked at me and said, "We have a problem then, don't we?" Then he moved on with his lecture.
Hindus differentiate between their two levels of authority, the Shruti and the Smriti. The Shruti is "that which was heard"; the Smriti is "that which is remembered." They are not concerned that every detail in a story is consistent (that in itself is consistent with the way they look at the world)—they are gleaning the deep lesson contained in each narrative, the true object of the recitation. The most beloved of the texts is the Bhagavad Gita or the "Sacred Song." Would Mr. Price consider going to India and ridiculing the stories of the Gita and its backdrop in the Mahabharatha? There are aspects to these texts that would lend themselves to such ridicule. But he couldn't do that, because he would not be permitted to execute such an affront to their beliefs.
Isn't it interesting that the only group of religious
believers that can be openly attacked and mocked to the cheers of like-minded skeptics is evangelical Christianity? Doesn't that say something about the nobility of the evangelical
Christian message that Christians will accept such a challenge without resorting to the extremes that all other faiths do when faced with a similar assault?
CONCLUSIONS OF THE REASON-DRIVEN LIFE
Consider these three implications of The Reason-Driven Life:
Man Is Taken to Be God In his chapter titled "You Are a Work of Art," Price writes the following:
But I say that you are nonetheless a work of art. And so am I…Thanks to your parents and your position in time and space, you have a palette of particular colors in your hand. It is up to you to create the life you will live. It is up to you to create your own meaning…If there is a God, he may have his own opinion as to what your life ought to be used for, what it means. But your life can have no meaning for you other than what it means to you, not him. You have to create it!
I like what Albert Camus said about art and why it must be gratuitous, why it must serve no purpose, neither to educate nor to propagandize…It serves no purpose, obeys no command, does not labor to convey a message.14
Please note that what Price affirms art must not do—not educate or propagandize—he takes the trouble to do in defending this view of art. And indeed, in accordance with what he believes about art, it has become a purely emotive expression, bound by no ideas of beauty or truth, invariably driven toward the sensuous and the profane. In his purposeless world, there is a purpose to his descriptions; he labors to convey a meaningful message in a world that he says is bereft of meaning. This is what happens when the reasondriven life attempts a rational explanation of life that it insists is irrational at its core. You are a work of art—but art has no objective purpose; by extension, you have no purpose and no meaning. He has rejected God as the Creator because he feels a creator is contradictory to making sense out of life. But when man becomes God, life at its core is contradictory.
This Life Is All There Is According to Price and those he admires and seeks to emulate, "now" is all we have, and there is nothing beyond the grave. All injustice, all hope of justice, all closure, all possibility of relationship is brought to an end by death.
The Greeks thought that justice was the supreme virtue.
Ethicists talk of love as the supreme ethic. Many assert that even in despair, with a little hope one can withstand the deepest of disappointments. Many a psychologist has asserted that with personal meaning many indignities can be endured. But if all hope for justice ends at death, it becomes incumbent on each of us to secure for ourselves what we see as justice before it is too late, no matter what this means for
anyone else.
No worldview can exist without some degree of faith.
Rationalism had its heyday in the middle of the last millennium and gave birth to existentialism, which ultimately produced postmodernism. Now we have a rationalism that is materialistic, existential, postmodern, positivistic, and relativistic—all of which are held with an absoluteness that defies reason—and Time becomes an unending sequence of events that have no ultimate purpose, either singly or as a whole, and inevitably we are brought to meaninglessness and ultimately to despair.
Man Is Only a Body The third implication of The Reason-Driven Life is that you are only a body. You are, according to Price, a neurological-chemical quantity with a brush in hand to paint on your own canvas. He goes to great lengths to deny the resurrection, as taught in the gospels, saying that it is both contradictory and contrary to reason. I strongly recommend that the reader visit the website of William Lane Craig
(www.reasonablefaith.org) to read his debate with Price on this issue. The position held by Craig is also held by many intelligent people who have come to different conclusions than
Price has about the facts they see. For either of them (or for proponents of the worldviews they represent) to refuse to examine what is said by the other side is to betray nothing more than a deep prejudice.
The truth is that there are valid arguments for the existence of God. There are arguments raised by atheists that present serious challenges for those who believe in God. There
are experiences that people have that demand explanation.
There are struggles on both sides of the issue. So the bottom line becomes this: Which side of the argument best takes into consideration all of reality without amputating any of it?
The price is eternal if Price is not right, and I believe Price is dead wrong. The person of Jesus Christ stands tall among the ideas of the world because he is exactly who he claims to be—the Way and the Truth and the Life. The words of C. S.
Lewis as he reflected on his recognition of God as God are worth repeating because they capture the very thing Price wishes to deny:
You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was
God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The prodigal son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?…The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and his compulsion is our liberation.15
In C. S. Lewis's fourth book in The Chronicles of Narnia,
The Silver Chair, a little girl named Jill finds herself in a strange forest in the land of Aslan. Her pride and foolishness have brought her there all alone. She is intensely thirsty, but as she approaches a stream, she sees a huge lion lying down beside the stream. The lion coaxes her to come closer and have a drink. With a "heavy, golden voice" he invites her to come and drink. In her fear she asks the lion if he would mind going away so that she can take a drink, to which his only response is a low growl. The sound of the clear water trickling over the little stones in its path adds to her thirst, so she asks the lion if he will promise not to hurt her if she advances. He gives her no promise. In desperation she asks, "Do you eat girls?" To which the lion responds without boasting, apology, or anger that he has "swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms."
Now she is really frightened and suggests that perhaps she'll do without a drink after all, until the lion reminds her that without water, she will die. "I suppose I must go and look for another stream then," Jill says. But the lion says, "There is no other stream."16
To all the searches of men and women, boys and girls, kings and emperors, cities and realms for another way to assuage their thirst for the eternal by any means other than what God has provided—digging their own streams or denying the existence of eternity and giving themselves full autonomy
—the Lion of the tribe of Judah revealed in the Holy Scriptures of the Bible says, "There is no other stream."
G. K. Chesterton, whose book Everlasting Man had a great impact on Lewis in his conversion from atheism to Christ, had gone the same route. His poem on his own conversion is remarkable:
After one moment when I bowed my head And the whole world turned over and came upright, And I came out where the old road shone white, I walked the ways and heard what all men said, Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed, Being not unlovable but strange and light;
Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite But softly, as men smile about the dead.
The sages have a hundred maps to give That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree, They rattle reason out through many a sieve That stores the sand and lets the gold go free: And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.17