Do Not Attack a Soldier When He’s in the Middle of Attacking Your Enemy, Or Richard Dawkins Publicly Praises Christianity

There was a much-talked-about recent public declaration by Richard Dawkins that he considers himself to be a cultural Christian, that he likes living in a culturally Christian (i.e., Christian) country, that “if we substituted any alternative religion, that would be truly dreadful,” that Christianity is a “fundamentally decent religion,” and the Islam that surrounds him in England is not.

It generated a lot of reaction, but I have not heard anyone point out the most important thing. Dawkins said publicly that Christianity is “fundamentally decent” and he greatly prefers it to Islam. He publicly supported our side. Richard Dawkins, of all people, said things that are dangerous to say in public but which support our side.

An Archon of Right Liberalism Takes the Turn to Orthogony

John C. Wright has long been one of the most intelligent and effective writers at the Right end of the political spectrum. He has been a great defender of the Constitution, the Enlightenment, the private sector as against the state, of traditional customs, mores and values, and so forth; and, in particular, of Christianity. He is one of the more competent, clever and entertaining Christian apologists now writing online.

He’s prolix, even compared to such as I. But his writing is always sprightly, and fun to read … so long as one has a half hour or so to spare for it each day. He’s a lawyer, so his comments on current affairs are well grounded in the tradition of English Common Law, in its down to earth common sense. And he’s also a competent and successful writer of science fiction novels, so he is able, ready and indeed eager to explore novel notions, and consider imaginatively how they might work out in practice.

A formidable guy, altogether. And what is more rare in these latter days of cultural antagony and deliquescence, sweet tempered and irenic withal. He is valuable and discerning wit.

Having grown jaundiced upon it myself circa 2009, it had bugged me for some years that despite all that, he had been so far still convinced of the Enlightenment as a natural and just evolution of Christian culture, rather than a divagation therefrom.

Well, I am pleased to report that he has recently suffered – nay, enjoyed – a paradigm shift of an orthogonal sort.

An Informal Introduction to Presuppositional Apologetics

Introduction to the Introduction

This is a lightly-edited version of a talk I gave to my Christian men’s group. I was asked to present a topic of my choosing and I chose to try to refine my understanding of Christian apologetics.

Dealing with the other person’s faulty presuppositions is not only important in Christian evangelism. The present world crisis is at root a matter of good presuppositions overthrown and no good ones put in their place.

Most people feel unmoored, because they are. To discover how to fix things, we must first know how to identify faulty Systems. A faulty System is recognized primarily by the evident fact that it doesn’t work. People are emotionally attached to a bad system when it is the only one they know, but freedom begins when people start to acknowledge that their System doesn’t work. Only then might they be able to hear about another, better System.

The Talk

“Apologetics” means giving reasons why Christianity is true. It means using facts and logic to show that Christianity is true.  It does not mean apologizing!

The word apologetics comes from the Greek apologia, which means giving a verbal and intellectual defense. Giving reasons. In ancient Greece, when a defendant was on trial he gave an apologia to prove his innocence.

In apologetics, the first person you must convince is yourself. Apologetics ministers first to the believer. We must preach the Gospel to ourselves daily; we must also remind ourselves that Christianity is true.

Apologetics is often not needed when we witness to unbelievers. We begin with Scripture, by delivering the Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ:

So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.  [Romans 10:17]

For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. [Hebrews 4:12]

Showing people the Gospel message from the Word of God is often enough to produce faith.

Philosophical Skeleton Keys: the Anselmian Definition

In the greatest, most far reaching, most consequential, and therefore most important insight of human thought so far, Saint Anselm of Canterbury defined “God” so that we might settle completely, and profoundly, all worries we could ever have – about God, and so about any other and thus lesser thing that we might suffer. He defined “God” so that we could stop worrying altogether, and so be happy; be, i.e., good, as properly oriented to reality, and so therefore happy.

I’ve elaborated the Anselmian Definition a bit for the sake of this discussion:

God is that than which no greater can be conceived along any dimension of greatness by any mind whatever.

Christ is Now Borne of a Pure Maid, in an Ox Stall He is Laid, Therefore Sing We at a Brayde

The words of the title come from Sir Christémas, an old Christmas carol. We sang it this year at Saint Dominic’s. It boils down to a drinking song in the final verse, as is not uncommon with the more boisterous carols: “… buvez bien, buvez bien, par toute la compagnie, make good cheer and be right merry and sing with us now joyfully …” “Buvez bien” means “drink you well.” Compare “Wassail, wassail, all over the town …” These are songs that were sung not so much in church, liturgically (although the monks were (and are) often famous brewers and vintners, so who knows …) as at the Christmas festivities in private houses. In the case of “Wassail,” one ought to consider that the lovely custom of caroling from door to door generally involved a fair bit of drinking. The carolers would pound on a door and start singing, in the expectation – as at All Hallows’ Eve – that at the end of their song they’d all be given a tipple or two of the household cider, or beer, or wassail, or mead, mulled wine, or whatnot. Or, even invited in to join the party.

Wherefore these parties, these drunken revels with dancing, halls with holly and mistletoe bedight, roast boar’s heads bedecked with bay and rosemary carried in on pallets to the feast, and so forth?

A good question.

More About That Reconquista Thing…

Original context here.  More discussion here.

Ackerman’s plan was summarized by me as strengthening biblically-faithful congregations, and strengthening and then reconquering moderate (i.e, wavering) congregations, all within the most infamous of the mostly-far-left mainline Protestant denominations. Eventually, if all goes well, we can retake entire denominations because liberal Christianity cannot sustain itself.

(By “we,” I mean Christians who are faithful to the message of Christ and the Apostles. I’m not calling on anyone here to join the Reconquista.)

That’s the key point. Liberal “Christianity” cannot sustain itself. It’s weaker than it looks.

For me, the most important thing about Ackerman’s plan is its spirit. Take the fight to the enemy in one of his strongholds.

This might require a little guile every now and then but not, it seems to me, much more that is required for normal life. To be a useful reconquistador requires one to be forthright in the faith just about all the time. You might have to be more discrete when under the eye of a liberal bishop, but even so, you cannot hide what you are doing and still be useful.

Christian Reconquista: Retaking the Mainline Denominations

In The Secret to Retaking American Culture, Richard Ackerman (also known as Redeemed Zoomer) lays out a plan for real Christians to retake the mainline Protestant denominations from the liberals. He argues that reconquest is both feasible and beneficial.

It’s feasible because liberal congregations cannot sustain themselves and are necessarily dying out. And it’s beneficial, Ackerman argues, because the mainline Protestant denominations still have valuable resources that could be redirected from their current destructive uses to directions beneficial to individuals and societies.

The Left has a strategy we can copy:

While conservative Christians have focused on evangelizing individuals, generally those with less cultural influence, the Left has successfully evangelized the centers of culture and exerted top-down influence.

The Left desired to conquer the mainline denominations because

they know …that religion was originally at the heart of the culture and its major institutions. Every Western culture was built on a certain institutional Church… Therefore, Leftists have been very intentional in hijacking the most culturally important churches in every Western nation and replacing them with their own ideology.

From Cosmic Coherence to Christianity

The other day I wrote that if readers were interested, I would explain how theism and then by extension Christianity – taking the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Atonement as the basic doctrines thereof – are entailed in the miracle of cosmic coherence. Longtime commenter and orthospherean Bill Luse expressed his interest, to my chagrin. So, now I’m obliged. Here goes, then.

The Argument from Cosmic Coherence; from the Cosmos; from Your Life Now

If events are not determined ex ante, then at each moment of its career, every creaturely particle of being in the transformations it therein suffers conducts anew a stochastic quantum computation of a way through a solution space (that itself evolves from each moment to each next) to its own next optimal configuration – or to something adequately proximal thereto – mutatis mutandis. In each such computation it must take account of its entire past – of, that is to say, the entire past of its actual world; for, in no other way might any event take a place in a history of its world as congruent thereto, and as a meet participant thereof – so that, in no other way might a coherent world be cobbled together from one time slice to the next. But, what a particle of being has inherited from its past cannot suffice to a solution of its own problem of what to make of itself. To be sure, its mundane data are needed as the foreground and basis – the proscenium, as it were – of its process of becoming; but each particular event must make of those data something new, and more; or, at least, different. Else it were moot, thus nil; so that, if it should fail to be different, it should fail to be, at all. It should rather in that case be just another episode in some other already actual thing. It could not in that case make any contribution to history of its own; could not act upon some others in a way peculiar to itself; so, could not act, at all; so, could not be, at all.

What has no effect upon another is to all others as nothing. What has no effect upon any other then *just is* nothing.

So, the only way to procure reality is to generate novelty. This is why Whitehead put Creativity in his Category of the Ultimate (together with the Many and the One).

Practical Advice for Christians Caught in the Ongoing Collapse of Institutional Christianity and Western Civilization

At his blog The 96^th Thesis, Missouri-Synod-Lutheran lay leader Matthew Cochran is in the middle of an important series of posts. He acknowledges that (most of) formal, institutionalized Christianity is failing decisively to shepherd Christians through our ongoing collapse of civilization. They’re asleep at the wheel.

I’m not a Lutheran. I’m an independent Calvinist. But we’re in the midst of an ecumenical collapse of civilization, so I have many brothers.

In the first such post,  After Lutheranism—Part 1, Cochran acknowledges that it will be up to lay Christians to keep the faith alive. After listing numerous theological and social failures of his denomination, he accurately laments:

But worst of all from a practical standpoint is simply our demographics. Like most church bodies in America, we are not-so-slowly dying simply because we couldn’t be bothered to have (and catechize) children to replace ourselves.

Later:

But the goodwill required from ordinary Lutherans to support such blatant self-serving nonsense has been utterly exhausted. All of this dead thinking is directed at preserving Synod as though that were somehow more important than faithfully teaching God’s Word. But if Synod cannot or will not help us faithfully teach God’s Word, then it has no reason to exist.

That is why the concern of pastors and laymen should be to preserve the Lutheran heritage we’ve been given and pass it on to our children. No matter what happens to denominations or to Lutheranism, we know that both family and the Faith will persevere until the End.

Change “Lutheran” to “Christian,” and “Lutheranism” to “Institutional Christianity,” and you have an accurate assessment that applies to all Christians. It’s up to us to preserve the Faith.