Skeel True Paradox

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8308-9669-1
Verlag: InterVarsity Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten

Reihe: Veritas Books

Foreword Review's Annual INDIEFAB Book of the Year Finalist How do we explain human consciousness? Where do we get our sense of beauty? Why do we recoil at suffering? Why do we have moral codes that none of us can meet? Why do we yearn for justice, yet seem incapable of establishing it? Any philosophy or worldview must make sense of the world as we actually experience it. We need to explain how we can discern qualities such as beauty and evil and account for our practices of morality and law. The complexity of the contemporary world is sometimes seen as an embarrassment for Christianity. But law professor David Skeel makes a fresh case for the plausibility and explanatory power of Christianity. The Christian faith offers plausible explanations for the central puzzles of our existence, such as our capacity for idea-making, our experience of beauty and suffering, and our inability to create a just social order. When compared with materialism or other sets of beliefs, Christianity provides a more comprehensive framework for understanding human life as we actually live it. We need not deny the complexities of life as we experience it. But the paradoxes of our existence can lead us to the possibility that the existence of God could make sense of it all.

David A. Skeel Jr. is S. Samuel Arsht Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He is the author of The New Financial Deal, Icarus in the Boardroom and Debt's Dominion. He has been interviewed on The News Hour, Nightline, Chris Matthews's Hardball (MSNBC), National Public Radio and Marketplace, and has written for such publications as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard and Books Culture. Skeel is a frequent speaker at Veritas Forums and is an elder at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. He blogs at www.trueparadoxblog.com.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Skeel, David

Leseproben

Preface
A few months after this book first began to take shape, I mentioned to a Christian friend that I was writing a short book defending Christianity. Her reaction was enthusiastic and expectant. “I sure hope it’s simple!” she gushed. “What we need are books that explain the simple truths of Christianity. Is it simple?” I wasn’t quite sure how to respond. “Not exactly,” I finally said, borrowing my words from a rental car ad of several decades ago. The core truths of Christianity are indeed simple. And I don’t think most readers will find the book difficult to read. But this is not a book about the simplicity of Christianity. My theme is Christianity and complexity. Complexity is widely seen as an embarrassment for Christianity. How can an ancient religion like Christianity possibly begin to explain a world that is as complex as we now know our world to be? After all, Christianity arose at a time when the sun was thought to revolve around the earth, modern travel and warfare were unimaginable, and no one dreamed of the secret life of subatomic particles. An atheist scientist friend of mine recently remarked that Christianity appears to be “not much more than a human creation of Bronze Age peasants derived from wholly unexceptional and largely fictional narratives.” Although the friend is not hostile to Christianity (or me), he is convinced that the world long ago passed Christianity by. The assumption that Christianity and complexity don’t mix seems to be shared not just by religious skeptics, but also by many Christians. Yet it actually gets things precisely backward. Complexity is not an embarrassment for Christianity; it is Christianity’s natural element. Or so I will try to persuade you from this page of True Paradox to the last. The complexities that will concern us most arise from the intangible aspects of our experience. Why do we have consciousness—and odder yet, why do we have a compulsion to devise elaborate ideas about our place in the universe? Why do we experience beauty as transcendent yet somehow impermanent and corrupted, and suffering as somehow wrong, rather than simply a part of the natural order? Why do the advocates of each new system of justice believe they can devise legal codes that will achieve a fully just social order, even though every previous system of justice has failed? These are the kinds of questions that any religion or system of thought that claims to be true needs to have good answers to. The questions we will be considering are, in a sense, a prequel to conventional Christian apologetics—that is, defenses of Christianity, usually aimed at those who are already intrigued by Christianity. (I suppose that makes these opening words a preface to a preface.) My hope is that at least a few people who don’t think there’s any reason to take Christianity seriously when they pick up this book or who are harboring doubts about their Christian faith will be tempted to read much better (and longer) books of conventional apologetics, such as C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity or Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God. I like to imagine this book as a bit like a gateway drug—a gateway to a faith that has little in common with the opiate Karl Marx so famously imagined. Every book is shaped by its author’s perspective, whether the author admits it or not, and that is perhaps especially true with a book like this one. So let me make a few very basic confessions. I have been a law professor for nearly twenty-five years, after—among other adventures—studying literature and zoology in college and practicing law for several years in a large Philadelphia law firm. I came late to Christianity—embracing it first at the end of my college years—and I still remember the questions that troubled me and what it felt like to discover that Christianity is not simply a lifeless list of rules. In the course of this work, I will range broadly (and often very briefly) across religions and systems of thought, from Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill to pantheist and dualist religions. It will suffice to define nearly all of these thinkers and ideas when they first appear in the discussion. But the two most frequently discussed perspectives should be briefly explained here. The first is Christianity, of course. What do I mean by “Chris­­tian”? For my purposes, a Christian is a man or woman (or girl or boy) who genuinely believes that Jesus Christ is God, that he was resurrected from the dead and that he is our means of reconciliation with God. The heart of Christianity lies in these (simple) beliefs, which can be summarized as belief in Jesus’ resurrection. As the apostle Paul says of himself and his fellow Christians, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Some might complain that this definition leaves out too much. A true Christian, they might argue, also believes that Adam and Eve were actual people, not simply characters in a story; that the Exodus took place as described in the Bible; and that the four Gospels are an accurate historical account of Jesus’ life and ministry. I would not for a moment suggest that these or a number of other issues are unimportant. But they do not lie at the very heart of Christianity. The feature that makes Christianity different from any other religion or system of thought is Christians’ belief that Jesus, the God who became man, suffered, died and was raised from the dead to reconcile humans with God. I give the same answer to those who might criticize my definition as too stringent. In his lovely meditation on embracing Christianity, My Bright Abyss, the poet Christian Wiman says, “I’m a Christian not because of the resurrection (I wrestle with this),” before marveling that Christ’s suffering “shatters the iron walls around individual human suffering” and “makes extreme human compassion—to the point of death, even—possible.”1 But to say that the core of Christianity is human compassion robs this faith of its transformative potential. The resurrection is not one particular doctrine that we can agree to disagree about; it is the mysterious source of a new way of living. Wiman himself later comes to the same conclusion, acknowledging that “to be a Christian has to mean believing in the resurrected Christ.”2 Christians do hold other beliefs as well, some of which will figure prominently in the chapters that follow. Christians believe that God created and is separate from the universe, for instance, and that human beings were made in God’s image. These beliefs will be a central theme of chapter one. One of the most mysterious of Christian doctrines, the Trinity, will make an appearance in a passage on beauty in art in chapter two. But the distinguishing feature of Christianity has always been Christians’ belief that Jesus was raised from the dead. The second frequently mentioned perspective is materialism. By materialism, I mean the belief that the physical, material world is the ultimate reality—there is no supernatural God, gods or spirit(s). This view, or views somewhat like it, is sometimes referred to as naturalism or by still other names. I realize that when some readers hear the term materialism, their first thought has more to do Black Friday, outlet stores or the bumper sticker “He who dies with the most toys wins” than with a denial of the supernatural. Some people who are preoccupied with possessions also are materialists in the sense I have in mind here, but others are not; indeed, some of the best-known materialists, such as the Princeton ethicist Peter Singer, rail against the acquisitive tendencies of contemporary Westerners (including Christians who share this tendency). Despite the ambiguity of materialism, those who reject the existence of God or supernatural forces are usually described as materialists, and each of the alternative labels has flaws of its own. I will stick with the conventional terminology. The best-known current materialists, New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, ground their materialism in evolutionary theory. They insist that human beings, together with all life on Earth, are the product of unguided Darwinian evolution. Although it is possible to be a materialist without also endorsing unguided evolution as the explanation for reality as we experience it, materialism and evolutionary theory are tightly linked in the contemporary world. Because of this, I will often focus on materialists who look to evolutionary explanations for the puzzles and paradoxes of our experience. The introductory chapter of True Paradox lays the groundwork for my embrace of complexity by focusing first on two prominent and recent strategies for defending Christianity that implicitly reject the perspective I will be taking here. Each of the strategies is designed, or so it seems to me, to deny the complexity of the world as we actually experience it. The chapter also points out that Christians are not the only ones who seem to have trouble with complexity. Many of the best-known skeptics of Christianity flatten out complexity in a different way: by downplaying or even denying the intangible dimensions of human experience. They are a little like the triangles, squares and other shapes in the movie Flatland, who are comfortable in two dimensions but are disoriented by the evidence of a third. The five chapters that follow consider a series of puzzles and paradoxes that each of us is familiar...