A Pragmatic Approach to Evangelicals, Calvinists, and Presuppositionalists

There are various perspectives among people who criticize religion. 1) There are critiques of religion coming from within each one of them over specific doctrines; 2) There are critiques coming from former believers of a specific religion; 3) There are deistic critiques of all "revealed" religions, 4) There are agnostic critiques of all metaphysical claims; 5) There are atheist critiques of all religion, and with it faith itself.

My present perspective is represented by (2) and (5). But I have embraced all five of them in my intellectual journey from believer to atheist. So, being the pragmatist that I am, let me introduce just a few selected Christian works on biblical issues that should shake most evangelicals, Calvinists, and presuppositionalists to the core, representative of (1) above.

---------------

Progressive evangelical works:

Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say about Human Origins.

Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament.

Kenton Sparks, God's Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship.

Kenton Sparks, Sacred Word, Broken Word: Biblical Authority and the Dark Side of Scripture.

Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture.

Alan Paglett and Patrick Keifert, ed., But Is It All True?: The Bible and the Question of Truth.

Even more progressively oriented works:

Thom Stark, The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It).

John Shelby Spong's works.

Women's Bible Commentary.

Susanne Scholz, Sacred Witness: Rape in the Hebrew Bible.

Walter Wink, Unmasking the Powers.

T.J. Wray and Gregory Mobley, The Birth of Satan: Tracing the Devil's Biblical Roots.

Mark Roncace, Raw Revelation: The Bible They Never Tell You About.

If time and money are an issue then just get one book from each of these two categories: Kenton Sparks, God's Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship, and Thom Stark's, The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It).

----------------

The kicker: One's religion cannot even escape the critiques coming from within, for there is no such thing as Christianity, there are only Christianities.

Any Christian who presupposes one's own particular sect is the true faith is delusional and biblically uniformed. That goes for Catholics and Protestants. That goes for any Christian who claims his or her faith is a "gift from God." That goes for Calvinists and Arminians. That goes for presuppositionalists. I do not think there is one Calvinist who has earned a PhD in biblical studies (OT or NT) from an accredited non-Calvinist university such as Harvard, Yale, Chicago Divinity School, Duke Divinity School, Notre Dame University, Claremont School of Theology, Boston University, and others like them. If they do exist they are about as rare as black swans. Calvinistic presuppositionalism does not stand a chance except from the most deluded among them.

0 comments: