I have allowed Christian scholars to post here at DC without my initial comments. [See tag below]. The following is one single comment left by Dr. Reppert in my combox. I thought it was worthy of further consideration. Dig in. I expect he'll defend what he wrote. I've taken the liberty to number his paragraphs for ease, should you wish to discuss them. Please, no ridicule.
I have a number of Christian scholars I regard as friends that I allow posting here at DC for comment (hit the tag "Christian Scholars" to see a few of them). Doug is writing his magnum opus titled, Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Christian Faith, which should be out by August of this year. He emailed me and asked that I publish a short article of his on the problem of evil which appeared in The Christian Research Journal, asking for comment. He'll have a chapter on this topic in his book too.
After reading it I responded:
Douglas Groothuis is a Christian Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary and co-editor with James F. Sennett of the book,
In Defense of Natural Theology. [Sennett has recently explained that while he has doubts he still believes,
seen here]. Groothuis is presently writing an apologetics book which I think will be the best of the lot and perhaps the standard text for years to come. Here is his submitted essay unedited and without comment:
I've written about my friend Dr. Sennett's struggles of faith in my book and
also here, where in the comments section he replied. The rumor has it that "he's really struggling with his faith." Sennett is the author of a book on Alvin Plantinga, and along with Douglas Groothuis edited the book,
In Defense of Natural Theology: A Post-humean Assessment.
You can find his books on Amazon.com.
Here is his unedited response to this rumor:
I invited
Dr. Blomberg to write a post to challenge us at DC, and he's graciously responded in the interests of a fair discussion of the ideas that separate us. No disrespectful skeptical response to such a respected scholar will be published.
I am honored, of course, in having a scholar like Dr. Haught write a response to my review. There have been five parts to it:
Part 1;
Part 2;
Part 3;
Part 4; and
Part 5. Here is his response in full:
The following was sent to me via William Hawthorne in response to Dr. Hector Avalos’ comments on a debate he had with Dr. Craig,
seen here.
I'm happy to clarify for Dr. Avalos what I meant by "printer's errors;" the rest of his remarks hardly merit comment.
Since I don't type, I've written all my books and articles longhand, including the book in question. The hand-written manuscript was delivered to a typist, who produced the typescript using an IBM Selectric typewriter with "golf balls" for different fonts. Later this typescript was re-done on a computer. Edwin Mellen Press used the camera-ready copy which I supplied to print the book. Somewhere in the transmission of the text letter-substitutions crept in, resulting in several misspellings. As I said in the debate, I take full responsibility for these spelling mistakes, since it was up to me to proof-read the text. These misspellings have, of course, no impact on the argument of the book. But then Dr. Avalos is less interested in the argument than in impugning the integrity of his opponent.
Such extraordinary ad hominem attacks by Dr. Avalos are unseemly and highly unprofessional and serve, I'm afraid, only to sully his own reputation.
Dr. Avalos' handling of my argument concerning the expression "the first day of the week" (Mark 16.2) well illustrates his modus operandi of half-truth and distortion. As I explained in the debate, the use of the cardinal number rather than the ordinal number violates the conventions of Hellenistic Greek, but not of Aramaic. I even supplied a reference to an Aramaic targum where the very phrase "the first day of the week" is found (Targum Esth. II 3.7) as an illustration. Now the half-truth mentioned by Dr. Avalos is that this targum comes from the period of late Aramaic (A.D. 200-700+). In the scant literature in middle Aramaic (200 B.C. - A.D. 200) we don't have any surviving texts that happen to mention the first day of the week. But we do have texts illustrating in middle Aramaic the convention of substituting the cardinal number for the ordinal number, as in, e.g., "the first month." The fact that no text survives having the very words in Mark 16.2 is thus inconsequential, an accident of historical preservation. That Mark's phrase is a Semitism is widely acknowledged and often remarked on by commentators.
Dr. William Lane Craig