Michael Martin, The
Case against Christianity. Temple University Press, 1991.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
After
a dozen years of active involvement as a born-again Christian, and
another twenty as some sort of Liberal Protestant, I finally gave up on
Christianity. I did so partly because the approach to life and faith
just no longer rang true to me, partly because the beliefs no longer
made any sense. Or rather, I could no longer make light of the fact that
they made no sense by retreating to claims of "mystery" and "divine
paradox." Wherever I turned, whatever issue I examined (and in the
course of a Ph.D. program in Systematic Theology and another in New
Testament and Early Christianity I had occasion to examine quite a
number of them, and from a sympathetic standpoint), I found that the
great "verities" of the Christian creeds seemed to make sense only so
long as you didn't trouble to think them out too far. If you did, then
you inevitably found it was a matter of apologetics. Advocates of the
doctrines of Incarnation, Atonement, biblical authority, the
Resurrection, the Trinity invariably wound up on the ropes, honest
enough to admit that the old doctrines, forged in an era when things
looked quite different, could he held today only with considerable
retooling, and even then it was a challenge to show their relevance,
what difference it would make to believe them. How the believer was at
any advantage in dealing with his own problems or the problems of the
world because he believed the doctrines. In the end it became apparent
to me that theologians stuck to their guns because of sentimentality and
because of their association with Christian communities that could be
given up no more easily than family associations. Christianity had to be
true. But it wasn't. It isn't. And that is what philosopher Michael
Martin (also the author of Atheism: A Philosophical Justification,
1990) demonstrates with great cogency and breadth in this volume.
Martin
deals with pretty much the whole menu of historic Christian doctrines
(the historical existence, resurrection, virgin birth, second advent,
and incarnation of Jesus, Christian ethics, salvation by faith and/or
works, divine voluntarism, and the atonement). He begins with a
searching and provocative section on the morality of belief, whether one
is entitled to take a short-cut to desirable beliefs without sufficient
evidence to establish them. Of course his answer is that one is not, as
any religious believer will readily admit when it comes to any other
(non-religious) area of life and decision making. Through the rest of
the book Martin has little difficulty showing how all the Christian
doctrines float in the air like Macy's parade floats. But he doesn't
stop there. Not only is faith in insupportable notions a sin, a cheat,
but Martin shows how doctrine after doctrine falls apart on close
examination. There is nothing really to believe! There is no systematic
coherence to most of them, no reason belief A should lead to belief B,
other than by historical accident. Implicit in the argument of the book
is the important insight that the Christian belief set (I almost said
"belief-system") is an accidental collection of doctrines which only
sometimes even fit together without being forced. Believers feel they
must take or leave the whole thing simply because they accepted it all
in one gulp from the church or evangelist who catechized them. If they
bothered to question or readjust any particular belief, the illusion of
seamlessness would pop like a soap bubble. It would no longer be a
matter of simple faith, which is what they want. What, really, does the
Incarnation have to do with the atonement? Why should belief in the
incarnation of God in Christ imply Trinitarianism instead of Modalism or
Tritheism? The believer never even stops to think of these things. But
Martin does. He leaves few stones unturned, few paths untrodden, in his
effort to reveal the arbitrariness and self-vitiation of the
hydra-headed theology.
I would
have enjoyed seeing Martin pause at greater length over the
implausibilities attendant on the evolution of Orthodox God-Man
Christology, but having, one supposes, to make some tough triage calls
given a manageable-length volume, he focuses more on recent attempts to
render the two-nature Christology coherent (e.g., Thomas V. Morris's
astonishing "two-minds" argument, which sounds like the Nestorian heresy
to me!). Martin's approach is rigorously philosophical. It is good to
see him take on Alvin Plantinga, whose "What? Me worry?" approach to
epistemology and foundationalism lets supposedly sophisticated believers
off the hook way too easily (see also D.Z. Phillips's chapter on
"Reformed Epistemology" in his Faith After Foundationalism).
Martin's
got you covered. There's a tendency for liberal and neo-orthodox
theologians to agree with severe criticisms of traditional faith and
then to say, "But of course, this doesn't affect my position!" Look at
Karl Barth's introduction to Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity,
Harper Torchbook edition, or Paul Tillich's claim that the God atheists
reject does not exist. But Martin zeroes in on such modernizers and
demythologizers in a separate chapter. Liberal theologians usually
manage to end up with a lot of sentimental mush or something that gains
its strength from an unspoken accommodation to the very humanism it
still claims superiority over. Princeton theologian J. Gresham Machen's
question is still a good one: is Liberalism still Christian? If so, it
is a toothless tiger.
With
such a comprehensive work as Martin's The Case against Christianity
I find myself with few criticisms to make. Let me just note a couple of
minor factual errors. Observing that the Nicene Creed said little about
the Holy Spirit, Martin says this lack was rectified at the Council of
Chalcedon. The result was the "Nicene-Chalcedonian Creed." Actually,
Chalcedon produced its own creed, while the Nicene Creed was embellished
instead at the Council of Constantinople. There is no "Nicene-Chalcedonian
Creed" so far as I know, but rather a Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.
Also, he garbles wording of the Testimonium Flavianum, the
paragraph on Jesus interpolated into Josephus. These slips in no way
affect the cogency of the argument, but you know apologists: they love
nothing better than to strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. They will
point to glitches like this and say, "Why bother responding when the
atheist doesn't even have his facts straight?" That's a dodge, but it's
a shame to give 'em an inch.
More
seriously, I kind of wish Martin hadn't opened his discussion of the
resurrection of Jesus with the observation that far all we know, one day
science may discover how a man could rise from the dead without divine
intervention. He mentions it as a mere possibility, but why bother?
Fundamentalists will seize on it as if to make Martin seem to be
grasping at straws. (Martin might better have pointed to the neglected
research of J. Duncan M. Derrett (Anastasis: The Resurrection as a
Historical Event) who shows how nick-of-time recussitations from the
very lip of the grave were so common in the ancient world that ancient
medical texts commonly discussed them. Along the same lines, though,
Martin does a fine job of pointing out the absurdity of apologists who
appeal to modern physics theories of indeterminacy to argue that there
is no absolute cause-and effect structure of inflexible natural law.
Apologists thus think to chip away at the "closed system" of
naturalists; but what they are really doing is to subvert the very
natural regularity that would make an anomalous event seem to point to a
supernatural cause. In other words, they destroy the argument from
miracle by their attempted defense of it!
When my
wife Carol saw me reading The Case against Christianity, her
comment was, "Yeah, like you need one!" Well, some people do. And Martin
has provided a good one.