The New Reformation Debate

Transcript The New Reformation Debate

Kevin Harris: Welcome to our podcast. This is Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. I’m Kevin Harris. Dr. Craig, you just returned from South Africa. A very important – some say that this debate in South Africa was historically significant. Why might that be the case?

Dr. Craig: This was a wonderful debate [1] to participate in because of the nature of the debate. It was a four-man debate against two very radical South African theologians who are pioneering a movement called the New Reformation in South Africa, which is very similar to the old Jesus Seminar here in the United States. These two theologians think that Christianity as it is traditionally understood is now outmoded. These two men are not even theists. They don’t even believe that there is a personal God who is distinct from the world and has made the world.

Kevin Harris: But they still want a reformation of Christianity?

Dr. Craig: Right. They are theologians. They teach theology at the University of South Africa. The South African church coming out of a kind of Dutch Reformed tradition is very pietistic from what we’ve been told and very ill-equipped to meet the challenges posed by the so-called New Reformation. So the people organizing the debate wanted someone to come in there who could debate these men and really expose the folly and the pretentiousness of their position. So they wanted to have it on the resurrection of Jesus. I said, well if we are going to have a four-man debate, I would like to be partnered with Michael Licona. Mike Licona did his doctorate on the resurrection at the University of Pretoria. So, in a sense, this was coming home for Mike. This is his alma mater. Mike is a very good debater. He’s got good techniques. He and I often talk. We both live in the same area. So they agreed to bring both of us over for this debate. So it was Mike Licona and me against Professor Spangenberg and Professor Wolmarans.

It was on the resurrection but even coming up with a topic was difficult, Kevin, because these two gentlemen are postmodernists. Their view is a kind of incoherent or inconsistent mishmash of scientific modernism with postmodern subjectivism, denial of truth and objectivity of canons of logic and rationality. They denied, for example, that texts have any objective meaning. So they refused to debate the question, “Did Jesus rise from the dead?” or “Was the resurrection a historical event?” because they said even to pose the question presupposes that there are objective answers to the question, that there is objective truth and these texts do have some sort of meaning. They don’t even agree to that.

Kevin Harris: Wow.

Dr. Craig: So we went back and forth, back and forth, trying to find a proposition that we could agree to debate on. What we finally arrived at was, “How should we understand the texts of the New Testament about the resurrection?” They reluctantly agreed to debate that with us. So in the debate I opened. I was the opening speaker. Our two contentions that we defended were that the texts of the New Testament teach that the resurrection of Jesus was a literal historical event – a literal physical event. The second contention was there is no good reason to deny this traditional understanding of the texts. In my opening speech I defended the first contention that the texts of the New Testament teach that the resurrection of Jesus is a literal historical event. I pointed out Paul’s disquisitions on the resurrection in 1 Corinthians15, the sermons in the Acts of the Apostles which treat the resurrection on a par with the crucifixion and burial of Jesus, an event verified by witnesses. Then the whole empty tomb tradition in the Gospels which point to the objectivity of this as a real physical event in history. I talked a little bit about the Jewish reclamation of Jesus because in preparing for the debate I found that Professor Wolmarans appeals to pagan mythology as the origin of the early belief in Jesus’ resurrection. [2] He takes this view that is popularized on the internet that has been invalidated by scholars for a hundred years that the belief in the resurrection is based upon pagan mythology.

Kevin Harris: That it was borrowed from pagan myths?

Dr. Craig: Yes. Particularly from myths about Dionysus or Bacchus, the god of wine and revelry and frenzy.

Kevin Harris: Osiris?

Dr. Craig: Yes, though his favorite is Dionysus. So I thought I need to explain to the audience first and foremost the Jewish reclamation of Jesus – that biblical scholars have come to discover that the proper interpretive context for understanding Jesus of Nazareth is first century Palestinian Judaism. Jesus was a Jew, all the disciples were Jews, and it is against that background that we are to understand the records of Jesus.

I pointed out that this has resulted in an increased credibility being accorded to the resurrection narratives – to the empty tomb, the postmortem appearances of Jesus, and the very origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection. Therefore, properly understood these narratives are presenting themselves as records of a literal historical event.

Then I just alluded to the second contention that there is no good reason to deny this. I pointed out that Wolmarans and Spangenberg are both atheists. Of course if you are an atheist you won’t believe in the resurrection. I said that is quite legitimate, but what is not legitimate for the atheist to do is to twist the meaning of the texts to make it accord with your worldview. What you need to do as an honest atheist is to just say that Christianity is false rather than use some kind of theological doubletalk to say it is really true even though the events didn’t occur.

Then I pointed out to close that really there is no good reason to deny that theism is true. These men are hopelessly out of touch, Kevin, with where natural theology is. I had with me a copy of the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. I held it up and explained what it is and said, look, anybody who thinks that theism is somehow out of date or obsolete just isn’t in touch with current philosophy of religion and this book is just a palpable example of it.

Kevin Harris: That book is available at ReasonableFaith.org.

Dr. Craig: It sure is. So that is how I closed my speech. We anticipated that Spangenberg would get up and give some sort of reasons for why this traditional understanding of the texts is wrong and that Mike Licona then would respond to Spangenberg in his speech. So my speech was prepared but Mike’s speech was extemporaneous and would simply be a response to whatever objections Spangenberg would bring up to this traditional understanding of the texts. That was the strategy we developed for the debate.

Kevin Harris: Now, how did Mike respond?

Dr. Craig: Well, what happened was that Spangenberg got up and he didn’t say anything of relevance to this traditional understanding of the texts. We thought he would get up and say modern science has invalidated this ancient worldview or that postmodernism shows that texts don’t have any objective meaning. He didn’t do any of that. Instead, all he did was get up and describe the different narratives in the four Gospels and how they differ from each other. Then he began to attack the doctrine of original sin and the doctrine of the Trinity. He said nothing about the resurrection.

Kevin Harris: Or what the New Testament says about the resurrection.

Dr. Craig: Right. He didn’t even conclude on the basis of these different narratives that they are hopelessly contradictory and that therefore the three facts that I defended couldn’t be true. He didn’t even draw that inference.

Kevin Harris: But he did try to say – was one of his points “Well, the resurrection narratives look like they are contradictory so they can’t be true.” Did he try to do that?

Dr. Craig: No, he didn’t draw that inference. All he did was review the resurrection narratives and point out, for example, that Mark does not narrate any appearances but just ends with the women’s discovery of the empty tomb whereas some of the other Gospels have the appearances. But whereas Matthew relates an appearance in Galilee and so does John, Luke does not relate any appearances in Galilee but has the disciples stay in Jerusalem where they see Jesus. He just pointed out those differences. [3] But he didn’t even then draw the inference that I thought he would draw which was that therefore the empty tomb and postmortem appearances are not in fact historical, which would have been an overreach. Maybe he had enough insight as a historian to know that that would be an overreach and so he didn’t draw that conclusion. But he just left it there. He just described the differences and then turned to attacking the doctrine of original sin and the doctrine of the Trinity.

So poor Mike Licona has to get up and he has nothing to refute. So Mike basically, after describing how it was great to be coming home to the University of Pretoria and then characterizing for the audience what a red herring is (how it is a smelly fish that you drag across the path of the bloodhounds to get them to go off track and follow some other track rather than go after their quarry), after describing what a red herring is, Mike just said all that Professor Spangenberg did was bring up red herrings in his opening speech, and while those issues are important and worth discussing in some other context, they are not the subject of tonight’s debate so I am not going to say anything about them. Instead, Mike then responded to some of the arguments that Spangenberg had given in his published work which we prepared briefs on but hadn’t even bothered to bring up in the debate.

So that was the way it kind of went the whole evening. They just wouldn’t even engage with the arguments. They had almost nothing to say.

Now Wolmarans was a little different, if I may be permitted to describe what he did. He was going to bring up the mythology stuff but again even his presentation was weak because he didn’t actually give any of the parallels between Christ and these pagan deities. So there really wasn’t even anything there to respond to. Instead he just asserted that the Gospels were mythological. I was prepared for this in my rebuttal. I explained that the vast majority of New Testament historians believe that the literary genre which is closest to the Gospels is the genre of ancient biography and that, therefore, the Gospels are not of the genre of mythology but rather they are of the genre of ancient biography which did have a historical interest. That is why the Gospels relate stories about people that actually lived like John the Baptist, Joseph Caiaphas, Pontius Pilate whom you can read about in the Jewish historian Josephus. They talk about events that really happened and are about places that really existed, that have been archaeologically excavated. These aren’t of the genre of mythology. These are ancient biography which have a historical interest and have been confirmed in many cases by other ancient historians and archeology.

I said therefore what has led Professor Wolmarans to think of the Gospels as mythology is his philosophical naturalism. It is because he thinks that anything that relates a supernatural event must be mythological that he classifies the Gospels as myths. So his ascribing the Gospels to the genre of mythology is not based upon a careful comparative literary analysis of the Gospels; it is based upon the philosophical presupposition of naturalism. Here you have a good illustration of how a philosophical presupposition has led this person into a disastrous misdiagnosis of the literary genre of a piece of writing out of a philosophical prejudice. Well, he again had nothing to say in response to this.

Kevin Harris: That is what you meant when you said that, “Well, as an atheist we’d expect you not to believe in the resurrection because on an atheistic or naturalistic worldview, supernatural things don’t happen. Therefore the resurrection didn’t happen.”

Dr. Craig: Right.

Kevin Harris: That is what you meant by that. But here it is an examination of these texts as the topic of the debate.

Dr. Craig: Right. The topic of the debate was what did the texts teach or what did they say? How should we understand them? It was funny. Wolmarans, in his response, said, “I’m not saying that we should understand them as mythology. Just that we could.” To which I said, “Well, of course you could but then you would be wrong.”

Kevin Harris: You could read them as a cookbook if you want!

Dr. Craig: Right, you can do anything you want!

Kevin Harris: How to make lasagna.

Dr. Craig: You can do anything you want in terms of what you could do but the debate topic for that evening was how should we understand them, and a proper literary diagnosis of these texts would be that these aren’t of the genre of mythology; rather, they are ancient biographies of Jesus. [4] Then I gave some historical evidence for the empty tomb, the postmortem appearances, and so forth.

In his final speech, poor Wolmarans just went into this long story about parents whose little boy died and they had ordered a birthday cake for the little boy and so when he died they didn’t go to the bakery to pick it up and the baker was angry with the parents because they didn’t come on time. So he was left with the cake on his hands. Then eventually the parents did go to the baker and they explained their son had died and so they ate together. I don’t know if they ate the cake or something. But I mean it went on and on and nobody saw the point of this anecdote. It was just kind of like out there. We all were sitting there scratching our heads saying what does this have to do with anything?

Kevin Harris: Do you understand it all now?

Dr. Craig: No, I still don’t know what point he related. But you know it was so typical of liberal theology. Kevin, I am convinced – and I am not being provocative here – that liberal theology is profoundly anti-intellectual. They claim that it is these Bible believing fundamentalists who are the people that are opponents of the intellect. I don’t think that is at all true. I think liberal theology is deeply anti-intellectual because on an intellectual level they have no good reasons for believing what they do. It is all based upon sentimentality and mysticism. When you ask them, “Give me some arguments for your position,” they are utterly inept. Nor can they refute the arguments for the position on the other side. I saw this with Bishop Spong in my debate with him. It was evident in my debate with Marcus Borg. It is all based upon sentimentality and mysticism.

Kevin Harris: Yeah, almost it is not important whether you get to the truth or what the facts are – it is “is it profound?”

Dr. Craig: Spangenberg, after Mike Licona’s speech, got up to give his rebuttal, and I have never seen anybody so angry in a debate before. He really lost it, Kevin. He began to rail against Christianity for its role in apartheid in South Africa and talked about how orthodox Christianity is dangerous and harmful. It was just a diatribe against the abuses that Christianity had been put to in South Africa in supporting apartheid and discrimination. It had no relevance whatsoever to the historicity of the resurrection or the teaching of these New Testament narratives. It was all an attempt to just push the hot buttons of the audience knowing that their opposition to apartheid would somehow translate into an opposition to orthodox Christianity. It was really manipulative.

Kevin Harris: Reminds me kind of some elements of the Silverman debate that you did with Dr. Silverman. He took the opportunity to list his litany of sacred cows of his issues – his hot buttons – and he wanted to take advantage of the platform to get those out. Well, so much for the debate topic, I’ve got to get my pet peeves out and take this opportunity to do it.

Dr. Craig: A lot of low-brow atheists do this, too, who aren’t capable of arguing on a philosophical level about theism and atheism. They use it as an excuse for talking about social and political issues. I can’t tell you how many times in debates, especially in Europe, my opponent has brought up George Bush and the war in Iraq. For them, this is the decisive refutation of the resurrection of Jesus! That George Bush is a Christian and he started the war in Iraq.

Kevin Harris: So God must not exist.

Dr. Craig: Yeah, so God doesn’t exist. [5]