JD Greear on straw man arguments

JD Greear takes on the task of teaching Bart Ehrman a little something about argumentation. Excellently done.

But surely Dr. Ehrman must realize that Bible scholars have demonstrated that Jesus’ claim to deity in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) are MUCH more substantial than he suggests to his students. They are not as blatant as Jesus walking around saying “I am God,” but just as significant. Ehrman does not address these more sophisticated arguments, ignoring them as if all Christianity had to offer were clever, anecdotal slights of hand.

Take, for instance this lengthy passage from N.T. Wright about Jesus’ claims to be God from an appendix in the great book by Antony Flew, There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. Why doesn’t Ehrman address this argument in class? Why pick on a weak argument as if that is all Christianity has to offer? To disagree with it would be one thing, to pretend it doesn’t even exist and beat up something weak in its place is not responsible argumentation.

…..[extended quote in here from N.T. Wright. Go take a look at it]

Dr. Ehrman did not deal with reasoning such as this. He took a rather weak argument used by middle school youth camp speakers and presented it as if it was “the best Christianity has to offer.” He did not bring up what Christian scholars on his level actually have to say about it. This is known as “straw man argumentation.”……Setting up weak arguments that do not represent the best of genuine Biblical argumentation and then knocking them down is not “fair” argumentation practice or good scholarship.

ouch. that will leave a mark.

bart ehrman’s new book

Bart Ehrman has written a new book and Methodist bishop William H Willimon takes it down with style in this review.

here is how the review begins, but take some time and go read the rest.

Bart Ehrman has written another book that is probably destined to be a best seller. God’s Problem is a lively, though thoroughly conventional and utterly predictable, dismissal of Jewish and Christian views of God. It is a real page-turner, quickly written by an author who assumes a position of moral and intellectual superiority to just about everyone who is unlucky enough not to be a tenured professor in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

God’s Problem begins not with God but with Ehrman, and with antitheology as autobiography. We learn that suffering has “haunted” Ehrman “for a very long time” and that it is the reason he lost his faith. The faith he lost was Christian evangelical fundamentalism, which, as we are told, crumbled under “critical scrutiny.” Ehrman told NPR’s Terry Gross that for a while he tried the Episcopal Church, finding its rituals aesthetically pleasing, but that he eventually left because “even in the Episcopal church they say the creed.” Even Episcopalians were too gullible and credulous for the agnostic Ehrman.

Being subjected to the puerile theodicy of undergraduates while he was teaching courses in religion at Rutgers was the coup de grâce for what was left of Ehrman’s faith. So the professor ventured forth on the journey that he apparently considers heroic, even though it has been made by millions in the West before him: the journey of taking God less seriously and himself more so. While this is now an old story, Ehrman seems invigorated by the telling of it—I presume because it his own story. The radical subjectivity and narcissism of evangelical pietism must be tough to shake.

While reading God’s Problem, I kept asking myself, why bother? There are no new insights or discoveries here. All of this is common knowledge to anyone who has taken a few Bible classes in any first-rate, state-funded, secular department of religion. And if one no longer believes in God, why attempt theodicy in the first place—who cares whether the God who isn’t is just or unjust, caring or uncaring? Any argument against the goodness of God that begins with the announcement that God probably doesn’t exist is a strange argument. Why beat a dead horse?

Hat tip to Challies