1. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Madman,” Gay Science 125, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), 95-96.
2. Anthony Giddens calls postmodernity the “radicalising of modernity” (The Consequences of Modernity [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990], 52).
4. In the writing of this chapter I have found the following presentations and critiques helpful; the list should be considered to extend to all the other sources cited in the footnotes to this chapter: Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory (New York: Guilford, 1991); Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Fredric B. Burnham, Postmodern Theology: Christian Faith in a Pluralist World (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989); Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990).
5. Ihab Hassan, “From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: The Local/Global Context,” Philosophy and Literature 25, no. 1 (2001): 1-13. His first major work on postmodernism was The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).
6. Mark Lilla, “The Politics of Jacques Derrida,” New York Review of Books, June 25, 1998, 36. Lilla was professor of social thought at the University of Chicago and more recently professor of humanities at Columbia University.
7. Modern architecture is the application of mechanical reason to the shaping of space. This results in form following function—giant boxes of concrete, glass, and steel with ninety-degree corners and not a curve in sight. The centers of many American cities—Atlanta, Dallas, Minneapolis—major in these highly formal and impersonal stacks of blocks. Postmodern architects rebelled against the impersonal, bringing back motifs from every earlier era of architecture from every culture—rose windows, classical columns, modernized gargoyles—tacking them on to structural forms that have no obvious organizing principle.
8. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 24.
9. Giddens writes, “What is characteristic of modernity is not an embracing of the new for its own sake, but the presumption of wholesale reflexivity—which of course includes reflection upon the nature of reflection itself” (Consequences of Modernity, 39). I have, for example, been reflecting throughout this book on the worldviews that shape our understanding; now I am looking at my looking, reflecting on my reflecting. Another way to put this is to say I will step back from my analysis to make a meta-analysis.
10. I have dealt with this issue in Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015).
12. Some naturalist philosophers (such as Paul M. Churchland and Patricia Smith Churchland) have, however, moved back toward a new emphasis on the mechanisms inherent in the material order. See “Naturalistic Epistemology,” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Robert Audi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 518-19.
13. I devote chap. 3 of Naming the Elephant to this issue.
14. Over thirty years ago I wrote a paper for a graduate course in seventeenth-century philosophy in which I demonstrated to my own and my professor’s satisfaction that Descartes and Aquinas held identical views of God. What I didn’t see then is that Descartes’s interest in how he knew such a God existed had had such consequences.
15. René Descartes, “Meditation II,” in Philosophical Works, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1955), 1:152.
16. For Kant, of course, “creating reality” must not be understood in the manner of New Age thought; the categories by which we understand reality—space, time, etc.—are part of our endowment as human beings; they form the structure of our knowledge.
17. I am painfully aware that my comments about Descartes, Hume, and Kant are superficial perhaps beyond forgiveness. But though the strokes are broad, I think they take the right shape. For the story of modern philosophy I have found Copleston’s History of Philosophy of special value (Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vols. 4-9 [London: Burns and Oates, 1958–1974]). In particular for the issues dealt with here, however, see Robert C. Solomon, Continental Philosophy Since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
18. “For, formerly, one believed in ‘the soul’ as one believed in grammar, and the grammatical subject: one said, ‘I’ is the condition, ‘think’ is the predicate and conditioned—thinking is an activity to which thought must supply a subject as cause. Then one tried with admirable perseverance and cunning to get out of this net—and asked whether the opposite might not be the case: ‘think’ the condition, ‘I’ the conditioned; ‘I’ in that case [am] only a synthesis which is made by thinking” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 54, in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Modern Library, 1969], 257); see also a much longer critique in secs. 16-17, pp. 213-14.
19. Richard Rorty, for example, moved from a philosophy post at Princeton University to become professor of humanities at the University of Virginia.
21. Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 286, quoted by Stanley Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 120.
22. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in The Portable Nietzsche, 47.
23. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 6-7. Compare Rorty’s statement with this one by Michel Foucault: “‘Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operations of statements” (“Truth and Power” [from Power/Knowledge], in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow [New York: Pantheon, 1984], 74).
24. Willard Van Orman Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 44. Quine adds, “Epistemologically these are myths on the same footing with physical objects and gods, neither better nor worse except for differences in the degree to which they expedite our dealings with sense experience” (45). I am indebted to C. Stephen Evans for this observation.
25. I have discussed religious relativism in more detail in chaps. 5-6 of Chris Chrisman Goes to College (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 45-68.
26. Lilla, “Politics of Jacques Derrida,” 38.
27. A brief, helpful introduction to this notion is found in Harold K. Bush Jr., “Poststructuralism as Theory and Practice in the English Classroom,” ERIC Digest (1995), available at https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED387794.pdf. A poignant and powerful embodiment of postmodern storytelling can be found in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (New York: Harcourt, 2001), which has sold more than ten million copies and been adapted into an Oscar-winning movie (2012).
28. In a self-reflective postmodern society, Lyotard points out, “most people have lost the nostalgia for the lost narrative. It in no way follows that they are reduced to barbarity. What saves them is their knowledge that legitimation can only spring from their own linguistic practice and communicated interaction” (Postmodern Condition, 41). Lyotard seems not to be aware that his “postmodern” story is itself a story acting as a metanarrative (something that has lost credibility in a postmodern society, according to him) and therefore no more credible than any other story, any other explanation.
29. “Knowledge is violence. The act of knowing, says Foucault, is an act of violence” (Grenz, Primer on Postmodernism, 133).
30. Some translations say “a little lower than God.”
31. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism,” in A Casebook on Existentialism, ed. William V. Spanos (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966), 289. For Sartre, however, the authentic self is never encompassed by its cultural context or any metanarrative; it is rather radically free.
32. See Rorty’s discussion of Freud as a “strong poet” in Contingency, 20, 28, 30-34, and his comments on the power of poetry (151-52) and on truth as “whatever the outcome of undistorted communication happens to be” (67; also 52, 68).
33. Grenz, Primer on Postmodernism, 130. Grenz also quotes Foucault as follows: “To all those who still wish to think about man, about his reign, or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting-point in their attempts to reach the truth . . . to all these warped and twisted forms of reflection we can answer only with a philosophical laugh—which means, to a certain extent, a silent one” (from The Order of Things [New York: Random House-Pantheon, 1971], 342-43, quoted by Grenz, Primer on Postmodernism, 131).
34. See the brief discussion in the section titled “The Third Bridge: Is and Ought” in chap. 5.
35. Richard Rorty, The Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xlii. Derrida runs into the same problem. Mark Lilla writes, “Derrida places enormous trust in the ideological goodwill or prejudices of his readers, for he cannot tell them why he chooses justice over injustice or democracy over tyranny, only that he does” (Lilla, “Politics of Jacques Derrida,” 40).
36. Ronald Beiner, “Foucault’s Hyper-liberalism,” Critical Review, Summer 1995, 349-70.
37. Beiner, “Foucault’s Hyper-liberalism,” 353-54.
38. Dettmar notes that this view “has been articulated most influentially” by Barbara Herrnstein Smith in Contingencies of Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). See Kevin J. H. Dettmar, “What’s So Great About Great Books,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 11, 1998, p. B6.
39. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 79.
40. What follows is a broad-stroke picture of late twentieth-century literary theory. Details can be found in Roger Lundin, The Culture of Interpretation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993). Bonny Klomp Stevens and Larry L. Stewart’s survey designed to introduce graduate students to literary study is also helpful; see their A Guide to Literary Criticism and Research, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace College, 1996). I have also found helpful critiques and countercritiques of postmodern literary theory in numerous articles in volumes of The Christian Scholar’s Review and Christianity and Literature. See especially the survey of Christian approaches to literature and theory in Harold K. Bush Jr., “The Outrageous Idea of Christian Literary Study: Prospects for the Future and a Meditation on Hope,” Christianity and Literature, Autumn 2001, 79-103. The following books are especially helpful: Clarence Walhout and Leland Ryken, Contemporary Literary Theory: A Christian Appraisal (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991); and W. J. T. Mitchell, Against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
41. Mark Krupnick, “Why Are English Departments Still Fighting the Culture Wars?,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 20, 2002, p. B16.
42. John M. Ellis, Against Deconstruction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Caleb Crain, “Inside the MLA: or, Is Literature Enough?,” Lingua Franca, March 1999, 35-43.
43. Ilan Stavans, “A Literary Critic’s Journey to the Culture at Large,” Chronicle of Higher Education, August 9, 2003, p. B7.
44. Morris Dickstein, “Literary Theory and Historical Understanding,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 23, 2003, pp. B7-10.
45. David P. Barash and Nanelle Barash, “Biology as a Lens: Evolution and Literary Criticism,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 2002, pp. B7-9.
46. D. T. Max, “The Literary Darwinists,” The New York Times Magazine, November 6, 2006, www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/magazine/the-literary-darwinists.html; Britt Peterson, in “Darwin to the Rescue,” The Chronicle Review, August 1, 2008, p. B7-9, surveys further work of literary Darwinists.
47. Jonathan Gottschall, “Measure for Measure,” The Boston Globe, May 11, 2008, www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/05/11/measure_for_measure/.
48. Karen J. Winkler surveys the lash and backlash of postmodern literary theory in “Scholars Mark the Beginning of the Age of ‘Post-theory,’” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 13, 1993, p. A9. See also Frank Lentricchia, “Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic,” Lingua Franca, September/October 1996, 59-67.
49. Jeffrey J. Williams, “Why Today’s Publishing World Is Reprising the Past,” The Chronicle Review in Chronicle of Higher Education, June 13, 2008, pp. B8-10.
50. In The Death of Truth (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1996), Dennis McCallum has collected a series of critical essays on postmodernism in healthcare, literature, education, history, psychotherapy, law, science and religion, each written by an expert in the field.
51. Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Tradition and Creativity in the Writing of History,” First Things, November 1992, 28. Himmelfarb’s essay, which ranges over history, law, philosophy, and culture in general, deserves reading in its entirety (28-36).
52. Himmelfarb, “Tradition and Creativity,” 30.
53. Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Where Have All the Footnotes Gone?,” in On Looking into the Abyss (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).
54. Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History (London: Routledge, 1991), 70 (the last sentence in the book). For a plea for pulling back from postmodern historiography, see Jeffrey N. Westerstrom, “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been . . . Postmodern?,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 11, 1998, p. B4.
55. For a survey of these issues in the philosophy of science, see Del Ratzsch, Philosophy of Science (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986).
56. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 29.
57. In a statement guaranteed to enrage traditional scientists and philosophers, literary critic Terry Eagleton wrote, “Science and philosophy must jettison their grandiose metaphysical claims and view themselves more modestly as just another set of narratives” (quoted from “Awakening Modernity,” Times Literary Supplement, February 20, 1987, by Alister McGrath, A Passion for Truth [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996], 187).
58. The original article appeared in Social Text, Spring/Summer 1996, 217-52; Sokal’s revelation of the hoax was “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” Lingua Franca, May/June 1996, 62-64; Sokal’s “afterword” giving “his own account of the political significance of the debate,” which was sent to Social Text at the same time as his article in Linqua Franca but rejected by the editors, was published as “Transgressing the Boundaries: An Afterword,” Dissent, Fall 1996, 93-97. The story of this hoax was widely broadcast in journals in the summer of 1996. See, for example, “Mystery Science Theater,” Lingua Franca, July/August 1996, 54-64; Bruce V. Lewenstein, “Science and Society: The Continuing Value of Reasoned Debate,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 21, 1996, pp. B1-2; Liz McMillan, “The Science Wars,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 28, 1996, pp. A8-9, 13; Steven Weinberg, “Sokal’s Hoax,” New York Review of Books, August 8, 1996, 11-15; “Sokal’s Hoax: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, October 3, 1996, 54-56; “Footnotes,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 22, 1996, p. A8. See as well Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (New York: Picador, 1998), and The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy, ed. the editors of Lingua Franca (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).
59. Richard Monastersky, “The Emperor’s New Science: French TV Stars Rock the World of Theoretical Physics,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 15, 2002, pp. A16-18.
60. Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Here’s a taste of Taylor: “Ideas are never fixed but are always in transition; thus they are irrepressibly transitory. . . . The words of a/theology fall in between; they are always in the middle [between the beginning and the end]. The a/theological text is a tissue woven of threads that are produced by endless spinning” (13). Taylor has since branched out from theology to cybernetics; see his profile in “From Kant to Las Vegas to Cyberspace: A Philosopher on the Edge of Postmodernism,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 29, 1998, pp. A16-17.
61. A collection of essays on this topic by some of the theologians mentioned here plus others is Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm, eds., The Nature of Confession (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996). See also George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984); Diogenes Allen, Christian Belief in a Postmodern World (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1989); Stanley Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), and Renewing the Center, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2006); Stanley Grenz and John Franke, Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001); Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001); James K. A. Smith: Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2006); and J. Richard Middleton and Brian J. Walsh, Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995).
62. Thomas C. Oden, After Modernity . . . What? (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1990); Carl F. H. Henry, “Truth: Dead on Arrival,” World, May 20-27, 1995, 25; David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994); and Gene Edward Veith Jr., Postmodern Times (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994). Oden uses the term postmodern to describe his own approach, but he does so because he takes what I have been calling postmodern not to be “post” modern but ultramodern. What he recommends for the church today actually does, he believes, go beyond the modern and so can legitimately be called postmodern.
63. See Charlotte Allen’s somewhat sensational “Is Deconstruction the Last Best Hope of Evangelical Christians?,” Lingua Franca, January 2000, 47-59.
64. Robert Greer, Mapping Postmodernism: A Survey of Christian Options (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003).
65. See Merold Westphal, “Blind Spots: Christianity and Postmodern Philosophy,” Christian Century, June 14, 2003, 32-35; Douglas Groothuis, “Modern Fallacies: Response to Merold Westphal,” and Merold Westphal, “Merold Westphal Replies,” Christian Century, July 26, 2003, 41-42. See also Douglas Groothuis, Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000); and Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? and Who’s Afraid of Relativism? Community, Contingency, and Creaturehood (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014).
66. McGrath comments, “Postmodernism thus denies in fact what it affirms in theory. Even the casual question ‘Is postmodernism true?’ innocently raises fundamental criteriological questions which postmodernism finds embarrassingly difficult to handle” (Passion for Truth, 195).
67. Charles Taylor, “Rorty in the Epistemological Tradition,” in Reading Rorty, ed. Alan R. Malachowski (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 258.
68. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie,” 46-47. Bernard Williams’s comment about Rorty could serve as well for Nietzsche: “Sometimes he [Rorty and, I would add, Nietzsche] seems quite knowing about the status of his own thoughts. . . . At other times, he seems to forget altogether about one requirement of self-consciousness, and like the old philosophies he is attempting to escape, naively treats his own discourse as standing quite outside the general philosophical situation he is describing. He thus neglects the question whether one could accept his account of various intellectual activities, and still continue to practice them” (“Auto-da-Fé: Consequences of Pragmatism,” in Reading Rorty, ed. Alan R. Malachowski [Oxford: Blackwell, 1990], 29). For an extensive, sophisticated critique of postmodern epistemology, see Alvin I. Goldman, Knowledge in a Social World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3-100.
69. Lilla, “Politics of Jacques Derrida,” 38.
70. See Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” https://philosophicalsociety.com/Archives/A%20Free%20Man%27s%20Worship.htm; Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Random House, 1980), p. 8, n. 9; Kai Nielsen, Ethics Without God, rev. ed. (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993).
71. Václav Havel, Letters to Olga: June 1979–September 1982, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), 331, 346, 358-59; see also James W. Sire, Václav Havel: The Intellectual Conscience of International Politics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001), 55-59.
72. Hassan, “Postmodernism to Postmodernity,” final paragraph.
73. John Horgan, “Between Science and Spirituality,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 29, 2002, p. B9.
74. Peter Watson, The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Perennial, 2001), 767-72.
75. Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher (London: Phoenix, 1977), 590-92.
76. E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), esp. 238-65. See, for example, the responses of postmodernist Richard Rorty and biologist Paul R. Gross in “Is Everything Relative?,” Wilson Quarterly, Winter 1998, 14-49.
77. Sokal and Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense, 211.
78. I end this chapter on a cryptic note. It is not my intention now or later to contribute much to what I have briefly envisioned. Others (see those mentioned in footnotes 61-62 above) are working on this, and I will leave the task to them and their colleagues.
1. I, Jim Sire, suggest the following books concerning Islam: Winfried Corduan, Neighboring Faiths: A Christian Introduction to World Religions, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012), chaps. 3-4; Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002); Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History (New York: Modern Library, 2002); Mark Hanna, The True Path: Seven Muslims Make Their Greatest Discovery (Colorado Springs: International Doorways, 1975); Erwin Lutzer with Steve Miller, The Cross in the Shadow of the Crescent: An Informed Response to Islam’s War with Christianity (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2013). Two books by Chawkat Moucarry are unusually helpful: The Prophet and the Messiah: An Arab Christian’s Perspective on Islam and Christianity (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2002) and Islam and Christianity at the Crossroads (Batavia, IL: Lion International, 1988).
2. More technically, there are four schools of Islamic law (shari’a), of which the most conservative is the Hanbalite school, named after its founder Ibn-Hanbal, who lived around AD 800. About a hundred years after his death, his approach was pushed to the forefront by Abu al-Hasan al-Ash’ari, whose followers are known as Ash’arites. This conservative strain was revived in Saudi Arabia in the eighteenth century by the very strict reformer Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Wahhabite Islam became the only acceptable school of Islam in Saudi Arabia and eventually gave birth to the Taliban in Afghanistan. To some extent, it also stands in the background of Al-Qaeda because its leader, Osama bin Laden, had personal roots in Wahhabism. Since I am taking an intentionally conservative approach in my account, it will mirror the Hanbalite and Ash’arite beliefs most closely. But it is precisely this conservative form of Islam that has been held by the groups creating the most interest of late, so we can hardly go wrong if our description of the teachings of the Qur’an sheds light on their understanding of the religion.
3. Frederick Mathewson Denny, An Introduction to Islam, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1994), 387.
4. I shall use God and Allah interchangeably, partly for the sake of variety in style (if I were to write extensively on the biblical God I would use such synonyms as the Lord or Yahweh) and partly to keep us alert to the fact that there are both similarities and differences between Christian theism and Islamic theism.
5. All quotations from the Qur’an come from the translation by Yusuf Ali, which is now available in many editions as well as in multiple locations on the internet. Islam holds that the Qur’an is only the Qur’an in its original Arabic form because any translation must interpret, and to interpret is potentially to distort. There is much debate as to which translation/interpretation is more accurate than others. Yusuf Ali’s version has come in for some criticism, but it continues to be the one that is handed out by mosques and Islamic centers to visitors, and thus it is a fair inference that it must be accurate enough to represent their faith. Furthermore, Yusuf Ali was a devout Muslim, whose study notes reflect a commonly accepted conservative approach, and it can thus be trusted to represent a sound Islamic view in its phrasing and teachings.
However, one must be aware of Yusuf Ali’s manner of translation. When moving from one language to another, sometimes a single word needs to be translated by several words, or a short phrase by a longer one. Usually translators just make these adjustments automatically and expect readers to be aware of such things. Yusuf Ali puts such words or phrases in parentheses, even though they are clearly an integral part of the meaning conveyed. Furthermore, his use of capitalization is somewhat unusual.
6. Please note that, strictly grammatically, in other settings the elative may carry no more force than the comparative or superlative degrees, but that, on this point at least, it includes the exclusivist meaning.
7. Isam’il Ragi al Faruqi, “Islam,” in The Great Asian Religions, eds. Wing-tsit Chan, Isam’il Ragi al Faruqi, Joseph M. Kitagawa, and P. T. Raju (Indianapolis: Macmillan, 1969), 309.
8. Hammudah Abdalati, Islam in Focus (Indianapolis: American Trust Publications, 1975), 5.
9. Menahem Milson, trans. and ed., A Sufi Rule for Novices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).
10. The Mu’tazilites arose in the early eighth century AD among philosophically literate converts to Islam, who attempted to make a rational case (kalām) for Islam. They took uncommon stances on two issues: the eternality of the Qur’an and the freedom of individual persons (to which we will come later in this chapter). Concerning the Qur’an, the Mu’tazilites asserted that the Qur’an was created. They were opposed by the Ash’arites (see note 2 above), who advocated the understanding that the Qur’an was eternal, but only as the thoughts of God, not as a separately existing reality. Although the Ash’arites managed to have the Mu’tazilites eventually declared to be heretics, Mu’tazilite ideas have been revived to a certain extent by contemporary Muslims. Nevertheless, it does not make much sense to consider either the Mu’tazilites or Ash’arites to have “solved” the problem for Islam, though the Ash’arite view has been the more enduring one. The debate is still ongoing. David S. Noss, A History of the World’s Religions (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2008), 569-72.
11. John L. Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 73.
12. Richard C. Martin, Islam: A Cultural Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1982), 92.
13. Please note that here and in several other places, the Qur’an goes along with the biblical notion that Adam was created from dust or clay. The statement in sura 96 that God created man from a clot of blood does not refer to the creation of Adam, but to the miracle of each human being from the fertilized ovum, which initially appears to be nothing more than a clot of blood.
14. Mahmoud Murad, This Message Is for You, www.scribd.com/doc/295593/This-Messageis-for-You.
15. If you look at the “bl” combination of letters in Iblîs, it may make sense to you that this name shares the same linguistic root as our word diabolical.
16. Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path, 68-69.
17. Denny, Introduction, 289.
18. Denny, Introduction, 289.
19. Suzanne Haneef, What Everyone Should Know About Islam and Muslims (Chicago: Kazi Publications, 1979), 37. As we shall point out further below, the word “grace” here is far removed from what Christians mean by the term because in the Islamic context what Haneef calls “grace” is based on our works.
20. Al-Faruqi, “Islam,” 308.
21. Contemporary Muslims have received much aid in this contention by the practice of textual criticism of the Bible, in which even Christians expose the many variants in the biblical manuscripts. However, the claim that the text of the Bible had been altered goes back to the time of Muhammad himself, long before this scholarly discipline emerged. For a Christian response on this issue, see Corduan, Neighboring Faiths: 109-10, 133.
22. Martin, Islam, 100.
23. There are several collections of hadiths, and they are considered of uneven reliability, even among Muslims. A representative collection is provided by Maulana Muhammad Ali, A Manual of Hadith (Lahore, Pakistan: The Ahmadiyya Anjuman Ishaat Islam, 1944), easily accessible at www.sacred-texts.com/isl/hadith/index.htm.
24. The first appearance of a “radical” Islamic group came about in the struggle for the successor (caliph) to Muhammad as leader of the new Islamic community, which pitted Muhammad’s own family (his son-in-law Ali ben Talib and his grandsons, al-Hassan and al-Hussein) against the Umayyad clan, who believed they were entitled to the position. A group called the Kharijites (which means “dissenters”) emerged with the message that the person who is most qualified to be caliph should be whoever was the most devoted to Allah and most exemplary in obeying the Qur’an. Anyone who thought otherwise had lapsed from true Islam and deserved to receive the same treatment as unbelievers who fight against Islam. In fact, the Qur’an considers lapsed Muslims and hypocrites to be worse than unbelievers: “They swear by Allah that they said nothing (evil), but indeed they uttered blasphemy, and they did it after accepting Islam; and they meditated a plot which they were unable to carry out: this revenge of theirs was (their) only return for the bounty with which Allah and His Messenger had enriched them! If they repent, it will be best for them; but if they turn back (to their evil ways), Allah will punish them with a grievous penalty in this life and in the Hereafter: They shall have none on earth to protect or help them” (9:74). Furthermore, “The Hypocrites will be in the lowest depths of the Fire: no helper will you find for them” (4:145).
There is a remarkable phenomenon occurring in contemporary scholarship in the social sciences with regard to explaining the nature of “fundamentalism” in its various manifestations, which are usually considered to be Christian fundamentalism, radical Islam, and Hasidic Judaism. The underlying question is what these “fundamentalists” have in common and what similar influences they might have in their respective settings. Needless to say, there are many conflicting opinions. See, for example, Bruce Lawrence, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). I would like to suggest that the problem is that these groups have little in common other than that they represent conservatism in their individual contexts. Observers have taken a term that is only appropriate to Christianity, applied it arbitrarily to other religions, and are now trying to explain a phenomenon that they themselves created by their own unreflective use of terminology. In the case of Islam, for example, if groups like the Taliban need to receive a general label beyond Wahhabite and Hanbalite, the best term would not be “fundamentalist” but “neo-Kharijite.” Their preferred self-designation is Salafi, which means “those who follow the prophet.”
25. Judaism looks forward to the Messianic age, Christians wait for the second coming of Christ (frequently along with the expectation of a millennium), and Zoroastrians are counting on Saoshyant to set the world right. Even among the religions where history is a never-ending cycle, Hindus expect Kalki, Buddhists Maitreya, and Jains another whole set of twenty-four Tirthankaras. See Winfried Corduan, A Tapestry of Faiths: Common Threads Among the World’s Religions (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 171-94.
26. Just as I have been doing with Islam all along, I am here referring to Christianity in what I consider its more representative form and relying more literally on the Bible. The fact that there have been Christians who have attempted to establish God’s kingdom on earth by their own power, sometimes even by physical force, does not mean that this perspective is of equal standing with the more biblical view that I am addressing in the text.
27. An interesting sidelight is provided by the Pakistani group (now actually two groups), called the Ahmadiyya sect. This sect was started in the nineteenth century by Ghulam Ahmad of Qadiyan, who claimed to be the Mahdi, the second coming of Christ, and the fulfillment of Hindu hopes for the return of Krishna (though not, as frequently misrepresented, Krishna himself). Ahmadiyya Islam is consistently pacifistic, and it has now divided into two subgroups, named after the towns of their headquarters. The Qadiyan branch says that Ghulam was only a reformer, whereas the Lahore branch takes the unorthodox view that he was a prophet as well. Consequently, the latter form of Ahmadiyya Islam is not officially recognized as true Islam in Pakistan.
28. To underscore this point, allow me to extend it a little further, not because it may look exaggerated to non-Muslims, but because it illustrates the reality that I am addressing. The hadith even includes the proper means of sanitation and which prayers to utter before and after one performs biological acts of necessity. Furthermore, it does so clearly and openly without violating any sensitivities, which are more likely to be the product of Western “Christian” scruples than Islamic attitudes. Maulana Muhammad Ali, A Manual of Hadith, chap. 4, sec. 1: “Natural Evacuations,” www.sacred-texts.com/isl/hadith/had07.htm.
29. Colin Chapman, The Cross and the Crescent: Responding to the Challenges of Islam (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 259-60.
30. Corduan, Neighboring Faiths, 48-49.
31. Chapman, Cross and Crescent, 122.
32. Chapman, Cross and Crescent, 129.
1. For further reading in worldview analysis and assessment, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007); David Naugle, Worldview: History of a Concept (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002); James A. Herrick, The Making of the New Spirituality: The Eclipse of the Western Religious Tradition (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004); Mary Poplin, Is Reality Secular? Testing the Assumptions of Four Global Worldviews (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014); and David Burnett, Clash of Worlds: What Christians Can Do in a World of Cultures in Conflict (London: Monarch, 2002).
2. Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1968), 88.
3. I have written at length about why one should choose one worldview over another in Why Should Anyone Believe Anything at All? (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994).
4. Keith Yandell, “Religious Experience and Rational Appraisal,” Religious Studies, June 1974, 185.
5. Each formulation of each worldview must be considered on its own merits, of course. But for each of the worldviews I have weighed and found wanting I know no formulation that does not contain problems of inconsistency.
6. See, for example, Romans 1:28.
7. For a full treatment of the nature of doubt and its contribution to the formulation of an adequate worldview, see Os Guinness, God in the Dark (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1996).
8. See, for example, Colin Chapman, The Cross and the Crescent: Responding to the Challenges of Islam (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003); and Chawkat Moucarry, The Prophet and the Messiah: An Arab Christian’s Perspective on Islam and Christianity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001).
9. See, for example, two collections of personal essays by philosophers who are openly Christian: Kelly James Clark, ed., Philosophers Who Believe: The Spiritual Journeys of 11 Leading Thinkers (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993); Thomas V. Morris, ed., God and the Philosophers: The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Paul M. Anderson, Professors Who Believe: The Spiritual Journeys of Christian Faculty (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998).
10. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 4th ed., ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 66.
11. The New Testament is the primary text for Christian theism, but I also recommend John R. W. Stott, Basic Christianity, Signature ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019), and J. I. Packer, Knowing God, 20th anniversary ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993).
1. A few books that should help you to think through the issues are Judith K. Balswick and Jack O. Balswick, Authentic Human Sexuality: An Integrated Christian Approach, 3rd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019); Hak Joon Lee and Tim Dearborn, eds., Discerning Ethics: Diverse Christian Responses to Divisive Moral Issues (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2020); Travis Collins, What Does It Mean to Be Welcoming? Navigating LGBT Questions in Your Church (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2018); Mark A. Yarhouse, Janet B. Dean, Michael Lastoria, and Stephen P. Stratton, Listening to Sexual Minorities: A Study of Faith and Sexual Identity on Christian College Campuses (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2018); Mark A. Yarhouse, Understanding Gender Dysphoria: Navigating Transgender Issues in a Changing Culture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015); and Gerald L. Hiestand and Todd Wilson, eds., Beauty, Order, and Mystery: A Christian Vision of Human Sexuality (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017).
2. See Newton Lee, ed., The Transhumanism Handbook (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019); David Livingstone, Transhumanism: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace, 2015); Max More and Natasha Vita-More, eds., The Transhumanist Reader (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013); Jacob Shatzer, Transhumanism and the Image of God (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019).
3. In addition to the books cited in chap. 4, see Stanley L. Jaki, Cosmos and Creation (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1980); Michael J. Murray, Reason for the Hope That Is Within (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999); James W. Sire, Why Should Anyone Believe Anything at All? (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1994); Richard Carlson, ed., Science and Christianity: Four Views (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2000); Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2000), Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (New York: Penguin, 2008); Matthew Dickerson, The Mind and the Machine (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2011); Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015); Stewart E. Kelly with James K. Dew Jr., Understanding Postmodernism: A Christian Perspective (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017).
4. Natural Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine, Science, Evolution, and Creationism (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2008), 10.
5. Natural Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine, Science, Evolution, and Creationism, 12 (italics original).
6. In “When Science Went Modern,’’ Hedgehog Review (Fall 2016), Lorraine Daston gives an historical and sociological account of this shift from the modern to the postmodern understanding of science. Daston’s term for postmodern is chastened modernity.
7. See chap. 4; also, Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell (New York: Penguin, 2006), and From Bacteria to Bach and Back (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017). For critiques, see Alister E. McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion? (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), and David Bentley Hart, “The Illusionist,” New Atlantis, Summer/Fall 2007, 109-21.
8. Paul M. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 133; also 130, 261, 271.
9. Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: Evolution of the Human Consciousness (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 210, 253, 290.
10. Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher (London: Phoenix, 1997), 1, 572.
11. In contrast, see Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015); also see her Absence of the Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
12. See Timothy R. Jennings, MD, The God-Shaped Brain: How Changing Your View of God Transforms Your Life (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013), 51-56.
13. Jennings, God-Shaped Brain, 51.