The evangelical Protestant apologist Norman Geisler died on the 1st of July, 2019. He was 86 years old. While he had a PhD in philosophy, he is not remembered for his contributions to that field, but applied his philosophical training to the defense of the school positions peculiar to the religious tribe of evangelical Protestant Christians — inerrantism of the Bible and such. I read him a little bit when I was nineteen, and promptly moved on to Pannenberg and Nietzsche. Most of Geisler strikes me as strangely preoccupied with something like sales — preconceiving the Bible to be a document that is divinely pristine and unerring (but confirming the historically specific tribal assumptions of evangelical Protestants), a document that is understood to be a foundation of truth, and vindicating it against anyone who would deny its normativity or trustworthiness (in the sense that Geisler wants it to be trustworthy). Recently, I recently came across his four-volume “Systematic Theology,” and wondered: what does he say about the ascension of Jesus? So I dug through it. Here is what I found.
Secularization
MacIntyre — Secularization and Moral Change, Some Concluding Thoughts
The previous post summarized the outlines of the course of the arguments made by Alasdair MacIntyre in the first, the second, and the third parts of his Secularization and Moral Change. As with the posts summarizing the individual sections, here I must reiterate that Peter Webster has what is probably the best summary of the book out there. I have offered a set of excerpts from A. V. Demant’s review. I also have asked whether the pre-modern world was the unified moral community that MacIntyre suggests it is.
Outlines and summary completed, a somewhat haphazard collection of my reflections/thoughts on Secularization and Moral Change follows below.
MacIntyre, Demant, and the Book of Sirach
Here I offer a question about whether MacIntyre’s framework in Secularization and Moral Change (we first reviewed part one, then part two, and finally part three, as well as summarizing the three parts) is entirely consistent with the evidence of previous ages regarding the novelty, within the modern period, of heterogeneous classes generating the loss of a sense of a shared moral community (and, thus, generating the loss of a shared religious community, culturally and sociologically).
I will not presume to answer this question, but I will offer material that will, I hope, allow one to ask it reasonably.
Alasdair MacIntyre — Secularization and Moral Change, Selections from Demant’s Review
V. A. Demant wrote a review of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Secularization and Moral Change which I list chunks of here, from the April 1968 issue of The Journal of Theological Studies.
MacIntyre — Secularization and Moral Change, Summary
First off, I must reiterate that you, reader, should begin by reading Peter Webster’s summary and overview of MacIntyre’s book.
Once you’re done with Webster, I would recap that, in this book, MacIntyre asks and answers three questions as follows: Continue reading
Into the Clarities 