Is Christianity Good for the World?

Is Christianity Good for the World? A Debate, by Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson

Internet-wise, I was at the right place at the right time. When I was reviewing Doug Wilson's Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, I stumbled across a blog post at Canon Press offering Doug Wilson's latest for bloggers to review. Even though I was months late, the very kind Frank sent me not one, but three books to review. This is about as close as I will ever come to winning the lottery, and this was much healthier for my soul!

This morning at breakfast, I just finished Is Christianity Good for the World?, a debate between celebrated atheist Christopher Hitchens and the always-pithy Douglas Wilson. Despite the serious subject matter and considerable intellect of the two authors, it's an engaging little book which I finished quickly (especially considering I was usually feeding a toddler while reading it). It began as a series of articles sponsored by magazine Christianity Today and evolved (if I may use that word) into this book.

I love a good debate, and this one was fun. Logical arguments, spotting fallacies and weak reasoning, trumping the opponent... these all make my nerdy heart go a-flutter. This debate all came down to authority, at Wilson's insistence. Hitchens started by railing against totalitarianism and religion, and pitted them against atheism and free will. Wilson responded by saying that unless you glorify God as God and give thanks to Him, argumentation is moot. Wilson kept trying to ask why Hitchens could use words like 'right,' 'wrong,' and 'evil' if morality, as he claimed, was a product of our evolved species. Hitchens argued that his morality was more noble because he was motivated by goodness itself and not fear of an imaginary afterlife. I thought it was interesting that despite Hitchens claiming the moral higher ground, he was consistently disdainful and made Wilson seem even more polite by contrast. Here's an example of his tone:

Deists used to agree with you about a Creator but were not religious in that the assumption of such an entity did not license the further assumption that he or she desired to intervene in human affairs, let alone the assumption that the torture and death of a single individual in a backward part of the Middle East was the solution that we had been awaiting for tens of thousands of years of brutish homo sapiens existence. (p. 52)

In my opinion, Wilson not only proved Hitchens' evasiveness in showing a basis for his standards of right and wrong, but he also showed himself to be funnier and kinder. After much civility, Wilson finally broke down and wrote:

You write like a witty but acerbic tenth-century archbishop with a bad case of the gout. (p. 64)

So, is Christianity good for the world? Hitchens seemed stuck on attacking all religion in general, and Wilson became (necessarily) focused on asking how an atheist had any moral claim to right and wrong, if we're all just 'matter in motion' and continually evolving and besides, who is to say that morality won't evolve to something totally different in the future? Wilson's arguments reminded me of "The Great Debate" between my old pastor, the wonderful Dr. Greg Bahnsen, and Dr. Gordon Stein. I'm paraphrasing from my recollections from high school when we studied this, so I encourage you to check out the video or transcript, but Dr. B trounced the guy by basically saying, "You're using the standard of 'right' and 'wrong' to judge me, but a godless world has no basis for absolutes. You're just borrowing from my own worldview."

Of course I'm a Christian, but I think Wilson showed his position to be more interesting and logically sound than Hitchens'. More than that, however, is Wilson's grace: congeniality towards his opponent, thankfulness to God and Christianity Today for the forum provided, and the grace given in the gospel message at the end of the book. Especially during the upcoming book tour and public debates, I hope this book changes hard hearts by changing stubborn minds. I think that Wilson's argumentation and Hitchen's celebrity will make this debate another one for the history books.

UPDATE: I was really thinking of the Bahnsen vs. Tabash debate, not Bahnsen vs. Stein. That's okay, they're both brilliant.

Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning

Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, by Douglas Wilson

This one's for you, Dan.

I've been eyeing this book for a while, and even (gasp!) was considering buying it when my mom loaned me her copy. Don't you love it when things like that happen?

I like Douglas Wilson's writing. I've been reading Credenda Agenda since I was in my teens, and I've read a fair amount of his books, too. I like straight shooters with clear absolutes (I could never make it in the emergent church), andI respect those with the intellect and wisdom to deal gracefully in gray areas, which education certainly can be. Doug Wilson combines both... this book was so rich that I took notes (which of course, I can't find now) and I filled a 3x5 card with sources I want to read. His writing style is similar to Dorothy Sayers (no surprise--one of her essays was the inspiration for this book), but his lengthy endnotes changed the tone from scholarly to more conversational.

His basic premise is this: as Christians, we shouldn't allow our Christian children to be educated by God's enemies. Salvation doesn't come from education, but from Christ alone. We are (somewhat) fortunate to see the American school system reaping what it has sown and collapsing in our lifetime. Turning back the clock 50, or even 150 years won't solve what is fundamentally wrong with public education: its foundation is man, not God. That said, our goal shouldn't be to give our children a better education than in public schools: we should aim much higher than that.

After thoroughly laying the groundwork, expounding on "the nature of knowledge" and understanding the student as both a fallen sinner and made in the image of God, Wilson dives into the classical model of education which was used in the Middle Ages. Let me warn you: as you read this, don't be a modern elitist. The medieval times were not full of cave-dwelling idiots. It was a time period that produced engineering marvels without technology, invented science, new kinds of literature, formed new forms of government and law, and art which is still unsurpassed. It was not uncommon for 16-year-olds to go to Oxford or Cambridge, and then go on to do things like invent calculus or discover new planets. Wilson, via Sayers, argues that it was because they knew how to think.

I enjoyed this book because I enjoy education. The various philosophies of education and the brief history of education in America were interesting. This book really threw a monkey wrench in my plans, though. I've been looking forward to homeschooling my present and future children since before I even had them. As the headmaster of a private school, the author makes a persuasive argument in favor of private schools. I began to question whether it was pride that convinced me that I can educate my kids all the way up to college better than a private school can. After all, I'm just one person with many, many, many failings. As I fell into self-doubt, I read their school's course curriculum and loved seeing the nitty-gritty details. Which made me think, does the average person like to read course curriculums? Maybe that means I should homeschool. Like my honey says, we have lots of time to figure that out, but it's still one more thing to worry about. You know, in case I get low or something.

Anyway, I highly recommend this book if you are interested in modern education, or if you enjoy reading about logical conclusions of the Christian worldview.

A Century of Horrors

A Century of Horrors: Communism, Nazism, and the uniqueness of the Shoah, by Alain Besancon

I've been putting off writing this review. I'm not sure why: I raved about this book to anyone who would listen. Despite its subject matter, I raced through reading it, but maybe now it's catching up with me. After a long day, tired Rachel just doesn't feel like curling up in bed and thinking about... a century of horrors.

It really was a fantastic book though. It evaluates Nazism and Communism, especially how they relate to the Holocaust (or "Shoah" if you're Jewish). The author avoided the grisly details of both ideologies to instead evaluate the bigger issues: physical destruction, moral destruction, the destruction of political life, theology, and memory.

Have you ever wondered why Nazism is considered evil incarnate, and communism just brings to mind "McCarthyism" and badly dressed dictators? According to the author, we have "hypernesia" of the former and amnesia of the latter, even though communism killed more people by over a factor of ten. The best analysis, I think, can be summed up from the following quote from "Physical Destruction" (chapter 1).

• The mode of killing is not a criterion of evaluation. The temptation to judge one death as innately more terrible than another must be resisted: no death can be seen from the inside. No one can know what a child experienced while inhaling Zyklon B gas or while starving to death in a Ukrainian isba. Because people were killed without any form of justice, one must exclaim that they all perished terribly--one person as much as the next--because they were innocent. (p. 11)

This quote references premeditated "famines" in Ukraine by Stalin, who simply decided to eliminate some Slavic people. Just because.

I would like to read this book again someday. It was concise but powerful. It's been a long time since I've read philosophy, and I would probably comprehend more if I were better-read. I haven't heard references to Hegel, Hume, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, or Trotsky since high school. The chapter on Memory was particularly over my head, probably because the author reference French politics and wrote from a Jewish perspective. As a Christian, I disagreed with a few minor points about Christianity, but he "gets" it, what Christianity is really about.

I was struck by Chapter 4 in particular, "Theology." He argued that both Nazism and Communism hated Christianity and Judaism because their gods were jealous. Fundamentally they are both evangelistic worldviews: Nazis thought the world would be redeemed through the "Aryan" people, and communism thought the world would be saved through their new definition of morality. They both tried to destroy God because they were/are His enemies, and they couldn't abide a God greater than them.

I highly recommend this book.