Johnny Skeptic

split from here - mod note

I paid Richard Carrier to write his rebuttal of James Holding's TIF. I debated TIF with James Holding et al at the Theology Web for well over a year in various threads. I eventually retired all of them. A couple of months ago I opened a new thread at the Theology Web titled 'TIF is another loser for James Holding.' Holding knew better than to debate the issue any further with me. Other opposition was short lived. All of my arguments were based upon Rodney Stark's 'The Rise of Christianity.' Stark explains the growth of the early Christian Church by secular means. He says that the early Christian Church had social advantages not shared by competing religions, benefits in the here and now, and benefitted from the weaknesses in pagan religions. My favorite passages are as follows:

“Moreover, the fruits of this faith were not limited to the realm of the spirit. Christianity offered much to the flesh as well. It was not simply the promise of salvation that motivated Christians, but the fact that they were greatly rewarded here and now for belonging. Thus while membership was expensive, it was, in fact, a bargain. That is, because the church asked much of its members, it was thereby possessed of the resources to ‘give’ much. For example, because Christians were expected to aid the less fortunate, many of them received such aid, and all could feel greater security against bad times. Because they were asked to nurse the sick and dying, many of them received such nursing. Because they were asked to love others, they in turn were loved. And if Christians were required to observe a far more restrictive moral code than that observed by pagans, Christians – especially women – enjoyed a far more secure family life.�

“The dynamics of stigma and sacrifice have the following direct and formal consequences (Iannaccone 1992). First: ‘By demanding higher levels of stigma and sacrifice, religious groups induce higher average levels of member commitment and participation.’ Second: ‘By demanding higher levels of stigma and sacrifice, religious groups are able to generate greater material, social, and religious benefits for their members.’�

Regarding benefits from the weaknesses of Paganism, Stark says the following:

“Henry Chadwick assured his readers that ‘Paganism was far from being moribund when Constantine was converted to Christianity’ (1967:152), and E. R. Godds noted that in the fourth century paganism began ‘to collapse the moment the supporting hand of the State [was] withdrawn from it’ ([1965] 1970:132). I quote these two distinguished scholars to illustrate the general agreement among historians that paganism was brought down by Christianity and that the conversion of Constantine was the killing blow – that paganism declined precipitously during the fourth century when Christianity replaced it as the state religion, thus cutting off the flow of funds to the pagan temples.�

Holding once told me that TIF deals only with the 1st century. I told him that if Rodney Stark's estimate of 7,530 Christians in 100 A.D. is anywhere near being accurate, that would invalidate all of TIF in its entirety. My argument was that historically, there plenty of examples of very small groups of people believing in all sorts of outlandish things, some things even more outlandish than Christianity. After debating the issue with me for well over a year, he finally said that even if he agreed with Stark's estimate, it wouldn't matter. I told him that it would matter quite a lot because that would mean that in the 1st century, only a very few people "bought one crucified," reference Factor #1 in TIF, or trusted the testimonies of women or trusted in bumpkins, which were two of the other factors. I demolished Holding so badly regarding the size of the 1st century Christian Church that when he wrote his rebuttal to Richard's article, instead of writing a detailed rebuttal to Richard's comments about the size of the 1st century Christian Church, reference chapter 18 in Richard's article, he told readers to go to the Theology Web and read the debates there. He wrote a detailed rebuttal to every other chapter in Richard's article.

Toto

Johnny Skeptic: just a note on Rodney Stark. Be aware that Rodney Stark has recently gotten a plum appointment to the faculty at Baylor University. Baylor only hires Christians, and as part of the deal, Stark announced that he had accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior.

Check out this thread in EC about Stark's attack on Darwinism.

This does not negate his earlier good work. Just don't elevate him to sainthood.

Johnny Skeptic

A number of months ago, a Christian at the Theology Web told me that Stark has taught at Baylor University, so I have figured all along that he was a liberal Christian.

Since I am an agnostic, Stark's attack on Darwinism doesn't bother me at all. I have no idea whether Darwin was right or wrong, but I am quite certain that the Bible is not the revealed revelations of a loving God, nor any other religous book for that matter.

As James Holding correctly says in his book review of 'The Rise of Christianity,' Stark uses a secular approach to explain the growth of the early Christian Church. Some Christians at the Theology Web claimed that Stark promoted Christianity, and that he would be appalled at the way that I have used his book. If Stark promoted Christianity, the book clearly proves that he was not promoting fundamentalist Christianity, and fundamentalist Christianity is the only kind of Christianity that I oppose.

Toto, Rodney Stark is not the only issue here. His bibliography is twenty pages long, so it is not just Stark that is at issue here, but a lot of other scholarly sources as well.

If Stark is a liberal Christian, then practically every Christian at this forum and at the Theology Web would oppose him on many issues. If Stark has become a fundamentalist Christian, then he has made a mockery of 'The Rise of Christianity' in many ways, and of many of his corroborative sources as well.

cognac

Hopely these distinctions won't seem like splitting hairs, but to those who're familiar with Southern Baptist politics they are quite real. In Southern Baptist circles Baylor University is not known as being "fundamentalist." It is aligned with the Baptist General Convention of Texas. That is a "moderate" Baptist group. The fundamentalist group is known as the Southern Baptists of Texas. They do not like Baylor.

Moderates would consider themselves to be conservative Christians, not liberal. While moderates think of fundamentalists as fundamentalists, Baptist fundamentalists think of themselves as the true conservatives.

Neither group obviously would consider themselves liberal, but fundamentalist Baptists consider the moderates to be liberal, though by any object standard a Baptist professor teaching at Baylor could not be labeled liberal.

Toto

Stark was not a Christian when he wrote the book, and was not promoting Christianity per se. He was widely regarded as an apologist for cults, including the Unification Church (the Moonies), so if you think that Christianity is just another cult, he might have been promoting Christianity in that sense. Nothing that he has written would indicate that he is a fundamentalist.

Johnny Skeptic

Rodney Stark most certainly did not write 'The Rise of Christianity' from a fundamentalist Christian perspective (I can quote some examples if anyone wants me to), but his perspective then or now does not make any difference at all regarding my use of the book. At issue is not what Stark's world view was or is, but whether or not the arguments that he and his numerous corroborative sources used are good arguments. As good as Stark's research is, one need not refer to him and his sources in order to ask Christians to reasonably prove that there were more than a relative handful of Christians in the 1st century. At the Theology Web, Christians opposed Stark for many months, but when I resorted to asking them what their evidence was to the contrary, it was a much different ballgame. The game lasted for quite a while, but eventually I retired all of the Christians and embarrassed plenty of them.

gregor

Baylor's no bastion of moderate thought. You can be expelled for alcohol on campus or being caught in a bar off campus. There are no school sponsored dances. And IIRC, they revoked a scholarship of a divinity student that claimed to be gay.

The regents struggle with their superconservative base and the desire to appeal to mainstream money. Many in the student body can be as fundamentalist as they come.

Now, it's not Liberty University, though. That's a strange new world.

cognac

I'm not interested in taking the thread off track. But please note in my post about "moderates" and "fundamentalists" I began it by talking about Baptist politics. These are terms that Baptists apply in specific ways to their own. If you're labeling them from outside of course you're going to apply a different standard. But at least acknowledge how they use the terms.

By citing alcohol and gays, you clearly have no understanding of what "moderate" means to a Baptist. No one in Baptists circles uses the term "superconservative" either.

My point is that if Rodney Stark was hired by Baylor I doubt that he's now a fundamentalist.

Toto

There appears to be an ongoing struggle at Baylor over whether the University should be explicity Christian, and make Christian theology a part of the entire curriculum. See the current Christianity Today Weblog.

In the original thread from which this is split, Richard Carrier notes:

cognac

You should have also brought over this quote about Stark from Carrier's post in the other thread:

This is exactly what I was trying to get at in my previous posts. I spent a decade as a journalist covering these issues. The nuances are sometimes mind boggling.