Influential Bible scholars pour a lot of their intellectual gifts into tearing up the roots of biblical Christianity. This is not new, but in our culture, the effect of "critical" biblical studies is multiplied. A general suspicion of "organized religion" finds confirmation from "the experts."

Such an expert is Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, recognized scholar, and author of the award-winning Gnostic Gospels (1979). This book convinced many that the early Gnostic heretics, who introduced pagan spirituality into the Church, represented a genuine Christian alternative, suppressed by a cold, calculating Church institution. In Beyond Belief (New York: Random House, 2003), Pagels expands this message.

Slaves, Women & Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis. By William J. Webb. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2001. 301 pp. n.p.

INTRODUCTION

Sometimes I wonder if egalitarians hope to triumph in the debate on the role of women by publishing book after book on the subject. Each work propounds a new thesis which explains why the traditional interpretation is flawed. Complementarians could easily give in from sheer exhaustation, thinking that so many books written by such a diversity of different authors could scarcely be wrong. Further, it is difficult to keep writing books promoting the complementarian view. Our view of the biblical text has not changed dramatically in the last twenty five years. Should we continue to write books that essentially promote traditional interpretations? Is the goal of publishing to write what is true or what is new?

Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism
Michelle Goldberg New York: W. W. Norton (2006)
224 pages

Michelle Goldberg, is a bright and engaging young senior political reporter for www.Salon.com. She ardently believes there is an influential Christian fundamentalism in America that is increasingly bellicose, overtly political, and aggressively theocratic. Her opinion about this movement is not new. There has been a veritable field day for similar books, some written by noteworthy Christians on the political Left, since the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004. Though I believe Michelle Goldberg has vastly overstated the problem she addresses, she has in the process surfaced some profoundly troubling issues that orthodox Christians ought to be thinking about, especially if they align themselves with the conservative majority in the Republican Party. The reasons we ought to be concerned, however, are not actually the reasons that Goldberg gives us in her hard-hitting and breezy critique.

Goldberg, who lives in Brooklyn, admits in a disarming and friendly way that she is "a secular Jew and ardent urbanite." She also states that her reason for writing this book was that she "was terrified by America's increasing hostility to . . . cosmopolitan values." Read the last two words very broadly to mean "secular values" and you get her drift. This reader, for one, was grateful that she was honest enough to admit her bias at the outset. I do believe her expression is sincerely authentic, and thus I believe she must be genuinely fearful of conservative Christians and their role in the public arena. But far too few secular critics admit so candidly that they have a dog in these "culture wars." Goldberg is to be commended for her honesty. This alone made me want to read the book to the end. My response was quite mixed, but I found the process fruitful. Let me explain.

Goldberg's thesis is rather simple: There is a growing expression of Christian nationalism in this country that threatens our social identity and, more importantly, our personal freedoms under the law. The Enlightenment has clearly ended, rational free inquiry is seriously threatened, and radical Christian beliefs in the public square may end the very republic, at least as we now know it. Goldberg is not alone in this thesis. Similar views are shared by the popular Jewish writer James Rudin in The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right's Plans for the Rest of Us (Thunder's Mouth, 2006), and in the New York Times best-seller by Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (Viking, 2006). Even Randall Balmer, himself a self-proclaimed evangelical, makes the same point in Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical's Lament (Basic, 2006). Running through each of these author's arguments, as in Goldberg's, is a conspiracy of some sort, a conspiracy to take over the nation for religion.

The Force of Reason
Oriana Fallaci
New York: Rizzoli (2006)
290 pages

I must refresh the memory of the oblivious and the hypocrite.
Oriana Fallaci

Italian author and journalist Oriana Fallaci's, The Force of Reason, is a postscript to her previous book on the same subject, The Rage and the Pride, regarding the Islamification of Western Europe. In Europe, hers is a household name…here she is not as famous. But she needs to be.

Nietzsche once said, "Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood." He would have dearly loved Fallaci. Her prose regarding how Europe is now Eurabia is written in blood and fire. In fact, she is so passionate (as well as accurate), that there are constant death threats against her life, as well as lawsuits brought by various European governments.

When asked if the death threats bothered her, Fallaci said,

It's my temperament. When you have been born in a war like me, living in a war as a child, when you have been in wars as a war correspondent all your life—trust me! You develop a form of fatalism; you are always ready to die. And when you love your own freedom as much as I do, you don't bend to the fear to be killed, because otherwise you do nothing—you go under the bed and you stay hidden 24 hours.

"The point is not winning or losing," she said. "Of course, I want to win. The point is to fight well with dignity. The point is, if you die, to die on your feet, standing up. If you tell me, ‘Fallaci, why do you fight so much? The Muslims are going to win and they're going to kill you,' I answer to you, ‘F**k you—I shall die on my feet.' (The Rage of Oriana Fallaci, www.observe.com)

Would to God, more Americans were this passionate about defending their freedoms.

After 9/11, Fallaci was enraged with both Muslims and the West. To her, the Muslims are hell-bent on subjugating the West via various forms of terror and the propagation of children (in the last half-century Muslim population has increased by 235 per cent . . . the Christian population increased by 47 per cent [53]), and the West is filled with spoiled, narcissistic, and deluded, politically correct idiots. Her two books on the subject are filled with both historical and contemporary accounts making her case.

American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of the Nation
Jon Meacham
New York: Random House (2006)
416 pages

The recent departure of one thousand of its five thousand members from Woodland Hills Church, because Reverend Greg Boyd announced that his church would intentionally "steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a ‘Christian nation' and stop glorifying American military campaigns,"¹ underscores the need for clear thinking about the relationship of church and state. Is America a "Christian nation"? If not, what is the place of religion in America?

Jon Meacham's new book, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of the Nation, brings some much-needed sanity to these important (and potentially volatile) questions.

Freedom For and From Religion

Late-nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister, Isaac A. Cornelison, stated the truth most succinctly: America is "a state without a church but not without a religion" (144). Meacham writes,

The great good news about America—the American gospel, if you will—is that religion shapes the life of the nation without strangling it. Belief in God is central to the country's experience, yet for the broad center, faith is a matter of choice, not coercion. (5)

The American gospel is that liberty for all—including religious liberty—is a fundamental human right given by none other than God. But the "God" of the American gospel is not the sole possession of any established religious institution but is instead in "the public domain."

The Founding Fathers intentionally linked "the cause of liberty to the idea of God while avoiding sectarian religious imagery or associations" (75). Unlike Europe, the Fathers guaranteed that no one church would be permitted to be intimately united with the political powers of the state. This does not mean that the Founding Fathers were devout, nor does it mean they were completely godless. Instead, they refused to give any one religious institution ruling power over others. True liberty included the freedom to worship—or not to worship—according to an individual's own desires.

I would like to preface this article by saying how excited I was to hear that Jeffrey Sachs, the famed economist, had published a book with the title after which this article is named. I first heard about the book in a Time magazine article entitled, "The End of Poverty," that I read on a flight home from India in 2005. The article stated that Sachs believed extreme poverty could be eliminated by the year 2025. That's in our lifetime.

Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith
Greg L. Bahnsen, ed. Robert R. Booth
Atlanta: American Vision (1996)
289 pages

In my theological mansion are many rooms. Some have been sealed off: "Enter Not," like the basement room marked, "Higher Criticism." On the ground floor there is a beautiful library with plush Victorian furniture and mahogany bookcases. First edition (of course) copies of Calvin, Luther, Owen, Edwards, and Spurgeon are book-marked on the table. In one wing of this illustrious mansion there is a long hall with tomes in Latin and Greek lining the walls. Raphael's fresco, "The School of Athens" (the original, you know, not a reprint) with Plato pointing up and Aristotle, with fingers spread, pointing down overlooks leather-bound volumes of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. At the end of the hall there are two adjacent rooms marked "Evidentialism" and "Presuppositionalism," respectively. Here, I often find myself standing in the hall between the two rooms, looking at the central portraits of B. B. Warfield in the former and Abraham Kuyper in the latter. Recently, I have had occasion to add a new book to the Cornelius Van Til Memorial Bookcase in my Presuppositional Study, Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith, by Greg L. Bahnsen, edited by Robert R. Booth.

This paper will seek to demonstrate that the primary charges raised against Christianity from Nietzsche's book The Antichrist are unfounded. Verbatim quotes from the book itself will be employed to make clear what Nietzsche is saying and to verify my interpretations of his statements. Quotes from The Antichrist are simply referenced by the aphorism number that they are given in the book, not the page number since Nietzsche's book has gone though numerous publications and is readily available on the internet for free without page numbers. Although virtually all of Nietzsche's works have anti-Christian language (selections of which have been included in this paper), I chose The Antichrist because it is Nietzsche's most militant writing against Christianity. I have not sought to give any particular order to the particular topics of disagreement. At times, there is some logical progression or I follow the order given in the book, but the overall the order, in typical Nietzsche fashion, is random.