Top 30 Apologetics Books (#15): James Orr, The Christian View of God and the World
By Rob Bowman | Plus, Andrew "Ike" Shepardson on Natural Theology
Quotable
Evangelical theology is animated by the conviction that God speaks and reveals truth about God’s self to humanity. The first four volumes of Carl F. H. Henry’s God, Revelation, and Authority carry the subtitle “God who speaks and shows.” God has “reveal[ed] himself in sovereign freedom” and only because God has spoken and shown God’s self can humanity have knowledge of God. The Bible itself, along with the persons and works of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, is part of a class of God’s self-revelation known as special revelation. However, God has also revealed God’s self in the natural world, as well, and this is known as general revelation. John Stott argues that general revelation has four key characteristics. (1) It is made known to everyone. (2) It is disclosed in the natural world. (3) It is continually communicated through the natural world. (4) “It is ‘creational,’ revealing God’s glory through creation, as opposed to ‘salvific,’ revealing God’s grace in Christ.” Paul states, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Rom 1:20, NIV).
There is a natural understanding of who God is and what God expects from people that everyone has access to in nature and in their own minds. As Evangelical theologian Wayne Grudem argues, “People can obtain a knowledge that God exists, and a knowledge of some of his attributes, simply from observation of themselves and the world around them.” General revelation also gives humanity knowledge of the moral law (see Rom 2:14–15) because God has revealed moral truths to the human conscience. This revelation is not exhaustive, nor is it salvific. God’s revelation in Jesus Christ is required for one to receive God’s salvation, and the Scriptures are necessary to know about God’s actions in providing the gift of salvation. General revelation simply begins to show to humanity the existence of God and of the moral law.
As people rationally reflect on general revelation, they engage in natural theology. “Natural theology is an attempt to discover arguments” that confirm the existence of God without appealing to special revelation. Natural theology is more explicitly philosophical than general revelation. While general revelation is God’s self-revelation, natural theology is humanity’s philosophical reflection on general revelation. Natural theology is “that branch of theology that seeks to provide warrant for belief in God’s existence apart from the resources of authoritative, propositional revelation” (i.e. the Bible).
Natural theology is not explicitly Christian, though, and the tradition of natural theology includes philosophers of all stripes such as Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, al-Kindi, Spinoza, Descartes, and many others. C. S. Lewis provides a famous popular example of natural theology (in the moral argument for the existence of God) when he argues from “The Law of Nature,” expressed in the observation that “men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.” He argues that if there is a moral law, then there is a Moral Lawgiver. He employs reasoning to draw a conclusion about the phenomenon of “The Law of Nature.” Natural theology can employ deductive arguments, inductive reasoning, and inferences to the best explanation. Natural theology develops many kinds of arguments for God including, but not limited to, ontological arguments, design arguments, and cosmological arguments.
— Andrew I. Shepardson, Who’s Afraid of the Unmoved Mover? Postmodernism and Natural Theology (Pickwick Publications, 2019). Footnotes omitted.
A Note from Dr. Paul Copan
As I think about the Advent season, I am reminded about my recent trip to Israel, where I was able to see where “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” God became a Jew! As we proclaim the gospel, we tell others the good news that God is with us—that he took on our humanity; that he identifies with us in our weakness, distress, and temptations; and that he rescues us from the powers of sin, death, and the devil.
This message is not only powerful and transformational. It is also publicly defensible. With our Worldview Bulletin, we seek to equip our readers as they proclaim and defend the good news of the gospel. Please join the growing number of subscribing members who draw on resources we ourselves have found helpful in articulating and giving reasons for the good news of Jesus in the marketplace of ideas.
Blessings,
Paul Copan
Note: Below, Dr. Rob Bowman continues his series on the 30 most important apologetics books in church history. See his earlier posts in previous weeks of Useful Things.
#15: James Orr, The Christian View of God and the World (1897)
James Orr (1844–1913) was a Scottish pastor and scholar who eventually became a noted professor of apologetics and theology in Glasgow during the early part of the twentieth century. His books were highly successful and popular defenses of Christian belief among evangelicals in English-speaking countries around the world.
In his classic apologetic book, The Christian View of God and the World as Centering in the Incarnation, Orr sought to defend the Christian worldview by appealing to the facts. Orr, who endorsed Butler’s argument in The Analogy of Religion (90), emphasized that faith in Christ commits the believer to a whole theology and worldview that need to be defended (4).
Orr proposes to defend the Christian worldview by an appeal to history, for it brings “all the issues into court at once. The verdict of history is at once a judgment on the answers which have been given to the theological question; on their agreement with the sum-total of the facts of Christianity; on the methods of exegesis and New Testament criticism by which they have been supported; on their power to maintain themselves against rival views; on how far the existence of Christianity is dependent on them, or bound up with them” (43-44). Note Orr’s use of the courtroom metaphor popularized by apologists like Simon Greenleaf; he speaks of bringing “issues into court” and of reaching a “verdict.” The imitation of legal argument is typical of the evidentialist approach.
In Orr’s view, belief in God and belief in Christ “stand or fall together” (65). “A genuine Theism can never long remain a bare Theism” (76). To be complete and stable, theism, or belief in God, must be held in the context of “the entire Christian view” provided in the biblical revelation (77). This revelation is absolutely necessary, because reason on its own cannot arrive at a Christian worldview. Reason can, however, give “abundant corroboration and verification” to the truth of the Christian revelation. This verification, while perhaps not demonstrative, at least is sufficient to show “that the Christian view of God is not unreasonable” (111). Orr is confident that the facts, properly presented, can be used to show that objections to Christianity are without merit. “The reason why Christianity cannot be waved out of the world at the bidding of sceptics simply is, that the facts are too strong for the attempt. The theories which would explain Christianity away make shipwreck on the facts” (234).
Some of Orr’s views were out of the mainstream of conservative evangelical belief. He did not hold to biblical inerrancy, and he accepted a form of theistic evolution. In the main, however, Orr was a staunch defender of the Bible and the historic Christian faith. In addition to the book we have highlighted here, Orr wrote significant books in defense of the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection.
Note: This series originally appeared in the Apologetics Book Club group on Facebook and was revised for publication as a book, Faith Thinkers: 30 Christian Apologists You Should Know (Tampa, FL: De Ward, 2019). The book includes an introduction, additional quotes from each of the 30 books, readings for each author, and a list of other recommended readings. For a free excerpt from the published book, please visit https://faiththinkers.org.
—Rob Bowman Jr. is an evangelical Christian apologist, biblical scholar, author, editor, and lecturer. He is the author of over sixty articles and author or co-author of thirteen books, including Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ, co-authored with J. Ed Komoszewski. He leads the Apologetics Book Club on Facebook.
Book Highlight
*Unless otherwise noted, descriptions are those provided by the publisher, sometimes edited for brevity.
Are postmodern philosophy and Christian theology compatible? A surprising number of Christian philosophers and theologians think so. However, these same thinkers argue that postmodern insights entail the rejection of natural theology, the ability to discover knowledge about the existence and nature of God in the natural world. Postmodernism, they claim, shows that appealing to nature to demonstrate or infer the existence of God is foolish because these appeals rely on modernity’s outmoded grounds for knowledge. Moreover, natural theology and apologetics are often hindrances to authentic Christian faith. Notions like objectivity and rationality are forms of idolatry from which Christians should repent.
This book carefully examines the nature of truth, rationality, general revelation, and evangelism to show that the postmodern objections fail and that Christians ought to lovingly and faithfully use natural theology and apologetics to defend and commend the Christian faith to a world in need of the knowledge of God.
Endorsements & Reviews
“Andrew Shepardson’s Who’s Afraid of the Unmoved Mover? is for a time such as this. In it, Shepardson skillfully delineates and dissects the claims of postmodernism and shows this ideology to be a gravedigger of the church. And he shows a way forward. I highly recommend this book and hope it will be read by all those who care for the truth and for staying on the right track in our evangelism and discipleship.”
— from the foreword by J. P. Moreland, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University
"Andrew Shepardson has done evangelicals a great service. He carefully has exposited and assessed the views of several leading postmodern evangelicals who reject natural theology and apologetics. Contrary to their claims, he makes a compelling case that these tools are not dead in our postmodern milieu; indeed, they are vitally needed. His recommendations for Christian education and churches should be taken to heart. This book should be read carefully by evangelical academics, pastors, and students.”
—R. Scott Smith, Professor of Christian Apologetics, Biola University
Find Who’s Afraid of the Unmoved Mover? at Logos, Amazon, Wipf and Stock, and other major booksellers.