I am very pleased to announce that Athanatos Christian Ministries has partnered with Hieropraxis, led by Dr. Holly Ordway, in their mutual quest to defend, promote, and transmit the Christian faith through the arts, and literature in particular.

ACM has been pursuing its vision for ‘literary apologetics’ by hosting conferences and writing contests for almost five years.  These efforts have been primarily geared towards casting that vision and calling Christian authors and apologists to embrace it.  With the help of Dr. Ordway, ACM is going to go much further.  Writers and evangelists are not going to be prodded towards ‘literary apologetics.’  A new series of online courses, culminating in a Literary Apologetics Certificate, will actually equip artists, philosophers, and theologians for the task.

The courses are hosted in conjunction with ACM’s online academy of apologetics.  Dr. Ordway will be the program director for the academy’s literary apologetics program.  Even better, we are taking applicants for the program effective immediately, and our first courses in this area of study will be available in the winter session, which begins in mid-February, 2012.  For more details, please visit the literary apologetics certificate page.

But that’s not all!

Dr. Ordway will also be presenting at ACM’s third annual online apologetics conference in mid-April, 2012.  Indeed, Hieropraxis will be one of the conference sponsors!  While the details of the conference are still somewhat tentative, you are welcome to check it out and even register right now.

See Dr. Ordway’s essay on the importance of ‘literary apologetics.’

I look forward to working with Dr. Ordway long into the future- as well as all those others out there yet to be discovered who likewise see the need to communicate the faith through the arts.

Yours,

Anthony Horvath

Executive Director, Athanatos Christian Ministries

Greetings and welcome!

ACM is a Christian apologetics ministry that focuses on defending the faith through the arts and literature in addition to  ‘standard’ apologetics approaches.  On account of this, ACM does a fair bit of publishing, including the upcoming release of Shirley Tucker’s award winning Diamonds in the Dust (December 1st).   (It is also available for purchase RIGHT NOW!)  Right now, we’ve got a fair bit of stock on our shelves of our various titles and we’re looking to send these books to good homes.

Christmas is coming up, right?  You’re going to be giving out gifts anyway, right?  Then give folks a book!  ACM has all kinds of books;  surely something in our catalog would be appropriate for nearly everyone on your list this year!  And by giving a book that you buy through ACM, you’ll be giving this ministry a buck or two.  Get it?  Giving a book to friends and family is giving a buck to ACM.  Give a book, give a buck. 

In time for the holidays, ACM has a whole new shopping cart system that should streamline the purchasing process.

ACM gets a greater share when you buy directly from us but if you want to purchase through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kindle, etc, you’ll see that in most places we have already provided links to our products on those sites.

Thank you all for your continued support!  And you should be thanking us.    We just took care of your whole Christmas list all in one place.    Use these links to get you started:

ACM’s full product catalog

ACM’s shopping cart:  Product Page  |  By category

To sweeten the deal for you, we even have some coupons you can enter for further savings.  (Don’t use the coupons to sweeten the deal for ACM.    )  Here they are:  $5.00 off:  SHIP-5  | 10% off:  XMAS10

]]> http://athanatosministries.org/acms-give-a-book-give-a-buck-christmas-special/866.html/feed 0 http://athanatosministries.org/2011-writing-contest-resource-page/585.html http://athanatosministries.org/2011-writing-contest-resource-page/585.html#comments Mon, 15 Aug 2011 15:44:32 +0000 admin http://athanatosministries.org/?p=585  

CONFERENCE HALL LINK

This page will be updated with resources as presenters make them available.

John R. Erickson

Story Craft: Reflections On Faith, Culture, and Writing By the Author of Hank the Cowdog

On Kindle

Home Page

Anthony Horvath

Executive Director of Athanatos Christian Ministries

Anthony will be drawing on his own short story, Polite Company, to make some points.  It is available on Kindle and Nook.   He will also be using one of unpublished stories, In Full Color.  You are strongly advised to have this read prior to the conference.  You may download it here:

Do NOT redistribute this story!

ACM’s Facebook Page

ACM’s Christian Writing Contest Facebook Page

ACM’s Writing Workshop

ACM’s online apologetics conference

Suggested Readings for Success in ACM’s Contests

Dr. Holly Ordway

Author of Not God’s Type

Founder of Hieropraxis.com.

Dr. Ordway is requesting paragraph submissions from our conference attendees.  She will select several paragraphs to use to work with in her presentation.  Selected paragraphs will be utilized without revealing who sent them.  Please send them to her directly by email at:  hollyordway@gmail.com

Shirley Tucker

Author of the soon to be released book: Diamonds in the Dust

Facebook Page

Robert Cely

“Reading Wine” short story.

Jamie Greening

Author of The Haunting of Pastor Butch Gregory and other Short Stories

Robert Kramer

Screenwriter and Contributing Editor of Christian Video Magazine.

Robert Abernathy

Author of The Walk to Walden Hill.

Facebook Page

Please remember, if you submitted a story in our 2011 contest and you requested one and you paid shipping for it, you do not need to purchase one.  You will receive your copy when they are available to ship.

Actual Retail:  $9.95.

• Buy 10 for $7 each + $10 shipping ($80)
• Buy 20 for $6.50 each + $14 shipping. ($144)
• Buy 30 for $6 each + $18 shipping. ($198)

50 and up are $5 each + $20 shipping (and an additional $2.00 per increment of 10).

Example, you want 70.  70*$5= $350 + $20 + $4 (2 increments of 10 over 50)= $24.00 for shipping.  Your total is $374.

To make such a purchase, please just go right to ACM’s ‘donate’ page and submit the amount you calculated.  Otherwise, you may use the form below.  Please note that we will need a mailing address.   Also, we use paypal to process our transactions but you can pay by credit card without having a paypal account.

You can also mail us a check at the address listed in the ‘donate’ area.

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10 copies $80.00 20 copies $144.00 30 copies $198.00

FOREWORD

By Anthony Horvath

In his 1992 book on the historical Jesus, Dr. Dominic Crossan wrote, “It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.”

The book you presently hold in your hands now will do more than arouse that suspicion, it will confirm it.  Dr. Albert Schweitzer originally published this book in German in 1905, systematically giving an overview of ‘historical Jesus’ research from the previous 150 years.  As you read his accounts of the attempts to detail who, finally, the historical Jesus, was, you will notice that most often it is the private beliefs of the researcher that seem to surface in the descriptions of the ‘historical Jesus.”  Indeed, Schweitzer himself refers to many of these accounts as the “fictitious lives of Jesus.”

As he closes his review he further observes that, “The vast numbers of imaginative Lives of Jesus shrink into remarkably small compass on a close examination.  When one knows two or three of them, one knows them all [pg 342].”

A survey of historical Jesus research since then reveals essentially the same two phenomena:  The ‘historical’ Jesus so often turns out to be a Jesus the researcher can bear having actually existed and there aren’t as many Jesuses that are bearable as we may suppose.

Several indisputable realities stand in the way from unbridled speculations.  In the first place, there is no question that the Christian Church sprung up at a definite point in time with such force that its violent suppressors were overthrown; Rome capitulated to Christ before it capitulated to the Barbarians, and the Church contains billions of people to this day.  This meteoric rise requires explanation.  An itinerant, but insightful goat-herder, who happened through Palestine on his way to death doesn’t really provide a satisfactory explanation for anyone.  Attention is then turned to the nature of the insight this peasant Jewish Cynic might have preached.  Surely something about it must have been so inspirational that it called men to renounce all they believed and risk dying painful deaths.

Surely there is something… if we could just put our finger on it…

Unfortunately, one of the realities that these researchers take as indisputable is that Jesus cannot be as the Church has understood him to be from the beginning.  He cannot have healed the sick.  He cannot have raised the dead.  He cannot have fed the masses.  He cannot have walked on the water.  He cannot have been God—any insinuation that Jesus made such a claim must have been put into his mouth by later Christians.   He cannot have died a thief’s death.  He did not rise from the dead and he certainly did not appear to his followers alive, intact, and glorified.

Such a scenario as described in the previous paragraph more than adequately explains the growth of the Christian Church in all its force and velocity but if this scenario is off the table, one labors in vain for something in the message and life of Jesus, stripped of the miraculous and supernatural, that is up to the task.

In solution to this problem, it is natural then that people would turn to their own experience of reality in search of that which fires their being.  What is it in the life of Jesus that makes them resonate so deeply that perhaps they might be driven to order their lives around this man, Jesus?

We cannot avoid the fact that the period that Schweitzer is surveying is one in which God had been officially and thoroughly debunked.  The Enlightenment had done its worst, and in the eyes of many, there wasn’t much left of traditional Christianity that had any basis in objective, empirical, scientific, historical fact.   This does not mean that spirituality had been jettisoned.  It does mean that this spirituality needed a new expression, a new source, a new context, and new theological underpinnings.  Deriving a theology without a God is no mean feat, but many of the writers of the “Lives of Jesus” attempted to do just that.  Schweitzer takes aim at some of these efforts directly while only alluding to others.  His evaluation of the theosophists are in the former category and the socialists and communists in the latter.  Darwin had provided some answers but they weren’t wholly satisfying.  One might say that they weren’t satisfying at all.

Schweitzer touches on this in his treatment of one of the writings of David Straus:

His last work, “The Old Faith and the New,” appeared in 1872. Once more, as in the work on theology published in 1840-1841, he puts to himself the question. What is there of permanence in this artificial compound of theology and philosophy, faith and thought? But he puts the question with a certain bitterness, and shows himself too much under the influence of Darwinism, by which his mind was at that time dominated. The Hegelian system of thought, which served as a firm basis for the work of 1840, has fallen in ruins. Strauss is alone with his own thoughts, endeavouring to raise himself above the new scientific worldview. His powers of thought, never, for all his critical acumen, strong on the creative side, and now impaired by age, were unequal to the task. There is no force and no greatness in the book.

To the question, “Are we still Christians?” he answers, “No.” But to his second question, “Have we still a religion?” he is prepared to give an affirmative answer, if the assumption is granted that the feeling of dependence, of self-surrender, of inner freedom, which has sprung from the pantheistic world-view, can be called religion. [page 80]

Schweitzer observes a further problem in the attempts to extract from the New Testament documents something of substance to hang one’s hopeful spirit on:  consistency.

When one has found a method for removing the embarrassing accretions of miracles and myth, there is no good reason why the method shouldn’t be extended completely.  Schweitzer devotes an entire chapter to this line of thinking, “Thoroughgoing Scepticism and Thoroughgoing Eschatology.”

He set the stage for extending rationalist principles to their logical conclusion and the consequences of such an act in the chapter immediately preceding where he details the situation at the end of the nineteenth century. In one example, he takes issues with one such attempt to reconcile the lasting power of the man Jesus with the rationalization of the texts by saying:

They propose to find experiences of the Christian community and Pauline teaching reflected in the Gospel of Mark; Bruno Bauer asserted the same. The only difference is that he was consistent, and extended his criticism to those portions of the Gospel which do not present the stumbling-block of the supernatural. Why should these not also contain the theology and the experiences of the community transformed into history? Is it only because they remain within the limits of the natural?

The real difficulty consists in the fact that all the passages which von Soden ascribes to the redactor stand, in spite of their mythical colouring, in a closely-knit historical connexion; in fact, the historical connexion is nowhere so close. How can any one cut out the feeding of the multitudes and the transfiguration as narratives of secondary origin without destroying the whole of the historical fabric of the Gospel of Mark? [page 321]

In other words, the operation of stripping out the ‘stumbling-block of the supernatural’ by means of invoking a later redactor eliminates the material that von Soden (in this case) found compelling:  it is all part of the same “closely-knit historical connexion.”

In short, Schweitzer argues that such an operation, applied consistently, kills the patient.  Any quest for the historical Jesus that does not take Jesus just as he stands as the texts present him destroys the man, just as the researcher believes he has found him.  Whether or not Schweitzer himself is able to produce a solution where others have failed is a question for you the reader to ascertain.

The reader may consider another approach, however.  Perhaps the solution is not to assume that science and history has so thoroughly dispatched with God as we have been led to believe.  Perhaps the very fact that so many people who ostensibly have done away with God still spend so much time mining the Gospels for the truth about Jesus shows that they really ‘doth protest too much.’  Their actions betray them… even they, the scholars and historians entrenched in their confirmed naturalism, cannot escape the reach of God through Jesus.  The fact that wherever and whenever they write—whether in the 1800s or in 1905 or in 1992—they still express sentiments pining for an explanation for their own spiritual nature and hoping that the (God-)man Jesus speaks to that explanation shows that they do not buy their own secularist accounts.

I am writing this foreword as a Christian apologist.  Knowing this, you may expect me now to put forward evidences and arguments for the veracity and reliability of the texts.  You might anticipate that I will now proceed to show why I believe that Jesus is exactly as the Church has always understood him to be, that is, how the Scriptures portray him, quite apart from our own personal idiosyncrasies and values.

I shall not do this.  I mean only to raise “reasonable doubt.”  The ‘thoroughgoing skepticism’ that Schweitzer calls for has been tried and found wanting—by skeptics.  After another hundred years of intense scrutiny, there remain only a handful of basic options in the quest for the historical Jesus.  One option accounts for all the facts but unfortunately for some it requires dispensing with the presupposition of naturalism.  That is, this option requires one at least begin their quest with an open mind.  I do not ask you to assume that there is a God before making your inquiries, I only ask that you do not assume there isn’t one.  This seems a fair and reasonable request on my part.  If you disagree, you will find in this volume a good example of what follows in consequence:  one ridiculous ad hoc supposition after another passing itself off as history.  If you can do better, I commend you, for you will be the first.

The problem essentially remains just as presented by C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity:

Yet (and this is the strange, significant thing) even [Jesus'] enemies, when they read the Gospels, do not usually get the impression of silliness and conceit.  Still less do unprejudiced readers.  Christ says that He is ‘humble and meek’ and we believe him;  not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of His sayings.

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him:  ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claims to be God.’  That is the one thing we must not say.  A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.  He would either be a lunatic- on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell.  You must make your choice.  Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.  You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.  But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher.  He has not left that open to us.  He did not intend to.

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If you would rather make a monthly or annual contribution, or a donation in some other amount, please go to my regular donation form, here:  http://www.athanatosministries.org/#donate (if your paypal account does not include your name, you may wish to send me a note so I can match up your book selection with your donation).

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If you’re on this page, I expect its because you support in the abstract various aspects of this ministry and I’d like to give you the opportunity to extend that support in a tangible manner.  What will your contribution accomplish?

It will go largely to ACM’s operating expenses:  web hosting (we have our own dedicated server… need a web host of your own?  Use us!), advertising, office supplies, graphic designing, book production, etc.

However, to this point I have taken very little in way of compensation for all the time and energy expended in carrying out the operations of ACM’s ministries.  Nearly every dollar of revenue  has been turned right around to directly support the operations of the ministry.

Yet the Scriptures say:  “The worker is worth his wages.”  It is my hope that with your help we can make it possible to start bringing in a regular pay check, even if it is a relatively small amount.

Moreover, there are a number of projects that have been put on the back burner or shelved altogether because there weren’t resources to bring them to completion.  (For example)

If you support the vision and various ministries that ACM is engaged in, this is an opportunity to make sure they keep happening!

These ministries include…

• ACM’s various writing contests ($5,000 to be disbursed in awards this year alone!)
• The production of apologetics related books
• Speaking engagements, including Pro-life advocacy
• Annual online apologetics conferences
• A literary journal with apologetics as its focus
• Anthony’s own writing endeavors
• In order to direct effort to the online conference, our online apologetics academy was suspended, but it is my hope that with your contributions and some volunteer support, we can start it up again as early as this summer.

As a special offer for this fund raising campaign, I am giving all new donors free copies of my latest book For No Reason At All:  A Romance.  This is a ‘back story’ book that I wrote for the Birth Pangs series that I never intended to publish but I thought what the heck, maybe new donors would like it.    Every donation above $25 made this month will get this copy mailed out to them… signed!  This is a very limited offer, good only for the month of June.  I hope you take me up on it! 

(Existing, regular donors can expect one of these in the mail eventually, too.)

In appreciation for donations $50 and up, I will throw in copies of other books in ACM’s catalog.  The more you donate, the more I’ll throw in.  Use the form below to select your donation amount and the books you want to receive.  When you click ‘submit’ you will be forwarded to a paypal page that will process your payment.  This campaign is for a one time donation.  If you would like to make a monthly or annual donation automatically, please use Paypal’s subscription feature through this link.

Want to support this ministry but not through this campaign?  There are other ways…

• You can simply buy one or more of our books on Amazon (print and digital).  Full catalog.
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The Anti-Apologist: Philip Pullman’s Covert Assault on the Christian Worldview within “His Dark Materials”

A Defense of the Integrity of Antony Flew’s “There is a God” From His Own Letters

The sources I referenced in the presentation can be found here.  The doc file for the note cards I was reading off of in the presentation is here: Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file.

Presentation Summary: Historically speaking, humans have always traded in death.  What makes the ‘culture of death’ unique is that for the first time in history, the pervasive solution to humanity’s problems always leans in one direction:  the elimination of humans.  This Malthusian outlook accepts as a dogma that the ‘pie’ is only so big and there isn’t enough to go around.   The ultimate solution, then, is to reduce the number of people vying for a piece of the pie.  The ‘Culture of Life’, however, has a different solution:  make a bigger pie.   The Malthusiasts turn to the State as the proper administrator of ‘scientific’ principles in guiding our own evolution.  The same way of thinking persists today.  The only difference is that they think that this time they can implement it without it ending in a holocaust.

A short story that I wrote, inspired by the ‘culture of death’, can be read on Kindle.

For a full length version of the video that you can post to Facebook, etc, click here. The full length audio is here, or you can download it here.

Now, the video, embedded in three parts…

Part One – Direct Link

Part Two – Direct Link

Part 3 – Direct Link