Atheism and Faitheism

Pitchstone Publishing

Durham, North Carolina

www.pitchstonepublishing.com

Copyright © 2017 Robert M. Price

All rights reserved.

Printed in the USA

Most of the chapters in this volume were previously published as essays or presented as conference papers. For more, see the Credits at the end of this volume.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Price, Robert M., 1954- author.

Title: Atheism and faitheism / Robert M. Price.

Description: Durham, North Carolina : Pitchstone Publishing, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017024460| ISBN 9781634311342 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781634311366 (epdf) | ISBN 9781634311373 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: Christianity. | Religions.

Classification: LCC BR96 .P725 2017 | DDC 230—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024460

To Jeff Lowder, the atheist Tom Cruise

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART ONE: CRITICIZING CHRISTIANITY

1. Must We Take a Leap of Faith? (Have We Already?)

2. Masochism and Piety

3. Plaster Sanctification

4. Protestant Hermeneutical Axiomatics: A Deconstruction

5. The Psychology of Biblicism

6. A Mighty Fortress Is Our Mentality (Do Our Doctrines Give Us Permission to Think?)

7. On Having Your Head up Your Assumptions

8. Damnable Syllogism: The Psycho(-Logic) of the Atonement

9. A Mess of Miracles

10. The Marginality of the Cross

11. Nothing Bespeaks the Divine Inspiration of the Bible

PART TWO: WORLD RELIGIONS

12. Kosher Pigs and Jews for Jesus

13. If You Dislike Christianity, You’ll Hate Buddhism!

14. Myths and Men: Three Great Religious Founders

PART THREE: RADICAL THEOLOGY

15. What Is (and Is Not) Postmodern Theology?

16. Postmodern Unitarian Universalism

17. Loose Canon: A Proposal for a New Biblical Canon

PART FOUR: FREETHOUGHT

18. Errors of the Elohist: An Appreciation of Ingersoll’s Some Mistakes of Moses

19. Is the Bible Mein Kampf?

20. Humanisms: A Theological Classification

21. The Return of the Navel: The Omphalos Argument in Contemporary Creationism

PART FIVE: BIBLICAL EXPLORATIONS

22. How the Gospels Subvert Apologetics

23. Acts 14 and the Equinox of the Gods

24. Heavenly Bridegrooms: The Sex Acts of the Apostles

25. Tendentious Table Talk: A Review of Craig L. Blomberg’s Contagious Holiness: Jesus’ Meals with Sinners

Credits

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

This collection of my essays represents opinions and theories floated at various stages of my career. I have been at various times an agnostic, an exponent of Liberal Protestant theology, a non-theist, a secular humanist, a religious humanist, a Unitarian-Universalist wannabe, an unaffiliated Universalist, and a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar. Am I forgetting anything? Any way you cut it, my name is Legion. These chapters show me thinking out loud, or rather, thinking in print. I have grouped them by subject area. The initial section, Criticizing Christianity, is three times the size of any of the others. Why? Because they are the products of my extrication of myself, step by step, from Born Again Christianity in which I dwelt for some dozen years. I had to think it out carefully and in detail, and from numerous angles. I share these writings in case they may be useful to others engaged in the same struggle. C.S. Lewis said that he wasn’t asking anyone to accept Christianity against his better judgment, if the arguments didn’t seem convincing. Well, I say the same from the other side: I am merely trying to account for my decisions and opinions. I will not mind if you reject my views. I only hope to provoke your developing thoughts. Let a hundred flowers bloom!

I have a few things to say about the various great religions and their founders. I guess I am not a very good atheist because I continue to love these faiths. I admire and cherish them as endlessly fascinating creations/expressions of the human spirit. You have to do that if you claim to be a humanist, don’t you? Surely humanists are at least partly anthropologists, right? Nothing human can be alien to us. To me, religion is art. And there is an art to studying religion. I once had to withdraw from an atheist educational program because I was expected to share the director’s disdainful and mocking attitude toward the various religions. You don’t have to believe in them, any of them, in order to love them. And you can never really understand a faith unless you look at it with empathy, in order to see what its adherents see in it.

I love theology, too. At the time I wrote some of these essays I considered myself an adherent of Radical (Deconstructive and Death-of-God) theology. Sometimes I still do. I prefer Nietzsche’s proclamation that God is dead to the straight-laced party line of purely secular atheism. But I have gladly written from the standpoint of old-time Freethought, too, and I gladly include some of those pieces, too.

But, as you know, I am the Bible Geek, and the Bible is my main focus of interest. So naturally I have chosen a hand full of my biblical studies. I can’t keep awake reading much of today’s scholarly pedantry. But I am careful to get my ducks in a row, to adhere to the standards of professional scholarship, even while being venturesome and speculative.

Again, I see my job not as framing dogmas but just to raise questions and possibilities you might not have considered before. I love it when other scholars do me that favor. So I’m trying to repay that debt by paying it forward.

—Robert M. Price

PART ONE: CRITICIZING CHRISTIANITY

1

MUST WE TAKE A LEAP OF FAITH? (HAVE WE ALREADY?)

I want to respond briefly to a challenge frequently issued by well-meaning religious believers to the rest of us. In fact I am sure most readers will have been confronted personally with this challenge, namely, that a leap, or at least a step beyond reason is required if one is to live a full and well-directed life. The believer does not mean to violate reason, since reason is deemed fine as far as it goes. It just is not perceived as going far enough. It is held that the living of human life requires fundamental answers beyond the kind available from mere logic. Thus, the challenge continues, a leap (or step) of faith toward belief in the Bible (or Reverend Moon, or whatever) is advisable. Only so can we be sure of the meaning of life, the proper moral code, etc. Fair enough. In the interests of friendly dialogue and mutual understanding, I want to take these claims seriously, and to indicate where I believe they fail to convince.

THE LIMITS OF REASON

First, in what way is reason said to be deficient? This claim is made in three different forms.

Sometimes the charge denotes the doctrine of the noetic effects of the fall, an implication drawn by some Calvinists (e.g., Cornelius Van Til) from the larger doctrine of total depravity. Reality, it is held, truly operates according to reason and logic; the trouble is that sin has so blinded and warped the rational faculty of man that his logical capacity is a very poor one, and is fundamentally distorted. Otherwise, it would be plain to everyone that the Bible is the Word of God, etc. This argument is not to be taken too seriously, for its allegation must apply equally to the logical faculty of the one making the charge, at least so long as his words are understandable, however unconvincing, to the unbeliever. (If the Calvinist’s pre-fall reason were regenerated and restored, would we sinners even be able to understand him?) Besides, since the only reason we know, the only logic we refer to by using that word, is being proscribed here, the result is the same as if we were simply being told to abandon reason in favor of a gnostic mysticism. And this is in fact what we are being told to do.

A second form of the not reason alone claim is that post-fall reason is still functional and healthy in itself, but that we unbelievers are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. The facts are supposed to be plain, an open-and-shut case as a matter of fact. Reason alone should lead any open-minded person to believe in the Bible (or the Divine Principle, or whatever). The trouble is that unbelievers are not open-minded. We are really just throwing out a smokescreen to avoid repenting, because we’ve got something to hide. Men love darkness rather than light, for their deeds are evil.

Therefore, only repentance and faith will take away the veil, and allow right belief to prevail. Again, this claim may quickly be brushed aside. It is a bald-faced ad hominem argument. It merely charges one with bad faith instead of actually dealing in logical refutation.

A third, and more weighty, form of the argument is that there is too much more to reality and to human life to allow us to remain content with what reason can provide unaided. Indeed isn’t it easy to agree that the error of scientism is its imperious arrogance in ruling that only the quantifiable is real? Weren’t the original logical positivists properly taken to task for not admitting that there are always other language games besides that of the scientifically demonstrable, in which statements may be judged meaningful? So the basic premise seems justified. Yet the way in which it is employed by the apologist for faith may seem more controversial.

Sometimes this challenge is brought to bear when there is no contesting the relevant facts. Suppose an evangelist or revivalist is challenging his hearers to begin a vital personal relationship with Christ. It is assumed that the audience is already nominally Christian, as is implied in the remark, "You may know about Christ, but do you really know him?" That is, even if one accepts the cognitive claims about Christ, there is more at stake in the situation. Volition, existential commitment, is just as important. Will you commit yourself to what you know with your mind? This is a point well taken. We run into difficulties, however, when those to whom the challenge is directed do not assume the cognitive validity of the religious claims. Suppose we do not already believe that Christ or the Bible is the revelation of ultimate Truth? Will existential commitment (a leap of faith) be adequate to carry us across the chasm of intellectual uncertainty? Blaise Pascal in his famous Wager said yes. So did William James in his deliberations on the will to believe. I want to examine the reasoning here, because there is more to it than first appears, yet there is finally less to it than there is supposed to be!

INTELLECTUAL HONESTY

Thomas Henry Huxley held that it is actually immoral to accept intellectual convictions for which we do not have sufficient reason. Now of course one might be mistaken in an honest judgment of the facts, accepting for sufficient what is really insufficient reason. What Huxley meant to censure was what we commonly call intellectual dishonesty, the witting acceptance of a rational-type position on other-than-rational, and thus inappropriate, grounds. The leap of faith appeal seems to be telling us that just such a jump is navigable and justifiable, since we need answers that reason alone cannot provide. We may (indeed must) readily admit that reason is but a formal instrument and that logic is always employed after presuppositions have been established. That is, of course, what presupposition means, after all.

But as unbelievers in revelation, we decline to leap, and this for two reasons. First, the logic of the argument assumes that there is only one there to leap to from here.

Pascal says that if Christian dogma is true, then you have the devil to pay if you do not wager in Christ’s favor. But if it is false, then a mistaken wager will cost you nothing and will on the other hand provide happiness and security (albeit ultimately illusory, but so what?) for this life. Yet what if Christianity is false, but Islam is true? Uh-oh! You’re headed for hell! There are just too many possible directions in which to leap. And after the leap had been made, it would seem to have been the right choice, ipso facto. How could it seem otherwise, if the leap were really one of faith? But on this side of the chasm what guide have we? The bet Pascal wanted us to make is not the sure thing he thought it was. One could lose one’s shirt, and at precisely the point when one made of asbestos might come in handy!

Another reason not to leap beyond reason to faith in a revelation is that this is not really allowed even by that extrarational margin recognized just above. For if in life we must sometimes go beyond reason, would it not seem that our goal in so doing would be itself extra- (or pre-) rational? Yet the revelation provided by an inspired scripture or creed is rational in nature (propositional revelation) however stridently it claims exemption from rational verification. Here is that inappropriateness of criteria that spells intellectual dishonesty.

Of course, there are types of religion, e. g., mysticism or Liberal theology, wherein that religious something more does not pretend to take the form of privileged cognitive knowledge. For instance, for Paul Tillich revelation is an unveiling, but not a rational explanation, of the Mystery of Being itself. This kind of revelation claim, that of mysticism, is indeed more than rational and does deserve serious attention. I only mean to challenge those who would ask us to accept a rational-type belief on other than-rational grounds (i.e., faith).

A PLACE TO STAND

At any rate, we say we are declining to take the leap advocated by believers. Yet they may reply that we have leapt already, merely by taking the position we hold, for "not to decide is to decide." In other words, it is impossible to stand in the middle. We inevitably leap to one side or the other. We act on the assumption that the religion in question is true, or on the assumption that it is not true, no matter how agnostic (and thus technically neutral) we may claim to be. Living on the basis of any presuppositions is supposed to be a leap of faith. We all leap, then; we can do nothing else—so why be ashamed of leaping to the side of Christ or the Bible, etc.? The problem with this seemingly cogent point is that it depends on an equivocal use of the term faith. Is the faith of the one who simply declines to believe in revelation on the same level with the faith that does believe?

No, it is not, as religious apologists themselves quite clearly recognize in other contexts. For instance, the New Testament is clear that the kind of faith in view is nothing like the faith that, e.g., I really exist, that my body is substantial, that the chair I am sitting in will not collapse under me. Instead, we are told that "faith is the substantiation of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen (Hebrews 11:1). The apostle Paul says that we walk by faith, not by sight" (2 Corinthians 5:7). This distinction is crucial. Faith in revelation is not faith in the inevitably evident. It is not the acceptance of those everyday realities which would take more faith to deny, the realities we cannot help but believe. Faith in the religious sense is that eulogized in the Gospel of John, Blessed are those who have not seen, yet have believed (John 20:29b). Or as Matthew puts it, faith is in realities which flesh and blood hath not revealed unto thee, but rather my Father in heaven (Matthew 16:17). By contrast, no leap is necessary to attain the perhaps unspectacular certainties of the agnostic. So without leaping we are already standing someplace.

What the religious person is really asking us to do is to leap from the common ground of mundane existence occupied by everyone, to a higher ground where life’s answers are available to believers. But we ask if there is really any ground higher enough to merit attempting the climb. For perhaps where we stand now is not so bereft of the moral truths we are supposed to go seeking afar off, in some revelation. Let us look at some of the realities self-evident where we already stand. I have already mentioned those intuitive certainties which it would take a leap of faith to deny: my own existence, that of my physical body, the reality of my physical environment, etc. (Even Descartes admitted that his doubt of these things was only hyperbolic, all for argument’s sake.) I believe we may add to the list certain moral truths, e. g., that persons deserve respect, that love is good, that honesty is obligatory, that truth is valuable. The crucial point is that these moral certainties seem to be intuitively established prior to any leap to higher ground. The religious apologist himself implicitly recognizes this when he urges that one ought to make the best available choice of possible revelations, presuppositions, directions in which to leap. He appeals to an implicit moral obligation to find and honor the truth. He assumes that prior to accepting the revealed moral standards he offers, the unbelievers will recognize the need to find moral truth. And he is right—we do! But then why urge us to look further? The basic urges to truth, love, and righteousness to which he appeals seem to us as undeniable as our perceptions that we exist in a real world. It would take faith to deny them. Intuition yields these convictions; what more has faith to offer? We fail to see why other ground would be higher than that which we already occupy. Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven? or ‘Who will descend into the deep?’ For the word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart" (Deuteronomy 30:14).

SAVING KNOWLEDGE

At this point our religious friend will naturally suggest another angle from which to view the problem. If he is willing to grant the unbeliever his moral seriousness, even the workable adequacy of his moral stance, another question would seem to remain outstanding. What if there is some saving truth available only to faith, and without which one will be damned? If this were true, the believer suggests with obvious cogency, wouldn’t it be good to know it? The blissful ignorance of the agnostic might one day turn out to be anything but blissful. (Remember our asbestos shirt.) If the question whence morality? is settled, the question of salvation still needs attention. A leap of faith might still be in order.

In answer, we must pose a counter-question. If God is a God of truth who requires honesty (and what creed denies it?), would he make salvation dependent upon an act of faith which some cannot make with intellectual integrity? Remember, we have already argued that to attain unto some alleged saving/revealed truth by a leap of faith would be impossible to do with intellectual integrity since it seems to entail accepting rational-type claims on other-than-rational grounds. If one must demur from the evangelist’s offer of faith, because one is zealous for honesty, will the God of truth condemn him? If our well-intentioned religious friend finds himself answering (however reluctantly) yes, then we must reject his offer as incoherent. For then it cannot really be the God of truth that we are being asked to obey!

Fundamentalists may have a rejoinder at the ready: But the truth is often narrow and no one objects! For instance, no pilot veers off his landing pattern because it would be narrow-minded to do otherwise. No one complains if a disease can be cured by only one treatment, so long as treatment is available at all. A point well taken, to be sure, but this is not the point at issue.

On the one hand, the line of reasoning just summarized does effectively refute the common liberal bias against the notion that one religion might be superior to others. (Is anyone really prepared to maintain that Buddhism or Judaism is not superior to the Rastafarian drug-cult?) Theoretically, there is certainly no reason that there might not be only one way of salvation, with non-believers in that religion being badly mistaken.

On the other hand, whether those non-believers (skeptics or believers in false religions) are damned by virtue of their ignorance is quite another question! And on this not even all Evangelical Christians are agreed. Some will allow some latitude for those who have never heard the gospel.

But it is pretty well agreed that the rest of us are in trouble, whether we have simply declined to accept faith, or having once embraced it, now reject it.

Let us urge the religious believer to reconsider this position. Suppose that there is in fact one true plan of salvation and that we are missing the boat (however conscientiously) by not accepting it. Our doubts are not negative but positive since, as Paul Tillich would say, they are affirmations of Truth. We reject this or that candidate for truth because we will be satisfied with nothing but the truth and are afraid that many notions do not pass muster as truth. We could not with intellectual integrity accept them. And if we have mistakenly cast aside as glass what turns out to be the gem of revelation, because we honestly could not recognize it as such, will we be damned for it? We would think better of a God of truth. So we admit to the religious person concerned for our eternal destiny, that he might in fact have the truth (as might a thousand other sectarians), but that the bare possibility is not cogent evidence. And, from his vantage point, we would suggest that he keep in mind the warning of Virginia Ramey Mollenkott: Failing to recognize that faith is a gift and not exclusively a product of the human will, certain conservative Christians refuse to believe in the integrity of a man who says that he cannot believe (Adamant and Stone Chips, p. 88). Even if we are wrong, we may not be damned.

Finally, in answer to our religious friends, we agnostics and unbelievers must deny that the limits of reason compel us to accept their claims for special revealed truth inaccessible by normal channels. We cannot see how the gap can be leapt with intellectual honesty. We deny that our refusal so to leap is in itself a leap. We are not convinced that a leap of faith would supply any lack, for we perceive no lack. Like the religious believer, we already love the truth, and so we fear no reprisals from the God of truth, if such there be. And we humbly acknowledge that there is always truth yet to find. But we feel ourselves on safer ground if we seek it in a manner that it may be found—that of rational inquiry. We wish to test all things and hold fast to that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

2

MASOCHISM AND PIETY

Surely one of the most bizarre and astonishing religious tracts to appear in recent years is a little leaflet called The Whipping. In summarizing The Whipping some rather startling historical and literary parallels will become apparent. Then I will pose some intriguing questions for Christian spirituality and sexuality that arise from it.

THE WHIPPING

The pamphlet opens with a boy’s defensive words to his father, ‘’It wasn’t my fault, Dad. We got in a fight and that kid called me a liar… and then he called my mother a bad name. To this protestation of familial honor, Dad’s only response is an ominous one. Bill’s father closed the bedroom door and began to take off his belt." The trouble seems to be that in the heat of battle, Bill had used profanity.

Dad proceeds to inform Bill as to the real gravity of his crime. When the Son of God hung on the cross at Calvary, He was dying there because you swore this morning … when the nails were driven into his hands, it was because you swore. However, despite the fact of Christ’s atonement, Bill’s parents had warned him he’d be punished if he swore again. Hadn’t his mom forced him to memorize, Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain?

But instead of a punishment, Bill is about to receive a kinky object lesson about the vicarious atonement:

W… What are you going to do, Dad?

Here, take my belt, Bill. Don’t look so surprised. I want you to whip me!

Bill’s father took off his shirt and kneeled by the bed.

But your back is bare, stammered Bill. The belt would hurt. You didn’t do anything wrong, Dad. I can’t hit you.

You must be punished for swearing, Bill. And as you hit me I want you to realize that you hurt Jesus more, more than you’re hurting me. Raise the belt!

I—I can’t, Dad. Please, I’ll never swear again. Please!

You must be punished, Son. And I’m going to bear the punishment something like Jesus bore your punishment on the cross. Go ahead, Bill!

The belt came down with a crack and a red welt appeared.

Again! Again the belt came down.

Harder!

Again!

Please, Dad!

Again! Another red mark appeared on his back.

I can’t hurt you any more, Dad. I see what you’ve been trying to show me, how Jesus suffered for me on the cross, even for my swearing. I didn’t know He loved me so. But I love Him now, and I love you too, Dad.¹

VICTORIAN PORNOGRAPHY

Though the prima facie intention of this leaflet is to demonstrate the love of Jesus as it is expressed in the atonement, a form-critical analysis reveals that something quite different is going on here. In both structure and subject matter, The Whipping resembles nothing so much as the genre of Victorian pornography known as flagellation literature. Indeed, the parallels are striking.

Steven Marcus devotes a whole chapter of his The Other Victorians to the large mass of flagellation pornography. He points out that while such material might be thinly veiled as medical monographs, lyric poems, comic operettas, or historical treatises, they regularly break down into small, disconnected units, and the natural form, so to speak, of the genre is the anecdote.² Precisely such an anecdote is embodied in The Whipping.

As to specifics, Marcus describes how a person is accused of some wrongdoing.. This person is most often a boy; sometimes he is a man acting or impersonating a boy.³ In The Whipping, Bill is accused by his father, and the roles are reversed, whereupon Dad in effect impersonates the boy. The accuser is almost invariably some surrogate for [the boy’s] mother.⁴ In the leaflet, Dad is shown carrying out the punishment for Bill’s violation of his mother’s warning. While Marcus says that an adult male figure, father or schoolmaster, occurs very infrequently, he also shows how the accuser/disciplinarian is portrayed in masculine, even phallic, terms.⁵ Latent homosexuality is thus implied. The Whipping, as were some few of the Victorian works, is explicit about the male-male scenario.

After the accusation is made, the one to be whipped defends himself (e.g., No indeed, ma’am, I never insulted my momma, upon my honour, I did not.)⁶ This protest soon turns to supplication for mercy, but to no avail. The accused is then seized. He is … tied down to a bed…. His clothes are then lowered or raised… in order to expose his buttocks, and the whipping takes place. It is invariably accompanied by talk, usually dialogue.⁷ All these elements, with merely idiomatic variations, are present in The Whipping.

The only material departure from the standard flagellation format would seem to be the fact of Dad’s substituting himself for Bill. Of course, the main point of this development is to serve the theological purpose of the tract. It is after all an illustration of the vicarious atonement of Christ. But the departure is not so great as it might first appear. Marcus admits that, In this literature, anybody can be or become anybody else…. There is, in the first place, an enormous amount of conscious acting or role playing throughout the literature; everyone is impersonating someone else. ‘She embraced me,’ runs a typical passage, ‘and pressing my hand with transport, begged I would suffer her to represent my niece.’ The playacting is frequently undertaken simultaneously by both parties. ‘She instantly, by desire, assumed the character of Flirtilla’s Governess.’⁸ In the same way, Bill (albeit reluctantly) portrays Dad, while Dad (with some apparent relish) plays the part of Bill.

MEDIEVAL PENANCE

No less revealing is the congruency of The Whipping with another historical precedent—that of the thirteenth-century flagellant movements active across Europe. Bands of fifty to five hundred penitents, specially uniformed and carrying whips and spikes, would embark on a month-long pilgrimage of punishment. The goal of these self-immolating redeemers, as Norman Cohn calls them, was to atone with their blood for the sins of their countrymen. In this way they hoped to fend off impending plagues and disasters. Cohn describes the typical flagellant troupe, which marched day and night, with banners and burning candles, from town to town. Upon arrival, they would arrange themselves in groups before the church and flog themselves for hours on end.⁹

Again the parallels cannot but arrest one’s attention. Just as these medieval ascetics sought to supplement Christ’s blood atonement with their own, so does Dad, who says You must be punished, Son. And I’m going to bear the punishment something like Jesus bore your punishment on the cross. Note that Dad is no longer simply illustrating Jesus’ vicarious atonement; now he himself is bearing Bill’s punishment.

And what of the resuIts? The impact which [the flagellants’] public penance made upon the general population was great. Criminals confessed, robbers restored their loot and usurers the interest on their loans, enemies were reconciled and feuds forgotten.¹⁰ Likewise, Bill renounces his crime (I’ll never swear again!), and he and his father are reconciled (I love you, too, Dad.).

THE HUMILIATE ME CULT

Now all these correspondences might simply be called coincidental, perhaps unfortunate, perhaps amusing. But they are not simply coincidental. Instead, The Whipping is just a particularly clear instance of a trend long present in Fundamentalist piety—what someone has called the ‘Humiliate Me’ Cult. According to this form of spirituality, the believer takes a kind of morbid delight in suffering. The key scriptural passage here is 2 Corinthians 12:10: For the sake of Christ, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For the record, these difficulties included the following: Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods…. (2 Corinthians 11:24–25)

Fundamentalist pietism has not balked at the path of discipleship thus marked out. This fact may be illustrated with a few quotes taken at random from the popular devotional booklet Our Daily Bread. Sometimes in God’s great wisdom He allows us to feel the sting and misery of our selfish, disobedient ways, that we may learn through the pain and humiliation that the Lord knows what is best.¹¹ He wisely scourges and chastens every wayward child that He may form in him the character of the Crucified.¹² "Be sure you learn the lesson He is seeking to teach you, for His ‘smiting’ is always profitable if