Exposing Myths About Christianity

A Guide to Answering 145 Viral Lies and Legends

Jeffrey Burton Russell

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780830866878
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

Renowned historian, Jeffrey Burton Russell, famous for his studies of medieval history, turns to the serious questions that confront Christianity in contemporary culture. Russell examines a wide array of common mispercerptions, characterizations, stereotypes, caricatures and outright myths about Christianity that circulate heavily within today?s society, and are even believed by many Christians. In a succinct and engaging manner, Russell discusses these errors and provides thoughtful, even-handed, carefully researched and sharp-witted responses. The author sets the record straight against the New Atheists and other cultural critics who charge Christianity with being outdated, destructive, superstitious, unenlightened, racist, colonialist, based on fabrication, and other significant false accusations.

Notes

Christianity Is Dying Out

1 Robert Wuthnow, Religion and Science Debate: Why Does It Continue? ed. Harold Attridge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 155-77.

2 “Sub-Saharan Africa Is World’s ‘Most Religious’ Area,” Christian Century, May 18, 2010, p. 19.

3 David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), p. 28.

4 “Sub-Saharan Africa,” Christian Century, p. 9.

5 Kinnaman and Lyons, unChristian, p. 223.

6 Cathy Lynn Grossman, “Most religious groups in USA have lost ground, survey finds,” USA Today, published March 9, 2009, updated March 13, 2009, www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2009-03-09-american-religion-ARIS_N.htm.

7 “U.S. Religious Landscape Report II,” event transcript, published June 23, 2008, www.pewforum.org/US-Religious-Landscape-Survey-Report-II.aspx.

8 Eric Gorski, “America: A Nation of Religious Drifters,” Associated Press, May 2, 2009, reporting on the Pew Foundation’s 2009 report “Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U.S.”

9 Adelle M. Banks, “God big in South, not so much in New England and Pacific Northwest: New Gallup results,” Christian Century, March 10, 2009, pp. 14-15.

10Andrew Greeley, Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millennium: A Sociological Profile (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2003).

11Dale Gavlak, “ ‘Religicide’ in Iraq,” Christianity Today, February 2011, pp. 13-16. Collin Hansen, “The Son and the Crescent,” Christianity Today, February, 2011, pp. 19-23, addresses the differences between Muslim and Christian views of Jesus.

12Kenda Creasy Dean, “Almost-Christian Formation of Teens: Faith, Nice and Easy,” Christian Century, August 10, 2010, pp. 22-27.

13Angelo Di Bernardino, ed., Encyclopedia of the Early Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 495.

14David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 236.

15As for recent views by scientists, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam, 2010), argue against the existence of God on the basis of the currently fashionable M-Theory (a development of string theory in physics), but the opposite is argued by Hugh Ross, Beyond the Cosmos: What Recent Discoveries in Astrophysics Reveal About the Glory and Love of God, 3rd ed. (Orlando: Signalman, 2010).

16Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian (Cambridge, MA: Basic Books, 2001), p. 55.

17Phillip E. Johnson and John Mark Reynolds, Against All Gods: What’s Right and Wrong About the New Atheism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010), p. 66.

18Ian S. Markham, Against Atheism: Why Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris Are Fundamentally Wrong (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 7, 32.

19See not only the popular books of the “new atheists”—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris—but also the tone of the American Humanist Society (for example, the May/June 2009 issue of The Humanist).

20Benjamin Wiker, The Catholic Church and Science (Charlotte, NC: Tan Books, 2011).

21Carlos Eire, Very Brief History of Eternity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 38.

22John C. Lennox, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Oxford: Lion, 2007), pp. 16-17.

23Jeffrey Burton Russell, Paradise Mislaid: How We Lost Heaven and How We Can Regain It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 111-14.

24Philip Jenkins, “The Crypto-Christians,” Christian Century, July 14, 2009, p. 45.

25See Markham, Against Atheism, pp. 54, 145, and Francis S. Collins, Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006), p. 4.

26Thomas G. Long, “Expect a Whirlwind,” Christian Century, February 22,...