Decommissioning the Doorway Press store

Over the next week or so I will be decommissioning the Doorway Press store website. Doorway Press is my publishing imprint for C.H. Cobb novels. Visitors to my author website, chcobb.com, will no longer be directed to Doorwaypress.com when they press a ‟Buy Now!” button under one of my books. Instead, they’ll be directed to the appropriate page on Amazon, where they can purchase the book as a normal Amazon transaction.

The Doorway Press website was a means by which folks could buy the books directly from me if they wished (I get a much better financial return when you buy my books from me). For the last year there’s been no traffic on that site, so I am cutting my web hosting expenses and shutting it down, though I will keep the Doorwaypress.com domain name.

The name ‟Doorway Press” (as well as the doorway logo) is significant. I intend my novels to be a ‟doorway” inviting the reader to re-examine some of the modern myths of secular thinking even while being engrossed in an action-packed story. The best representatives of that agenda are The Candidate and the Outlander Chronicles series, particularly Outlander Chronicles: Phoenix. While all my books are written from a thoroughly Christian worldview, the Falcon series (book 1 is Falcon Down) does not display quite as strong of a philosophical apologetic as the others.

As far as ‟works in progress,” at present I am not working on any full-length novels. I’ve been tinkering on and off with several different short stories, but that’s pretty much stalled out for the time being.

You can still get books directly from me by contacting me by text, email, or Facebook. All my books are available at Bread of Life Christian Bookstore in Greenville, and of course, on Amazon. Most of my books are also available in the Greenville Public Library, however, I think some of them might have walked off.

While the Doorway Press store has been shut down, the mission continues:

The Mission of Doorway Press

DOORWAY PRESS IS THE PUBLISHING IMPRINT OF INDEPENDENT AUTHOR C. H. COBB.

FICTION

It is the mission of Doorway Press to publish well-written, exciting tales that captivate the reader on the strength of the story and characters alone. If you find a Doorway Press book hard to put down, we’ve done our job.

Along the way, we also want to provoke questions in the reader’s mind about life, death, meaning, purpose, faith, and postmodern myths of Western society, without bogging the story down in philosophical baggage. If you find yourself taking a second look at your most cherished beliefs after reading a Doorway Press story, we’ve done our job.

NON-FICTION

It is the mission of Doorway Press to publish well-written, interesting books and studies that properly represent the truths of the Bible as they have been understood since the Reformation. If you have gained a greater love and understanding of Jesus Christ, and a greater passion for the glory of God after reading a Doorway Press non-fiction, we’ve done our job.

Review of Surprised by Doubt: How Disillusionment can Invite us to Deeper Faith, by Chatraw and Carson

Surprised by Doubt: How Disillusionment can Invite us to Deeper Faith

This is a really good book. It has several problems, which I’ll discuss last, but if you just skim book reviews, I want to make my point early on: this is indeed a good book and can be used effectively with those wrestling with doubt.

As you might guess, the title is a take-off on C. S. Lewis’s Surprised byJoy. The similarities rise to more than just the title. The authors quote Lewis frequently as they make their case for genuine Christianity. Their writing style is warm and not overly academic—also like Lewis’s. On balance the book is an invitation to carefully rethink the issues that have provoked many moderns toward skepticism, or even outright rejection, of the claims of the Christian faith.

One thing that adds to their credibility is that the authors themselves have struggled with doubts about their own faith. Another is that they honor questions and doubt without dismissing or belittling the skeptic. Instead, they engage with the doubts. Another is their humility: they freely admit they don’t have answers for all of the questions. Carson and Chatraw make a case for mystery—that unanswerable mystery should be expected when investigating a sovereign God.

I’m thankful that they are going after base hits, not home runs—they admit repeatedly that they cannot prove the existence of God or the claims of the faith. Instead they are building a “wager” that the Christian explanation of reality is far more likely than alternative explanations.

The principal metaphor they employ for the Christian faith is that of a great house with many rooms, each representing a different flavor of historic, orthodox Christianity. Chatraw and Carson divide the book into three sections: The Attic, Outside the House, and The Main Floor. The rooms on the main floor all share the same load-bearing walls. The load-bearing walls represent the unifying commonality of the essentials of the orthodox faith. In other words, while each room might differ on peripheral issues, if you’re on the main floor, you are a legitimate, true Christian.

In Part 1, the first five chapters of the book, Chatraw and Carson flesh out the metaphor, saying that some people have moved up to the attic and erected new walls consisting of peripheral issues that the attic dwellers insist are load-bearing. These individuals tend to say, “if you don’t have the same walls I do, you’re not really a Christian.” Like most attics, the ceiling is not high, and these Christians have adopted a stooped posture, unable to stand up straight. That stooped posture skews how they see others and how they read the Bible.

The authors provide several examples of attic dwellers. Evangelicalism on the left, with its nouveau catechisms of social justice and sexual/gender doctrines gets a mention. Fundamentalism on the right, with its dogma specifying the approved positions on culture (politics and political parties, forms of entertainment, use of alcohol and tobacco) or theology (eschatology, position on modern Israel, the ordinances, church governance), occupies a large part of the authors’ concerns. Some churches and fellowships (right and left) become vitriolic in their insistence that all true believers must share their particular distinctives.

The authors’ chief concern in the book is for believers who grew up in an “attic church” and have reached a point of disillusionment in which they are ready to jettison the faith because they see these questionable and peripheral issues being confidently elevated as though they are essentials alongside the actual Gospel.

In Part 2, chapters six through nine, Chatraw and Carson encourage the reader to examine closely the ground outside the house before jumping out of the Attic window (the metaphor is escape, not suicide). Four alternate philosophies are explored: the New Atheism, Optimistic Skepticism, Open Spirituality, and Mythic Truth. Chatraw and Carson drive the presumptions attached to each of these secular philosophies to their logical conclusions, demonstrating that the ground outside the house is not quite as inviting as it might first appear. Jumping out the Attic window simply trades one set of problems for an even worse set.

In Part 3, chapters ten through sixteen, Chatraw and Carson invite the reader to come down to the main floor and have a look around. “Now, as we turn to explore the main floor of the Christian house, we are asking a different question: Does Christianity offer a better foundation, better explanatory power, and a better way to live than the [outside] spaces we explored in part 2” [93]? They employ three perspectives: C. S. Lewis’s device of “Looking at” and “Looking Through,” to which they add “Stepping In.”

“Looking at” is a serious exploration of the historical evidences of the resurrection in chapter ten. What explanation provides the best understanding of the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead: Fraud? Hallucinations? Chatraw and Carson provide multiple reasons why the claims of Jesus’ resurrection are best explained by His actual, historic, physical resurrection.

Next, in chapter eleven, the reader is asked to look at the Person in the Center—Jesus Himself. Are the four gospels credible? Did they misrepresent Jesus? What kind of man was He? The authors point out that the gospels present Jesus as one who challenged and scandalized the orthodoxies of His day, rather than one whose ministry was calculated to win wide approval.

In chapter twelve, we are invited to examine the load-bearing walls that are absolutely essential to the integrity of the house over all. “This brings us to the load-bearing walls of the Christian faith. Attic Christianity mistakenly makes the house appear as though most of its walls are load-bearing or at least integrally attached to the load-bearing walls” [113]. The authors’ answer is to step back and look at the historic creeds which have stood the test of time over the centuries, such as the Apostles’ Creed. The Apostles’ Creed has been accepted by the Church at large as a legitimate statement of faith for at least fifteen hundred years by believers in different faith streams of Christianity. It provides common ground for the Christian faith.

Moving to the motif of “looking through,” in chapter thirteen the authors explore Pascal’s critique of Descartes’ skeptical approach to knowledge. In Pascal’s view, the human appreciation of and desire for transcendent truth, beauty, and goodness is itself an argument for God. Pascal’s “wager” is to “take all of the aspects of human behavior into account, and ask this question: Where might true joy be found” [131]?

Chapter fourteen suggests that justice, human dignity, beauty, and meaning are all markers “gesturing toward a profound and mysterious meaning” [140]. In the authors’ words, “Christianity provides a window that makes sense of the world, including human nature and our deepest aspirations” [134]

The third perspective, “Stepping in,” occupies chapters fifteen and sixteen. Chatraw and Carson suggest that the skeptic “try” Christianity. “If you’d like to believe in Christianity, but don’t think you can, you might be going about things the wrong way. It could be that you have been trying to control contingencies in order to achieve a certain kind of certainty, your own two-plus-two approach to the God question” [147]. They provide three reasons for staying on the “main floor” rather than bolting through the window:

• There are good reasons to take the core claims of Christianity seriously [149];

• What other options do you have [149]?

• Since we can’t opt out of formative practices altogether, the question becomes which practices best form us for flourishing [151].

The chapter ends with this hopeful sentence: “But the collective witness of his people and the Scriptures is that those who humbly continue to seek God will eventually find him” [153]. Chapter sixteen suggests the spiritual practices the seeking skeptic should engage in: participate in the sacred by observing birth, death, and marriage; commit to a room on the main floor of the house that is serious about worship; slow down and pray; meditate on Scripture; slow down to appreciate the beauty of creation; and continue to look both at and along the faith.

Though I believe Surprised by Doubt is a helpful book to give someone who is considering “deconverting” from the faith because of disillusionment, I do have several concerns. For one, the authors don’t consider the matter of recent creation to be one of the load-bearing walls of the faith. It is presented as a (losing) argument with science that contributes to the disillusionment of doubting believers. But the doctrine of creation refuses to play nice. Once you give ground on recent creation by accepting some combination of theistic evolution or old-earth theories, you’ve started pulling on a thread integrally connected to nearly every major doctrine of Scripture. Besides, “science” is not speaking with a unified voice on evolution and long ages: genuine empirical science is calling into question major assumptions made by evolutionists. “Received truth” like James Hutton’s principle of uniformitarianism, the bedrock of evolutionary geology, is being seriously challenged (even by secular geologists). Andrew Snelling’s magisterial work Earth's Catastrophic Past Geology, Creation and the Flood (two volumes) documents the modern scientific discoveries that dispute doctrinaire evolutionism. Is the doctrine of recent creation a load-bearing wall of the Gospel? Perhaps not, but the loss of the doctrine throws a great deal of historic orthodoxy into difficulty. Just like the authors were courageous to drive the four secular philosophies to their logical conclusions, it might be wise for them to do the same thing if one jettisons recent creation: the resulting theological problems are daunting.

Like C. S. Lewis, Chatraw and Carson also admit to the possibility of universalism, as though the doctrine of eternal judgment is a non-load-bearing wall. Despite the authors’ loyalty to historic orthodoxy, apparently that’s a historic doctrine they have chosen to overlook.

My final concern has to do with their closing advice—engage in spiritual disciplines. For readers who are genuinely regenerated but are struggling with doubts, that is precisely the right advice. Their re-immersion into spiritual disciplines will eventually have its intended effect. But for readers who are disillusioned because they’ve never truly been regenerated (in other words, to whom 1 John 2:19 applies), Chatraw’s and Carson’s advice sounds like preparationism—a highly disputed practice in orthodox circles. In their own words: “Without claiming a mechanistic and universal demonstration of the truth of Christianity through these practices, in this chapter we’ve been inviting you to wager on Christianity by developing habits that allow you to step into its light. If there is a God and Christianity is true, these practices are some of the means of experiencing his grace” [160].

These problems aside, I think this book can be greatly used of God for people who are wrestling with doubts. The authors’ gentle tone and style, the focus on the essentials, the easily understood metaphor, and the excellent reasoning combine to make this a useful book. Four stars, highly recommended.

Book Review of Nancy Pearcey’s Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

Nancy Pearcey is one of those authors the breadth and depth of whose research is simply astounding. It would take me five lifetimes to read the books and authors she cites in Finding Truth.

The modern evangelical church (in general—there are exceptions) has not done well in dealing with the honest skepticism of young adults. Rather than being eager to field tough questions and face intellectual challenges, it seems we have become fearful of them—perhaps even intolerant of hearing them. Nancy Pearcey shows us how to recover the honest intellectual punch that Christianity actually possesses to interact fruitfully with non-Christian worldviews and belief systems.

Pearcey assembles a methodology in five principles by which alternate worldviews can be examined and then respectfully but firmly repudiated. The first principle is Identify the Idol. All non-biblical worldviews have some sort of starting point—some faith-based assumption on which the rest of their worldview is built. Some God-substitute (inevitably, a limited part of creation) is elevated to ultimate or divine status.

The second principle is Identify the Idol’s Reductionism, and it is based on the fact that “when an idol absolutizes some part of creation, everything else must be explained in terms of that one limited part” [98]. The result dehumanizes people. “When we define God as a something instead of a Someone, we will tend to treat humans as somethings too” [98, emphasis original]

Principle three is to Test the Idol: Does It Contradict What We Know about the World? I once heard Dr. Bill Edgar (Westminster Seminary) describe a similar approach as climbing inside someone else’s worldview and taking it out for a spin, to see if it works. News Flash: it won’t. No one can live consistently with an idolatrous worldview—at some point their life will contradict their professed belief.

The next principle is more philosophical: Test the Idol: Does It Contradict Itself. Pearcey walks through a number of worldviews and unmasks the fact that they are internally inconsistent and self-refuting. For instance, she takes aim at logical positivism:

What happened, though, when the test of logical positivism was applied to itself? Its central claim was that statements are meaningful only if they are empirically testable. But is that statement empirically testable? Of course not. It is not an empirical observation. It is a metaphysical rule—an arbitrary definition of what qualifies as knowledge. Thus when the criterion of logical positivism was applied to itself, it was discredited. It stood self-condemned. [185]

The final step is Replace the Idol: Make the Case for Christianity. One of the ways she makes the case is to help people understand that other worldviews are free-loading on Christian principles, most frequently Christian morals. They are assuming Christian principles, but have no logical support from their own worldview to do so. In her words, “You might say they function as if Christianity is true” [220, emphasis original]. Her point is to gently confront the individual by showing them their ethics cannot arise out of their worldview, but only out of a Christian one.

The clarity of Pearcey’s writing, the extensive use she makes of the books and statements of non-Christian thinkers, and the comprehensive documentation of all her points and citations makes this book an invaluable resource. Highly recommended—five stars.

Review of Thomas Howard's Chance or the Dance

A garden of delight is the little book (136 pages) titled “Chance or the Dance, A Critique of ModernSecularism,” by Thomas Howard. Although the topic is serious, the writing is Lewis-like, almost whimsical, and very enjoyable.

The thesis of the author is that a new myth (“if you can’t measure it, it does not exist”) has replaced the old myth (angels, demons, gods, heaven, hell); and with that changing of myth has come a necessary alteration of significance. Under the old myth, everything means everything: the patterns and rhythms and images of everyday humdrum existence all point to an Ultimate Reality—they all mean something. Conversely, under the new myth nothing means anything: everything is the product of random chance, the fortuitous collocation of molecules and atoms and therefore the very concept of meaning or significance is an impossibility.

The book is not a philosophical tome by any means – the writer eschews jargon and uses garden-variety experiences and objects (wherein is the whimsy) – lunch, acorns, soup cans, dishrags – to assert his argument (lurking behind it all I sense he is drawing allusions to Plato’s forms). But it’s not a book to exhaust the reader with mental gymnastics – his points are simple. He also draws richly from the world of art, literature, movies, poetry, etc, to make his case.

Do not be fooled: this is not a book for skimming. He builds the wall of his argument a brick at a time and if you skim you’ll wind up missing bricks here and there. Pay close attention to the first two chapters where he lays out his ideas of the old/new myths, the notion of form and content, and imaging/imagination. These are matters Howard uses constantly throughout the book, and you’ll want to note well what he means by them.

Like Lewis, Tolkien, and Chesterton, Howard comes from the tradition of Anglo-Catholic philosopher/writers. If there’s a bone I have to pick with this excellent and clear-minded tradition it is the exaltation of reason to an excessive height, often putting God at the wrong end of the microscope and making Him the object upon which we exercise our rationality, rather than seeing God as the author of a rationality to which He himself is not subject. This tradition often overlooks the darkness which sin has imposed on our ability to think rationally. In any case, you’ll enjoy Howard’s exquisitely precise argument that comes wrapped in the clothes of everyday life.

Howard only intimates but does not state the ultimate point of his book. He suggests rather than proclaims. As a reader who knows the Ultimate Reality behind the images, I found this to be a little frustrating, something like listening to a truncated rendition of a glorious piece of music. The conductor, coming to the finale of a bravura performance of a gorgeous symphony, waves the orchestra to silence and neglects the the final page. The music hangs in the air, begging for its crescendo. But that is just the sort of subtlety that defines all the pages of this little volume—Howard leaves the reader to connect the final, obvious dots. Perhaps, in the end, that is part of its appeal.

That resolution does come (in the edition that I read) in the afterword by Tyler Blanski. One might accuse Blanski of stating the obvious, but in four pages he does it well. Many readers of this book might be muddling about in darkness. Connecting the lines to the final dots might be asking too much. Blanski marks the path clearly for those wearing the opaque glasses of secularism.

Five stars to Howard’s Chance or the Dance; it is a relentlessly more powerful apologetic than citing facts, figures, and statistics.

Review of Michael D. Aeschliman’s The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism

While neither Aeschliman, nor the philosophers he quotes, possess Lewis' happy ability to clothe complex philosophical notions in the lingo of common man, nonetheless his defense of Lewis' concern about scientism is well done. Aeschliman describes scientism as a misuse of science that asserts "what is not in principle observable is not in fact in existence."

This is an excellent book for exposing the inherent contradictions in philosophical materialism. Reducing man to an object of study is fatally contradictory, because, as Aeschliman points out, the realm of scientific theory is limited to objects lower than man. But when man the observer of man the object assumes that one is higher and the other lower, it is but a short distance from there to the idea that the proper end of science is the manipulation of some men by others for the sake of maximum utility. Man becomes a means to an end, rather than the end itself. Brute facts having triumphed over values (the former being seen as objective and real, the latter as merely subjective), there is no longer any wisdom (what Aeschliman terms sapientia) to govern the use of technology--it may be as readily employed in eugenics or nuclear war as it is in delivering water to an African village.

“Modern scientistic doctrine," Aeschliman says, "holds all fact to be objective and all value to be subjective. To call it a ‘doctrine’ is to draw attention to the fact that its characteristic assumption that only factual statements have validity is itself nonfactual, speculative, and dogmatic; it is, in fact, a diabolically ironic article of faith” [74].

Note well: the book is not anti-science; rather it is a call for science to once again be the handmaiden of wisdom: the recognition that there are ultimate values that define right and wrong, anchored in God Himself. Highly recommended.

Book Review: Reasons we believe, by Nathan Busenitz

Reasons We Believe: 50 Lines of evidence that confirm the Christian faith, by Nathan Busenitz.

I am a little conflicted about how to describe this book. Busenitz' volume is primarily a small encyclopedia of internal evidence: in other words, it recounts what the Bible itself says about the fifty lines of evidence. It's a great book for answering a question in the form of, "does the Bible really teach that?"

If someone asks you, "does the Bible really teach that it is the Word of God?" or "does the Bible really teach that Jesus is God?" Busenitz provides, in compact form, a precis with many biblical references providing the ammunition you need to answer the question. Not all, but nearly all the evidence Busenitz provides comes from within the covers of the Bible itself--and his reasoning from the biblical text is very solid.

However, his use of external evidence is a little uneven--sometimes he uses it, sometimes not. When he does, it's invariably excellent.

If you are looking for a work on apologetics, I would recommend Busenitz plus. In other words, get Busenitz because of his excellent, faithful use of internal evidence. Add to it something like I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist by Geisler and Turek, which is stronger on external evidences. Between the two you'll get a more complete accounting of God's supernatural works in a material world.