Reviews for Gifts from the Ascended Christ

The average rating for Gifts from the Ascended Christ based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-10-02 00:00:00 Melissa Mcdonald 4.5/10 The first part of the book, defining religion ('that which is held to be a self-existent first principle') and the necessity of religious belief in all theoretical thought (e.g. the axiom of a closed universe of matter and energy in materialist theories; various axioms, Platonic, constructivist, and otherwise underlying different views of the foundations of logic and math) is very good and worthy of reading. Something about his argument nevertheless 'feels' slippery or overly clever in rhetoric. When Clouser moves on to his constructive Christian project he makes misstep after misstep, moving from self-performative incoherence on the nature of civilizational institutions to outright heresy on the nature of God (stressing transcendence to the elimination of immanence, making even relations or persons in the essence of the godhead unknowable) to claims that the nature of God as revealed is created (in a way more extreme even than the Eastern Palamists, denying the existence of forms or ideas in the mind of God, denying that logic or Good or really anything is inherent in God qua God instead of God qua revelation). He then reinstates what's essentially the Kantian noumenal wall to deny the possibility of any natural theology (or any rational antitheistic arguments, again putting God entirely beyond the reach of reason in a way that even Clark denied), finally tripping so badly as to reduce the value of the first half of the book retrospectively.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-06-18 00:00:00 Garrison Nutt The first two-thirds of the book are spent deconstructing modern scientific philosophical backgrounds. It is an excellent beginning to understanding the faults of the new atheism. The problem is that he then goes on to construct a new philosophical worldview that starts with Christ. Clouser claims to have built this on the philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd (The Transcendental Idea). Dooyeweerd did construct a philosophy based upon God, but Clouser doesn't accurately represent him. That was disappointing. There is no easy access into Dooyeweerd's work and I had hoped that this book would provide a general introduction. It doesn't. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone who wants a clearer understanding of the "philosophy of the cosmonomic idea," but it is a good penetration of New Atheism's faults.