An Author Interview from Books At a Glance
Greetings, and welcome to another Author Interview at Books At a Glance. I’m Fred Zaspel, and we have Mark Coppenger with us today. Mark is the recently retired professor of Christian Apologetics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, and he is our Review Editor for apologetics here at Books At a Glance. We have him with us today to talk about his brand new book – Cases and Maps: A Christian Introduction to Philosophy.
Mark, welcome, and congratulations on your new book!
Coppenger:
Thanks, I appreciate that.
Zaspel:
Tell us about your own background and how you got into philosophy … as an interest and then as a professional area of study.
Coppenger:
Well, my father went to Southern seminary, where I’ve taught. He graduated back in, I think, ‘37, and ended up as a Navy chaplain in World War II and was in the South Pacific, Guadalcanal, and worked on up into China. But when he got back, he had the G.I. Bill and he ended up going to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and got the doctorate there in church history. He pastored some, but he also taught at schools like Carson-Newman and Belmont and Washita. And as was often the case in these Christian schools, they had to draft somebody to teach philosophy. We didn’t have a lot of guys coming through the pipeline in philosophy graduate programs so they would find someone in the Bible department or church history, or whatever, to teach a little bit of philosophy. He did that, particularly at Washita, and then he did some summer stuff at George Washington University and the University of Colorado and different places, kind of boning up on philosophy. So he found himself teaching philosophy. And I remember, one day, we were going on a family trip and somehow or other I asked him what he did, and he started talking about some philosophers they were reading. I think I was in what we would call middle school now, I guess junior high school, and he mentioned something about dialectical materialism and bourgeoisie, and I thought, “wow, that is so cool! What’s that stuff about?” (laughing)
Zaspel:
(laughing) Just to say it, sounds good!
Coppenger:
It does sound good! And he wasn’t at all a Marxist, he’s very strongly against that. But, anyway, words like metaphysics and that intrigued me.
Well, when I got to college, it was the ‘60s, and of course there was so much tumult in the land, students just trying all kinds of things and occupying the Dean’s office and teaching existentialism and who knows what. And I thought, wouldn’t it be great to be in that mix, and then be prepared to offer Christian answers. So, anyway, I ended up majoring in philosophy and took courses in aesthetics and philosophy of religion, and so forth. And then I thought, well, if I’m going to teach this I ought to get a graduate degree. And to make a very long story short, I ended up at Vanderbilt with a full ride and got the PhD in philosophy and epistemology and actually worked for the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Vanderbilt project and taught some before I went to Wheaton.
I could go on and on, but he just started talking about this stuff and I thought that sounded really interesting and pursued it. And it was interesting.
Zaspel:
You related that story, I think, in the introduction to the book and I thought it was just delicious; it was great.
Coppenger:
Well, thanks.
Zaspel:
What exactly is the work of a Christian philosopher? What’s been your work as a philosopher, not just reporting on philosophy, but also doing philosophy?
Coppenger:
Well, you know, I had a big surprise, I think it was literally my first class at Vanderbilt. I may talk about this, but I had bought this big Plato book and I figured I was just going to learn a bunch of Plato and then talk about it the rest of my life. And we spent the whole day on like a paragraph or so, and I thought there’s no way we’re getting through this book. And I slowly started to realize we were there to learn to do philosophy instead of just learn about what philosophers had said. Doing philosophy is really doing what Socrates and Plato were doing. Socrates asked the what is it? question, again and again. These dialogues were given over to the what is it? question, and he believed there was an answer. So The Republic is like what is justice? Then there’s, what is courage?, What is friendship?, what is righteousness or goodness? And on down the line. And so, you just go at it hammer and tongs and you have these various tools you work with just in terms of clarification and implications. Somebody will throw out an answer, “well, this is justice.” And you say, “well, let’s see how that travels. That seems to imply this, is that what you want? It also implies this, is that where you want to go?” And then you may say, “well, yes,” or “whoa, I didn’t know I set that up,” so you reconsider. That whole approach is called reduction to absurdity or, in Latin, reductio ad absurdum, and it just means to trace out the implications and see if things get crazy, and if they do, backtrack.
So, in my ordinary life as a philosopher, and an ethicist in particular, I come across all kinds of issues that are definitional. One was what is justice? I had a Mennonite friend who was voting for McGovern and I was voting for Nixon, and he said, I think McGovern is more in love with justice or something like that, and I thought Nixon was, too. What’s justice? So, I did a book on that when I was at Wheaton.
So, justice is one. Now, we have social justice, and then people are throwing out terms like hate speech. Well, what is hate? Is it really hate to disagree? You remember when the candidate, Trump, said he didn’t think John McCain was a hero. And it was like, how dare you, sir, he was certainly a hero, he was captured. Well, heroes don’t get captured. It was back and forth on this, and I thought, well, what is a hero, exactly? I mean, what makes one a hero?
You get that, over and over. And by the way, the Bible doesn’t have tight answers on a lot of these things. It’s not like let’s go to Zechariah 3:12, a hero is… here’s the definition. Or that sort of thing. So, we’ve got a lot of work to do; and so long as it’s congruent with the Bible and consistent with the Bible, and I think motivated by Christian impulses, then it has its place.
Zaspel:
Tertullian famously asked, rhetorically, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” The implication, of course, seems to be – “Athens has nothing to do with Jerusalem.” And in fact, the New Testament seems to have a dim view of philosophy at times. So just why should a Christian be interested in philosophy? How might it be helpful?
Coppenger:
I tell you what, I have my Tertullian moments, too, when I go to the American Philosophical Association. It’s supposed to be the love of wisdom and you can go for hours in some of those meetings and not hear much wisdom. Also, the Bible says that the gospel is foolishness to the Greeks; the crucifixion is foolishness to the Greeks. And there’s still a lot of that that goes on, but it turns out Athens has a lot more going on than just rejection of Christianity. And, as I said, there’s a place to sort things out where the Bible is not explicit. I’m supposed to comment on a paper in Philadelphia in January at the American Philosophical Association, a paper on ethics. And as I go to these meetings I am perplexed at how people with advanced degrees and credentials and all this stuff could say just crazy things. You know, there’s an LGBTQ group and there’s a PETA group, and I just think, man, you’ve really got to have a PhD to think this crazily. So, there is a bit of that, but I will say this. Back in the ‘80s when I was at Wheaton, a group of philosophers got together and said we ought to have a Christian Philosophers group, here. Plantinga was in the thing, Dick Wallace, Art Holmes at Wheaton, and others, so we just ventured it. We put the invitation out and hope somebody would show up. We had a room with about 35 chairs, and we thought if we set far apart, it would look like something happened. It turns out I think over 80 people showed up. And there was this groundswell of people saying we are Christians. We struck a nerve, and we were off to the races after that. So, a lot of Christian philosophers today are validly Christian.
Zaspel:
That’s great.
Okay, give us just a brief overview of your book so we can know how you approach your topic.
Coppenger:
Philosophy is considered very arcane and abstract and jargon-ish, and the like, but it struck me that it is very practical. I was drafted to teach philosophy of law when I got to Wheaton. I started to get into cases, and I became fascinated. I did a casebook in bioethics, but I started going through law libraries and I came across the most fascinating things. One of them had to do with a Romanian sculptor named Constantin Brancusi. He brought an abstract sculpture called Bird in Space to New York around 1920 to enter it into a show or for an exhibit, and the customs officer said he owed about 20 or 30% tariff. Brancusi said he thought art came in free. And the customs officer said, “that ain’t art.” It was abstract and it didn’t look like a bird, so the customs officer classified it as a kitchen utensil or a piece of metal work. So, Brancusi sued and went to customs court and the customs court of the US had to decide what was art.
Well, I taught aesthetics, so there is a case to press that point. And then I would find another case about cannibalism on a lifeboat, and another case about all kinds of stuff. And so, I thought, I’m just going to use these cases to introduce every area of philosophy.
And then you have a bunch of maps. Philosophers come up with maps and say if you follow this, it’s going to take you here, and this is a good place to go; here’s the lay of the land. It’s kind of like the worldview thing, but it’s also sort of a narrative. Philosophers say go on this pragmatic track, go on this naturalistic track, go on this theistic track, and it will take you here and there, so I thought well, let’s just do some maps. So. I came up with a total of 45 of these things, including maps and cases.
Zaspel:
Okay, you give us 22 legal cases and 23 maps. Which are your favorites? What do they introduce?
Coppenger:
Well, I mentioned the Brancusi case. Another fun one was one fellow was totally taken with what’s called spiritualism. I think Houdini played with it a little bit. It’s séances and things that go bump in the night, talking to dead relatives and stuff. So, anyway, the fellow was so taken with it that he changed his will to give his money to the spiritualists. And when it came to probate, his daughters were incensed that they lost their inheritance for this knucklehead operation. So, there’s that clause that says being of sound mind, I bequeath. And they said, “anybody believes this stuff, ain’t of sound mind.” So there, I introduce what is a sound mind? What is rationality?
Recently there was a case in Indonesia, where a monkey got a photographer’s camera and took some selfies. The guy took the pictures and made a coffee table book out of some of this stuff and PETA jumped in and said, “wait a second, you’re profiting from his photographs.” And they said the monkey has a copyright. And so they had to decide whether animals could own property and have copyrights. So, we talk about the difference between men and animals.
There’s a fun case in Missouri; it’s an older case, but this guy had some pinball machines and the rule in Missouri was that you couldn’t pay off something of value; you couldn’t have a gambling device. The machines were paying off in extra games, but not in money. And so, the court had to decide whether that was something of value, extra games. And the judge, it’s a delicious decision, the judge says, “look, this is trash and if you get more trash, you got nothing.” I use this to introduce value theory and what counts as valuable and not.
Let me just mention one other case real quickly. A fellow, I think it was in Germany, who said… It’s very strange, very dark, but he was dying and somehow he decided he wanted to be eaten once he died. So, he put out a request for cannibals and he got some takers; and so, he hired one of them and the guy followed through. The question was, wait a second, is that illegal? You know the old thing about consenting adults, and liberty, and nobody is harmed who didn’t want to be harmed. The guy who was eaten signed on; the guy who ate signed on, so we shouldn’t touch it. So, they just said but, these are grown-ups, it’s a very strong libertarian principle, so they let the guy go. And then after a while, they said, wait a second, this is crazy, this is disgusting so they came back. But it’s a case that introduces the limits of liberty. You know, the whole thing about smoking pot, or wearing motorcycle helmets, how much liberty should you have?
Very quickly, on the maps. There are a couple of writers who talked about a map of the 1-to-1 scale. You know, in the military we might have 1-to-50,000 or something, so a town that was 20 miles across might be like ¼ of an inch across, that sort of scale. But the question was could you have a map of the 1-to-1 scale, and the answer is yes, technically, but when you unroll it, you’re going to irritate the farmers, because it’s just the size of the thing you are portraying. So, I use that to introduce the notion of abstraction. Like if you’re talking about dogs, it’s not like every single dog must be defined separately, but there is a class termed dog that covers a lot.
Another one is the entrance to New London, Connecticut, Harbor. We have a nautical chart there and it shows there are rocks on both sides. And I use that to introduce Aristotle’s what’s called the Nicomachean ethics – this notion that virtues are middle grounds between extremes. So courage is good, but too much is foolhardiness, and too little is cowardice, and that sort of thing. So I got into Aristotle.
And then there’s an interesting map, and I will end with this one. It’s called a T and O map. It’s a world map that is shaped like a T, and at the top of the T is Jerusalem. It’s like a cross and the shaft goes down, and that’s the Mediterranean. And then the right crossbar is the Nile, and the left crossbar is the Danube. And the point was that Jerusalem and the things of God are at the top of the world, not the magnetic North Pole or what have you. They didn’t know about that back then, but still. And I use that to introduce the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas that basically said the eternal law was at the top of everything.
I have a lot of fun, using London subway maps, and I use the displacement of the Cherokees in a legal case, and so on. It’s a way to take people and say look at this case, look at this map. Now, let me tell you that connects up with Kant and John Stuart Mill and Aristotle and so forth and so on. Anyway, I had a lot of fun with it.
Zaspel:
We’re talking with Dr. Mark Coppenger, author of the new book, Cases and Maps: A Christian Introduction to Philosophy. Mark is just always interesting and enjoyable to read. If you don’t think philosophy can be interesting, you need to read this book.
Thanks, Mark – I appreciate your good work.
Coppenger:
Thank you, Fred, I appreciate it.
