62 Sermon Illustrations on Philosophy

Jesus ministered in a pluralistic world, filled with Judaism and pagan

mythology and philosophy. When Jesus stood upon the Mount of Temptation and

turned his back upon the opportunity to control the economic, political,

military and religious systems of the world, he chose a Messiahship that would

worship the one true God alone and embrace a kingdom that was not of this

world. Although his life had its share of encounters with a profoundly

pluralistic society, His focus remained constant. Both His speeches and His

silences directed His examiners to issues of truth, spiritual reality and His

own divine mission. He refused to be deflected from His path to the Cross.

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Sermon in Acts series. Paul before the Athenians. Acts 17:16-33

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SEEKING SKEPTICS

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I. "Know your enemy."

II. Paul's confrontation with the modern world.

A. Ancient Athens was the intellectual center of the world.

B. Epicureans. "Eat, drink and be merry."

C. Stoics. "If you don't mind, it doesn't matter."

III. These popular philosophies summed up how ancients coped with life.

A. There has been little change to this day.

B. The pursuit of pleasure and knowledge still dissatisfy.

C. Paul was labeled a babbler.

IV. "Unknown gods."

A. Paul preached to the people on their level.

1) God is the Creator.

2) All humans have a common ancestor.

B. We are morally responsible before God, and must change our ways.

V. All truth is God's truth.

A. Paul quotes two Greek poets, Epimenides and Aratus, for support.

B. God's truth can be found in other cultures.

VI. What do Christians have to say to their world?

A. Evangelicalism is tagged as anti-intellectual.

B. We should challenge our society on its level.

C. The gospel still stands.

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Walt K., a psychologist, agnostic/humanist/free-thinker, has this to say about Christians:

When Christians talk with me about their faith, I usually feel sorry for them. I feel that I have gone on to a more intelligent approach to spirituality. I used to be a very devout Christian, but have been completely turned off to traditional religion. I know some Christians are sincere and try to live their faith; I respect that. I do not respect the hypocrites, self-deceivers, liars, and self-serving proselytizers.

There is nothing about Christianity that attracts me anymore. I’m turned off by the typical power game played by those who say, “I know God; therefore, I have truth and everyone who disagrees with me is wrong and will burn in hell forever!” Give me a break. This is all due to ego, power, and self-deceit.

About Christianity, I say, “I tried it and don’t like it!” It’s lacking in consistency, truth, and any real relation to the actual universe. Since rejecting Christianity, I have found peace, lack of guilt, and self- acceptance, as well as a degree of tolerance that most Christians will never achieve.

I did not come upon my decision easily or lightly, nor for emotional reasons. It was hard to break my “conditioning,” and I still miss some of it (the hymns especially). But for the most part, I am free of the baggage Christianity imposes upon its adherents. I am still interested in religion, and continually look for, and evaluate, different alternatives. But the most part, I find them wanting.

“We would be deluding ourselves if we thought that evangelical thinking in our day has progressed very far.”

In February 1993, Mark Noll spoke these words at his induction as Wheaton College’s McManis Professor of Christian Thought. In a talk entitled “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” he decried the anti-intellectualism he saw in modern evangelical life. As his ideas gained greater exposure with Christianity Today’s publishing of his address (Oct. 25, 1993, p. 28) and the 1994 release of his book with the same title, a debate spread through the Christian community: Was the evangelical mind really in such bad shape?

Other evangelical scholars added to the discussion. Alister McGrath, theology professor at Oxford University, presented a more optimistic outlook in EVANGELICALISM & THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY (InterVarsity; excerpted, Christianity Today, June 19, 1995). Fuller Theological Seminary president Richard Mouw urged Christian intellectuals to learn from popular religion in Consulting the Faithful (Eerdmans; excerpted, ct, July 18, 1994). Dallas Theological Seminary’s Darrell Bock, a New Testament professor, promoted a fresh outlook on a theological tradition in his book PROGRESSIVE DISPENSATIONALISM (Victor/Bridgepoint, coauthored with Craig Blaising; summarized in Christianity Today, Sept. 12, 1994).

This spring Christianity Today brought these four together for a three-hour discussion on the state of the evangelical mind. What follows is their lively and wide-ranging discussion.

I. The state of the evangelical mind

How would each of you characterize the current state of the evangelical mind?

Noll: I am most concerned about the widening gap between the evangelical populace and the evangelical academy. Every popular forum I have attended that has discussed The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind has been dominated by the most rigid kind of six-day creationism. I’m not sure where this is coming from, and I do not know exactly what it means. But I think its elevation to the status of dogma is crippling to the Scriptures and demeaning to the Christian tradition.

I feel the same way about Christian politics, which in the United States is in a degenerately low state. Any positive insights the academics have drawn from the Scriptures to think about the body politic have simply been lost in the great engines of media that are prostituting Christian values.

On the other hand, in the Anglo-American world, evangelical Bible work is very good. Although an undertow of fundamentalist overreaction remains, the situation has never been better. The kind of work that Darrell Bock and his colleagues at Dallas are doing is an indication of a new sophistication that combines fidelity to orthodox tradition with real savvy in using modern scholarship.

Theologically, the situation is worse but therefore better. It is worse because there is more confusion, but better because people are re-examining some important basic matters. Personally, I do not like the direction of Clark Pinnock’s THE OPENNESS OF GOD (InterVarsity), for example, since it seems too much like process theology. But I’m glad that it was published, because it puts some important matters on the table and is getting solid rather than knee-jerk responses.

In other parts of the academic world, evangelicals are doing solid Christian thinking, especially in philosophy. There is also good work beginning in psychology, sociology, and economics.

So while good things have been happening, the effort needed to develop the evangelical mind is huge. And we’ve just begun to realize the dimensions of the task.

Mouw: I agree that there is an evangelical mind that is misfunctioning. But I also think that there’s an evangelical mind that is functioning well, albeit not always in a uniquely evangelical way. Then again, who says that a good Christian mind has to be a uniquely evangelical mind at every point?

And if the evangelical mind is in bad shape, so is the mainline Protestant mind, the Roman Catholic mind, and the Eastern Orthodox mind. But frankly, I believe we have the best intellectual networking going on anywhere. Evangelical political scientists get together. Evangelical sociologists get together. Evangelical literati get together; evangelical philosophers, evangelical economists. We have official organizations, workshops, conferences, symposia, publications, and e-mail networks. There’s nothing like it in any other part of the Christian world. I can’t imagine a better place to be an intellectual right now than in evangelicalism.

McGrath: I would characterize evangelicalism as an “emerging” movement: from a period where its primary concern was numerical strength to this current period focused on intellectual and spiritual maturing. I would not have expected an evangelical mind to exist at this point, in light of the movement’s recent history. In the past, we were worried about surviving and maintaining our distinctive identity. But that period of our history is behind us.

Evangelicals now feel sufficiently confident to confront the issues Mark has raised in his book. They are aware that there is a culture waiting to be addressed, and that evangelicalism has the resources to do it. We have yet to achieve anything like what our forebears did back in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. But I see very hopeful signs for the future, particularly amongst younger evangelicals.

Bock: I wouldn’t say the evangelical mind is emerging as much as it’s re- emerging. The church was bleeding at the beginning of this century in the face of modernism, and it had to withdraw, retreat, and rebuild itself, almost from scratch. As a result, the church had little energy to do reflective, calm, deep thinking. When a body is in trauma, its first priority is to save itself.

If I can change metaphors, the evangelical movement is like a teenager coming of age in which she is now facing major decisions about adulthood. So the question is this: Now that we have the potential for recovery, how do we move on from here? Mark stepped in at this point and said, “Let’s take a courageous road to full recovery.” He gave us a good warning about the kinds of decisions we should be making. On the other hand, we should never forget that the evangelical church emerged out of a bloody battle with modernism. We should be grateful to our forebears.

Mouw: And it was a battle in which we lost academic institutions. How many times have different evangelical groups said, “They’ve taken away my college, my seminary”? So if we have become protective of our academic institutions in a way that has restricted the academic enterprise, we need to remember the real and painful historical experiences that catalyzed the defense-building.

Noll: What took place at the end of the nineteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth century was indeed a drastic time that required drastic remedies. Although I think the remedies were extreme and ended up in unwise excesses, they were basically good reactions. I have one qualification to add, however: our institutions were not only taken away. I think, in part, they were given away.

Also, I do not see anti-intellectualism only as a problem. Some parts of the Christian faith have to be anti-intellectual. All orthodox Christian movements possess a foundational place for faith that is not grounded on rationality (though neither is it antirational). The problem is much more the misfunctioning of minds: bad thinking rather than no thinking.

How and when did the “bad thinking” begin?

Noll: The time between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was one of crisis for the church. Supernaturalism was under attack. The Bible was under attack. The role of the Holy Spirit in a believer’s life was under attack. And groups within the broad evangelical stream did the right thing in defending the Bible as the written Word of God, the reality of the supernatural, and the real work of the Holy Spirit.

So the Holiness, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal movements were all foundationally good, but they went astray. And they did so in terms of the life of the mind by seeing their efforts as a replacement rather than a balancing act. Supernaturalism replaced nature. The work of the Holy Spirit replaced the work of the mind. Trust in the Bible replaced an openness to instruction from the world as a whole. These extremes have left behind the anti-intellectual legacy, which may be in process of being overcome.

What I would appeal for now is the development of an ability to let ancient Christian traditions provide norms for the more recent traditions- fundamentalist, Pentecostal, Holiness movements. We need to have a dialogue across the centuries so that the foundationally solid and instinctively sound aspects of those reactionary movements can be magnified and the excesses trimmed away.

What is at stake in this debate?

Noll: There are some important pragmatic matters at stake: being able to hold your head up high as a self-identified Christian in certain venues-in the academic world, in the arts, in modern media. But those matters are not nearly so important as honoring God, the Creator and Redeemer.

God made the world. God entered the world in the person of Jesus Christ. And God through the Holy Spirit redeems the world. These fundamental Christian realities should push the church to take very seriously the study of what God has made possible: the natural world, the world of human institutions, aesthetics, et cetera. I think fundamentally this is a theological problem. But I realize that other people are not as Puddleglumish or Eeyorish about these matters as I am.

Mouw: We all agree that there is an element of scandal here. But I think it’s important to understand the legitimate reasons why evangelicals have been suspicious of the mind. Evangelicals are the heirs to a tradition that has had great, necessary moments expressing bold suspicion toward the mind. One, for example, was in the seventeenth century, when the pietists reacted against rationalistic orthodoxy. They wanted more than a religion of the head; they wanted a religion of the heart. Another occurred when evangelical Christians took a stand against the Enlightenment mindset that viewed human consciousness as the highest standard of truth. These were two glorious moments.

But anti-intellectualism developed when people moved from a legitimate suspicion of a rationalism-whether it was an orthodox or heterodox rationalism-to an illegitimate rejection of the intellectual life as such.

And to clarify-and I think Mark glosses over this a little bit-fundamentalism is actually a highly intellectual approach with its very strong emphasis on assenting to truth. It is not so much against the mind as it is against the academic mind or the mindset of the academy, which is an important distinction to make.

McGrath: I know it’s historically nave to put your finger on a single episode, but I think the Scopes trial signaled a change in the fundamentalists’ outlook on learning institutions. Universities and colleges no longer were seen as inherently Christian, no longer signified sound learning, and actually displayed an anti-Christian bent.

This is the central issue of the state of the evangelical mind. The word academy no longer means “scholarly, informed, having access to wisdom.” Some modern universities instead seem to posit agendas that are often anti- Christian. Fundamentalists saw this process happen but did not know what to do about it. They knew academic excellence must have a place in evangelicalism. So the founding of evangelical institutions and seminaries became part of the long process of reconstructing an evangelical mind.

Mark does a good job of depicting how fundamentalists realized they had a big problem on their hands, and what they did in response. But looking back, what else could they have done? It’s very easy for us to be wise in hindsight.

II. Inerrancy

How has this distrust of the academy influenced the way evangelicals deal with and formulate our doctrines of Scripture?

Noll: First of all, I do not think there is any future for Christian thinking from people who do not have an implicit, thorough trust in the truthfulness of the Bible. What was glorious about the fundamentalist, Pentecostal, and Holiness movements was their seriousness about the Bible. But as evangelicals were attacked in their view of Scripture, they began to pull away from classic holistic understandings of the Bible toward sectarian, particularistic understandings of the Bible.

The new cruxes often became matters such as the interpretation of Genesis, Isaiah, Daniel, and Revelation or the authorship of Ephesians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and other Pauline epistles. Although these are reasonably important questions, they are not the fundamental issues of the Bible. The fundamental issue of the Bible seems to me to be what John addresses in chapter 20, verse 31: “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.”

Without the defensive work of the previous generation on the Scriptures, we would be lost. In this way, critics like myself show themselves to be smaller people than some of the supposedly narrow-minded people we criticize. But by the same token, what we need now is a more vigorous, better rounded, more organic, more classically Christian use of the Scriptures. We do not need to solve details of problems that are mostly extrinsic to the biblical authors themselves. Instead, we need to concentrate on what the Bible focuses on, namely, the history of redemption culminating in Jesus Christ.

Bock: The church needs to develop a prioritized theology that concentrates on and emphasizes the things that Scripture does. And the questions that Scripture covers in less detail, we should give less attention to as well.

Even though we are redeemed, we still have fallen minds. We still make judgments that are sometimes wrong, so we need to do our theology with humility. And if we emphasize what Scripture emphasizes, we are going to have a better chance of getting it right than if we pick areas of interest to us just because they’re fascinating.

McGrath: The British scholar David Bebbington makes a point that the Cross seems to have no central place for most American evangelical theologians this century and asks, “Why not?” The answer is that American evangelicalism has become reactive. It has had to defend its own understanding of theological authorities and methods, emphasizing the authority and inerrancy of Scripture. But as a result, American evangelicals rarely hear what Scripture actually says. They have defended the authority of Scripture using words that have been coined for this particular strategy, which are not themselves biblical.

I hope that as American evangelicalism regains its confidence, it constructs theologies that deal with what Scripture says rather than concentrating on why Scripture has its authority.

Bock: I’m torn because, on the one hand, I identify with the concerns that the text be taken for what the text is doing and what it presents. But in the back of my head there’s a little whisper reminding me that the bleeding church we were talking about went through a nightmare because other people made certain kinds of wrong and destructive decisions about what Scripture was doing that created the problem.

So we walk a tightrope of asserting the authority of Scripture without making interpretations that deny what we’re asserting. But this is part of having a good mind, being able to sense when you have to tread carefully, gently, and circumspectly.

We’re all aware of detailed passages with two or three interpretive alternatives, where the decisions between them are tough, and no options are totally clean in terms of what they offer us. And yet, to give some description of the Bible’s trustworthiness without asserting Scripture’s fundamental truthfulness leaves us in a no-man’s land in the midst of that circumspection.

Mouw: The emphasis on inerrancy has been helpful in that, however we spell out what we mean by the word, we have guarded the message character of Scripture as precious-in a way we do not find in other communities and traditions. But I think, for all of the problems of the past in terms of evangelical biblical scholarship, we’re really in pretty good shape right now.

When Darrell writes about progressive dispensationalism, he says there’s an emerging commonality to an evangelical hermeneutic. Nobody is talking about the chaos of evangelical studies at this point.Part of the reason why we’re not in chaos is that we never entirely accepted the critical approach in the first place. It was no big surprise for us that biblical scholarship is guided by presuppositions.

So we can be a little more relaxed and more constructive today because we do not have to deconstruct our own past projects. Maybe God, in his providence, used our defensive, isolated, biblical scholarship to preserve an integrity that allows us calmly to pursue issues that are being loudly dissected in other places of biblical scholarship.

To push the point a little further, inerrancy has played a critical role in evangelicalism’s recent history. The claim that someone is “soft on inerrancy” is a significant and potentially threatening criticism. What does this say about the problem we’re discussing?

McGrath: I believe in the trustworthiness and sufficiency of Scripture, and that’s where all evangelicals are, really. But the problem is that we move in situations where these beliefs come under threat, and then we have to erect additional fences to safeguard these tenets. And these fences are, in effect, temporary structures to safeguard us against the threat that is here today and gone tomorrow. For understandable reasons, the fences have come to be seen as being at least as important as the truth they’re meant to safeguard.

We cannot ignore history. We cannot ignore situations that have resulted in this need to safeguard beliefs that once would have been taken as indisputable by all Christians. We’ve got to respect the past. But the situation has changed, and now we’ve got to make sure that we defend what once did not need to be defended. I’d still like to maintain the emphasis that what we are defending [the content of Scripture] is actually far more important than the means of defense we bring.

III. Evangelical populism

Noll: In complex situations such as inerrancy questions, we can discern an academic evangelical response and a populist evangelical response. In the academic area, there is not much of a problem. But on the popular side, we see something different: the translation of academic issues into litmus tests and, therefore, the promotion of nonthinking in order to cut out a cancer or to handle a desperate situation. It’s at this level that we do the most damage to Christian thinking: an issue that requires some discrimination, some complexity of thought, is handled like a political football. The measure of success becomes not clarity of thought and the ability to discriminate between levels of discourse, but whipping up a crowd using political maneuvering. So the person with the best political skills will appear to win the theological battle when, in fact, the real issues are simply being obscured.

Aren’t you using the words academic and popular to mean “mature” and “immature,” because the debates you are referring to took place at scholarly gatherings?

Noll: It’s more complicated than that. What you’ve just called immaturity, which I would call populism, is precisely the force that sustains the U.S. evangelical movement in a way it is not sustained in Europe, Britain, and is barely sustained in Canada.

So there are Christians who are immature intellectually but who are dedicated evangelistically, and very savvy in media and politicking. They may cause problems in intellectual arenas, but in other areas of life, they are necessary and a delight.

Mouw: In America, there is a populist, anti-intellectual Christian remnant that feeds on overstatement, rhetorical overkill, prooftexting, and sloganeering, which grows out of distorted, grassroots pietism. I’m a pietist, so I do not mean to be trashing pietism. But this is a distinctly spiritual issue, the lack of humility, of self-criticism, of a “Search me, O Lord, and try my thoughts” attitude among the populace.

Bock: There is another, insidious element to this issue. The character of our populist theological debates mirrors the lack of civility our culture-at- large has at carrying on substantive debate. If you ask, “Where can I find reasoned discourse today?” you might not get an answer. Frankly, this is what scares me more than anything else. We need to create in the church a sense of value and integrity so that we can conduct our debates in ways different from the world.

What can we value in evangelical populism?

Noll: There’s much, much to be valued. If American evangelicalism has something to offer to the world, it is the virtues of Christian fellowship. The theme of “the people of God” is a critical biblical theme. The people of God are terrific at knowing when the gospel is being violated. But for the purposes of what we’re talking about today, the Bible does not say the people of God are to be the ones that decide most intellectual questions.

American evangelicalism is wonderful in that it has no boundaries. The terrific fellowship, helpfulness, and lack of concern for authority and place have all positively affected Christianity in this country. But American evangelicals often function like an engine run amuck when it comes to intellectual questions. And this explains why, generally speaking, there are fewer active believers in Britain than in America but much better Christian thinking. We have the virtues of our vices and the vices of our virtues.

Three Pillars of Modernism.

1) Acceptance of the Natural World and Rejection of the Supernatural.

• The only reality is that which you experience – sensory.

• Miracles are myth.

• The orderliness of nature proves existence of God, but He is no longer

involved with His creation. (Deism, the belief system of the

American founding fathers.)

• More recently, the modern world determined there is no real need of a

God who is not involved in His creation.

2) All of society and human tradition is to be built on reason alone.

• All things can be understood by ways of human reason.

• Personal faith requires no need for revelation.

• Great challenge for the Church is to prove that Christianity is true.

3) Science and education are the preeminent values that produce progress.

• Truth is objective, factual.

• Absolute truth rules the universe apart from God’s intervention:

• More education is the answer to most human problems.

“For the last two centuries, modern thought has assaulted Christianity in the name of reason and in the name of humanism. Christian theology was dismissed as superstition, unworthy of rational, educated human beings. Christian morality was also dismissed as repressive, built around fear and guilt.”

Postmodern Times, Gene E. Veith, page 71.

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A COMPARISON OF APOLOGETIC METHODS

A lecture given by T.E. Grover Gunn on March 11, 1997, at the apologetics conference sponsored by Christ Presbyterian Church in Elkton, Maryland.

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C. H. Spurgeon in his famous sermon "Free Will, A Slave" makes the statement:

"If a man talks very slowly, he may speak in a fine manner; but when he

comes to talk fast, the old brogue of his country, where he was born,

slips out."

For example, some hymns by Charles and John Wesley sound like they were written by a Calvinist. The same is probably also true of some of their sermons. It is when they are talking slowly and trying to write a consistent work of theology that their Arminianism becomes most evident.

I would guess that the same thing often happens in apologetics with regard to evidentialists and presuppositionalists. Some godly and learned men believe in evidentialistic apologetics. I would probably agree with many of their efforts to defend the faith in the context of evangelism. I would probably be able to give a hearty "Amen" to many of their sermons. It is when we debate each other or when we engage in our more detailed explanations of our apologetic that our differences become most evident.

THE TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENT

I want today to look at the basic difference between how a presuppositionalist defends the faith and how an evidentialist defends the faith. I will start by looking at how we use the transcendental argument.

The phrase "the transcendental argument" sounds intimidating, but it is really a simple concept. At times we accept something, not because we can directly prove it, but because of "the impossibility of the contrary." We cannot prove a certain position, but we can show that the inevitable consequences of rejecting that position are simply unthinkable. The price of rejection is beyond any possibility of payment.

There are two children's books which I believe are good examples of a limited use of the transcendental argument. They are Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. Mr. Carroll was a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford back in the nineteenth century, and he was author of the book Symbolic Logic. In his two children's books, this scholarly logician created a world where absurdity reigns. Here's a short selection from Alice in Wonderland:

Alice ... tried another question. 'What sort of people live about

here?'

"In THAT direction," the [Cheshire] Cat said, waving its right paw round,

"lives a Hatter: and in THAT direction," waving the other paw, "lives

a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad."

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad.

You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

And here is a short selection from Through the Looking Glass:

Alice laughed. "There's not use trying," she said: "one can't believe

impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the [White] Queen. "When

I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why,

sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before

breakfast...."

Here is a fantasy world where everyone is mad and where people believe impossible things. One thing we soon learn when we read these two books is that living in a world where absurdity reigns would be impossibly frustrating. This is a transcendental argument for the validity of logic. You cannot use logic to directly prove logic, but you can show the impossibility of an absurd world.

The transcendental argument is used to prove foundational presuppositions. Every system of thought goes back to some foundational axiomatic truths that are self-evident and self-authenticating. Dr. Greg Bahnsen stated it this way:

"... every argument chain must end in a self-authenticating starting

point; every world view has its unquestioned and unquestionable

assumptions, its primitive commitments."1

The only other alternative is to have an infinite regress: A is implied by B, B is implied by C, C is implied by D, and so on and so on ad infinitum.

Presuppositionalism does not use the transcendental argument to prove secondary axioms such as the validity of logic. Presuppositionalism uses the transcendental argument to prove what is truly life's most ultimate axiom. According to presuppositionalism, if Christianity is not true, then there is no possible proof of anything. Nothing can be known with any certainty unless the living and true God can be known.

The Greek scientist Archimedes said, "Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand, and I can move the world." It doesn't matter how long your lever is, you can't move anything without a solid place to plant your lever's fulcrum. Similarly, it doesn't matter how sophisticated your world view is, you can't prove anything unless you start with at least one axiomatic, self- evident, self-authenticating truth. You must have a solid place upon which to stand or else you are lost is a world of relativism and flux.

THE WORLD VIEW SCALES

Let's change our metaphor now. We've compared a world view to a fulcrum and lever. Let's now compare it to a set of scales, a device for weighing. A world view is like a set of scales in that you use your world view to evaluate truth claims. You use your world view to weigh evidence. There is, however, one thing you cannot weigh in your scales, and that is the scales themselves. To validate the scales in which you weigh everything else, you need a more subtle approach, an indirect approach. You need the transcendental argument.

Here's the solution. You get the official Bureau of Standards to send you a set of authenticated weights with the official weight stamped on each unit. You take these and weigh them on one scale. According to that scale, your five pound weight is heavier than your ten pound weight. You must reject that scale as defective because of the impossibility of the contrary. If that scale is not defective, then five pounds weighs more than ten pounds, and that's impossible. That scale is defective because of the impossibility of the contrary.

You try another set of scales, and according to it, all your authenticated weights weigh exactly what is stamped on them. Either that set of scales is correct, or all your official, authenticated weights have the wrong weight stamped on them. Since that is impossible, unthinkable, out of the question, that set of scales must be correct. You have authenticated your scales using the transcendental argument. You have demonstrated the scales to be accurate because of the impossibility of the contrary.

Now for this to work, you have to have that set of those official, authenticated weights with the exact weight stamped on each unit. You need something as an indicator of impossibility. Now in terms of our world view, do we have anything like that? Yes, we do. God gave each us a set of authenticated, official weights with the exact weight stamped on each unit when he created us in His own image.

THE IMAGE OF GOD

What does it mean to be created in the image of God? Negatively, man's creation in the image of God does not mean that God has a literal body after which He patterned the human body. Almost no one teaches this except the Mormons. According to the Mormon scripture Doctrine and Covenants, "The Father has a body of flesh and bone as tangible as man's." This bizarre Mormon teaching is related to their teaching that God the Father is an exalted finite man.

The Bible teaches that God is a Spirit (John 4:24) and that spirits do not have material bodies (Luke 24:39). During the Old Testament, God at times appeared to men in bodily forms (cf. Genesis 18:2,13); these, however, were veiled manifestations, revelations in forms accessible to finite man. No man has ever actually seen God in a direct sense (John 1:18; 1 Timothy 1:17; 6:16; Exodus 33:20).

The Bible also speaks of God in terms of human body parts, but these are figures of speech. For example, God's speaking to Moses face to face was a figure for God's speaking to Moses with the same personal intimacy with which a man speaks to a friend (Exodus 33:11,20). The fingers of God refer to God's creative ability (Psalm 8:3), and the arm of the Lord refers to God's power to save (Deut. 4:34). God no more has literal fingers and arms than He has literal wings and feathers (Psalm 91:4). Man's claim to uniqueness is his being created in God's image (Genesis 1:27-28; Psalm 8). To say that this refers merely to the form of man's physical body is to say that man's uniqueness in creation is relative and that animals like the ape with physical forms similar to man's are created nearly in God's image.

The image of God in man is not found in man's physical form, and there are certain attributes of God that cannot be reflected in man or any other element of created reality. Only God is eternal and without any beginning in time. Only God is a non-derived, non-created being. The image of God in man must refer to nonmaterial characteristics of man where the finite creature can reflect the infinite Creator.

The New Testament teaches that in regeneration man is renewed "according to the image of Him who created him" in knowledge, righteousness and holiness (Col. 3:10 & Eph. 4:24). Thus man as a rational and spiritual creature upon whose heart is written the law of God reflects the Person of God. One can think of many other areas where man reflects certain divine attributes. Man is a creature of language, and God is a God who speaks. God, while not subject to irrational passions, displays love, anger and many other emotions which are reflected in human experience. God creates, and man is creative; God is Lord, and man was given dominion over the earth; God judges and rules, and man judges and rules. God has a will, and man has a will; God has plans, and men have their plans. God imputes value to things ("God saw everything that He had made, and it was very good"), and man is an economic creature. God experiences personal relationships within the Triune Godhead, and man is a social creature who exists both in diversity as individuals and in unity as a race. This social aspect of man is most basically expressed in the marriage relationship: "... God said, Let US make man in OUR image, ... So God created man in His own image; ... male and female He created them."

In short, man's creation in the image of God means that Adam was created like the Creator in every way it was possible for a finite, limited creature to be like the eternal Creator God. That includes our rationality. Rationality is a very important aspect of the divine image within us, but the image of God is not limited to rationality. There are many other innate predispositions and abilities and instincts and conceptions that are the stamp of the divine image upon the very core of our being. The French mathematician, scientist and theologian Pascal said, "We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart... The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing."2

The image of God is complex, and people are different. The question, "What will touch and arouse the divine image in that particular person?" is similar to the question, "What would cause that particular person to laugh?" The good apologist develops the art of probing human hearts to answer that first question. Also involved is a divinely given gift of intuition, and the Holy Spirit has distributed the gifts as He wills.

What about the effect of the fall, especially the noetic effects of sin; that is, the effects of sin upon the way we think?

THE NOETIC EFFECTS OF SIN

The Bible teaches that fallen man in his natural state is at enmity against God and cannot please Him (Romans 8:7-8). He does not seek after God and he does not do good (Romans 3:11-12). He has gone astray and has turned to his own way (Isaiah 53:6). Apart from the gift of God's regenerating grace, he is morally unable to come to Christ in saving faith (John 6:65; 10:26; 12:39- 40). Emotionally, he loves moral darkness (John 3:19) and the things of Satan (John 8:44), and he hates God's light (John 3:20). Intellectually, the things of God are foolishness to him (1 Corinthians 2:14) and his understanding is darkened (Ephesians 4:17-18; 2 Corinthians 4:4; John 8:43,47). Volitionally, he has been taken captive by the devil to do his will (2 Timothy 2:26; John 8:44). In regard to his total being, he is spiritually dead (Ephesians 2:1; John 5:25).

Humanity was created in God's image, that image was shattered by the fall, but that image was not obliterated. It remains because creation in the image of God is the distinctive defining characteristic of humanity. It still exists deep within the heart of fallen man as a testimony to God's truth. This inner voice does not have the power to raise fallen man from his state of spiritual death, but it is a sufficient inner testimony to hold fallen man accountable for his sin on judgment day. Perhaps the clearest passage on this is Romans 2:11-16. Every person has "the work of the law written in [his heart], [his] conscience also bearing witness."

DIVINE FINGERPRINTS

We have discussed the inner stamped weights which God has given us. There are also external stamped weights, and that is the whole of creation which surrounds us. Creation is the work of God's fingers (Psalm 8:3). The whole world is pulsating with the revelation of God; there is no escaping it. Knowledge of the true and living God bombards fallen man (Psalm 19:1-2).

In order to avoid these external stamped weights, fallen man has to project a fantasy world. I believe a science fiction series such as Star Trek, The Next Generation is an interesting commentary on this fantasy world. We have Mr. Data, a sophisticated robot who (notice I said, "who") is practically human. Since humans are only complex chemical machines, a computer such as Mr. Data must be given as much respect and granted as much dignity. In the episode "The Measure of a Man," Captain Picard successfully defends Mr. Data in court from an official attempt to disassemble him for research purposes by arguing that Mr. Data has "sentience," the capacity for sensation.

In the episode "Silicon Avatar," the Crystalline Entity is a huge primitive life form which has devoured all life, including human life, on many planets. Yet Captain Pichard opposes its destruction unless absolutely necessary. After all, who are we to judge another life form that is just innocently following its instincts?

The evolutionary origin of species is obvious in this fantasy series. There are multitudes of planets with multitudes of life forms. There are humans, Vulcans, Klingons, Romulans, and other species. Despite all their diversity, it is curious that all these evolved species have two legs, two arms, two eyes, two ears -- a basically human structure. Might that be some evidence of a common Creator, a master Designer? How could the randomness of chance account for such substantial commonality? One episode, "The Chase," was devoted to answering these questions. It turns out that eons before, an intellegent species from the planet where life first evolved distributed "seed codes" in "the primordial oceans of many worlds" to direct their evolution toward a certain physical form. That episode explained the common design that remains evident in spite of the bizarre diversity among species such as humans, Klingons, Romulans, and Cardacions. We are thus assured that we have no need to assume a Creator. Also, the studio has no need to try to portray characters with significantly non-human body structure, which would probably be very inconvenient and expensive.

We can maintain our fantasy to a degree in the world of theater, but it is more difficult in the more mundane world of our daily existence. The stamped weights are out there, and they constantly chant their message: "God exists! Praise His name!"

PULLING DOWN STRONGHOLDS 2 Corinthians 10:4

Let's review for a moment. We have the set of scales. That is a person's world view, his basic understanding of reality which he uses to measure truth claims. We also have the set of official weights with the weight stamped on each unit. There are internal stamped weights, the image of God bearing testimony deep inside the heart of every man. There are also external stamped weights, the whole of creation covered with divine fingerprints.

Now what we do in apologetics is to challenge people to weigh the basic issues of life on the scale of their world view. We challenge them to be honest in acknowledging the logical and consistent implications of their view of reality. We challenge them to compare these readings with what they know to be true in their heart of hearts, even if they will not consciously admit it. Using this method, we bring to bear upon their consciences the challenge implicit in Paul's rhetorical question, "Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?" (1 Corinthians 1:20).

Let us say that we are dealing with someone who rejects God and believes in naturalism. The material world has always existed and is all that there is. There is no immaterial reality such as the human spirit or God. The human mind is nothing but the chemical reactions of the human brain. As one writer put it, "the brain secretes thoughts as the liver secretes bile." Human beings are evolutionally advanced animals or complex chemical machines. Death is the end of all personal existence. History has no meaning or purpose or goal.

MORALITY

Ask such a person to weigh morality on their scales. What do the scales say? Morality is nothing but a human convention based on majority opinion. Human sacrifice, for example, is immoral in our culture at the present time. It was not immoral in Aztec society. It may not be immoral in our society in the future.

If there is no reality beyond the material world of energy and matter, then any sense of morality which we may have is nothing but a naive fantasy and illusion. Deny God and all that remains of ethics is varying opinions and alternate lifestyles and cultural conventions. In such a world, who are we to impose our values upon others such as the Nazis?

How does the secularist avoid the conclusion of Alexander Pope's poem Essay on Man, "One truth is clear, whatever is, is right"? That is what the world's scales say, if we will but read them honestly. Deep inside every person, an alarm goes off. Something shouts out, "That's unthinkable!" Charles Dickens made a comment about "the precept, that 'Whatever is is right'" in his novel A Tale of Two Cities. He referred to it as "an aphorism that would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome consequence, that nothing that was, was wrong." This "aphorism" is sometimes called the naturalistic fallacy. It is what the secularist scales say about morality, but the human heart protests that such a morality is itself immoral.

HUMAN DIGNITY

What about the question of human dignity? Human life is sacred only because humanity is created in the image of God. Deny God, and there is nothing unique or special about human life. Human suffering becomes only a series of biochemical stimuli in a meaningless world. If the human race is nothing but an evolutionary fluke that arose from a primordial soup, if the human being is only a sophisticated biological organism, then killing a human belongs in a category with slaughtering a cow and felling a tree. One day the sun will burn out, all self-conscious and personal life will be extinct, and not even the memory of humanity will survive.

SCIENCE

What about science? The world says that all significant knowledge about the objective world is empirical in nature; that is, based on the appearance of things through sense experience. That very statement, however, is self- contradictory because it is not the result of empirical testing and experience. Instead it is a statement of faith, a religious commitment which is the creed of scientism.

People so often fail to notice how much they have assumed as a faith commitment as opposed to what they have proved through scientific tests. How can finite humanity ever prove the uniformity of nature? How can humanity know that "nature" behaves the same out in the unexplored recesses of space, or even in the unexplored regions of planet earth? How can science prove that "nature" will behave the same tomorrow as it behaves today? The fact that the sun has arisen in the east every day for millennia is no proof that it will do so tomorrow. If there is no knowledge beyond what finite humanity is able to discover on its own, then there is no adequate basis for science.

SOLIPSISM

Are you familiar with solipsism? This is the world view which says that I alone exist. Everything else is a projection of my mind. How can you logically refute that? No one can get beyond their sense perceptions to verify the existence of something out there that is more than a projected appearance. We cannot logically disprove solipsism, but very few people have ever accepted it. Something deep inside rebels against the idea. We are created in the image of the triune God, and therefore we are social creatures. We cannot accept the idea that we are the only personal being in existence, that we are in reality solitary and isolated, that our contact with other personal beings is all an illusion based on self-deception.

Bertrand Russell stated that he had once received a letter from the eminent logician, the late Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist and was surprised nobody else was. Russell remarked, "coming from a logician, this surprise surprised me."3 Do you see the contradiction between this woman's heart and head? In her head, she believed that she alone existed. In her heart, she desired others to agree with her and to share her philosophy.

We could go on and on and on. Weigh every aspect of life on the scales of secular atheism or some similar world view, and the readings on the scale will contradict those test weights which God has implanted in the human heart and in the creation.

DISHONEST SCALES

One has to put pressure on the non-Christian to read his scales honestly. He has a tendency to be like the butcher who puts his thumb on the scale to make the meat he is selling cost more. The Bible condemns dishonest scales (Deuteronomy 25:13-16), and we should also.

The non-Christian at times wants to believe that his world view scales register the weight which that testimony deep in his heart says it should register. Presuppositionalists call this "operating on borrowed capital." The atheist rejects God, but he wants to believe that he nevertheless has a consistent basis for morality and aesthetics and logic and science. The presuppositionalist pressures the non-Christian to read his scales honestly. Apart from a belief in the true and living God who is revealed in Scripture, a person does not have even a consistent basis for making a simple statement of predication such as "I exist" or "1 + 1 = 2." Belief in the God of the Bible is the only possible consistent "precondition for intelligible experience and meaningful thought."4

TAKING EVERY THOUGHT CAPTIVE 2 Corinthians 10:5

The next step is to weigh the evidence on our scale, which is the Christian world view. We believe that the Bible is self-authenticating truth. It is our ultimate axiom. We believe the true and the living God has revealed Himself in the Scriptures, and that is the essence of our world view. In this case, the consistent reading of the scales agrees with the testimony of the inscribed weights deep in our heart of hearts. Let's look at some examples.

KNOWLEDGE

Let's consider the issue of knowledge. How can we know anything with any certainty? The answer is that God can have knowledge with an absolute certainty, and God has spoken to us.

God has a certainty that is beyond anything we can attain. God made everything, God knows every fact, God is in control of every development, God is everywhere in the fullness of His being, and God knows the past, present and future simultaneously. God is able to evaluate and analyze each individual fact in the light of His comprehensive knowledge of all current facts, all past influences, all future developments and all possible contingencies.

We know so few of the facts, and the one fact we do not know can change our understanding of all the other facts. I remember an episode from the TV show The Twilight Zone from when I was a child. It was about some space aliens who visited earth. People were quite alarmed, but these creatures from space assured everyone that there was nothing to fear. They had come on a mission of mercy to primitive earth, which they viewed as a "third world" planet. They even had a missions manual entitled "To Serve Mankind."

With their advanced technology, these aliens began their impressive work of service. They enabled farmers to produce unprecedented harvests, they prevented natural calamities, they healed incurable diseases. These visitors from space soon won the trust of the world. Then some began to ask about the visitors' home planet, and the aliens began offering tours to whomever wanted to go. Most who went chose not to return to primitive earth. The main character of the story, one of the few remaining skeptics, finally decided to go on one of these intergalactic tours. Just as he was entering the spaceship, his girlfriend shouted to him from the crowd below. "Stop!" she cried, "Don't go! We've deciphered their language. The book "To Serve Mankind" ... it's a cookbook!"

All of this is to illustrate one point: you don't know anything for certain unless you know everything. For the one thing you don't know can change the meaning of everything else. As Christians who accept the Bible, we know the One who possesses absolutely certain knowledge, and He has spoken to us.

LOVE

Let's weigh love on the scale of our world view. In our world view, the most ultimate reality is not an impersonal universe, it is the triune God of Scripture. There is but one true God, but He exists in three Persons. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are each fully God and thus perfectly suited as intimate companions for each other. They are an "I" and a "You" and a "He" within the one being of the one true God. They have loved each other, communicated with each other, and had fellowship with each other from eternity past. In our system, personal love is consistent with, not contrary to, the most ultimate reality.

MORALITY AND AESTHETICS

Christians don't have to argue for the existence of some abstract, impersonal principle of morality or beauty. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but when that beholder is God, it is an absolute aesthetic standard rooted, not in an abstraction, but in the personal taste of an absolute and infinite Person. Likewise, morality exits only as a personal opinion of what is right, but when that opinion is God's opinion, it is an absolute moral standard rooted, not in an abstraction, but in the holy character of an absolute and infinite Person. Because we believe in God, we have a consistent basis for believing that there is an absolute and universal moral ought. Because we believe in God, we have a consistent basis for believing that there is absolute and universal standard of aesthetics.

SCIENCE

God took a world that was without form (chaotic) and void (lifeless) and then transformed it into an ordered cosmos teeming with life. This fact is the basis for the orderliness in nature that is the prerequisite for science to work.

David Hume, the philosophical skeptic, observed that the simple fact that we have seen the sun rise day after day in no way guarantees that it will rise tomorrow. In terms of his world view, Mr. Hume was correct. In contrast, the Christian knows that God made this world as an orderly and predictable creation. He also knows that God upholds His creation with the hand of providence. These two facts are the Christian's guarantee that the sun will rise tomorrow.

The fact that there is a design in creation confirms our belief in an intelligent Designer. We are learning more and more about the complexity of life. And even on a microscopic level, many of the extremely complex molecular structures of living matter are like little machines that are useless except in their final, complex form. There is no possibility of their having obtained complexity through gradual improvements because they are useless in less complex stages. They are like the mousetrap. You can't use the wooden base to catch a few mice and then add the spring and catch a few more. You can't catch any mice with a mousetrap until all the parts are present and assembled in their proper working relationship. This "irreducible complexity" of the building blocks of life even on the microscopic level of molecules is consistent with and confirms our belief in God.5

HISTORICAL EVIDENCE

We do have historical evidences for the proof of Christianity: the resurrection of Christ, the conversion of the apostle Paul, the fulfillment of ancient prophecies. We weight these on our scale, and they confirm its accuracy in a special way. I will not cover these historical evidences in detail here because there are so many apologetic works which discuss these so thoroughly. I will note their special importance. Christianity is not a religion rooted in human philosophical speculation. It is a religion rooted in historical events which actually occurred.

We could go on and on and on. We weigh every conceivable area of life, every possible issue of any significance. On the scales of unbelief, if we will read the scales with consistency and honesty, something is wrong. Issues that should carry great weight have no weight at all on the scales of unbelief. Yet the readings on the scales of belief are consistent with what we know to be true in our heart of hearts. Nevertheless, the world loves its skewed scales and will try to read them dishonestly before admitting that the scales themselves are the problem.

To use another metaphor, God has implanted a tuning fork deep within the heart of every human created in His image. When the message of the Bible goes forth, that tuning fork resonates and cries out, "This is truth! This is meaningful! This is light and life!" Of course, fallen humanity is deaf to this cry. The deafness is a self-imposed moral deafness for which one will rightly be held accountable. Only the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit can overcome this deafness.

EVIDENTIALISM

Evidentialists also use the transcendental argument, but they have a different ultimate presupposition which they view as self-attesting and self- evident:

the validity of the law of non-contradiction.

the validity of the law of causality.

the basic reliability of sense experience.

These three principles have to be true because of the impossibility of the contrary. These are the assumptions necessary for life. Human logic is dependent on axiom one, and all scientific endeavors require axioms two and three.

The evidentialists says that both he and the non-Christian accept these three principles based on a transcendental argument. This is the common ground between the God-denying pagan and the Bible believing Christian. Using the tools provided by this area of agreement, the Christian can first prove the philosophical necessity of a divine being. Then using these same tools and the witness of the Bible as a historical book, the Christian can demonstrate the probable truth of Christianity.

There are two very basic things wrong with this.

When you weigh the claims of God and Christ on those secular scales, the scales are going to register rejection.

We have first told the nonbeliever that he can basically trust himself as an independent thinker. We then hope to argue from there to the conclusion that the nonbeliever should rely wholly on the Lord instead of trusting himself, that he should submit to the Lord in all of life instead of being a "free thinker" You can't get from that point A to the desired point B.

Look at the price the evidentialist has had to pay to accept the non- Christian's scales as common ground. He has set aside the authoritative claims of God, Christ and Scripture. He has granted the hypothetical possibility of a world independent of God that can successfully function and be successfully understood in terms of the axioms of logic and science. He has conceded that man can successfully use logic and science to analyze and judge reality irrespective of the truth of Christianity.

When you weigh on these scales the Christ "in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" (Colossians 2:3), these scale are going to register rejection.

When you weigh on these scales the sovereign God of Scripture "for [whom] and through [whom] and to [whom] are all things" (Romans 11:36), these scales are going to register rejection.

When you weigh on these scales the Christ who "is before all things, and in [whom] all things consist" (Colossians 1:17), these scales are going to register rejection.

There is a frustrating futility in asking the non-Christian to weigh our evidence of his scales. We point out that every cause appears to have an effect, and we ask if the need for a final cause points to a Creator. We point out the intricate design of our world, and ask if such a design points to a Designer. If we found a watch in the woods, wouldn't we assume the existence of a watch maker? If we found a garden on an isolated island, wouldn't we assume that somewhere on that island lives a gardener? We put these questions on the world's scales, and what do they read? We immediately encounter problems because the very validity of the world's scales as an autonomous measure of reality depends upon the assumption that the sovereign God does not exist.

The world's scales also depend upon the epistemological ability of finite humanity . For that reason, these scales have a natural tilt toward skepticism. Measuring reality is a task infinitely beyond finite humanity's autonomous ability. This built in skepticism is often conveniently ignored when measuring secular systems, but it is stressed when weighing evidence for God's existence. In that context, many questions are raised. How do we know there is any true causality? How can we prove that what appears to be cause and effect is not coincidence? How do we know that there is not an infinite regress of causes? Even if there is a God, how can we be sure that there can be a cause and effect relationship between the eternal and the finite? How do we know there is not an evolutionary principle at work which causes design and order to arise naturally from the original chaos?

These skeptical questions have as much validity as do the world's autonomous scales. The fatal mistake of the evidentialist was to acknowledge the validity of the world's scales at the onset of the discussion.

We put these same issues on our scales, and we get an entirely different reading. The world about us is far too complex, too orderly to have just happened. The general tendency in nature is not to go from chaos to order but to go from order to chaos. We are reminded of this every time we have to straighten up the office or the house. The world about us is far too wonderful just to have happened but the world about us is also not nearly wonderful enough to be self-generating and self-explanatory. This data confirms the message of the Bible. The Bible says that the sovereign Creator God is so wonderful that He alone is an uncaused Cause, a non-derived Being who is self-generating and self-explanatory.

Evidentialism is like the tower of Babel. The evidentialist has built a human foundation on earth and is trying to build up from it into the heavens. Presuppositionalism is like Jacob's ladder. Heaven has come down to earth and has given us a divine foundation upon which to build. Jesus said, "No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man who is in heaven" (John 3:13). Jesus, the one who has come down to us from heaven, has provided the only adequate foundation upon which to build our understanding of things both earthly and heavenly. "For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ" (1 Corinthians 3:11).

We put the data on the world's scales, and the reading is skepticism about God. We put the same data on our scales, and the reading is confirmation that the God of the Bible exists. You can't win this argument if you begin by abandoning the Christian scales and adopting the world's scales in the name of establishing a common ground for discussion.

Here is the second major problem with the evidentialistic approach: the evidentialist has told the non-Christian that his scales are working well and giving an accurate reading of reality.

These scales are basically the world view of the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. Instead of saying, "Hey, your scales work great!", we should be saying, "Hey, get your thumb off of those scales! You're cheating!"

There may be some unthinkable consequences if the law of non-contradiction is not valid and if the law of causality is not valid and if sense experience is not reliable. Nevertheless, those unthinkable consequences are unavoidable is the non-Christian world view is true. That is the point we should be stressing. The apologist should be pressing the non-Christian to the line of despair instead of giving comfort and shelter to the enemy by catering to his illusions.

The true common ground between the Christian and the non-Christian are not the philosophical assumptions of the Enlightenment. The true common ground are those internal and external stamped weights which God has given us. Both the Christian and the non-Christian are created in God's image. Both the Christian and the non-Christian live in a world created by God and covered with His finger prints.

Dr. Greg Bahnsen contrasted evidentialism with presuppositionalism this way:

"[Manifesting the foolishness of this world's 'wisdom'] calls for much more than a piecemeal attempt to adduce vague probabilities of isolated evidences for the reasonableness of Christianity. It requires, instead, the full scale demonstration of the unreasonableness of anti-Christianity in contrast to the certainty of truth to be found in God's word."6

CONCLUSION

Let's conclude by considering the parable of the wise man and the foolish man found at the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7:24-27:

24 "Therefore whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will

liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock:

25 "and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat

on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the

rock.

26 "Now everyone who hears these sayings of Mine, and does not do them,

will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand:

27 "and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat

on that house; and it fell. And great was its fall."

We should invite the non-Christian to watch as we build our world view house on the solid rock of Jesus Christ. We should invite him to bring against our house the rain and floods and winds of criticism. The house will not fall, for it is founded on the rock.

We should also invite him to build his world view house on the sands of his ultimate commitments and presuppositions. Then we should bring against it the rain and floods and winds of critical examination. It will fall, and great will be the fall thereof.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOOTNOTES

1. Greg L. Bahnsen, "Always Ready" (Atlanta, Georgia: American Vision and

Texarkana, Arkansas: Covenant Media Foundation, 1996), 68-69.

2. William Edgar, "Reasons of the Heart" (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book

House, 1996), 14.

3. Joseph Gerard Brennan, "The Meaning of Philosophy," Second Edition (New

York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1953), 131, footnote 6.

4. Greg L. Bahnsen, "Always Ready," 70.

5. Nancy R. Pearcey, "The Evolution Backlash: Debunking Darwin" in World,

March 1, 1997 edition, pages 12-15. The mousetrap is Mr. Michael

Behe's favorite example of irreducible complexity; see page 14.

6. Greg L. Bahnsen, "Always Ready," 60.

For more information about the apologetics conference, email T. E. Mike Chastain at DeoRex@aol.com.

These lectures are available from Southern Presbyterian Press, the publishing arm of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. For more information, email Mr. Andy Wortman at awortman@carol.net.

*

THE PIT

=======

A man fell into a pit and couldn’t get himself out.

A SUBJECTIVE person came along and said, “I FEEL for you down there.”

An OBJECTIVE person came along and said, “It’ s logical that someone would fall down there.”

A CHRISTIAN SCIENTIST came along, “You only THINK that you are in a pit.”

A PHARISEE said, “Only BAD people fall into a pit.”

A NEWS-REPORTER wanted the exclusive story on his pit.

A FUNDAMENTALIST said, “You DESERVE your pit.”

CONFUCIUS said, “If you would have listened to me, you would not be in that pit.”

BUDDHA said, “Your pit is only a state of mind.”

A REALIST said, “That’s a PIT.”

A SCIENTIST calculated the pressure necessary (kgs./sq. cm) to get him out of the pit.

A GEOLOGIST told him to appreciate the rock strata in the pit.

A TAX MAN asked if he was paying taxes on the pit.

The COUNCIL INSPECTOR asked if he had a permit to dig a pit.

An EVASIVE person came along and avoided the subject of his pit altogether.

A SELF-PITYING person said, “You haven’t seen anything until you see MY PIT!!”

A CHARISMATIC said, “Just CONFESS that you’re not in a pit.”

An OPTIMIST said, “Things COULD be worse.”

A PESSIMIST said, “Things WILL get worse!!”

JESUS seeing the man, took him by the hand and LIFTED him OUT of the pit.

________

Kenneth D. Filkins

*

One morning a graduate student noticed a friend leaving a seminar on particle physics.

“How was it?” he asked.

“Just great! Everything we knew last week about physics isn’t true.”

Their short exchange reveals the angst of our modern situation. Having abandoned belief in UNIVERSALS — eternal truths about the world and human existence — modern man is left with the PARTICULARS of everyday experience. With the corpus of what we “know” contingent upon every new PARTICULAR, man soon loses hope in certain knowledge. Such was not always the case.

From the time of Plato, it was commonly believed that knowledge was unified. The principles governing the physical as well as the metaphysical were thought to be derived from a source external to the material world. That led to confidence in TRUTH — statements about experience and being that were not only objective and real, but knowable. That all changed with the “Kantian Turn.”

Immanuel Kant argued that real knowledge was limited to the physical realm of nature open to sensory experience and scientific inquiry. Whatever exists beyond the material world, he insisted, could be apprehended only in a limited and uncertain way. Kant’s division led to what Francis Schaeffer called a “two-story” view of knowledge.

The lower story contained PHENOMENA: nature, matter, and the particulars. This was the realm of “facts” established through reason, science, and experience. Here knowledge was concrete and certain. The upper story contained NOUMENA: supernatural, spirit, and the universals — ”beliefs” based on intuition, faith and religion. On this level, knowledge was “soft” and subjective. Between the stories was an opaque barrier, making the upper level invisible from the lower one.

LOSING TRUST

Before Kant, universals were sought to UNDERSTAND the particulars; after Kant, particulars were used to CONSTRUCT the universals. It was a program destined to fail, for two reasons.

Unhinged from universals, things like ethics, morality, and religious beliefs are determined by the winds of prevailing opinion. Also, because particulars are limited and finite, one can never be sure that some future observation won’t nullify the universal constructed. Such was the case for Copernican astronomy, Newtonian gravity, luminiferous aether, the Bohr atom and, as the grad student learned, everything he “knew last week about physics.”

After losing trust in transcendent truth, man became trapped “downstairs,” with its swirl of opinion polls, scientific theories, and experimental observations. With no overarching authority to tease out answers to the pressing questions of life, the optimism of an earlier age gave way to pessimism and despair. Yet, contrary to Kantian thought, the opaque barrier was imaginary; for there had always been an enduring source of truth: the Revealed Word.

Elsewhere, I described the Revealed Word as a divinely-crafted tapestry in seven interlocking threads: the Created Word of the sensible universe; the Imprinted Word of mind, heart and conscience, the Spoken Word of the prophetic voice, the Written Word of scripture, the Incarnate Word of Jesus made flesh, the Indwelling Word of the Holy Spirit, and the Corporate Word of the Church; each interwoven into a grand narrative that contains knowledge about the true nature of things.

Is truth, then, just a matter of faith? Far from it.

FORMING BELIEFS

What people accept as true, in the final analysis, is what they REASON to be true.

In thinking beings, the mind is the organ that processes sensory information. It weighs inputs from cultural authorities (teachers, scientists, and spiritual guides), social conventions (moral codes, civic laws, and religious traditions), as well as emotional reactions and personal predilections. What ends up as “truth” depends on the weight given to each factor.

In Anglican teaching, the faith “once for all delivered” rests on the authority of reason, tradition, and Scripture. A popular illustration depicts this dependency as a three-legged stool, indicating that each leg is equally important in supporting the faith.

In another illustration, faith is a tricycle — where Scripture is the big front wheel, with reason and tradition as the small rear wheels. The idea being that even without one or both rear wheels, faith would remain upright and navigate the rough roads of life, if but wobbly. At first blush, that would seem closer to a biblical understanding. On the other hand, if the “wheel” of reason is non-essential or severely compromised, truth reduces to blind faith.

The apostle Paul would have bristled at the thought. His writings are replete with rational argument, as were his discourses with the Athenian philosophers, King Agrippa, and the procurator Festus. The author of Hebrews states that faith is “the EVIDENCE of things not seen.” And Jesus himself stated that love of God is not only spiritual and emotional, but mental.

It is through our cognitive faculties that we question, imagine, and discover how things really are in the universe and our existence. Reason is intrinsic to our humanness — a general revelation sufficient to point lower-story dwellers “upstairs.” Without reason, a person couldn’t wonder, much less discover the answers to upper-story questions.

Yet, as we have learned, unaided reason can carry us only so far.

THE “GREAT DISAPPOINTMENT”

The architects of modernism promised unlimited progress through reason and science. And their commitment to lower-story knowledge led to breathtaking wonders: nuclear power, space travel, satellite communications, modern medicine, and more.

But while man achieved astonishing success harnessing nature, his understanding OF nature — its foundational structure, inner workings, and origin — remained woefully tentative and incomplete. Worse, lower-story knowledge offered no moral or ethical pegs for science. Consequently, modern technology enabled modern man to pursue modern ideals at the cost of more human blood than had been spilled in all prior history.

After modernism defaulted on its promissory note, hope was lost in the discovery — and existence — of underlying principles. In the wake of the “Great Disappointment,” what happens, happens. Man is helpless to explain the parade of experiences that make up life, much less life’s meaning; he can only choose how he reacts to those experiences, and attach some meaning — if he must — to his otherwise meaningless existence. For in the end, life is a crapshoot that began eons ago after a fluke collision of particles.

THE NATURAL END

Fate, chance, and uncertainty have been common themes in art, literature and music for the last four decades. Movies like AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999) and the films of Woody Allen — most recently, MATCH POINT (2005) — turn on the idea that there is no “guiding hand” or rational law that governs the cosmos; there is only chance. One of the most chilling yarns on that premise is the 2007 Oscar-winner for Best Picture, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.

The story involves a psychopathic killer, named Anton Chigurh, who embarks on a murderous rampage to recover a $2 million booty. After murdering several victims, Chigurh stops at a gas station, pays for a snack, then asks the attendant, “What’s the most you ever lost on a coin toss?”

When the attendant says he doesn’t know, Chigurh flips a coin and tells him to “call it” (It’s clear to the audience that if the attendant guesses wrong, Chigurh will kill him).

The attendant hesitates, but eventually calls “heads.” Chigurh lifts his hand from the coin, remarking, “Well done ... It’s your lucky quarter.” Chigurh turns and leaves the attendant shaking his head and quaking.

Near the film’s end, Chigurh makes the same offer to a woman he intends to kill. After telling her to “call it,” she refuses.

“The coin don’t have no say. It’s just you.”

Chigurh grins. “Well, I got here the same way the coin did.”

The scene cuts to Chigurh checking his boots for blood as he exits her house.

The movie’s tagline — ”There are no laws left” — is a fitting summary of two-story thinking. For without universals, there are no laws; only conventions that have no more meaning than a coin toss. It is the crumbling foundation of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.

If we feel uncomfortable as its citizens, it is a clue that something is wrong. Maybe transcendent truth DOES exist. Maybe life DOES have meaning and purpose; and maybe the universe IS governed by laws; not of chance, but of one who promised:

“For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and

not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you

will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to

you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your

heart” (Jeremiah 29:11-13).

________

Regis Nicoll is a freelance writer

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #6392]

The question, "Who are you, God?" begets contradictory answers when left to experience or perception. Faced with an array of answers, the seeker often turns to argument. Are the philosophers able to tell us who God is?

Having read numerous debates, I have noticed the ease with which the sophisticated can hide behind a mountain of words and been left doubtful as to whether argument, even at its best, is able to untangle the mystery of God. While I do not wish to minimize the importance of philosophical debate, it seems that many find it easy to climb the ladder of abstraction. Yet I wonder: When the discussion rises to such high levels, how many are blocked from debate and our existential struggles obscured?

With the limitations of both experience and argument, frustration reaches a high point, and all kinds of caricatures of God can be fashioned to suit our desires.

Eugene Peterson tells a fascinating story about when he was a pastor in New York City. His church’s caretaker, a German man named Willi Ossa, was an artist by day and a janitor by night. Ossa offered to do a portrait of Peterson, and Peterson agreed, only to keep the friendship going, for Ossa harbored a quiet but hostile attitude toward Christianity. Day after day, Ossa would paint his subject, yet never permitting him to see how he was progressing.

One day, the artist’s wife dropped in and with one look at the picture she shrieked, "Sick! You paint him to look like a corpse!" Ossa, upset by this untimely revelation, snapped back, "He’s not sick; that is the way he will look when the compassion is gone, when the mercy gets squeezed out of him." You see, Ossa hated the state church of his homeland, blaming it for not doing more to stop the Holocaust. He wanted to show Peterson his future if he persisted in what he perceived to be the "Christian way." It is a sad story and an indictment against Christendom’s historic baggage.

But behind it all, one wonders if that is not the picture of God that many have, perhaps even you, my friend. Born out of some aberrant experience or radical philosophy, one is left with a portrait of an unloving and uncaring God, conditioned by the artist’s own misperceptions. Once again, a point of reference is needed in order to answer the question: "Who are you, God?"

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Copyright © 2002 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

Philosophers discuss many strange topics, and they usually do so in a strange fashion. The strangest topic of all for the philosopher is ethics.

Ostensibly the task of the ethicist it to investigate two questions: “What is good?” and “How can I be good?” The albatross of contemporary ethics is that it gets mired in the first question and never makes it to the second one. It stalls out on “What is good?” and never properly addresses “How do I become good?” This pushes ethics out of strangeness and towards perversity, for what good are volumes and volumes of theoretical discourse on goodness, if in the study you don’t get one whit closer to being good? We ought to study goodness so we can learn to be good not so that we can learn to be learned; for why study goodness save to be good?

I should not be too hard on the philosopher, though, for they have good reason to be reticent in addressing the question, “How can I be good?” for ethics cannot answer this question. Rational discourse is utterly powerless to make a person good. To be clear, discussion might make the right path apparent, but discourse cannot provide the power to choose this path. And so ethics is in the difficult position of having to raise a question it cannot answer. To use Christian language, it does not have the power to transform the evil inside us, though, it knows the evil must be transformed. Thus ethics must fall silent, and fall silent it does.

I know of only one source for the transformative power to be good: the genuine and persevering work of the Spirit in the life of the believer. Only in humbly trusting in Him, and the efficacy of Christ's death and resurrection in my life, do I find the resources to be good. True faith brings true righteousness. And righteousness is what the ethicist seeks; for righteousness is living right towards God. That is goodness realized.

As a Christian I do not mean to smugly criticize the ethicist, lest I risk stealing away my righteousness in Christ with the legerdemain of pride. Leslie Newbigin, the scholar missionary, had it right when he said, “The Christian is one who has forever given up the hope of being able to think of himself as a good man.”[1] Outside of Christ we are not good, and we are only inside Christ if we are humble.

Humility then ought to be our track as we pursue a life of faith in Christ. The Spirit, His Spirit, empowers such an endeavor. And the result is righteousness.

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1. John Baille, Ed., A Diary of Readings (NY, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), p. 327.

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Copyright © 2002 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #18173]

Comments from kids about love - Part 1 of 4

CONCERNING WHY LOVE HAPPENS BETWEEN TWO PARTICULAR PEOPLE

"One of the people has freckles and so he finds somebody else who has

freckles too." - Andrew, age 6

"No one is sure why it happens, but I heard it has something to do with

how you smell ... That's why perfume and deodorant are so popular." -

Mae, age 9

"I think you're supposed to get shot with an arrow or something, but the

rest of it isn't supposed to be so painful." - Manuel, age 8

ON WHAT FALLING IN LOVE IS LIKE

"Like an avalanche where you have to run for your life." - John, age 9

"If falling in love is anything like learning how to spell, I don't want

to do it. It takes too long." - Glenn, age 7

ON THE ROLE OF BEAUTY AND HANDSOMENESS IN LOVE

"If you want to be loved by somebody who isn't already in your family, it

doesn't hurt to be beautiful." - Anita C., age 8

"It isn't always just how you look. Look at me. I'm handsome like

anything and I haven't got anybody to marry me yet." - Brian, age 7

"Beauty is skin deep. But how rich you are can last a long time." -

Christine, age 9

REFLECTIONS ON THE NATURE OF LOVE

"Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty

good too." - Greg, age 8

HOW DO PEOPLE IN LOVE TYPICALLY BEHAVE?

"Mooshy ... like puppy dogs ... except puppy dogs don't wag their

tails nearly as much." - Arnold, age 10

"All of a sudden, the people get movie fever so they can sit together

in the dark." - Sherm, age 8

By what authority do you know about God? Our society contains a panoply, a cacophony even, of voices telling us about God. Who He is, or how He isn't, or that the He is actually a She. How do you unmix the Babel, separate the wheat from the chaff?

The contenders for the authoritative voice on God are plentiful. Philosophers, possibly with theological envy, tell us many things about God. Churches, mosques and monks, also have something to say on the matter. Family and friends seem to stake a rightful claim on the topic, too. And certainly our experiences seem like they should have a seat at the table, so to our feelings.

But our choice is not as simple as deciding between the philosopher and the priest, or our feelings and what our friend says – for we still would have to decide which philosopher, which priest, which feeling, which friend. All these different sources of knowledge about God are not themselves univocal. Each source itself contains many and often contradictory voices. This is easy enough to see within the discipline of philosophy since there are philosophers of every theological stripe: atheist, pantheist, and theist. And certainly the plethora of religions and the numerous sects within each major religion demonstrates that religions contradict each other. As for family and friends, my agnostic friend tells me one thing while my Christian mother has told me the opposite.

We are in the same sort of fix when it comes to our experiences and feelings. They also contain contradictions. At one time I feel God to be very close, at another very far away. Today, I have experienced His grace, but there certainly have been days where God did not enter my conscious experience as far as I could tell. So on the basis of experiences and feelings, we are still left with a question mark: how do we get reliable knowledge about God?

This is a question that I have struggled with for many years, and I still struggle with today. The answer that I have come to trust is not in a book or in a tradition. It comes from a person, a special kind of person, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Yes, I know, I said it wasn't from a book, let me modify that: the gospels introduced me to Jesus, but thankfully, He did not remain on the page. He has met me in my life.

Go find Christ in the Gospels. Ask Him about God, and expect Him to meet you in your life.

____________

Copyright © 2002 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

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Forged in the heat of theological battle, Augustine's five most distinctive teachings remain controversial.

Despite Augustine's long and dominating shadow over 1,500 years of Western church history, his central ideas have not been universally accepted or uniformly interpreted. The Eastern Orthodox regard some of Augustine's key ideas as pernicious, if not heretical. Anabaptists have rejected much of his theology, while Protestants in general claim selected teachings and ignore others.

Nonetheless, Augustine is widely regarded as the church's most influential philosopher and theologian. His five central ideas were forged in the heat of theological conflict, and they remain controversial today:

1. The nature and source of evil.

2. The nature of the church and its sacraments.

3. Original sin.

4. The relationship of grace and free will.

5. Predestination.

Augustine refined each of these doctrines as he battled what he believed were heresies, or at least false worldviews: a dualistic "cult" known as the Manichees, a Christian sect in North Africa known as the Donatists, and the beliefs of a British monk named Pelagius and his followers. Augustine's distinctive teachings are essentially answers to these theological enemies.

EVIL NOTHINGS

One of the most pressing theological problems in Augustine's time was how to justify belief in an omnipotent and perfectly good Creator when sin and evil were obviously deeply woven into the created beings.

The Manichees taught that two eternal beings control the universe, one of them good and the other evil. Even if the all-good deity is superior, they argued, it cannot at present conquer or control the evil one. The Manichees also taught that evil is intrinsically associated with matter and that only spirit is good. Thus, the good deity created spirits but not matter.

Against this double dualism (reminiscent of both Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism), Augustine developed an idea he believed was consistent with biblical revelation and the best of philosophy: evil is not some "thing" or "substance" but only the privation of the good (privatio boni). It is to goodness what darkness is to light.

The source of evil, then, is not God's creation (how could God create "non-being"?) but the misuse of human free will. According to Augustine, evil "is nothing else than corruption, either of the measure, or the form, or the order that belong to nature." Elsewhere Augustine wrote, "The only evil thing is an evil will."

The vast majority of later Christian thinkers depended on Augustine's "theodicy" (defense of God) to reconcile the reality of evil with God's goodness. Some Christians, though, have found Augustine's concept of evil insufficient to account for the power and types of evil we experience. Nonetheless, Augustine's response to dualism was largely triumphant over Manicheism.

CHURCH AS A MIXED BAG

Augustine also fought with the Donatists, especially their perfectionist theology of the church.

Donatists believed the grace of God could be found only in an undefiled church, and since they restricted their membership to those they believed to be true saints, they believed they had a monopoly on grace. Thus they considered only their baptism and Lord's Supper valid.

Augustine, however, argued that the church is both universal (not limited to a particular branch) and mixed (some members saved, others not). Only God can know definitely which baptized persons are truly regenerate. Augustine accused the Donatists of a sin worse than condoning impurity: dividing the church.

Augustine and the Donatists also differed on the qualifications of priests. Donatist priests had to be morally pure; specifically they must not have lapsed during Roman persecution. Augustine, like his North African predecessor Cyprian of Carthage, based priestly authority not on irreproachable behavior but on the criterion of apostolic succession — Jesus' disciples laid hands on the next generation of leaders, who laid hands on the next, and so on.

Augustine contended that God's saving grace was conveyed ex opere operato, that is, by Christ himself through his priests regardless of their character or beliefs. If the recipient of the sacrament is not resisting grace, and if the priest performing the sacrament is rightly ordained and in good standing with the Catholic church, grace is conveyed. The human priest is merely Christ's extended hand in the sacrament.

"What these [priests] administer," wrote one Augustine scholar, "is the baptism of Christ, whose sanctity cannot be corrupted by unworthy ministers, any more than the light of the sun is corrupted by shining through a sewer."

Augustine's ideas became the Catholic church's bulwarks against all forms of sectarian and schismatic reform. Even the "magisterial" reformers (Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Cranmer) accepted most of Augustine's answers to Donatism, though they all rejected ex opere operato, arguing that recipients of the Eucharist must have faith for grace to be effective. The Anabaptists, on the other hand, rejected these ideas and repeated Donatism's insistence on a pure, or at least regenerate, church.

OF HUMAN BONDAGE

Augustine's notions of original sin, grace and free will, and predestination are inextricably bound together, and they were shaped by his debates with the Pelagians.

Augustine believed that humankind suffers from original sin, meaning that since the fall of Adam, we are depraved — incapable of doing good without supernatural help. The commands of God to do good were given, Augustine concluded, simply to point out our inability and throw us on the mercy of God.

Pelagius, however, believed that if God commands us to live good and even morally perfect lives, he must give us the ability to obey without any special, supernatural assistance. Thus Pelagians denied there was any "original sin" or "depravity." Instead of being "depraved," the only disadvantage we currently have is that, living in a sinful world, we are more likely to develop sinful habits. Sin is a social disease, not an inherited spiritual-genetic defect.

Thus, Pelagius concluded, we are capable of living sinless lives simply by exercising our wills for the good. "A man can be without sin and keep the commandments of God, if he wishes," he wrote, "for this ability has been given to him by God."

Augustine was more outraged by Pelagius than by any other rival, and in response, he argued even more forcefully that we are born condemned for Adam's sin and incapable of not sinning.

"A man's free will," he wrote against Pelagius, "avails for nothing except to sin." Only the supernatural power of God's grace, imparted through baptism, could heal the deadly wound of sin upon the human soul. (Hence the need for infant baptism — to heal that wound immediately.)

Furthermore, only the power of God's grace could restore in some measure the free will lost in the fall of Adam's race. Grace cannot be received by an act of human will or even cooperated with (synergism) — it must be given as a gift.

"The Spirit of grace therefore causes us to have faith," he wrote, "in order that through faith we may, upon praying for it, obtain the ability to do what we are commanded."

THE CHOSEN FEW

Why do only some receive this gift of faith? In On the Predestination of the Saints, written not long before he died, Augustine concluded that God simply chooses some persons out of the mass of fallen humanity to save and leaves others to their deserved condemnation. The reason some are so graced and others passed over lies only in "the hidden determinations of God."

The basic outlines of what later came to be known as "Calvinism" are found in Augustine's later anti-Pelagian writings. The Catholic church appropriated some of these ideas, such as inherited guilt (though not total depravity) and the absolute necessity of supernatural grace for meritorious works of righteousness. However, Catholic theology by and large passed over Augustine's doctrine of predestination in favor of an emphasis on human cooperation with grace after baptism.

Wycliffe, Luther, Calvin, and other reformers reaffirmed Augustine's doctrine of predestination, inherited depravity, and the sovereignty of grace — though Anabaptists and other radical reformers rejected the same (but without affirming Pelagianism).

Most theologians define their positions in relation to Augustine's doctrines. Almost all of them can appeal to something in the great North African church father, and almost all of them neglect some aspects of his teaching in favor of others. But no one after him can ignore him. Augustine's teachings on these and other controversial subjects have determined much of the agenda for Christian theology for a millennium and a half.

Martin Luther refers to Augustine more often than to any other theologian, echoing, for example, his gloomy view of human will: "Where reason is in error and the will turned away, what good can man attempt or perform?" But Luther felt he had moved beyond Augustine on the matter of justification: "In the beginning I devoured Augustine, but when the door into Paul swung open and I knew what justification by faith really was, then it was out with him."

Thomas Aquinas cited Augustine when defending his views on original sin and infant baptism: "According to the Catholic Faith we are bound to hold that the first sin of the first man is transmitted to his descendants, by way of origin. For this reason children are taken to be baptized soon after their birth, to show that they have to be washed from some uncleanness. The contrary is part of the Pelagian heresy, as is clear from Augustine in many of his books."

John Calvin, when accused by the Roman Catholic church of theological innovation, argued that he was instead hearkening back to Augustine: "Augustine is so completely of our persuasion, that if I should have to make written profession, it would be quite enough to present a composition made up entirely of excerpts from his writings."

When English Reformer Thomas Cranmer commissioned a portrait of himself from Gerlach Flicke, he had a copy of Augustine's De Fide et Operibus ("On Faith and Works") painted on the table in front of him. In Cranmer's personal copy of the book, he had underlined the phrase "a good life is indeed inseparable from faith."

Anabaptist leader Menno Simons disagreed with Augustine on many things, including church leadership, the nature of Christian community, and infant baptism. In fact, he dismissed any influence when he wrote that if Augustine and other church fathers could support their teaching "with the Word and command of God, we will admit that they are right. If not, then it is a doctrine of men and accursed according to the Scriptures."

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Roger E. Olson is a professor of theology at Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University, in Waco, Texas. He is author of The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Reform (InterVarsity, 1999).

Copyright(c) 2000 by the author or Christianity Today

G. K. Chesterton once made the comment that men have always one of two things: either a complete and conscious philosophy or the unconscious acceptance of the broken pieces of some incomplete and shattered and often discredited philosophy. [1]

Perhaps today Chesterton might add one more category: The conscious (or somewhat conscious) acceptance of many pieces of many philosophies. America, it seems, is the melting pot in more ways than one. A recent issue of Christianity Today noted the increasing popularity of “Heinz 57” style spirituality, where one is free to dabble in a variety of belief systems and philosophies.

Of course, I am being somewhat facetious because this is certainly nothing new to human behavior. Moreover, in a conscious accepting of many pieces of philosophies, “completeness” is not understood as Chesterton used the word complete — meaning sound philosophy. Any sense of completeness comes from the idea that in dabbling in a variety of belief systems, one can create a satisfying philosophy for their unique life and needs. It is “practical spirituality” that is sought above all else.

And sought it is. Marketers are well aware that spiritually sells. Universities offer courses ranging from the Psychology of Spirituality to Spirituality and Hip Hop. And the masses are simply noting that spiritually is hip. However, the fascination with being spiritual is not, many are careful to note, an interest in being religious. Whereas spirituality is seen as liberating, religion is perceived as limiting — and we are a culture thoroughly suspicious of all limits.

This is interesting, because practically speaking, there are limits all around us, though the human drama with life and God seems to be thoroughly intent on pushing all limits. But honestly, in removing the fences, which is what we have attempted to do in our postmodern culture, have we discovered that the grass is, indeed, greener on the other side? Have we truly enabled ourselves to live better, fuller, more complete lives, or does it more often seem the contrary? Are we happy with our pieces of spirituality, our dabbling in many philosophies, or does it still seem that we are missing a piece? And if we were told tomorrow that we could only hold seven pieces, would we be happy with our seven or would we then want eight? As my colleague Stuart McAllister has stated, “The impracticality and inability to live life as prescribed by postmodern tenets and prophets is one of the strongest arguments against it.” And that is a far cry from “practical” isn't it?

Charles Wesley once described a spiritual experience that led him to faith in Jesus Christ and a life transformed by his amazing love. In a triumphant hymn he described it like this:

Long my imprisoned spirit lay,

Fast bound in sin and nature's night,

Thine eye diffused the quickening ray,

I woke the dungeon flamed with light.

My chains fell off, my heart was free,

I rose went forth and followed Thee. [2]

You see, in his honest look at Christ, Charles Wesley saw an honest look at himself — a broken, sinning, imprisoned man desperately in need of a Savior. I believe the spiritual hunger of our nation is real. The question is, how practically are we willing to look at what we truly need? For in bowing before the One who emptied himself of all but love, we find exactly what we seek. Will you rise and follow Him?

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1. G. K. Chesterton, The Common Man, 173.

2. Hymn: And Can It Be That I Should Gain?

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Copyright © 2003 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

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Quotes by noted philosopher (and atheist) Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche:

“What is evil? - Whatever springs from weakness.”

“Plato was a bore.”

“Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”

"Faith" means not wanting to know what is true.”

“Almost two thousand years, and no new god!

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.”

“What is done from love is always beyond good and evil.”

“This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.”

“Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of Man.”

“Arrogance in persons of merit affronts us more than arrogance in those without merit: merit itself is an affront.”

“No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows.” A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.”

“The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of life is to live dangerously.”

“To live in a way as if life has no sense at all - here is what its sense is.”

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

“In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak: but for that one must have long legs.” Aphorisms should be peaks.”

“The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.”

“Whatever does not destroy me makes me stronger.”

“In the mountains of truth you never climb in vain.”

“On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.”

“The struggle against a purpose in art is always a struggle against the moral tendency in art - against its subordination to morality.” Art for art's sake means, Let morality go to the Devil.”

“If you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once, and we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.”

“Necessity is not a fact but an interpretation.”

“One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.”

“When one has finished building one's house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way--before one began.”

“He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; One cannot fly into flying.”

“Making music is another way of making children.”

Doxa: My Testimony

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EARLY DAYS OF ATHEISM.

I was born in Dallas Texas, in the mid 1950's, and raised in a clean, white, southern middle class setting, complete with old civil war sentimentality and country values. Our family had been staunch members of a certain fundamentalist sect, as far as I can tell, from before the civil war. They were probably in on the founding of the group and may have been based in Barton W. Stone's Cane Ridge Revival, in the Kentucky of that period known as “The Second Great Awakening.” It was a very exclusivistic group called “the Church of Christ.” They were almost cult-like in that they believed they were the only true church, and all others were going to hell, (even the Baptists and Catholics -- especially the Catholics). They were so self-righteous they didn't even use instrumental music because they thought that made them more holy. In the 1960s, when I hit the upper grades of elementary school, I began opposing the war in Vietnam (age 12). I identified with the anti-war movement (especially SDS), the hippies, Bob Dylan and the Byrds. I had a childhood crush on Joan Baez (that never really ended). I couldn't wait until I grew up and went to college so I could join SDS and protest the war (which I was sure would still be going -- and I only missed it by a couple of years).I began to question the truth of the Christian religion when I was 13 in rebellion against the strictness of a private school I was sent to which was ran by the church of Christ. At 16 I went to public high school, having continued to believe in God but in more of an eastern vein.

However at 15 or 16 I decided that I was an atheist. It seemed outmoded and childish to believe in God. After all, we didn't need God to explain the existence of the world, we had evolution and the Big bang. I knew there were mistakes in the Bible and found them every time I looked for them. And it was a fact that the world was filled with pain, suffering, injustice. How could there be a loving God? Above all else I resented injustice! I was curious about thought and about the world, I began to read history, psychology, literature, and to study about other world religions (I had actually began doing this in 6th grade but about the age of 15 I made a big big push to learn as much as I could).

In my junior year of high school, I began missing church, and abstaining from the classes. One Wednesday night my parents asked me to go with them, so I did. I even attended the class. They showed a film about the decline of the Inca empire, and the film concluded that the Inca's fell because they weren't Christians and didn't know God. It was a very ethnocentric, simplistic and extremely badly done bit of fundamentalist propaganda. Angered at this one-sided rendition of history, I asked if I could get up and do a bit of film criticism. They allowed me to do this, the youth director was really not a bad guy. And I lambasted the Bible and all of belief after giving a little lecture on history, the rise and fall of empires and how racist their film was. It ended in a shouting match and I determined never to go back. In fact I never did. My parents were horrified. We had several shouting matches about it. But they couldn't force me to go to church. They tried the “as long as you live in my house...” Line and I threatened to quite school and move out. They gave in. I know it hurt them terribly, I could see real pain in their eyes every time they came home from church and found me watching TV or just waking up. But I didn't care. I had to be independent. I had to shape my own beliefs, and I couldn't see the importance of going just to please them. I would do that today If I had it to do over just because I know it hurt them and it wouldn't hurt me to go. In any case, that shouting match set me on a course for the next several years. I became determined to disprove Christianity and to demonstrate its falsehood to the world. I usually spend Saturday nights and Sunday morning from then on reading skeptical books and doing research to disprove the Bible.

SUMMER OF HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION.

The summer I graduated from high school, I was invited by the old youth director to go on a trip with the seniors to the Grand Canyon. I hadn't seen them in a long time, a couple of years, and the bitterness of the last meeting had gone. We had a wonderful trip. They were all fun and nice and I enjoyed playing chess on the bus and getting to know them again. I was almost sorry I hadn't gone to church in those years for my parent's sake. But it seemed more important to be true to my beliefs. I read Mark Twin's Letters from the Earth on that trip, while I wasn't playing chess on the bus. At the Grand Canyon the youth director let me make a little speech to the group talking about my beliefs. I don’t' think he really knew what I was going to say. I think it was hard for him to believe that I was really an atheist. Again I really gave it to them.

I explained evolution and talked about other religions and how absurd it was to think that all those other people are going to hell just because of the time and place in which they were born. I answered all their objections, shot them to pieces, answered all their arguments and left it with them saying things like “someday God will open your eyes,” “Jesus loves you,” “think with your heart,” which I took to be a total victory. The Youth director's face was so crest fallen. He clearly wasn't expecting this and was probably saddened to see how far-gone I was. A couple of weeks after we got back, the youth director came to my home with a man who taught at the Church of Christ's “School of preaching.” He had a doctorate in Biblical studies and was clearly far more knowledgeable than I. His wife was there too, and she wasn't a bad apologist either. Together the three of them shot me to pieces. They even brought a couple of others along to give themselves an audience. I was outraged but covered it up pretty well.

It amazed me that there really were good answers and that the Bible really could be defended, but that only made me all the more determined to disprove it. That was a remarkable summer, the summer I graduated form high school. The previous summer I had spent about a month researching the Bible and thought I had it disproved. This summer (graduation) I went to the Grand Canyon, read 100 books, sometimes four a day! I read great literature, such as James Joyce, Saul Bellow, Herman Hesse, and not to forget the Mark Twain atheist stuff. I finished out that summer doing more Biblical research and that practice would become a habit which I still practice to this day (well over 20 years) of concentrating on Biblical studies in the summers. But for the rest of my time as an atheist I would pursue my project of research to debunk the Bible every summer and I had huge files demonstrating the weaknesses of the inerrancy position. Unfortunately, what I didn't realize was that the Church of Christ had biased my outlook to such an extent that I just ruled out the true greatness of the Christian tradition. I assumed that if the C /C was wrong surely the rest of it was even worse.

So what I took for anti-Christian works were largely made up of liberal scholarship, much of it believing. People such as B.H. Streeter made up the bulk of my research. Streeter was a true scholar, the canon reader at Cambridge, but also a true believer and very devout. Every so often I would come across one of his statements of faith and devotion and would be totally puzzled as to how he say such a thing when he could surely see that all the evidence he gave pointed to a Bible full of mistakes and far less than perfect (see the Revelation and Canon page). Once college began, however, I discovered Jean Paul Sartre and existentialism. That became the center of my thought life throughout college. In my freshman philosophy class someone asked the professor if there were really people who didn't believe in God. I said that I really didn’t' believe in God, and called myself an atheist, and the whole class began shouting at me! Some even threatened to beat me up! But held my ground and argued against the whole class of about 100 people. That was before the big "Hate Christianity" fad, and it was in Texas, so the majority were raised in the Bible belt and raised not to think.

FIRST STEP TOWARD BELIEF AND FORMATION OF ATHEISTIC WORLD VIEW.

There I was in college, I was still an atheist but my zeal for arguing about it waned as I got into more of college life; debate, traveling to debate tournaments and lots of research, sociology, gaining some understanding of literature and philosophy, which I read in high school and loved, but in college I was actually learning something about it. I really got into existentialism. It was the late '70s and that was a hold over from the early 60s at least on Texas campuses. And Dope. Dope was a huge part of my college experience. Watching the original Saturday Night live with Belushi and Chase and Laraine Newman etc., stoned and at a college debate tournament, that was a huge part of my college experience. But every summer I was still doing my anti-Bible research. In the summer of '79 my parents had their 40th wedding anniversary (my brother and I were born to them late in life).

My sister's friend came to town with her family. She was an older woman, married, at first I dismissed her as one my my sister's “crazy Jesus freak friends.” My sister and brother-in-law had been missionaries in Latin America. They were Church of Christ missionaries, but it was in Latin America that they encountered the charismatic movement in the form of the dreaded Catholics, and they became “filled with the Spirit.” In the early 70's they drove me crazy with their wild “Jesus freak” stuff and their miracle stories. I was determined to ignore her friend, but as we talked at the anniversary shindig, held in a church of Christ, I discovered that this woman was really pretty bright and well read. My bother invited her to join us, and our best friend, in a discussion back at the house after the party. So latter at my parent's house we sat in my old room and talked.

Sure enough, she had a lot of really amazing miracle stories and I thought she was insane. But she was too “together” to be insane. In many ways she just seemed like the “neatest” person I'd ever met. She had a great personality and somehow made us feel that she really cared. And she was fairly bright and yet she claimed to have experienced amazing things; healings, demons; God's presence, etc. That got my attention. When I went back to my apartment and resumed preparations for school in the coming year, I thought quite a bit about that talk, and determined that that year I would seek out how it was that all the liberal scholars I'd been quoting against the Bible could actually be Christians (I had noticed that many of them made great statements of faith, and yet to my Church of Christ mind they were debunking the Bible because they didn't accept inerrancy). I couldn't see how they could be aware of so many “anti-Bible” facts and yet have faith in God. During that year I read the four Gospels sporadically, and compared them to Eastern Religion, studying that with a friend who had approached me with the proposal that we two figure out “the religion thing.” Everyday after class he would come over, listen to Ravi Shankar albums, drink Miller highlife beer, get stoned and read from the Tao te Ching and the Bahagavod Gita.

It's too hard to give a rundown on the intellectual issues that I had to work through at that time. I fancied myself an existentialist, but it was probably just an undergraduate thing. My knowledge of it was pretty superficial. That's what's so funny about many skeptics who make all these claims about Christians not thinking, because even though I read and thought avidly before, I learned a lot more about philosophy and gained more of a dedication to getting it right and being scholarly after -- but that may be due to age more than religion. I guess the three main issues that I was concerned about at that time were:

1) the historicity of the Bible, especially in light of my researches.

2) the justice of God; hell and pain in life, etc.

3) and the hypocrisy of the Church; all the devilment it has caused throughout history.

These were not mere excuses not to believe they were real impediments to belief. I had stated on a number of occasions that I could never be a Christian because of these things. And of course all of this against the background of the sheer existence of God in the first place. I couldn't see how God could exist when there was 'no proof' but more importantly, we didn't need God as an explanation of anything. Science demonstrates the workings of the world, the evolution of life, and the regularity of scientific law argues against the probability of any supernatural realm beyond this one; maybe such a realm exists I argued but it serves no purpose for us, and how can it intrude into this realm when we are constantly witnessing a regular universe that operates by cause and effect and never observe violations that can't be explained by psychology and so on. (Hume's argument against miracles essentially).

Now I'm going to do a part II because my browser stinks and I can't load really long posts, but it’s almost finished. I think some of the major objections, such as the evil doings of the institutional church in the Middle Ages, were answered by my sister's friend, and largely just because she took the problem seriously, but pointed out that that was not the Gospel and that historical accidents placed the reigns of the church in the hands of unscrupulous men via institutionalization. But I think taking the problem seriously made a lot of difference. Too often in witnessing Christians think they must disown the proper values of human dignity and the sanctity of life and to defend the church at all costs. We don’t have to do this. The Church has gon off track many times. We can admit this, and until we do the learned atheists will never take the Gospel seriously.

SECOND STEP TO BELIEF; READING THE GOSPELS CRITICALLY BUT NOT SKEPTICALLY; EXAMINATION OF JESUS HIMSELF.

As I read the Gospels I began to feel that Jesus was a really the coolest person. I began to really admire him. He was always focussed on the individual, the one in need, always opposing hypocrisy, and undermining the authority of the power structure. He was full of compassion, but wasn't weepy. It makes a big difference not to read it just to find contradictions. But I was still bothered by the three Issues I'd mentioned. I couldn't figure why B.H. Streeter was a Christian when he constantly gave evidence that the Bible was not divinely inspired. It would be years and years before I fully worked that out, and I had to go to seminary to do it. But gradually I began to realize that the Church of Christ had brainwashed me against other forms of Christianity so that it never dawned on me that there was this wider tradition of which the Church of Christ was only a small part. The historicity of the Bible: I'd done enough research to see that a good case could be made for it. There's too much on that to get into here, but I did realize that even though the Bible is not inerrant, it can be trusted at least in the sense that the four Gospels are probably the only trustworthy account of what Jesus said and did, and that the likelihood is that he said and did very similar things to those recorded in the NT. I also began to admire his ethical teachings so much it seemed like those things didn't matter. so what if he didn't give the whole sermon on the mount at one time, he must have said; otherwise it's like saying Sartre didn't really write Roads to Freedom Trilogy (well maybe not but whoever did is one of my favorite novelists and it couldn't have been made up by just anyone). If Jesus’ followers somehow made up his character and teaching then they were literary geniuses and maybe that in itself is reason enough to be at least a liberal nominal Christian.

INITIAL CONVERSION EXPERIENCE

The justice of God issue: I began to piece together my own free will defense the more I read of the Bible. And as I think just being able to stop and think about it without trying to poke holes in it all made a lot of difference. I began to have a growing feeling that there must be something to it all, religious belief and the Gospel. One night a friend came to my door, and he was in dire shape. He was having a bad reaction to some medication. He said he felt like demons were running through his body. He was freaking out. (Do they still say that?). I went back to his apartment with him and he kept getting worse. I wanted to take him to a hospital but he had a certain reason not to want to go and refused. I didn't know what to do. HE was writhing around on the floor and screaming, I was going to call an ambulance but he kept screaming at me not to. I didn't know what to do. In desperation I actually prayed and said “OK, Jesus, God, if you are really there, please make him stop!” I had just enough time to think “what if it doesn't work?” when I noticed that he began to settle down. He just wound down and went to sleep in about 30 seconds. I just stared at him sleeping peacefully and thought “what just happened?” I kept thinking I said “If you are there...” and the condition was met. Well I wasn’t going to break down that easily. It was obviously a coincidence. But it stuck in my mind that the condition was met. So wasn't it incumbent upon me to think even more deeply about it all.

One night I was reading the Bible and I decided to get high and than perhaps I would really see the deep spiritual truths (ho ho ho right?) I lit up the old bong and toked the best Columbian [marijuana] my roommate could buy, and after reading for about five minutes was as un-stoned as before. So I smoked another bowl, flying, read some more, and each time I repeated this process I'd be as sober as a...Christian. But I did find the passages extremely moving that time. I decided I didn't need dope and never touched it again, after about 6 years of smoking heavily. Not long after that I saw a special on PBS done back than with Jacob Needleman whom I had read in my sociology of religion class and knew to be non-Christian and scholarly. That had a pretty profound affect upon my thinking about religion. It was positive to religion but universalistic in perspective; Christianity presented as just one in a number of approaches to God, all of which reflect some aspect of truth. But then the Eastern guy (the guy I was studying with) stepped in. He was trying to prove to me that Jesus was an Eastern guru and everything in the Bible was really Toaism ala Rom Dos (or Hinduism really I guess). But in the middle of all that it hit me that verse in Romans 2:7 about the Pagans not born under the law are a law unto themselves and it occurred to me that this universalism could work in reverse too. What if these Eastern guys are getting glimpses of the truth and that doesn’t say who Jesus is.

So I began to study the claims he made about himself. It was clear to me that he was claiming to be the Jewish Messiah and not the “song of god” in some eastern sense (we are all sons of god because we are all god etc). That verse “ye are all gods” I found a study Bible my mother gave me that year and talked to my sister's friend about it when I saw her at Christmas, so learned the word Elohim doesn’t necessarily mean divine, it can mean many things, etc. So it looked to me like he was making unique claims about himself “I am the way the truth and the life no one comes to the Father but by me.” So the old C.S. Lewis thing hit. If this guy is so great to be such a wonderful teacher and so together that hey could not have been insane, and yet says he's the only way to God, maybe he had some insight no one else does?

BORN AGAIN!

One weekend I went to my parents house and was studying for test at 3:00 a.m. I began to think about my life, my motives, etc. all that had been going through my mind. I thought about Sartre and self-authentication -- then it hit me -- Kierkegaard, Christian existentialism. Merely reverse Sartre and you get Kierkegaard. And why do that? Self authentication. How could Sartre think any less of me if I made a Sk's [??] leap of faith as my form of self-authentication? That would be My unique authenticating act. Who could complain? And why do it? God made my friend settle down, and I asked him to, etc. but more than that the long search people, the human nature of religious faith -- it is the ultimate authentication. So I laid on the couch and prayed. I don't remember my payer except i said “I want to change and find the truth, I wont to find the self fulfillment of these people who know you and I want to know Jesus, so please born me again.” And at that moment I began to feel a presence, it was fait at first, just a sense of something, then stronger -- clean, it was looking at me, it loved me, and it was love. I felt it totally washing over me and in me. I did feel born again. For the first time in since childhood I felt love for myself and that God loved me, this presence loved me. And I remembered it from childhood. This was the feeling of goodness I had as a kid. The next two months I just glided around. I'd stay up all night reading the Bible and the next day go look at the sun rise and feel like I'd stumbled on to some really amazing thing no one knew about. The Eastern guy came over and I told him about it and he said “I knew you'd say that! I knew you'd cave in and sell out to the Christians!” I said, but we agreed to stick with whatever we discovered the truth to be, no pre-set conclusions.” “But you are arriving at pre set conclusions,” he said. The last time I saw him he was shouting at me and going 'can God make a rock so big he can' lift it?” I swear the he tried to pull that. That sense of the presence continued. It grew stronger every time I prayed. I was beginning the happiest phase of my life.

One night I felt something hitting my bed and turned on the light and there was nothing there. So I prayed and it stopped. I wondered if I was going insane, but somehow it didn’t work like insanity because rather than tearing my life down it was building it up. I began apologizing to people I had hurt, I was renewing old friendships, feeling love for my parents, feeling self acceptance for the first time since childhood and so on. After that point the objections I had amassed for years melted away very quickly. The mass of Xerox copies from all manner of scholarly books and articles demonstrating the inadequacy of the Bible some how seemed hollow and inconclusive. I began to think about Streeter's faith and how he was able to believe and use what he knew to back that belief despite its seeming skeptical nature. I also knew that the Christians had good answers to most of it and it seemed that all one needed was a reason to take up one set of assumptions or the other. With one set of basic assumptions all the counter evidence disappeared, and vice versa. But which assumptions to make? These experiences gave me the push I needed to take up the Christian assumptions, and faith began to pile up almost in a cumulative process; or so it seemed. I also suddenly began to think of new answers or to look at the evidence in a new way. For example, one author used Streeter's account of the conversion of an Indian mystic name Sadu Sundar Sing as proof that St. Paul's conversion was based on psychological guilt. The evidence; Sing had a similar Damascus Road experience, after hating and mocking Christians. But in light of my own experience I was more willing to believe that maybe Sing's experience really was like Paul's, maybe it was a revelation from God and that doesn’t prove anything either way. And maybe the guilt release thing came into it just because God is in the business of forgiveness?

BAPTISM OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

That summer I found the charismatics. I prayed for baptism of the Holy Spirit, my sister's fiend was a Charismatic so I thought that was the thing to do. I was alone in my room, moved back home that summer, and as I prayed nothing happened. Two hours of praying and nothing. So I just raised my hands as I'd seen Charismatics do and thanked God for the 'gifts' just taking on faith that they had been bestowed. Suddenly I felt my arms raising as though I wasn't doing it. A sort of magnetic like force was raising them. I felt an energy pouring over me. It was like electricity, I could physically feel it, but it didn't hurt, it felt good, and in a strange way it felt like love. I felt as though my palms were on fire, and It was so strong I was knocked standing out of my chair. I felt this “electricity” pour over me for about two hours and I praised God and felt great, peace, love, joy, and an amazement as if watching myself from afar and wondering if it was happening. Eventually I found it hard to move my mouth and found my self saying words that didn’t make sense. Latter that summer I would find those words in a national Geographic; they were Mayan place names. Why? I haven't the foggiest. Although I would like to explore the notion that even though the Mayan religious was idolatrous and seems brutal, it also made a great deal of the notion of the King shedding his blood on behalf of the people. I don’t know if that figures in to it or how.

REFLECTIONS ON FAITH AND PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD.

Up to that experience, like a participant observer in my own conversion process (due to my sociology training) I had sort of been keeping tabs on things. Every new turn in the road I would examine form two perspectives. In one sense I would come to new insight and new levels of faith, and in another I would mark it and relate it to some theory of sociology I had learned as if watching myself in a process, or as if tricking myself into infiltrating a cult for sociological research. But at the same time I would find objections to the sociological theory and move on to the next plateau, yet somehow leaving a mental book mark “this is how the subject moved beyond this point.” But after this experience which I call “baptism of the Holy Spirit,” I stopped this somehow (though I was aware of doing it, it wasn't planned) and just began moving on with faith, determined to know God as fully as possible at all costs! That experience I have never forgotten. I know it sounds crazy and I don’t balme you for thinking that. I would have thought the same thing just a few months before it happened. But there is was and I couldn't explain it but I couldn't deny it.

I searched through all the sociological and psychological stuff I'd been studying in school to show myself I was being tricked by some hidden desire to believe, but for everything I found I could find an answer as well. I had actually been doing that sense that incident with my freaking out friend so I was pretty much through that phase by this time and after this my commitment was total. I didn't even care about philosophy I just wanted to pray form then on. And I did pray and I felt that presence every time i prayed, though never again that strong. And I had other similar experiences I can't deny them, I know they happened and I know they had manifestations that were not mere psychology. A few months latter I began reading philosophy again and this time the arguments for the existence of God were opened to me. I could see they made perfect sense. I went on to learn more about philosophy than I ever knew and to harmonize my views with my faith. About 10 years latter I went to seminary and got a Masters in theology. I thought my way out of the Charismatics by that time and weathered the storms of Reaganism (I was about the only charismatic that wasn't for him). But I still believe in the gifts and have seen many healings had many other miraculous things. The thing that makes my sister's friend so amazing is not just that she has seen many such miraculous things, but that she's a neat and strong woman who fought for her social conscience and didn't fit in with the Churches and was led by God to stand alone many times.

It is the life of a person that really speaks of the truth of God, not so much their ideas alone. Seminary was a leading liberal seminary and I wanted to be a theologian. I got my theology worked out, and changed it and worked it out again. But that game me a synthesis of the two ways of life, the intellectual and the spiritual so that they are not in conflict. I went to a secular doctoral program for my Ph.D. which I'm trying to finish now, in the history of ideas. I began that to study postmodernism and did study it but got into history of science and the Enlightenment, which is what pisses me off so much with people like the glob fly because I do know what I'm talking about on that stuff. So I've been a Christian since April of 79, and I still feel God's presence and it is a satisfying and fulfilling and consistent way of life. What I find from all of this is that faith is self-authenticating. I don't say self-validating because any sort of belief is self-validating. What matters in terms of proof is falsifyability. At least according to Karl Poper. But in any case, I'm a Kuhnian, and I say all our ideas take socially constructed form by the time we talk about them. The authenticity of first hand religious experience, however, cannot be reduced. To try and reduce it to counter causality to to dismiss it in any way is simply to lose the data and transform the experience into something else. Now it doesn’t' really prove anything, because others have their own experiences too.

But in a different sense it is "self-authenticating.” It is an expression of our own decision making, and it is an authentic sense of what it is to be human to live in the world. It is not reducible to anything else, despite the lack of proof, it must be taken on its own terms. And as such, to the extent that it cumulatively stacks up to a consistent way of life over time, has the same sort of validity that any of our big choices in life have. It is a leap of faith, it is a decision to believe, and to the extent that it forms a consistent way of life is as real to the believer as the world of our daily experience is to all of us. To take the first step is to initiate a process whereby faith will confirm it's own validity as the “evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11) And after 20+ years I can say Jesus has not let me down. I'm not yet to the point of receiving the final reward of faith, eternal life, but I have been re-convinced countless times, and know with full assurance; God is there, Jesus is real, he is a rewarder of those that diligently seek him, and hope in him does not disappoint.

Antony Flew’s rejection of atheism is an encouragement, but his rejection of Christianity is a warning. Rejecting atheism is simply not enough.

________

The death this month of Antony Flew brings an end to one of the most interesting lives in twentieth century philosophy. Throughout the last half of that century, Professor Flew was recognized as one of the most significant philosophical advocates of atheism, eventually writing at least 35 works, many arguing for the non-existence of God. Then, at age 81, Antony Flew changed his mind. God, he explained, probably DOES exist.

The story of Antony Flew’s embrace and then eventual rejection of atheism is both fascinating and instructive. Born into the London home of a prominent British Methodist minister, Flew was surrounded by Christianity. “I was not always an atheist,” he explained. “I began life quite religiously. I was raised in a Christian home and attended a private Christian school. In fact, I am the son of a preacher.”

Indeed, Flew not only attended a private Christian school, he was in fact educated at the Kingswood School, a school for boys established by none other than John Wesley himself. As he recalled, “I entered Kingswood as a committed and conscientious, if unenthusiastic, Christian.”

So, how did Antony Flew become an atheist? The critical issue was the challenge of evil. As an adolescent, Flew came to the conclusion that God could not be simultaneously both good and all-powerful. The conflict Flew saw between the love and the omnipotence of God led to a devastating loss of faith. Looking back, Flew commented that “by the time I reached my fifteenth birthday, I rejected the thesis that the universe was created by an all-good, all-powerful God.”

Flew then attended Oxford University from which he advanced from undergraduate to graduate studies in philosophy. His postgraduate studies in philosophy were under the direction of Gilbert Ryle and were deeply influenced by the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

During his studies and a year of teaching at Oxford, Flew participated in the Socratic Club, whose president from 1942-1954 was C. S. Lewis. A paper Flew read to the club entitled “Theology and Falsification” became one of the defining moments of Flew’s career. Mark Oppenheimer would later describe the paper as “a heroic tract for committed atheists.” Though Flew was originally assumed to be a proponent of analytical philosophy along the lines of A. J. Ayer, he actually believed himself to have refuted Ayer’s claim that theological beliefs cannot be true simply because they cannot be falsified. Instead, Flew argued, theological assertions should be considered to be false simply because there is no adequate evidence to confirm them.

Over the next several decades, Professor Flew taught at a series of colleges and universities and wrote a small library of philosophical works, many espousing and supporting atheism. He was also involved in public debates on the issue. His writings were widely circulated among philosophers and university students, and, despite the fact that he also wrote on other philosophical questions, his personal reputation was inseparable from his atheism.

Nevertheless, his atheism was not so well-established as it seemed. The key transition in Flew’s life happened when he began to believe in something very much like the theory of Intelligent Design. “My departure from atheism was not occasioned by any new phenomenon or argument,” Flew insisted in 2007. “Over the last two decades, my whole framework of thought has been in a state of migration. This was a consequence of my continuing assessment of the evidence of nature.”

By 2004, Flew publicly denied that life could have emerged from matter alone. Eventually, Flew came to insist that the laws of nature could only have come from a divine mind. In other words, there must be a God.

Flew’s public announcement in 2004 that he had rejected atheism and embraced some kind of belief in God was a philosophical bombshell. Evangelicals championed his rejection of non-belief and were cheered by the public nature of his announcement. Nevertheless, a closer look was needed.

Antony Flew never embraced Christianity. He rejected the possibility of divine revelation and flatly rejected the idea of divine judgment and hell. He told THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH [London] that the God he had come to believe “probably” existed is “most emphatically not the eternally rewarding and eternally torturing God of either Christianity or Islam,” but only God as First Cause of the universe. In other words, Antony Flew embraced a form of Deism (the belief in a God who creates but then removed himself from creation), rather than theism (the belief in a communicating, ruling, and judging deity).

When atheist critics suggested that Professor Flew, then in advanced age, had experienced something like a deathbed conversion out of fear of death, the professor retorted with a rejection of any afterlife. “I want to be dead when I am dead and that’s an end to it,” he made clear. “I don’t want an unending life. I don’t want anything without end.”

The life of Antony Flew provides us all with significant lessons and insights. First, we are reminded of the fact that basic and important questions of faith often arise in adolescence. The biography of Antony Flew may well have been remarkably different had his theological questions and concerns been treated with dignity and seen as an opportunity by the mature Christians around him.

When young people sense that there is no intelligent Christian response or answer to their deep questions and concerns, they may well come to the conclusion that there are no answers and that there is no intellectual defense of the Christian faith.

Second, Flew’s intellectual pilgrimage underlines the fact that the boldest atheistic arguments are often put forth by people who are closer to belief in God than may first appear. In retrospect, Antony Flew had dropped hints of openness to belief in God, even as he was recognized as one of the world’s most famous atheists. Many prominent Christians, now and in the past, were once fervent atheists. Atheists, we should note, at least consider the question of the existence of God to be consequential and important.

Third, the conclusion of Antony Flew’s life must affirm for us the fact that the rejection of atheism does not always lead to an embrace of Christianity. Salvation comes only to those who come to belief and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ — not to those who merely embrace the existence of a divine First Cause. Rejecting atheism is not enough.

The death of Professor Antony Flew should not escape Christian attention. His life and thought trace the transition from atheism to some form of belief in God. But not every form of belief in God leads to salvation. The Gospel of Jesus Christ does not rest on just any belief in God. Antony Flew’s rejection of atheism is an encouragement, but his rejection of Christianity is a warning. Rejecting atheism is simply not enough.

*

[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #12240]

Philosophers have a way of discussing truth in abstraction. Such discussions are helpful and do have their place, but they are often out of the average person’s reach. The impression often given is that knowing truth is a complicated matter. In other discussions, truth seems equally unknowable.

The Bible is a book that thankfully does not argue its case for truth purely at the philosophical level. Yet it offers answers to the very questions that human beings cannot escape: WHO AM I? WHERE DID I COME FROM? WHY AM I HERE? WHERE AM I GOING? The Bible compels our attention because it addresses issues of real life in the structure of a story and a historical setting. It begins its exposition by assuming the existence of God in its opening words. If we, therefore, turn to the Bible for addressing issues of truth, we will find ourselves facing the God of Scripture!

In such a quest, it is appropriate to examine the words the Bible uses to describe the idea of truth. Notably, the Hebrew words for truth, faith, and faithfulness all spring from the same root. This particular association of words immediately suggests important connections that we cannot afford to ignore. Truth is not just the characteristic of a statement or proclamation; it is the character of the very being of God. “Your love, O LORD, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies” proclaims the psalmist in 36:5. God is TRUE because He is faithful to his Word and the character He has revealed. And rightly, we relate to Him by being faithful to his call to draw near.

This language study quickly demonstrates the tremendous moral and practical implications for words that are to be understood beyond conceptual and cerebral terms. The Hebrew shows no dichotomy between belief and behavior; the believability of God’s objective truth revealed by Him and through his Word is matched by his moral behavior, which is equally trustworthy. At the same time, we can see that the New Testament writers are straining to express something of truth that is not simply conceptual, but reflects the total character of God and those who believe in Him. Hence, Paul’s use of the Greek word “pistis” goes well beyond simple belief, but also describes A RESPONSE on the basis of belief.

Scripture brings to light a quality of truth that is all too often lost in abstract discussions or in popular gnostic descriptions. Truth at the conceptual and content level must not be separated from truth at the practical level; the objective and verifiable must always be set alongside the existential and experiential. In other words, the answers we seek to questions of truth must satisfy our hearts even as they stimulate our minds.

The truth of God’s being and character is far more than a set of creedal principles. This truth can transform our lives in terms of a loving and free relationship. From this God and his Word, we can receive true answers to the questions that are inherently raised within us. WHO AM I? WHERE DID I COME FROM? WHY AM I HERE? WHERE AM I GOING? The answers God provides us are simple enough for a little child to understand and yet so profound that the deepest quest of the most sophisticated philosopher can be satisfied.

________

Copyright © 2006 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

Perhaps one of the greatest minds of the 19th Century was Frederich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Nietzsche had a power with language, and a penetrating view of reality unmatched by any of the thinkers of his day. Indeed, he spoke with such passion and such foresight that he still influences much of philosophy today. But Nietzsche was bitterly anti-God and he absolutely despised Christianity. He considered it a slave religion.

Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God. He stated:

“I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and

innermost perversion, the one great instinct of revenge, for

which no means are too venomous, too underhand, too underground,

and too petty.”

For all his learning and intellect, Nietzsche died in 1900 after 11 years of insanity brought on by syphilis.

In a very real sense, the modern world began 350 summers ago when a young man was excommunicated by the Jewish community in Amsterdam. The excommunication of Baruch (later changed to Benedict) Spinoza is one of the hallmark events in the development of the modern mind and modern secularism. The anniversary of Baruch Spinoza's excommunication also serves as a reminder of the ideological roots of modern biblical criticism and the political agenda behind Spinoza's critical approach to the Bible. Born November 24, 1632 to Michael de Espinoza and Hana Debora, his second wife, Baruch Spinoza was a son of privilege. His ancestors had fled Portugal and Spain during the Inquisition and the Spinoza family became pillars of the Marrano Jewish community in Amsterdam.

As a boy, Spinoza was noted for his brilliance. In his fascinating new book, THE COURTIER AND THE HERETIC, Matthew Stewart quotes a Polish observer who noted the brilliant young Jewish boys of Amsterdam, speaking of them as “small as grasshoppers” who were also “like prodigies because of their unusual familiarity with the entire Bible and the science of grammar.”

No one knows exactly what happened between Spinoza's childhood and adolescence as an orthodox “grasshopper” and his emergence in early adulthood as a scandalous heretic. As a matter of fact, the actual writ of excommunication, pronounced on July 27, 1656, provides little specificity. Instead, the declaration indicates that the ruling council of the Jews in Amsterdam had “for some time known the evil opinions and work of Baruch de Espinoza” and, having “endeavored by various ways and promises to bring him back from his evil ways,” nonetheless excommunicated him for his “horrible heresies” and “awful deeds.” The sentence of excommunication was the most serious ever handed down by the Jewish authorities of Amsterdam: “We warn that none may contact him orally or in writing, nor do him any favor, nor stay under the same roof with him, nor read any paper he made or wrote.”

Within four years of his excommunication, Spinoza would complete his most famous work, the ETHICS, in which he would promote a theory of pantheism more extreme than anything yet encountered in Western thought. As Jewish scholar Yirmiyahu Yovel notes, “With these ideas Spinoza distances himself from both Judaism and Christianity, and even from the accepted philosophical traditions; he was a heretic not only from the point of view of the established religions, but also from the point of view of the freethinkers and from the several varieties of philosophic deism they were espousing at the time.”

As Yovel explains, the deistic heresies “have at least acknowledged the existence of a transcendent deity elevated above the world.” Spinoza, on the other hand, simply denied any distinction between God and the universe. “In short,” Yovel explains, “Spinoza proclaimed himself a heretic not only among the faithful, but also among representatives of the accepted heresy of his period, thus separating himself from all of the major spiritual currents of his time.”

In the end, Spinoza would deny any concept of a personal God, all claims to divine revelation, any claim of biblical inspiration, and the validity of miracles. In essence, he serves as the father of modern biblical criticism. As a matter of fact, Spinoza is the first major figure credited with proposing an exclusively secular reading of the Bible. The philosopher Leo Strauss acknowledged Spinoza's legacy over three decades ago: “In our time, scholars generally study the Bible in the manner in which they study any other book. As is generally admitted, Spinoza more than any other man laid the foundation for this kind of Biblical study.”

Interestingly enough, the focus of Spinoza's early heresies was Judaism, but he soon turned his critical attention to Christianity. Spinoza saw dogmatic Christianity as the great enemy of the modern age and his project of biblical criticism was expressly intended to liberate Christianity from its dogmatic moorings.

As Roy A. Harrisville and Walter Sundberg note, “Spinoza's intent is clear, if indirect: false Christianity is dogmatic Christianity of any stripe. It is a child of unreason. For the sake of reason, dogmatic Christianity must be overcome.” Harrisville and Sundberg then explain why biblical criticism came to serve as Spinoza's major proposal for removing the threat of dogmatic Christianity. “What is needed is something to direct the passion of the multitude from false religion to true religion.... Since the Christian Bible is the authoritative source for the Christian religion, its understanding must be reshaped by rational criticism. Spinoza's political program of reform, then, is established in the exercise of biblical criticism.”

Most modern persons would doubtless be surprised to know that the main ambition behind the emergence of biblical criticism was political -- to transform the society by removing the obstacle of orthodox Christianity. Yet, as Spinoza's essays in his most notorious work, the THEOLOGICAL-POLITICAL TREATISE make clear, this was precisely Spinoza's ambition.

In Spinoza's view, both Jews and Christians had simply mistaken the particularity of their religious texts for a claim to divine revelation. Since Spinoza believed in no personal God, it was impossible for God to have inspired the Bible in any sense. Instead, Spinoza believed that the Bible was simply a product of human authorship, reflecting all of the historical circumstances, prejudices, and faults of those authors. As a thoroughgoing rationalist, Spinoza believed that the goal of human existence should be to live by the service of reason alone. Nevertheless, he believed that the vast majority of human beings were driven by emotion and passion, and were thus unable to understand what was known by the rationalist elite. Thus, the masses are attracted to simplistic and fanciful ideas such as miracles.

Spinoza's rejection of the miraculous was absolute. In the first place, he did not believe in a God who would act in any personal manner. Beyond this, his absolute denial of any distinction between God and nature meant that it would be impossible for any action or event contrary to nature to occur.

As Spinoza wrote: “The universal laws of nature are merely God's decrees, following from the necessity and perfection of the divine nature. So if anything were to happen in nature contrary to her universal laws, it would also be necessarily contrary to the decree, intellect and nature of God. Or if anyone were to maintain that God performs some act contrary to the laws of Nature, he would at the same time have to maintain that God acts contrary to his own nature -- than which nothing could be more absurd.”

The idea of a supernatural deity who revealed himself in the Bible is nothing more than superstition, Spinoza insisted. And superstition is “the bitter enemy of all true knowledge and true morality.”

Spinoza denied the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and the inspiration of the Scriptures as a whole. The prophets were simply men of elevated moral insight, whose actual worldviews and understanding of reality were often woefully deficient.

In one central paragraph, Spinoza offers his approach to understanding the Bible: “Now in exactly the same way the task of Scriptural interpretation requires us to make a straightforward study of Scripture, and from this, as the source of our fixed data and principles, to deduce by logical inference the meaning of the authors of Scripture. In this way, by allowing no other principles or data for the interpretation of Scripture and study of its contents except those that can be gathered only from Scripture itself and from a historical study of Scripture -- steady progress can be made without any danger of error, and one can deal with matters that surpass our understanding with no less confidence than those matters that are known to us by the natural light of reason.”

As Spinoza scholar Steven Nadler suggests, Spinoza denies that the Bible provides “privileged knowledge of natural or spiritual phenomena.” In Spinoza's view, the enduring message of the Bible is merely obedience to God, altruism, and submission to the divine predetermination of all things.

With specific reference to Israel, Spinoza denies that the Jews were in any way “elected” by God. Instead, they were simply the product of historical circumstance, benefiting from historical, geographical, political, and economic realities. The Torah was simply a fortuitous development that offered rules and precepts that aided the Jews in their endurance, survival, and national development. The Bible is simply the work of human writers who were often ill informed, prejudiced, and superstitious.

As Matthew Stewart argues, “In short, Spinoza presents a thoroughly secular and historicist reading of the scriptures -- entirely unexceptional by modern standards -- according to which the Bible is clearly the work of human hands, and the truths it relays are, in the main, not FACTUAL but MORAL.”

Armed with his new philosophy, Spinoza saw himself, as Stewart acknowledges, as “the spiritual leader of a global revolution.”

The foundations of modern biblical criticism, and the secular worldview from which these foundations emerge, are all present and visible in Spinoza's writings. Indeed, one of the most fundamental distinctions common to the critical reading of the Bible -- the distinction between MEANING and TRUTH -- is well established in Spinoza's thought. In Spinoza's own words, “the point at issue is merely the meaning of the texts, not their truth.” Or, as Harrisville and Sundberg explain, “The distinction between truth and meaning is crucial to Spinoza's argument. Truth refers to matters of universal significance that reason is able to discern regardless of time and place. Meaning refers to the cultural expressions and artifacts of specific peoples bound to time and place.”

Thus, the miracle accounts found in the Bible are described as meaningful, even if untrue. The “truth” of the Bible is found only in its call to “true virtue.”

Harrisville and Sundberg understand the revolutionary character of Spinoza's thought: “In retrospect, Spinoza appears to be the trailblazer of a revolutionary position. In his work the Bible has become the object of historical science. This science is unalterably opposed to the proposition that the foundation of biblical study is revealed religion. The only proper foundation of religion is human reason.”

Further: “The motivation for historical criticism of the Bible is clear. It is a primary means to free society from the destructive force of religious passion. That is to say, the purpose of this new exegesis is not proclamatory or dogmatic, but political. The content of the Bible is investigated with an eye firmly fixed on its social effect. By undercutting religious passion, Spinoza encourages doubt. From doubt, Spinoza believes there will spring the social good of tolerance.”

Thus, the anniversary of Baruch Spinoza's excommunication in Amsterdam 350 years ago serves as a reminder of the radical roots of modern biblical criticism -- and of what little remains when divine revelation is denied. The Bible is left as nothing more than a “meaningful” witness to the religious passions of the ancients, marked by all of their own prejudices, faults, and misconceptions.

Once again, we face the basic fault line in modern thought -- the line between the belief that the Bible is indeed the written Word of God and the belief that the Bible is nothing more than a fallible moral witness. Matthew Stewart is absolutely correct in noting that Benedict Spinoza's concept of biblical criticism is now seen as “unexceptional” in the modern secular academy. Beyond this, Spinoza's distinction between meaning and truth has found its way into all too many pulpits, churches, seminaries, and denominations. We can only hope that a reminder of what took place in Amsterdam 350 summers ago might serve to remind the believing church of what is at stake today.

The great French mathematician Blaise Pascal encountered God in a powerful experience. When he tried to describe it in his journal he wrote in bursts, capturing flashes of what he thought he had seen in the vision — a vision that, by empirical standards, could only be called fantastical. There was no doubt in Pascal’s mind, though, that it had happened, and happened in time and space, in a way his mathematically trained brain conceived of things as happening. Pascal remembered the exact time — between the hours of half past 10 and half past midnight on Monday, Nov. 23, 1654. Jesus appeared to him; God was real; the Christian story true: “Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace. God of Jesus Christ. God of Jesus Christ. MY GOD AND YOUR GOD.”

In a collection of writings found after his death, published as “Pensées,” Pascal blended his two passions, mathematics and faith, to lay out what has come to be known as Pascal’s Wager. It is rather simple: it is smarter to bet that God exists, and to believe in him, because if it turns out that he is real, you win everything; if he is not, you lose nothing. So why not take the leap of faith?

Mortimer J. Adler was born into a non-observant Jewish family. After he became a philosopher he was attracted to the teachings of Catholic Thomas Aquinas but he never formally converted.

Adler took a long time to make up his mind about theological issues. When he wrote How to Think About God: A Guide for the Twentieth-Century Pagan in 1980, he claimed to consider himself the pagan of the book’s subtitle. In volume 51 of the Mars Hill Audio Journal (2001), Ken Myers includes his 1980 interview with Adler, conducted after How to Think About God was published. Myers reminisces, “During that interview, I asked him why he had never embraced the Christian faith himself. He explained that while he had been profoundly influenced by a number of Christian thinkers during his life, ... there were moral – not intellectual – obstacles to his conversion. He didn’t explain any further.”

In his 80s Adler was baptized by an Episcopalian priest and later joined the Roman Catholic church.

Offering insight into Mortimer Adler’s conversion, Ken Myers quotes him from a subsequent 1990 article in Christianity magazine:

“My chief reason for choosing Christianity was because the mysteries were incomprehensible. What’s the point of revelation if we could figure it out ourselves? If it were wholly comprehensible, then it would just be another philosophy."

A story that I heard second-hand from a meeting of phenomenologists has two philosophers driving together to a conference. They must have rented a car at the airport, because the passenger is reading the informational material stuffed in the glove compartment.

“Hey,” he says, “Do you know that there’s a fine for burnt out lights in this state?”

“No,” replies the driver, “I didn’t, and I didn’t check them either. I’d better pull over and make sure they’re in good shape. Why don’t you go around the car and check the bulbs?”

“Okay” says the passenger, as he opens his door and walks around to the front of the vehicle.

“I’m checking the turn signals,” shouts the driver, “are they working?”

“Yes!”, came the reply. “Wait, No! Yes! No! Yes!...”

Like those philosophers, the truth we extract from Job depends crucially on our expectations of truth. This chapter is designed to disappoint everyone’s expectations. Those of you who thought I was going to follow in the footsteps of great theologians and philosophers of the past, the “ground of being” and all that will be disappointed as will those who find in Job an irrational God who steps outside all of our understanding. For it seems to me absurdly futile to construct rational arguments proving the essential irrationality of the Universe. Yet both intensely conservative and thoroughly intellectual people have done just that, arguing that the message of Job is intentionally illogical and irrational. What could have enticed them into such dire straits? Who incited them to abandon, even scuttle, the ship of reason in such perilous waters? Finding the answer to these questions reveals more about the captain and his choice of the Charybdis of despair than about the Scylla of suffering. For the writer of Job, by putting truisms in the mouths of the enemy, and enigmas in the mouth of God, cleverly forces the reader to make choices about what constitutes truth. Thus this chapter will not be about Job so much as it is about modern man and his encounter with Truth.

KIRKEGAARD, CHAMBERS AND BARTH

What do Soren Kirkegaard, Oswald Chambers and Karl Barth all have in common? Besides all being Europeans born in the 19th century, they were all deeply religious men who found a refuge for faith in divine irrationality. In each case, they were responding to sacrilegious men who used the cover of rational argument to draw the Church into heretical behavior. This did not, of course, prevent their philosophy from being used by the same sacrilegious spirit as a weapon against the Church. For the Truth cannot be protected by defenses of Men, he can only be encountered by the sincere of every age. Inasmuch as rational argument or irrational faith clears a path through the choking weeds of this world’s irreverent philosophy and leads us to Truth, so it becomes our true journey of faith.

In response to the creeping eighteenth century rationalism and its trivialization of the Church, Kirkegaard saw true faith opposed to reason. He saw in Abraham the anguish of belief, as God demanded from him his sole heir and son, Isaac, where the only deliverance from this anguish became Abraham’s blind faith in a loving God. Kirkegaard generalized that anguish to all of life, and by that step made blind faith essential to all of life. It was a bold step, but a desperate one, which now repeated countless times, has left atheistic rationalists in firm control of reason, and cast the Church adrift on the stormy seas of irrational faith. Soren would have approved.

Likewise Karl Barth was appalled by the blatant appropriation of the Church’s sacred symbols by the Prussian army, the wholesale theft of holy scriptures. When the very belt buckles of the army had imprinted on them “Gott mit uns”, God with us, it suggested that the generals had made God their mascot, their lucky talisman against the enemy. In contrast, Barth argued that God is beyond our beckoning, beyond our understanding, and it is therefore absurd to imagine we know on whose side God stands. In a similar way, this was the answer of the American doughboys who responded to the German banner by raising a hand painted sign from their side of the barbed wire, “We got mittens too.” Karl only said it more elegantly.

Oswald Chambers was a relatively young man when he died in 1917, leaving only a few of his works. His semi-mystical MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST has become a best-selling devotional book in some circles, rivalling the more famous THE IMITATION OF CHRIST. In addition, his wife collected his daily sermons on the book of Job, made at the YMCA Hut Zeitoun Camp in 1916. In this short book, BAFFLED TO FIGHT BETTER, Chambers addresses the question of why England should be suffering through the first world war. Some godly people had inferred that God must be very angry at England and must be disciplining its people. Chambers’ answer, strangely enough, echoes Kirkegaard and presages Barth, when he denies any causal relationship and says that God has “no reason” we can understand, just as God gave “no reason” for afflicting Job. I focus on this book for two reasons: first, Chambers has an impeccable reputation with conservatives unlike the other two men; and second, Chambers addressed an entire study to the book of Job. If we understand Chambers, then, I believe, we will understand much of the modern response.

• THE WAR

It is impossible to understand the attraction of existentialism without understanding the milieu in which it developed. The nineteenth century growth of scientific rationalism and the Hegelian triumph of the spirit had spread the message of the imminent arrival of the millennium, a 1000 year period of unparalleled peace and prosperity that immediately preceded the return of Christ. To put it in perspective, the amount of world trade and the growth in the gross world product of the 1890’s had produced an excess of disposable income and prosperity that was not seen again until the latter half of the 1980’s. This rosy view of civilization was destroyed by two bloody, senseless, exhausting, and destructive world wars. The aftermath left more than nations in ruins, it destroyed the philosophy and moral fiber of three generations, it produced despair. Thoreau had written 50 years earlier that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation”. That desperation had visibly changed, so that in the first half of the 20th century one could say “most men lead lives of deepening despair”. It was to that subvocal cry that Chambers directed his study of Job, and it is the test of his answer that we ask “does his solution bring hope?”

• THE NEGATION

As with many other studies of Job, Chambers begins by negating other interpretations. Chambers begins with a provocative sentence, “It is in such a book as Job that many suffering souls will find consolation and sustaining, and this because no attempt is made to explain the WHY of suffering...” In the second paragraph he denies that Job was perfected by suffering because he was blameless to begin with. In the third paragraph he argues that the only explanation for Job’s suffering lies in the heavenly court, not in Job’s earthly behavior. In the following paragraphs he argues that Satan cannot be blamed for instigating or causing Job’s pain, leaving God alone, as chief of the heavenly court, responsible for Job’s pain. A little later Chambers argues that a changing “dispensation” cannot account for Job’s suffering either. He makes the point more than once that there is no rational explanation for Job’s suffering based on past experience or expected outcome. Job’s trial was in essence, tragic.

Already at the end of the first chapter, Chambers is developing the theme of tragedy. He argues that Job’s faith had been built on circumstance, on cause and effect. “Then came calamity after calamity, everything Job believed about God was contradicted, and his creed went to the winds.” The explanation for Chambers’ interpretation can be seen in his application of this calamity to the present. “Today there is in our midst a crop of juvenile skeptics, men who up to the time of the war had had no tension in their lives, and as soon as turmoil embroiled them they flung over their faith and became cheap and easy skeptics. The man who knows that there are problems and difficulties in life is not so easily moved.... Many a man through this war has lost his form of belief in God and imagines that he has thereby lost God, whereas he is in the throes of a conflict which ought to give birth to a realization of God more fundamental than any statement of belief.” Chambers apparently sees in tragedy the only way to divorce one’s faith from a rational empirical belief, a step which requires complete tragedy. “One such thing the war has done is to knock on the head all such shallow optimism as telling people to ‘look on the bright side of things’ or that ‘every cloud has a silver lining.’ There are some clouds that are black all through!”

• THE DESPAIR

Chambers does not leave us in any doubt as to the outcome of tragedy. “Facing facts as they are produces despair, not frenzy, but real downright despair, and God never blames a man for despair. The man who thinks must be pessimistic; thinking can never produce optimism....The basis of things is not reasonable, but wild and tragic, and to face things as they are brings a man to the ordeal of despair.”

I quote these sentences from Chambers because otherwise you might think I was quoting Kirkegaard or Sartre. I find the amazing similarity of their thought can only be explained, not by their common faith, but by their common background. We who live at the end of the 20th century know the result of choosing Charybdis, but we must appreciate the many lethal heads of Scylla before we condemn such a choice.

Chambers develops the theme of despair to argue that it is not temporary, but permanent. “The sense of the irreparable is one of the greatest agonies in human life....There are things in life which are irreparable; there is no road back to yesterday. Job’s sense of the irreparable brought him face to face with the thing God was face to face with, and when a man gets there he begins to see the meaning of the redemption. The basis of things is not rational, common sense tells him it is not; the basis of things is tragic, and the Bible reveals that the only way out is through redemption.”

• THE IRRATIONAL

In this last quote we see Chambers developing the theme of the permanent character of despair and its intimate connection with logic, with rational reason, with empirical belief. In contrast, Chambers holds up the irrational redemption of God. “Reason is our guide among the facts of life, but it does not give us the explanation of them. Sin, suffering, and the book of God all bring a person to the realization that there is something wrong at the basis of life, and it cannot be put right by his reason. Our Lord always dealt with the ‘basement’ of life, that is, with the real problem; if we only deal with the ‘upper story’ we do not realize the need of the redemption; but once we are hit on the elemental line, as this war has hit people, everything becomes different. There are many men today who for the first time in their lives find themselves in the midst of the elemental with no civilized protection, and they go through appalling agony. This war has put an end to a great deal of belief in our beliefs....A man up against things as they are feels that he has lost God, while in reality he has come face to face with Him....There are many things in life that look like irresponsible blunders, but the Bible reveals that God has borne the responsibility for these things.... God accepts vicariously the responsibility for dealing with sin, and on the basis of the redemption men find their personal way out and an explanation.”

• THE EXPLANATION

Here, on page 28 of a 142-page book, Chambers presents his thesis. God’s irrational redemption that only allows a personal interpretation. No one else can interpret it for you, no one else can explain it for you, but when you take the mighty leap of faith, without reason, without experience as a guide, only then is an explanation found. The remainder of the book becomes merely an elaboration on these themes. Let me skip to the end of the book, in Chambers’ explication of Job 42 where he summarizes the answer:

Everything a man takes to be the key to a problem is apt to turn

out another lock....Everything that man attempts as a

simplification of life, other than a personal relationship to

God, turns out to be a lock, and we should be alert to recognize

when a thing turns from a key to a lock. The creed Job held,

which pretended to be a key to the character of God, turned out

to be a lock, and Job is realizing that the only key to life is

not a statement of faith in God, nor an intellectual conception

of God, but a personal relationship to Him. God Himself is the

key to the riddle of the universe, and the basis of things is to

be found only in Him. If a man leaves out God and takes any

scientific explanation as the key, he succeeds only in finding

another lock....

We sometimes wrongly illustrate faith in God by the faith of a

businessman in a check. Faith commercially is based on

calculation, but religious faith cannot be illustrated by the

kind of faith we exhibit in life. Faith in God is a terrific

venture in the dark; I have to believe that God is good in spite

of all that contradicts it in my experience....

There is a great difference between Christian experience and

Christian faith. The danger of experience is that our faith is

made to rest in it, instead of seeing that our experience is

simply a doorway to God Himself. The reason many of us refuse to

think and discover the basis of true religion is because

evangelical Christianity has been stated in such a flimsy way.

We get at Truth through life and personality, not by logic or

scientific statements.... Intellect asks, ‘What is truth?’ as

if truth were something that could be stated in words. ‘I am the

Truth’, said Jesus. The only way we get at Truth is by life and

personality. When a man is up against things it is no use for

him to try and work it out logically, but let him obey, and

instantly he will see his way through. Truth is moral, not

intellectual. We perceive Truth by doing the right thing, not by

thinking it out....we shall find that the Truth is not in a creed

or a logical statement, but in Life and Personality. This is

what Job is realizing.

A POSTSCRIPT

What was it about the two world wars that produced such deep despair? Why is it that this despair was not found in America, though she had fought in both wars? What is so European about Existentialism? As I puzzled over this, I thought, perhaps because the world wars were not fought on American soil. But then, 50 years previously the United States had fought the bloodiest war in history on its own soil, the American Civil War. Yet this war had not produced profound despair. What could be different about these wars? Surely it was not the weapons of mass destruction. The machine gun was first deployed in the Civil war, as was the introduction of trench warfare. Nor was it the immediacy of tragedy; one of every four men in the South died during this war. The duration of the wars were all about the same as well. Something else must be different.

Then it occurred to me, the Civil War was a war about ideas. Separatism versus Federalism, Slavery versus Industry, the Knight versus the Guild. All the players in this conflict knew to a greater or lesser extant that this was a war of ideas. Lincoln agonized over the responsibilities he faced in waging war on his brothers, his Gettysburg address is a clear statement of his recognition of this battleground of ideals, the experiment that was the United States. The Abolitionists interpreted the war as apocalyptic judgment on the sin of slavery; the famous battle hymn of the republic began “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword...” And because this war was viewed as a holy war, it had a simple interpretation. It caused suffering, vast suffering, but it was suffering for a reason.

But there were no such easy explanations for the two world wars. Rationalism was rampant in both camps, and rationalism seemed incapable of stopping the conflict, worse, it justified the conflict. Christianity had become a trapping of state, and was voiceless and powerless to stem the tide of war. Greed, power, pride, and fortune, these were the instigators of the war, but hardly worth dying for. The wars of Europe were wars of men against themselves, they were self-inflicted, holocausts of hubris. The reaction of Chambers then, is the correct response, for it recognizes the deep emptiness, the dark pit into which Western Europe had stumbled. It is in such a bear trap of despair that a man might cut off his leg to save his soul. We can empathize with Chambers, but we have lost the lesson if we emulate him.

A SUMMARY

I hesitate to summarize such a complex thinker and proponent of the faith as Oswald Chambers, yet a few points might be made without doing him great injustice. He has indeed adopted much of the terminology and arguments of the Existentialists, yet at the same time he gives a curious twist to the ending of his book. He argues for the irrationality of Truth, yet simultaneously for the application and morality of Truth. Other philosophers pick up on the theme of truth equated to moral action, but few have found the answer to universal suffering in a personal Truth. Though not emphasized by Chambers, this personalization of Truth appears to me to be the crux of the argument, for it is the hope he advances against despair. Therefore I frame my questions in the light of this Truth.

Was the disease of 18th century rationalism so deadly that it required such radical surgery? Is life truly tragic? Was the solution of “faith in a personal God” just another pit for a religion based on empirical experiences? Was the rational demand that we avoid all rationalizing an impossible task, like “not thinking of pink elephants”? Is it possible to separate the “rationalism” of man from the “rationalism” of God in the person of Truth? Why should it be necessary to make Reason and Life antagonists in the person of Truth? Do we have any justification in believing Job himself could find this hope that Chambers ends with? I raise these questions because I prefer not to examine Job in the same manner as Chambers. That study has already been done. Rather I would like to write the epilogue to Chambers, to take his Existentialism into a new Epistemology, to the knowledge of personal Truth.

ELIPHAZ, BILDAD, AND ZOPHAR

In the light of Existentialism, these 3 friends would be used as counter-examples, as men who held on to a indefensible belief in the rationality of God long after such belief was rendered incredible. In explaining this strange situation, many commentators present these men as priggish, stick-in-the-mud, reactionary demagogues who cannot conceive of a transcendent, supra-rational or, heaven forbid, irrational God. Chambers takes such a line, equating these men with dogmatic, judgmental Christians. A variant shows up in the Appendices, where Roger Eaton presents Bildad as a doddering, well-meaning old man with outdated advice. A strange hybrid appears in many “conservative” commentaries where the three are presented as essentially correct, but with serious attitude problems that hindered their message.

All of these analyses possess a common denominator, they do not merely attack or refute or defend the message of the three -- the necessity of a rational God -- but rather the attitude and presentation of the three. These abundant analyses are about more than the psychology of these men, though certainly psychology plays an important part, but they are about the interface between psychology and truth. This indicates that the writer of Job is successful at drawing the reader into the debate about what constitutes truth: words? actions? attitudes? a combination? If I will be allowed to call that epistemology, then the book of Job is about the certainty of knowledge, the quality of truth, the search for understanding: the epistemology of God.

THE ARGUMENT

Doing gross injustice to the debate recorded for us in Job 3-30, this is my brief summary of the argument. The friends argue that the laws of nature and heaven require that all evildoers be punished and all the righteous blessed. Why? Because God is running the universe and God, by definition, is just. Thus a just God implies a just creation, which in turn implies a just retribution for man’s actions. Job’s accuser’s invert the equation to say that the existence of good or evil in our life is directly traceable to God’s retribution. However this conclusion may be an error in logic.

Without getting too deeply into symbolic logic, we can demonstrate that one cannot easily invert the “implies” relationship between subject and predicate. Look at this syllogism:

(A) Rain implies that rainclouds are overhead.

(B) It is raining.

(C) Therefore, there are rainclouds overhead.

Now let us attempt to invert it by switching (B) and (C).

(A) Rain implies that rainclouds are overhead.

(B’) There are rainclouds overhead.

(C’) Therefore it is raining.

Clearly we have seen cloudy weather without rain, showing that an implication is too weak an argument to support inversion.

Thus Job’s friends are making a much stronger statement when they infer that Job must be guilty of great sin. They are saying that the linkage between Heaven and Earth is more than a chain, it must be as stiff as steel, that God’s justice is equivalent to perfect retribution. The connection must be bi-directional to be invertible. To appreciate the strength of this statement, let us invert the predicate and the subject: Man’s actions require that a just God respond appropriately.

THE DEFENSE

Now there are easily a dozen ways one can attack or defend this statement, each one leading to a different view of God. Many of these arguments are listed in the Theodicy appendix. Let me suggest a partial list of defenses that could be made.

1. Our knowledge of the laws of heaven is inductive (generalized from observations) and not deductive (a priori necessary). Therefore the “law of retribution” is an imperfect human generalization of God’s divine justice, which may not be infallibly construed by our finite understanding.

2. God’s interaction with humans, His revelation, is only limited by His essence (e.g., God cannot lie). But human behavior cannot limit God, for God is free to do whatever is not contrary to His essence. Thus God is never required to respond in a certain way, to perform a perfect retribution for human behavior.

3. God’s choices are inherently beyond our comprehension, for God is transcendent, Man finite. All so-called “laws of heaven” are accidental regularities interpreted by men as “laws”. God is in essence, irrational or supra-rational.

Note the progression in the above list concerning the link between Heaven and Earth. The first says something about man’s limitations in holding his end of the link. The second says something about the link itself, and the third completely abolishes any link whatsoever. Existentialism takes the third approach, performing radical surgery on man’s relationship to Truth. Calvinism and medieval nominalism both adopt the second approach. C.S. Lewis in THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH and others including possibly Karl Barth argue for the first approach.

There are strengths and weaknesses for each position. Clearly the third position silences all rationalism but at the very real danger of cutting the Church adrift from the stays of the historical creeds and confessions. The second position saves God’s face, but at the risk of making it inscrutable or, even worse, hardened. The first may divert the frontal attack, but is vulnerable to a flanking motion of rationalism making additional claims on truth and justice. (See the Theodicy appendices.)

TRINITIES

Perhaps these arguments can be crystallized by analogy to the trinity of communication in which three steps are needed: intention, execution, and comprehension.

1. Intention: As I write this chapter, I have in my mind what it is I want to say. This has a real, though perhaps intangible existence.

2. Execution: I then attempt to write it on the page, editing and rewriting until it comes close to my ideal. The final product is the written word, with potentially eternal existence.

3. Comprehension: Finally you, the reader, with laudable perseverance, convert those words into ideas in your head as well, which have both an intangible and perishable existence.

Now let us apply these steps to the transfer of truth, to the understanding of heavenly laws, to the knowledge of God.

1. The first defense argues that man’s comprehension is limited.

2. The second defense argues that God’s execution is arbitrary.

3. The third defense argues that God’s intentions are irrational.

The chain of truth can be broken at any link to halt the heresies of deterministic rationalism. But can it be broken without setting the ship of reason adrift?

• JOB

Job’s defense against the attack of the three uses elements from the entire chain. He argues that God’s intentions are deliberately hidden, so that he is unable to understand God’s actions. Now Job is not saying that God is normally incomprehensible, rather the opposite, that this is unusual behavior for God. Second, Job argues that God is always free to do as He pleases, that the wicked do prosper and the righteous perish; one counter-example is enough to demolish the equivalence relation of the three friends. But note again that he does not think this is good or just behavior, it is incomprehensible, yet it is God. Third Job argues that Man cannot stand in God’s presence, that despite God’s apparently unfair actions, it is not possible for him or anyone else to present a case before God. This is not a problem with man’s intellect, but a problem with man’s spiritual condition. Thus without impugning God, Job argues that the chain of Truth connecting Heaven and Earth is seriously rusty and occasionally non-functional.

Is this Existentialism? Well, probably not. Job would say that normally God does behave rationally, otherwise his suffering would not be atypical. Job is not saying that God is always unreasonable, but rather that God has been much more approachable in the past. Nor does Job restrict God or condemn God for His actions, if only He would do it in person. Job is devastated by more than the calamities that have befallen him, he is devastated by God’s apparent absence. Carefully note the difference between this feeling of abandonment with Kirkegaard and Chambers’ sense of tragedy. For Kirkegaard, it was the non-believer who must make the leap in the dark to find the light of God’s presence. But for Job, it is the believer who finds, as C.S. Lewis writes in A GRIEF OBSERVED, not only does God not answer the door, but one hears the sound of the latch being locked and the bolts being thrown. Existentialism may arise from the despair of the skeptic but Job’s cry is the voice of the abandoned child.

• ELIHU

Elihu’s attack, coming as it does at the end of Job’s speech, has no countering argument. This has led some commentators to suggest that Elihu holds the answer to Job and the three. However, if we view Elihu with the above filter, we see that Job has already answered him.

Elihu abandons the doomed attempt of the three to prove equivalence between God’s justice and Man’s behavior. Instead, Elihu argues, we need only consider God’s activities and our response. Thus the connection between Heaven and Earth need only be uni-directional, the “implies” connection is sufficient for men to understand God’s demands. In contrast to Job, Elihu argues that God’s directives to men are clear and straightforward, that God’s actions are perfectly understandable, and His intention is plain: the creature must worship the Creator.

To Elihu, Job’s insistence on a personal touch is therefore ludicrous, why God would absolutely swallow him up. No, Elihu says, we should instead submit to God’s chastisement patiently and reverently. That’s the way the Universe is constructed, and the way it runs. Man is completely insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and any attempt by Job to hog the limelight puts far too much attention on this miserable creature. In fact, Job is in real danger of heresy by associating himself with man-centered pagans. Job’s sin, according to Elihu, is in not keeping that stiff upper lip and proper subservience to God. God is free to do what He wants, we are not. In essence, Elihu adopts the second position that God’s actions are arbitrary.

I said earlier that Job has answered Elihu, however, Job never condemned God, as Elihu seems to have heard, rather Job is stating the facts: God has abandoned him. Job says the chain of communication from Heaven to Earth has broken, Elihu refutes Job by telling him it never was a two-way street. If Elihu turns that broken chain and Job’s pain into a virtue, then he is not judging Job, but condemning himself.

GOD

God’s response, on the surface, appears absurd, lending support to those who say God is irrational. One almost gets the feeling that the plot has been developing for 37 chapters, building an air-tight case that God cannot refute, and the author in desperation resorts to a non-sequitor in place of a proper climax. Certainly these final chapters are a major disappointment for those of us who expected an answer to the deep philosophical paradoxes presented by the dialogue. But perhaps this disappointment was intentional, and by it we learn something that a purely philosophical reply would overlook. Let us begin then in the darkness of absurdity and grope towards the light, let us begin with what exists and search for the essence.

• THE GOD WHO IS THERE

The most significant event, independent of the content of these chapters, is simply that God appeared. If God had never come, Job would have died broken-hearted and despairing, a man without hope; even had his fortunes been restored, I doubt that he would have lived long enough to father ten more children. I am hypothesizing, of course, yet the importance of God’s presence to Job cannot be overplayed. This dialogue about epistemology could not be resolved without an appearance by God. Contrast this with the theodicies listed in the appendices, do any of them resolve the problem of evil by a mere appearance of the Almighty? Yet this was the main, if not the only thing Job needed. It is as if the stained glass in the cathedral or the icons in the shrine were a better answer to the problem of evil than St. Augustine’s logic. Why?

In the Garden, was it more important that God gave a reasonable command about the Tree, or that God commanded? When my son had a nightmare and woke up crying, was it more important that I proved the absence of monsters with a night light, or that I was present? For Job’s eloquent complaint, was it more important that God gave a comprehensive answer, or that God answered? Perhaps for pain, Sartre is right, existence does precede essence. In many of these most basic, and therefore childlike difficulties, it is not the intellect that must be satisfied, but the heart that must be comforted. God’s message, by frustrating the intellect, speaks to the heart of this abandoned child. God’s presence, in bypassing reason, goes beyond abstract knowability, it proves His Fatherhood and His huggability.

• THE GOD WHO SPEAKS

However God does more than make a stage appearance, He speaks. And His speech is comprehensible, it is second person singular, it is direct, it is personal. God establishes a two-way, person-to-person, trans-finite, static-free, auditory communication channel. Not only does His presence not “swallow up” Job as predicted by Elihu, but He uses neither dreams, nor circumstances, nor angels to speak with Job. Nor does He communicate with movies, with multimedia, with hyper-linked browsers, with sensory overload or underload, but with words. Just as Adam walked with Him in the Garden, so the Truth is transmitted in person using common speech with ordinary perception.

Why is this so significant? Because many people, including Eliphaz and Elihu, argue that God cannot communicate to us in ordinary ways; Job, on the other hand, expected it. Does this negate their arguments for an infinite God and finite human understanding with its categories and filters? Not really, what it is telling us is that there is nothing common about common speech. Just as we argued that God in His essence is outside spacetime, yet in His revelation to men is both temporal and causal, in exactly the same way His communication with men spans the gulf between Heaven and Earth, it is trans-finite.

Consider Job’s complaint. If no one heard it, its existence would be fleeting and ephemeral; sound waves leaving no imprint on earth or sky. But once his words were written down and “engraved on lead forever”, they would last untold generations. And once God had heard this complaint, those words would become eternal and unchangeable. What has happened? Something very human, something physiological, something created by lips and teeth and breath has become eternal. Yet imagine that Job spoke not Hebrew, but Minoan B, would one still say that his words were everlasting? No, but if through translation the meaning of the words survives, can we not say that both the word and its idea partake of the eternal?

God’s greatest gift to man was speech. Genesis records that God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”, the same breath used for speech. Man’s first act and first responsibility was to name the creatures, to speak, to create eternal ideas out of his fleeting perceptions. None of the other creatures speak, excepting angels and the serpent. If we view the serpent as a mouthpiece for Satan, then Man alone among mortals is the sole owner and caretaker of the gift of speech. Science tells us that not only are monkeys (and most other animals) physiologically not equipped for speech, but only humans have special portions of the brain “hard wired” for language. Rephrasing the comment made very early in this study, God’s divine gift to Aristotle was to equip and enable him to speak of Plato’s ideals. Appearing as it does, as the first thing Man does, “hard wired” into his flesh, essential to his psyche, can we separate this function, this essence from his existence? If it is then part of his existence, could it not be “the image of God”, the umbilical cord to Heaven? For this gift, the human-divine word, spans the darkness, the chaos that lies between the Heavens and the Earth.

• THE GOD WHO EXAMINES

We have said that speech was the umbilical cord, but speech alone is not enough, it is a necessary but not sufficient condition or otherwise rhetoric would still be taught in our institutions of higher learning. That is, I can lecture my students on Astronomy, but I have no clue of their comprehension until I examine them. Now some schools of thought hold that examinations are a waste of time, but nearly everyone would agree that there is some objective, testable criterion of comprehension, of conveyed truth. Examination presupposes that truth can be conveyed, that truth can be grasped, that there are objective criteria to evaluate this transfer. Thus when God examined Job (and also, I believe, the three friends), it was more than an appearance, more than a speech, it was an expectation that Man can know, can really comprehend the Truth.

But wait, you say, God is asking questions for which either there is no answer or the answer is “I don’t know”. What kind of teacher gives an examination where the entire class receives a score of 0? Well, one could imagine a number of scenarios. Perhaps the class had not taken the lessons seriously enough. Perhaps they had the mistaken impression that they knew the material, or perhaps they had a completely erroneous perception that needed correction. As we discussed in earlier chapters, an examination is a much more effective teaching strategy for certain types of problems, for just as self-discovery of the truth is more exciting than lectures, so also self-discovery of error is likely to be far more effective than a reprimand.

If we adopt this view that God’s impossible exam was a reprimand, what was the erroneous perception, or what was the overlooked truth He wanted us to learn? Looking through the questions posed by God, I detect the following types (not counting Hebrew parallels twice):

• 29.. QUESTIONS ABOUT MAN’S ABILITY (CAN YOU..., HAVE YOU...?).

• 11.. QUESTIONS ABOUT MAN’S KNOWLEGE (DO YOU KNOW...?).

• 6... QUESTIONS ABOUT GOD’S ABILITY/KNOWLEGE (WHO CAN...?)

• 4... MISCELLANEOUS QUESTIONS.

Clearly the first message God wants to convey is the inability of man to act like God. The second message is that man has limited knowledge. The third message is that God is neither limited in ability nor in knowledge. The remaining miscellaneous questions ask who it is that is challenging God, or is bringing a claim against Him.

Embedded in these categories, is a meta-question, a question about the categories themselves. In 38:36 God asks, “Who endowed the heart with wisdom or gave understanding to the mind?” The close proximity of this verse to the 11 examination questions concerning human knowledge must be intentional, it must be probing more than “what man knows” and asking “how can man know?”, it must be a question about epistemology. Simultaneously, coming as one of the 6 questions about God’s abilities, it expects the answer “God”. So this question appears to say that God has the power to overcome Man’s learning disabilities. This is key, because God is not saying that Man can never understand spiritual truths, but rather that Man depends upon God’s gift of understanding. Thus God not only expects Man to know the truth, but He grants the ability to do so.

SUMMARY

In conclusion we see that the three friends, in an attempt to explain Job’s suffering, are guilty of a sacrilegious rationalism that makes God a puppet to Man’s choices. In response to this deterministic rationalism, Job and Kirkegaard and many others have attacked the chain of truth that connects Heaven to Earth. Using the analogy of the trinity of communication, the knowledge of God can be broken at three points: intention, execution and comprehension. Although Job’s statements are not as radical as those who follow after him, nonetheless he finds the chain dysfunctional in his circumstances. God’s reply re-establishes every link of the chain, while simultaneously superceding the requirements.

• His presence proves more than His rational intent, it demonstrates His Fatherhood.

• His speech says more than His ability to communicate, it establishes the divine character of the human word.

• His probing questions examine more than finite human abilities, they establish the basis for all human knowledge.

These trinities we have discussed are neither a comprehensive list, since one could discover nearly an infinite number of them, nor an accidental similarity, the way two philosophers might have similar facial hair, rather they point to the very personal character of Truth, to the requirement of dialogue with the Truth. The Truth cannot be conveyed otherwise. Be it objective or subjective abstraction, an abstract concept of truth is immediately subjected to the rationalism of the three friends and the existentialist counter-reaction, it is as much a failure of comprehension as the man who watched the blinker bulbs. For only personal truth can rebuild the chain to answer the heart as well as the mind. And if the Truth is a person, we will only know the Truth when we are in relationship with him.

________

1. Oswald Chambers, MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST (Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc., New York., 1935)

2. Oswald Chambers, BAFFLED TO FIGHT BETTER (Discovery House Publishers, Box 3566 Grand Rapids MI 49501, 1931)

3. God Questions Man's Ability

Job 38:12,16,20,22,31,32,34,35,37,39.

Job 39:9,10,11,12,19,20,26,27.

Job 40:9,24. Job 41:1,2,3,4,5,6,7,13,14.

4. God Questions Man's Knowlege

Job 38:4,6,17,18,19,24,28,29,33. Job 39:1,2.

5. God States His Ability and Knowledge

Job 38:5,8,25,36,41. Job 39:5.

6. Miscellaneous Questions

Job 38:2. Job 40:2,8. Job 41:11.

________

Copyright © 1997 Rob Sheldon

Wait, no, don’t run away! I can see your eyes already starting to glaze over when you see that title. Please think of this as a small bolster and support to your faith, at a general level but profound. (And isn’t that true of Jesus in general, that He is very accessible at a general level yet is amazingly profound?)

Let’s get right to the issue in this first article: how can we determine the truth of statements that claim knowledge about something beyond our experience (that is, the metaphysical)? For example, Jesus says, “I am the living bread that came down out of heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he shall live forever,” and “I have come as light into the world, that everyone who believes in Me may not remain in darkness.” How can these be validated?

After all, anyone can make claims about what is true in the spiritual realm. The comedian George Carlin had a joke about an ex-hippie who founded a religion which teaches that “when you die, your soul goes to a garage in Buffalo.” Here in Berkeley, I have often had the thought that a person is permitted to believe just about anything so long as it’s not the Bible. So how can we determine what is true? What are some things Jesus says and does to bolster His own claims?

For this we look at Mark 2:1-11, the story about the paralytic who is healed by Jesus after being lowered through the roof by his friends. Jesus says to him, “your sins are forgiven” (which is a claim about the spiritual realm, that He has authority to forgive anyone’s sins). But in vv. 6-7, the scribes wonder, “How can this man say that? No one can forgive sins except God alone.”

So Jesus backs up His claim by doing something empirically verifiable, something in their experience: “Which is easier, to say to him, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say ‘Arise, take up your pallet, and walk’? But in order that you may know that the Son of Man has authority to forgive sins,” He said to the man, “I say to you, rise, take up your pallet and go home”– and the man did just that!

Do you see? He backed up His claim about the spiritual world by something miraculous yet very visible in their experience. The feeding of the 5,000 in John 6 is another instance of this, as is His promise of His resurrection in John 2.

How can this work, when we are engaged in conversation with non-believers? There are two pieces of empirical evidence to which I frequently return: the evidence for the Resurrection, and the fact that something happened, way back when, which caused a group of Sabbath-worshipping Jews to become Sunday-worshipping Jews. It is worthwhile for every Christian to have, readily available in their minds, those facts which demonstrate that the Resurrection really took place, in real time and real history. The empirically verifiable validates His claims about the spiritual realm.

“Which is easier, to say this or to do that? But in order that you may know…”

==========

In the first article on this topic [above], we saw how in Mark 2:1-11 Jesus used something that was empirically verifiable (the healing of the paralytic) to validate His claim of something that was not empirically verifiable (that He has authority to forgive the sins of any human being). And we considered how we now have a verifiable event of more weight and significance, which is the resurrection of Jesus, predicted by Him and by the Scriptures, and which took place in real history, not in some mythical ‘religious history.’

We now turn to another incident which displays an interesting phenomenon, viz., that people’s very perceptions are colored by their receptivity to Truth.

In John 12:28-30, in the middle of a rather intense and brief discourse, we hear Jesus crying out to His Father, and the response of the crowd:

“Father, glorify Thy name.” There came therefore a voice out of heaven: “I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.” The multitude therefore, who stood by and heard it, were saying that it had thundered; others were saying, “An angel has spoken to Him.”

Now, please note here that there was one phenomenon, one event: the Father spoke to the Son, and said comprehensible words. But there were three different perceptions of this one phenomenon:

– Jesus (and presumably at least John) heard actual speech;

– others who perhaps had some spiritual interest but in some way were not fully receptive to God identified what they heard as ‘the voice of an angel’;

– a third group heard nothing more nor other than thunder.

Curious, isn’t it? The very same event received three distinct interpretations. C.S. Lewis depicts this same kind of phenomenon in the Creation scene towards the end of the Narnia book The Magician’s Nephew, where Uncle Digory cannot perceive that the animals are talking, only that they are bellowing and braying. (He shows a similar effect in the great gathering scene in Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in the under-rated space trilogy.)

What this should tell us is that people’s perceptions of spiritual phenomena — such as the Resurrection, the Bible, the life of Jesus, His claims on every human being — can be fundamentally affected by whether or not they are receptive to spiritual truth. This is all the more reason to pray, to beseech God to open the eyes, ears, hearts, and minds of those around us who so desperately need to hear and heed His voice!!

==========

The first article in this brief series showed that Jesus validated His claims to authority (and indeed to Deity) by the empirically verifiable event of healing a paralytic, and that the most potent and fundamental verifiable event to validate everything He claimed was and is the resurrection. In the second article, we saw that a person’s perception of spiritual truth can be quite dependent on their receptivity to this truth. (Perhaps this could be summarized as “Receptivity brings perceptivity”?)

Here in this final article we will see a similar truth to the second, yet phrased quite bluntly by the Lord Jesus. He says explicitly that a person’s willingness to obey the Father is an essential condition for being able to perceive the truth of what Jesus says.

John 7:16-17:

“Jesus therefore answered them and said, “My teaching is not Mine, but His who sent Me. If any man is willing to do His will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of God, or whether I speak from Myself.”

Do you see? This is as true of us who follow Jesus as it is of those who do not, that our willingness to obey will have a huge impact on our perceptivity, our ability to receive it as coming from God.

As the philosopher J. Budziszewski says in a wonderful article, “Escape from Nihilism” (http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9801/budziszewski.html – perhaps taken from a speech?), “modern ethics is going about matters backwards. It assumes that the problem of human sin is mainly cognitive – that it has to do with the state of our knowledge. In other words, it holds that we really don’t know what’s right and wrong and that we are trying to find out. Actually the problem is volitional – it has to do with the state of our will. In other words, by and large we do know the basics of right and wrong but wish we didn’t, and we are trying, for one reason or another, to keep ourselves in ignorance.”

The human Will, left to itself, rebels against God. This is why Jesus says, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him,” and this too is why we must pray for those whom we care about. It is the cause as well that the best reasoning of those opposed to the Gospel, no matter how impressive or high-sounding, is flawed because at its heart is a self-destructive problem of the Will. Reason itself is tugged wayward by human sin.

Comments from kids about love - Part 1 of 4

CONCERNING WHY LOVE HAPPENS BETWEEN TWO PARTICULAR PEOPLE

"One of the people has freckles and so he finds somebody else who has

freckles too." - Andrew, age 6

"No one is sure why it happens, but I heard it has something to do with

how you smell ... That's why perfume and deodorant are so popular." -

Mae, age 9

"I think you're supposed to get shot with an arrow or something, but the

rest of it isn't supposed to be so painful." - Manuel, age 8

ON WHAT FALLING IN LOVE IS LIKE

"Like an avalanche where you have to run for your life." - John, age 9

"If falling in love is anything like learning how to spell, I don't want

to do it. It takes too long." - Glenn, age 7

ON THE ROLE OF BEAUTY AND HANDSOMENESS IN LOVE

"If you want to be loved by somebody who isn't already in your family, it

doesn't hurt to be beautiful." - Anita C., age 8

"It isn't always just how you look. Look at me. I'm handsome like

anything and I haven't got anybody to marry me yet." - Brian, age 7

"Beauty is skin deep. But how rich you are can last a long time." -

Christine, age 9

REFLECTIONS ON THE NATURE OF LOVE

"Love is the most important thing in the world, but baseball is pretty

good too." - Greg, age 8

HOW DO PEOPLE IN LOVE TYPICALLY BEHAVE?

"Mooshy ... like puppy dogs ... except puppy dogs don't wag their

tails nearly as much." - Arnold, age 10

"All of a sudden, the people get movie fever so they can sit together

in the dark." - Sherm, age 8