Grace and Miracles

Thoughts on Apologetics

2011-11-13T13:15:00.000-08:00

George MacDonald:

I fear only lest, able to see and write these things, I should fail of witnessing and myself be, after all, a castaway---no king but a talker; no disciple of Jesus, ready to go with Him to the death, but an arguer about the truth.

C. S. Lewis, in the poem, "The Apologist's Evening Prayer":

Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust, instead

of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head.

From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee,

O Thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.

Anette Acker, in the blog comments, prior to ever writing anything on apologetics (quoting C. S. Lewis):

"What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words."

I'm sure that Lewis, as an apologist, saw the futility of words. People will always find the words to defend what they want to believe. Only a personal encounter with God (even if it's not dramatic) brings true faith.

Do I agree with that? Well, I certainly agree with George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis, but I'm not sure about that Anette Acker person. (People who use words like "always" are always wrong.)

Apologetics has been very helpful to me in terms of answering the question of whether Christian theism is intellectually defensible, even as I seek out and honestly confront the best counter-arguments. The answer is an unequivocal Yes--more so than I expected when I first started engaging in discussions with atheists.

But I think it has limited value in terms of changing minds in dramatic ways, and this is why: First, we are all governed by will and emotion as well as intellect, and a person's worldview is often a major part of his or her identity. I remember when Norway voted on EC membership back when I was a child. Everybody had bumper stickers that said, "JA" or "NEI." I may not have understood any of the issues, but I knew that all right-thinking people said "JA," and a "NEI" bumper sticker was conclusive proof of feeblemindedness, a character flaw, or both.

Although most adults are a little more sophisticated than that, we are still prone to thinking in terms of in-crowds and out-crowds and banding together against the opposition. So completely changing our minds and, consequently, our identities, is difficult.

Second, those who have never experienced the presence of God in their lives and for whom God feels non-existent will require a much higher burden of proof than someone who has lived the Christian life, studied the Bible in-depth, seen answers to prayer, and experienced spiritual growth. The same evidence may be sufficient for one person and not for another.

Ray Comfort once wrote a couple of posts about a Canadian Christian talk show host who was experiencing a crisis of faith. The main reason for his crisis was that he had never experienced God's presence in his life, so for him God may as well be non-existent. How much would it help him if I said, "Just look at this evidence and these arguments. Can't you see that Christianity is true?" No, he probably wouldn't be able to see it because his own immediate experience would speak to him more powerfully than anything I could say. As hard as it is to change a worldview, it may be easier than maintaining a radical disconnect between experience and belief, at least for some people. He would need prayer more than argument.

Judging from their writings, C. S. Lewis and George MacDonald did not experience this disconnect. However, the above quotes capture their sense that apologetics, or thoughts of God, are a poor substitute for God Himself, and how our thoughts can crowd out the stillness that God inhabits. If I'm always arguing about God, unable to rein in my thoughts, how can I draw near to Him?

I'm going to take an indefinite break from blogging about apologetics. The central reason is that it has become impossible to keep the comments from getting out of control, and it's burning me out. (The post on my daughter's study abroad has 199 comments on numerous subjects, and about half of them are mine.) I have always felt that apologetics blogs can be counter-productive if arguments are made and not defended or questions remain unanswered. Although the truth of Christianity does not depend on the ability of any given Christian to defend it, people still often conclude that there is no answer if they don't see one. Maybe it is my fault that my discussions spiral out control, but I have not discovered any way to avoid it without leaving unanswered objections, questions, and arguments. And that's something I feel irresponsible doing. If there is a solution I have not found it.

I do feel privileged to have had these discussions with you all and have learned a lot. They have been an invaluable gift to me and I appreciate your friendship. But everything tells me that I'm at a point of transition.

So although I will do a post on the power of prayer, as I've said I would, I will not be engaging in debate in the comments.

Rick's Legal Thriller Hit #1 in the Kindle Store Today!

2011-11-11T16:37:00.000-08:00

Just out of the blue, Amazon decided to feature When the Devil Whistles as their Daily Deal today (Friday) for $1.99, and it shot up to #1, right above John Grisham!

It has been #1 much of the day, but I figured I would immortalize it by taking a screenshot.

The book description is:

Allie Whitman is a professional whistleblower with a knack for sniffing out fraud in government contracts. Conner Norman is a gifted litigator and together they form Devil to Pay, Inc., a shell corporation that files lawsuits based on Allie s investigations. They soon find themselves fighting potentially fatal battles in and out of the courtroom, going great lengths to protect secrets that could ruin them both.

And the author description:

Rick Acker is a Deputy Attorney General in the California Department of Justice. He prosecutes corporate fraud lawsuits like those described in When the Devil Whistles. He has led confidential investigations into a number of large and sensitive cases that made headlines in and out of California. Rick holds law degrees from the University of Oslo and the University of Notre Dame, where he graduated with honors. In addition to his novels, he is a contributing author on two legal treatises published by the American Bar Association. Rick lives with his wife in the San Francisco area. Visit him on the Web at: www.rickacker.com.

The Eternal Weight of Glory

2011-10-19T05:48:00.000-07:00

On May 20, 2007, my husband's brother died of cancer, leaving a wife and a two-year-old daughter. He was thirty-eight.

His pain became excruciating toward the end of his life, and one day, after getting off the phone with my mother-in-law, I remember praying, How can anything be worth this? How can You let a good man with a young family die in ever-growing pain?

Two weeks before he died, with very little remaining strength, he spent several hours at his computer, writing. He had degrees from Brown, Princeton, and the University of Chicago Law School. He had worked for a large, prestigious law firm and had left it to follow his dream to do environmental protection for a non-profit organization. He had lived in France and Kenya and had climbed mountains around the world. But his "Final Jottings"—right before the cancer attacked his brain—were : "Do not fail to seize the love of God, which is available to you in the all-embracing sacrifice of Christ."

I have for a while talked about writing a post on the problem of evil, but theodicy is a daunting subject because the Bible is never philosophical about suffering and evil. The shortest, and, in my opinion, the most powerful verse in the Bible is John 11:35, which follows the death of Lazarus: "Jesus wept." Jesus knew that He would raise Lazarus from the dead and increase the faith of those present, but He was "deeply moved in spirit and was troubled" when He saw their grief (John 11:33).

The Book of Job is all about the problem of evil, and yet Job, with his raw and authentic complaint to God, is applauded by God, while his friends, with their judgmental platitudes, are sharply rebuked (Job 42:7). God rejects their simplistic theodicy and answers Job by asking if he really is in a position to judge God. Does he have the wisdom of God?

The problem of evil is complex because, on the one hand, God has permitted evil and suffering, but on the other hand, we are called to overcome evil and alleviate suffering wherever we see it. Acts 10:38 says that Jesus "went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him." So the devil is responsible for oppression and suffering, and God's will is healing and well-being. But God created Satan and all the fallen angels, and He could put an end to all suffering and evil right now.

Why doesn't He?

In order to do justice to the problem of evil, we have to put it in its proper context. Although it is a practical problem for anyone, philosophically it is a Christian problem, since Christianity, more than any religion, speaks of a God of love. But the Apostle Paul, who was called to his ministry with the words, "I will show him how much he must suffer for My name's sake" (Acts 9:16), says in 2 Corinthians 4:17-18: "For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal."

Paul says that suffering is producing for us an eternal weight of glory. And since God is preparing us for the eternal Paradise that will someday replace this temporary order, it is no wonder that if we belong to Christ we will become familiar with the dizzying spin on the potter's wheel.

Only a particular kind of universe can produce certain moral qualities in us. If we never encountered danger, how could we practice courage? If we never experienced opposition, how could we learn fortitude? If nobody ever wronged us, we would not learn forgiveness. If poverty did not exist, we would have no opportunity to practice charity or learn contentment. Failure and suffering can teach us humility and empathy. If we were self-sufficient and never wanted for anything, we would not seek God.

The new Paradise will, unlike the innocent Eden, consist of redeemed sinners who will have known the deepest lows of human existence and its greatest heights, like a symphony of high and low notes, dramatic fortissimos and tender pianissimos. That is how God uses evil for His own good purposes, and Romans 8:18 says: "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us." This life, for better or for worse, is like a mist that appears for a short while and then disappears (James 4:14). But our share in the kingdom of God will last forever.

To be sure, hardship can bring bitterness and hopelessness, but that is a choice we make. We can also choose to overcome evil with good and let the fire of affliction purify us. As Augustine says:

For, in the same fire, gold gleams and straw smokes; under the same flail the stalk is crushed and the grain threshed; the lees are not mistaken for oil because they have issued from the same press. So, too, the tide of trouble will test, purify, and improve the good, but beat, crush, and wash away the wicked. So it is that, under the weight of the same affliction, the wicked deny and blaspheme God, and the good pray to Him and praise Him. The difference is not in what people suffer but in the way they suffer. The same shaking that makes fetid water stink makes perfume issue a more pleasant odor.

It is to the one who overcomes that God will "grant to eat of the tree of life which is in the Paradise of God" (Revelation 2:7). And in order to overcome, there has to be something to overcome. Romans 12:21 says, "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." We are not to take what life throws at us sitting down. We are called to fight! And we overcome the world by our faith (1 John 5:4), which is the power of God within us.

My brother-in-law passed into eternity on a high note. He overcame the ravages of cancer that threaten to dehumanize and became increasingly conscious of the love of God through it all. His Final Jottings may, from an eternal vantage point, have been his greatest accomplishment of all.

But in no way am I downplaying his tragic and untimely death. Death is an enemy that will someday be destroyed (1 Corinthians 15:26), because evil and suffering are not God's will.

And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, "Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away (Revelation 21:2-4).

Why I Haven't Been Blogging

2011-10-02T06:07:00.000-07:00

I apologize for dropping from the face of the blogosphere a couple of weeks ago, but our thirteen-year-old son was hospitalized with what turns out to have been a very severe reaction to a medication, and I'm just now becoming capable of letting my mind do anything but pray. I think he is going to be fine, although he has unfortunately inherited his mother's sensitivity to medications--I'm allergic to three antibiotics.

Now we just have to figure out what to do about all the missed schoolwork . . .

Divine Inspiration

2011-09-04T07:40:00.000-07:00

Darkknight56 asked me what it means for the Bible to be inspired by God, and I said that I would do a post on the subject. So let’s start by looking at the story of Peter warming himself by the fire in the courtyard of the high priest and denying Jesus three times before the rooster crowed. In Matthew 26 and Mark 14, the high priest and other members of the Sanhedrin questioned Jesus in the courtyard and condemned Him to death before Peter denied Jesus and before the rooster crowed. However, in Luke 22, Jesus was only held in custody in the courtyard, and the denial of Peter and the rooster’s crowing happened before the Sanhedrin took Jesus to the council chamber to be questioned.

In other words, Mark and Matthew have the meeting where Jesus references Daniel 7:13 take place before dawn in the courtyard and Luke records it as taking place in the council chamber during the day. Unless Jesus was questioned and pronounced guilty twice—once before and once after Peter denied Him—it looks like the details don’t quite line up.

Oh, no! What do we do? We take a chill pill because the sky is not falling. What does the Bible say about divine inspiration? 2 Timothy 3:16 says: “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.” The Greek word theopneustos is only used in 2 Timothy 3:16 and it literally means, “God-breathed.”

So it says that all of Scripture is God-breathed, but it also tells us the purpose of the Scriptures—to train us in righteousness and equip us for every good work, or, as 2 Timothy 3:15 says, to give us “wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.”

If this is the purpose of divine inspiration, then unless we insist on holding the Bible to a standard that it doesn’t set for itself, the minor discrepancies I mentioned before don’t matter. We can be saved through faith and equipped for God’s work without knowing exactly when and where Jesus was questioned by the Sanhedrin.

Historical Accuracy

But of course the facts do matter because Christianity is a religion based on the historical fact of the resurrection of Jesus. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:17, if Christ has not been raised from the dead, our faith is in vain. This fact is the lynchpin of Christianity.

So the New Testament narratives have to be historically reliable, and according to the late Roman historian A. N. Sherwin-White, they are. Sherwin-White did a detailed analysis of the trial of Jesus in the synoptic Gospels and the Book of Acts. He says, “As soon as Christ enters the Roman orbit at Jerusalem, the confirmation begins. For Acts, the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming.”

And he does address the question of when and where the trial before the Sanhedrin took place by saying: “The detail of the time-table may seem trivial, but it is like the button that hangs the murderer. Mark and Matthew have the time-table right, where Luke is less probable.” In other words, Mark and Matthew (and John) are correct that it took place at night and they took Jesus to Pilate in the morning.

Why does he say that the details are like the button that hangs the murderer? For two reasons: First, Sherwin-White says that we have enough information about Roman officials’ daily round to know that they started their workday very early and ended it by noon at the latest. Some officials started before dawn and completed their work by ten or eleven. This means that on Luke’s scheme, the Jews would have arrived at the Praetorium to see Pontius Pilate too late, while he was engaging in his organized leisure activities. Sherwin-White concludes, “The Jews, because of the festival, were in a hurry. Hence there was every reason to hold the unusual night session if they were to catch the Procurator at the right moment.”

Second, he says: “The quite unessential detail of the fire, which is common to both Mark and Luke, in the story of Peter’s denial, supports the Marcan version. Why light a fire—an act of some extravagance—if everyone was sleeping through the night?” If Jesus had just been held in custody in the courtyard of the high priest, as Luke reported, no fire would have been lit.

So through his knowledge of Roman history, Sherwin-White is able to confirm the historicity of these important events that have in the past been rejected by scholars like German theologian and church historian, Hans Lietzmann. (According to Sherwin-White, Lietzmann “pours a great deal of scorn” on the idea of the trial taking place at night and concludes that no trial ever took place before the Sanhedrin.)

Sherwin-White likewise confirms the historicity of minor details like the soldiers dividing amongst themselves Jesus' clothing (Luke 23:34), by saying: "Given the relevant prophecy from the Old Testament [Psalm 22:18], there is every reason to assume that this is one of the evolved myths dear to the form-critics. But, as has been familiar since Mommsen, legal texts confirm that it was the accepted right of the executioner's squad to share out the minor possessions of their victim."

In other words, in spite of minor discrepancies like the one between Luke and the other Gospels regarding the time-table, the New Testament appears to be remarkably accurate historically.

How Can We Tell if God Inspired the Scriptures?

Of course the evidence for historical accuracy tells us little about whether the Bible is God-breathed. It merely says something about the human authors, much like the accuracy of a secular document does. Nor does the minor discrepancy in Luke tell us that the New Testament is not God-breathed, since it does not undermine the purpose of divine inspiration stated in 2 Timothy 3:16.

To address the question of whether the Bible is divinely inspired, we have to see if it contains evidence that it is the product of one Mind, communicating the message of salvation. If so, then this evidence would be supportive of the claim and purpose of 2 Timothy 3:15-16.

Let’s focus on the beginning of Genesis, one of the most contentious parts of the Bible and, if my observations are an accurate gauge, the cause of most defections from Christianity. But I'm not going to get into the question of the age of the earth or other scientific aspects of creation. Instead, I am going to talk about some of the typology of Genesis and see how well it fits the theology of salvation.

A "type" is something in the Old Testament foreshadowing or pre-figuring Christ or His salvation. Luke 24:27 refers to typology (Moses) and prophecy (the prophets), when it says, "Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures." Although what Jesus actually said is not recorded there, Jesus often explicitly referenced the Old Testament types during His ministry. However, other types are left for us to discover on our own.

Paul says in Romans 5:14 that Adam is a type of Him who was to come. So if Adam is a type of Christ, then Eve is a type of the church, which is the bride of Christ (Ephesians 5:25, Revelation 21:9). In Genesis 3:6, where Eve is tempted to eat the fruit, she noticed that the tree was "good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise." In other words, her temptation falls into all three categories mentioned in 1 John 2:16, "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life." But she fell.

Jesus was also tempted by Satan in ways that fit into these three categories (Luke 4:3-12): Turn a stone into bread (lust of the flesh), worship Satan and He would receive the splendor and authority of all the kingdoms of the world (the lust of the eyes), and jump from the highest point of the temple and legions of angels would catch Him (the boastful pride of life). He resisted the temptations and fulfilled all righteousness on behalf of the church.

After Adam and Eve fell, they sewed together fig leaves to cover themselves. This corresponds to Matthew 21:19, where Jesus curses a fig tree that has no fruit but only leaves, as well as the parable in Luke 13:6-9 of the fig tree in the vineyard that didn't bear any fruit.

In Genesis 3:21, God takes away the fig leaves and covers Adam and Eve with garments of an animal's skin. Likewise, God covers us with the righteousness of the sacrificial Lamb, Christ. John 15 says that if we abide in Christ, we will bear good fruit—in other words, we will have the righteousness of God.

Genesis 3:8 says that Adam and Eve hid from the presence of the Lord God after they sinned. Isaiah 59:2 says that our sins separate us from God. However, God sought them (Genesis 3:9), and when they responded, He gave them the garments of skin. Luke 15:4-9 says that God seeks the lost. However, it is up to us to respond if we are to receive His salvation (Revelation 3:20).

They were driven out of the Garden of Eden and not permitted to eat from the tree of life. But Paradise was restored through Christ, who says in Revelation 2:7: "To him who overcomes, I will grant to eat of the tree of life which is in the Paradise of God."

A lot more could be said—like how Adam was put into a deep sleep and Eve was "taken out of man," just like the church was born out of Christ after He died on the cross (Jesus often referred to death as "sleep"), and how God finished His work of creation on the sixth day and Jesus said on the sixth day, "It is finished!" However, my purpose in all this is simply to illuminate the theological cohesiveness of the Bible, as if one Mind is communicating His message through all the various human authors, spanning many centuries and two religions. And even in the very first pages of the Old Testament, the central message is about salvation.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles—and Sending Daughters Abroad

2011-08-01T17:26:00.000-07:00

I've probably watched the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles at least five or six times, and it's just as laugh-out-loud funny each time. It is about a man (Steve Martin) who tries to get home to his family for Thanksgiving, and everything that can go wrong goes wrong on his trip, including the fact that he always ends up with an annoying shower ring salesman as a companion (John Candy). But I don't think it's just the comedic genius of John Candy and Steve Martin that appeals to me. I watch that movie to truly appreciate the fact that I am not out there experiencing a trip of nightmarish proportions. I'm experiencing it vicariously, yes, but with the power to instantly end the experience via the click of a remote control and go to sleep in my own bed--a power I woefully lack when I'm actually out there braving airports and delayed flights. So that movie is more than just mindless entertainment to me--it's a complex psychological experience.

I've been having the opposite psychological experience since I woke up this morning, after finding out that my daughter Chelsea has been stuck at the Reykjavik airport on her way to Norway--about sixteen hours now. She will hopefully arrive in Oslo by 2:30 a.m., barring further delays. After much time talking with relatives on the phone, communicating with Chelsea through email, and researching hotels on the Internet, she has a hotel room by the airport and will be picked up by my dad when she checks out tomorrow at noon. Hurrah for the Internet for making long distance helicopter parenting possible!

Not that Chelsea needs helicopter parenting. She pretty much planned this year abroad entirely by herself--figuring out how to get her college credits transferred, how to get a Norwegian social security number and passport (she has dual citizenship), learning the culture and language, and following the Norwegian news. She has lived and breathed Norway for the past year.

She has also carefully researched the Norwegian fashions. (In case anyone is wondering, Converse high tops are a must have if you are planning a trip in the near future--the more colors the better.) A couple of days before she left, after too many trips to the mall to buy and return shoes and stuff, I warned her against going to Norway with a Norwegianer-than-thou attitude, by telling her about my Italian friend back when I studied in Norway my junior year in college. His real name was Giorgio, but when he moved to Norway he exercised the exceedingly poor judgment of legally changing it to Jørgen. He wore traditional Norwegian sweaters all the time and spoke Nynorsk (the version of written Norwegian that combines dialects and which is used in more traditional parts of the country). He was far more Norwegian than those of us who were born there, and of course we thought that an Italian born-again Norwegian was too funny.

Chelsea explained that she was in no danger of becoming like Jørgen because although she had worked very hard to become as Norwegian as possible, she wouldn't look like she had tried too hard. She would look like she effortlessly blended, instead of screaming, "I am American!"

Maybe true. But even with all the right footwear, the best laid plans of mice and men and college girls can go awry. Several months ago when we made the reservations, Chelsea didn't need a meddling mother to tell her that a ten-hour layover in Reykjavik (which has now turned to sixteen) was too long and that she should go through London instead. She loved Iceland almost as much as she loves Norway (and yes, I think the past tense is probably correct, although I haven't asked her about it).

I just got on Flight Stats and found out that her flight out of Iceland has taken off. Yay! And it will arrive at 2:30 a.m. local time. Not so yay--especially since we left for the San Francisco Airport at 6:45 a.m. yesterday, and her trip will take a grand total of 37 hours. But at least it should be over soon.

So I think I'll take a deep breath (after I call and double-check Chelsea's hotel reservations in Oslo) and watch Planes, Trains and Automobiles again tonight.

UPDATE at 7:30 p.m. Pacific Time: She is now in her hotel room and the lady at the desk was nice enough to offer to let her check out at 2 p.m. tomorrow, so she can sleep in.

Why is Faith Necessary for Salvation?

2011-07-27T07:45:00.000-07:00

First, I want to apologize for taking so long since my last post. I commented on a couple of other blogs, and although I enjoyed the discussions, they went on for far too long. This is a habit of mine that I'm going to try to conquer, so I can take less time between blog posts.

However, I had planned to answer a couple of questions on Think and Wonder. Wonder and Think . . . about two months ago, but since that post is now old, and my answer is kind of lengthy (very atypical for me, I know), I figured I would just do a blog post on it. Maybe others have the same questions.

Why is belief a necessary component of Christianity? Of salvation?
Why this mental affirmation of the death and resurrection of Christ for our salvation?

Hebrews 11:6 addresses the first question: "And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him."

In other words, in order to come to God, we have to believe that he exists and that seeking him is worth it. There is nothing esoteric about this concept. Unless we believe that a hospital exists and is likely to cure our disease, we will not go to the hospital either.

And it is by coming to God, through Christ, that we are saved. This theme of God calling us to come to him runs through the Old and the New Testaments:

"Does a maiden forget her jewelry, a bride her wedding ornaments? Yet my people have forgotten me, days without number" (Jeremiah 2:32).

"Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare. Give ear and come to me; hear me, that your soul may live. I will make an everlasting covenant with you, my faithful love promised to David" (Isaiah 55:1-3).

"If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him" (John 7:37-38).

These verses talk about persistently coming to God, not just responding to an altar call. It is the lifestyle described in Micah 6:8: "He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."

And why does God require us to come to him or walk with him? So he can heal our souls. Walking with him has great reward, which is why Jeremiah 2:32 asks rhetorically: "Does a maiden forget her jewelry, a bride her wedding ornaments?"

When Jesus laments unbelief, he says: "For this people's heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them" (Matthew 13:15). Unbelief shuts us off from the healing God wants to give.

However, Hebrews 11:6 implies that simply seeking God earnestly is indicative of sufficient faith. And this is illustrated in the story of Mark 9:19-25, where Jesus tells the father of the convulsing boy: "Everything is possible for him who believes." The father responds with, "I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!" This man did not have very much faith, but he had enough to seek Jesus and to ask for help--even help to believe.

What is Faith?

There are two facets of the Christian faith: First, there is the intellectual belief that it is true. This depends on objective evidence and reasoning. And second, faith means the ability to receive what God wants to give. Jesus frequently chided his disciples for their unbelief--in spite of having seen many miracles--referring to it as the hardness of their hearts. The disciples had evidence, and yet they often doubted (Mark 16:14).

The Intellectual Aspect of Faith

Christmas movies often tout the virtues of faith, but faith in and of itself is entirely neutral. It is good to believe something true and bad to believe something false. And to know the difference, we have to think critically.

The Judeo-Christian tradition is highly intellectual. The Jews have always valued literacy, and the Book of Proverbs continually exhorts us to acquire wisdom and understanding. Proverbs 8 is a celebration of wisdom, saying, "For wisdom is better than jewels; and all desirable things cannot compare with her" (Proverbs 8:11), and characterizing wisdom as God's companion when he planned out and created the universe (Proverbs 8:22-31).

When the Book of Acts describes Paul's evangelistic efforts, they almost always involve him reasoning with people (Acts 17:2, Acts 17:17, Acts 18:4, Acts 18:19). He reasoned with the Jews from the Old Testament Scriptures, but when he addressed the Greeks in Athens, he met them where they were by referencing what was familiar to their culture (Acts 17:22-31).

Of all the groups that Paul addressed, only the Jews from Berea were called "noble" or "noble-minded," because they "they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true" (Acts 17:11). In other words, they were receptive to the message, but they didn't accept it uncritically--they checked the Scriptures to see if what Paul said about the Messiah was true.

The Bereans were not motivated by jealousy like the Thessalonians, nor did they scoff like some of the Athenians. They simply evaluated the claims of Paul rationally, and this earned them the description "noble-minded."

The Spiritual Aspect of Faith

Although intellectual belief is important, by itself it cannot save us. James 2:19 says: "You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder. But are you willing to recognize, you foolish fellow, that faith without works is useless." The faith that saves is the kind that changes our hearts so that our actions follow. This is a gift to us from God, by his Spirit.

Ezekiel 36:26-27 prophesies: "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws." Saving faith enables us to receive what God wants to give, so that we may become everything God intends for us to be.

How do we get this kind of faith? Revelation 3:20 says: "Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me." All we have to do is surrender to God and permit him access to our hearts and our needs.

This is not something we do just once. If we want to grow spiritually we have to keep an open door policy with God, so that we come to know him and let him do the renovation that needs to be done in us. The more we let that happen, the more we make it possible for God to work through us, building his kingdom.

Why Is Faith in the Resurrection Necessary for Our Salvation?

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:17: "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins." And in Romans 6:10-11, he says: "For the death that [Jesus] died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus."

In The Resurrection of the Son of God, N. T. Wright uses the analogy of a bank account to explain what this means (he is referring to the word translated "consider" or "reckon" in Romans 6:11).

When Paul says 'reckon', he does not mean that the act of 'reckoning' something creates a new entity . . . the language of 'reckoning' is that of adding up a sum, a column of figures. When I add up the money in my bank account, that does not create the money; life is not, alas, that easy. It merely informs me of the amount that is already there. When I have completed the 'reckoning', I have not brought about a new state of affairs in the real world outside my mind; the only new state of affairs is that my mind is now aware of the way things actually are.

When Jesus died for us and rose again, he set up an eternal "bank account" for us with everything we could possibly need or desire forever. By his stripes we are healed from the explosive temper that controls us, the demanding ego that makes us and those close to us miserable, and every affliction of body or soul.

And we have to know about that for the same reason that if we possess a bank account containing a large sum, it does us no good if we have no idea it exists--or if we know about it but rarely get around to making a trip to the bank.

As Paul says in Ephesians 1:18-20: "I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms."

Faith means having the eyes of our hearts enlightened, so that we can understand that the power that raised Jesus from the dead is available to us. And that power comes from the Holy Spirit, whom we are given as a pledge of our inheritance when we believe (Ephesians 1:13-14).

My Faith Journey

2011-06-15T19:41:00.000-07:00

A statue on Notre Dame campus
with the inscription, Venite Ad Me Omnes
("Come to Me All")

My friend, Mary, has asked me to contribute a chapter to her book about people who have emerged through a crisis of faith with a changed and stronger faith, and the following is the first draft. I would welcome any suggestions on how to make it better.

At first I wasn't sure if what I experienced was a true crisis of faith in the way that others have experienced it, because I never felt abandoned by God for very long. When, at my lowest point, the thought, Maybe God does not exist, began to form in my mind, it was countered by the words of Job in Handel’s Messiah through the car stereo: “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” God was closer to me than ever—hovering over the chaos.

So in that sense my crisis was very different from those who eventually abandon their faith. But in other ways I suspect that it was similar: My crisis shook the very foundation of my faith, which had to be rebuilt brick by brick into something more solid. I came to a point where platitudes wouldn’t sustain me—I had to know that it was true. My faith could no longer be like a fragile object stored in a glass cabinet. It had to be taken out and tested at the risk of its destruction.

I faced the crossroad that permits no shrinking back into one’s comfort zone, which leads either to a stronger, deeper faith or its abandonment. Mary’s book is from the perspective of those who end up taking the former path, as described by George MacDonald in words that comforted me during that phase of my life:

"A man may be haunted with doubts, and only grow thereby in faith. Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to the honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood . . . Doubt must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed."

My Faith Prior to the Crisis

My faith background is fairly eclectic. I was baptized into the Norwegian Lutheran State Church, of which one of my only memories is being stuck in the annual going-to-church-on-Christmas-Eve traffic for about an hour, when the entire community tried to cram into a relatively small traditional church. My other memory was of going to the same church on a school field trip in fourth grade and being shocked when a Pakistani boy in my class announced before the field trip that he didn't believe in our God. That was my first experience of anyone believing anything different from what the state church taught.

After moving to the U.S. when I was eleven, our family started attending the Norwegian Lutheran Memorial Church in Minneapolis, where I went through confirmation. Then I attended St. Olaf College, once again (you guessed it) a Norwegian Lutheran institution.

Things started to change at the age of nineteen, when I came to Christ in a Charismatic church while visiting my aunt in Florida for spring break (such a rebel, I know). My senior year, I met my husband Rick, who also had a Lutheran background, but to his father's dismay I corrupted Rick into leaving the Lutheran Church, and we attended an evangelical church after we married. Then we enrolled at Notre Dame Law School, a Roman Catholic institution, where we found an evangelical church in South Bend.

Already at this point, I had experienced the gentle stretching of my faith that I think helped me through my coming crisis. Rick was a more critically-thinking Christian than I was at the time, so he challenged my myopia. And I knew that there were genuine Christians outside of my narrow sphere of modern evangelicalism, like our Contracts Professor Edward Murphy, a deeply spiritual Catholic Christian who authored the book Life to the Full, and who sadly succumbed to cancer a few years after we left Notre Dame.

But I still had that sense that I was the center of all rightness and to the extent people said what was familiar to me, they were also right. And the further they were from that center, the more wrong they were. I never asked myself why I should be so right—I simply equated familiarity with truth.

The Day that Changed Everything

Ingrid at four months

Our first two children, Chelsea and Ingrid, were born during the three years I was in law school. It may not seem like the brightest idea to have babies in law school, but this was, after all, Notre Dame, where people often had children numbering in the double digits—and when in Rome . . . (Sorry—I didn’t even notice the pun until after I wrote it.)

But God prepared me for what lay ahead by showing me that I could do all things through Him who strengthens me, including juggling babies and my studies. I had a rough semester that started a month after Chelsea's birth, when I was in a sleep-deprived stupor every day. After that semester, I concluded that the only way I would make it through law school with decent grades was if I started every day with an hour of focused Bible reading and prayer. After that, my grades became better than before I had children, and when May 12, 1993 rolled around, I had just completed my best semester in all my years of schooling and was awaiting graduation.

Ingrid was released from the
hospital, but very sedated, for
my graduation.
(Rick graduated the year before.)

That was the day when Ingrid, at five months old, had her first seizure. I was feeding her at the time, and my first thought was that she was choking on the milk because she stopped breathing and turned blue. But I had seen a seizure before while working with the mentally disabled, and in my haste to call for medical assistance I yanked the phone cord out of the wall and couldn't keep my hands from shaking as I tried to plug it back in. But my fears at the time did not come close to doing justice to the reality we faced.

Ingrid was in and out of hospitals in Indiana, Illinois, and Minnesota over the next three months, while doctors tried in vain to stop the seizures that came every few minutes. At one point, she developed pneumonia because she was so heavily drugged that she could hardly swallow. She stopped crying and smiling, and her right hand became fisted and unusable from the seizures.

I spent most of those three months just praying—praying while sitting in the hospital, praying at night, reading the Bible and devouring books on prayer. I had experienced God's faithfulness many times before and knew the power of prayer, so I would have faith and I wouldn't stop praying until she was healed—even if it killed me. I would permit no doubt in my mind and no grief in my heart.

I remember one night toward the end of the three months while Ingrid was at a hospital in St. Paul, the premier hospital for epilepsy care in the Midwest, and we were staying with my parents in Minneapolis. I was up praying in the middle of the night, as usual. Rick found me and said, "Let's say a three-year-old is helping her father do something that only the father can do. It is okay for the three-year-old to take a break and get some sleep. You're the three-year-old in this scenario and God is the father, so why don't you come to bed?"

I thought that was a quaint analogy, but what kind of mother would I be if I let my eight-month-old suffer while I slept? So I stayed awake and continued to pray. I was convinced that by the time we exhausted all natural remedies, God would intervene and heal Ingrid.

After three weeks at the St. Paul hospital, the doctors had concluded that Ingrid was not a candidate for surgery, and the experimental drugs had not helped her. But she had apparently overstayed her visit, because they told us that she would be discharged, without anywhere else to go. "We think that Ingrid is doing much better, and is ready to go home. She only has about seven seizures per day now."

"But that's because you give her Ativan after three seizures, which knocks her out after about seven seizures for the rest of the day," I said.

"No, we think she is doing better even without the Ativan."

"Let's test that then and wait to give her Ativan," I suggested.

"Okay, but we still have to get the discharge papers ready. Most epilepsy patients stay for a maximum of two weeks, and Ingrid has been here for three now." So they knew as well as I did that Ingrid had not improved at all on the experimental medicine. But they were not willing to tell us that there was nothing else they could do.

While we waited for the discharge papers, Ingrid had over twenty seizures, just as I had suspected. Then the Ativan stopped them by once again putting her into a deep sleep. I was exhausted and my conviction that Ingrid would be healed was gone and replaced with overwhelming dread and tension. I had not cried since my graduation week, when Ingrid was first hospitalized. But I cried the whole time we waited for the papers and during the entire drive back to my parents' house.

Rick recalls holding Ingrid and praying for her later that night. Her tiny body convulsed with one seizure after the other, every minute or two, and he thought to himself, I'm holding my daughter as she dies.

The next day we started driving back to Illinois, where we were living at the time. Darkness hung like heavy curtains around me, and I started experiencing almost unbearable panic attacks. No longer was I only concerned about Ingrid, but I began to fear for myself as well for having driven myself so hard at a time when I needed to grieve and heal. I had made the leap of faith headlong into the abyss, and now I wondered if anyone was there to catch me, or if I had leapt to my doom.

Then the song came over the car speakers: "I know that my Redeemer liveth. And that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God."

Job's bold pronouncement of faith in God and the resurrection kindled a small spark of faith within me. I didn't have great faith, in spite of my mental gymnastics and my frantic, all-consuming prayers, because when Ingrid wasn't miraculously healed in the way I had hoped, my immediate reaction was, I knew it.

But I still had a little faith—enough to do the one thing that faith demands of us: come to Christ. "Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28).

So I clung to Him like never before, releasing everything into His hand—Ingrid, my precarious mental state, and my faltering faith. For the first time, I came without asking for anything except His presence. I surrendered everything at His altar. And I decided that instead of trying to control God, I would listen to Him and let Him lead me.

Over the next two weeks, I continued to struggle with panic attacks and waves of depression, and I felt very strongly that God commanded me to cut out all caffeine, alcohol, and refined sugar from my diet (which I later learned can make panic attacks worse). I started jogging, making a practice of thanking God for every blessing, releasing all my anxieties to Him, and resting in His presence moment by moment.

God's light spilled into my life, more powerful than ever, filling me with a joy and peace that I had never before experienced. The darkness fled at His presence, and the panic attacks disappeared and never came back.

During this two-week period, Ingrid continued to have seizures that we had to stop with Ativan, which would put her into a deep sleep for the rest of the day. But we knew that Ativan was not a permanent solution, because it stops working for seizures after a couple of weeks of daily use. So at the end of the two weeks, her seizures started coming every few minutes even when we gave her Ativan, and we had her admitted to the intensive care unit of the local hospital.

I thought the poor ICU doctor would have nervous breakdown, because he had inherited this problem from the specialists in St. Paul, and there was nothing he could do. He had long phone conversations with them, and finally he told us that the specialists had recommended that we try combining the experimental medicine (Felbatol) with Phenobarbital, rather than Tegretol. I don't think anyone thought this would help, since we had tried just about every combination of every anticonvulsant available.

But the seizures stopped. For two weeks, Ingrid did not have a single seizure. Then she started having a few, several times a week, but we were out of crisis mode and were able to sign her up for rehabilitative therapy and early intervention programs.

That was not the solution I had envisioned, and Ingrid's disabilities continued to be challenging, but the pressures I faced made me look to God, who had a lot to teach me. Some say that God's ways are inscrutable, but I say that He's eager to instruct, even though the human mind can only very slowly process the truths that He has revealed. We can't wait for answers to every why before we believe, because only when we live by faith, by looking to Christ, does the puzzle begin to take shape.

Where I am Today

Back when Ingrid was first admitted to the hospital in St. Paul, we met with a hospital social worker who wanted to see how we were holding up. I made a point of giving all the "right" answers and demonstrating what a great attitude I had. I thought for sure I had succeeded, because she smiled and nodded a lot, so obviously she was quite impressed.

But in her report, she said that I was in denial and really needed a good support network. I was somewhat offended by this at the time, but she was 100% correct in what she said about me.

That is one way in which I am different today. In the aftermath of the crisis, I learned how important it is to face all truth—about myself, the world around me, and the Bible. "Behold, You desire truth in the innermost being, and in the hidden part You will make me know wisdom" (Psalm 51:6). I have come to see that truth is the building block of genuine faith. Only when I resolve to build my foundation of faith with solid materials will it sustain me during a crisis. And this means testing everything to make sure it's true.

I have also become more faithful to the Bible, which some may claim is inconsistent with the desire for truth. But no such inconsistency exists. I have found that the more I seek the truth, the more I see that it lines up perfectly with the teachings of the Bible, and the stronger my faith becomes. In the beginning, it felt threatening to me to seek the truth because I risked finding that what I believed was false. And much of what I believed was false because I had plenty of blind spots. But I have always found the Bible to be true.

Another question raised by my story is whether I still believe in modern day miracles, and the answer is an emphatic "yes." I believe they happen and that we should pray for them.

But we don't experience the power of God by trying to twist His arm like I did when I prayed for Ingrid. After Ingrid was discharged from the St. Paul hospital, Rick and Chelsea were looking at cartoon pictures on the computer, and one of them was of a tiny man sitting on a huge hand and breaking into a major sweat trying to move an unyielding thumb. I can't tell you how much that picture spoke to me at the time! That is not what prayer is supposed to be like.

God wants to give, and when we surrender to Him moment by moment, we receive His power. And it is this power that alone can do great works in this world that glorify God. Only God can glorify God, and "Christ in us" is our "hope of glory" (Colossians 1:27). Yes, we are to wrestle in prayer, but we wrestle to stay persistent and focused. As Martin Luther said, "Prayer is not overcoming God's reluctance, but laying hold of His willingness."

Prayer is the simple act of abiding in Christ, like a branch on a vine, but such simplicity is the greatest challenge of the Christian life. And so my journey continues.

The Opium of the People?

2011-05-26T16:25:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, I had a conversation with Juanetta, a homeless woman who occasionally collects money for her shelter outside of our local Target store. She told me of her heartbreak when her son was sentenced to prison, but how God had helped her finally surrender the burden to Him. And she was full of joy, with a smile on her face and words of kindness to everyone who passed by. “God has something wonderful to give us and all we have to do is open up our hearts,” were her parting words to me, and as always when I talk with her, I didn't just feel enriched, I was enriched.

But if Karl Marx had still been alive and leaving Target at the time of our conversation, he might have said that it proved his point:

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Getting rid of the vale of tears is a noble goal and one that Juanetta and I share. We agree that it is not a good thing when children end up in prison, and that people should give generously to the poor. (She was after all collecting money for her shelter.) But did Marx really think that he could eradicate car accidents, terminal illnesses, poverty, broken marriages, and the rebellion of children by simply demanding that people give up those things? And since he could do precious little about the vale of tears, it seems rather backwards to demand that people give up its "halo."

I don't for a moment concede that faith is an illusion, but Marx correctly observed that it helps people get through difficult times. In fact, I would say that there is a positive correlation between faith and poverty. How does the Bible explain this correlation? James 2:5 says: "Listen, my beloved brethren: did not God choose the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which He promised to those who love Him?" He has set up this world to function according to the survival of the fittest, but He has set up the kingdom of God in such a way that only the humble can receive it. "God is opposed to the proud, but He gives grace to the humble" (James 4:6). And that means the poor and disadvantaged have a distinct advantage.

Like Juanetta said, God has something wonderful to give us, but we have to open our hearts to receive it. And if our hearts are full of other things, we won't. Augustine agreed. "God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full—there’s nowhere for Him to put it."

In her Magnificat, Mary, the humble young girl with great faith who was chosen by God to carry His Son, said: "[God] has done mighty deeds with His arm; He has scattered those who were proud in the thoughts of their heart. He has brought down rulers from their thrones, and He has exalted those who were humble. He has filled the hungry with good things; and sent away the rich empty-handed" (Luke 52-53). At the end of the Gospels, God exalts another Mary with the honor of being the apostle to the apostles—the first messenger of the resurrection of Jesus. Who was Mary Magdalene, the mystery woman who received the spotlight at such an important moment, but is hardly mentioned elsewhere? Luke 8:1-3 indicates that she may have been wealthy, but that Jesus had cast out of her seven demons. We are not given any details, but we can safely say that this means she had major issues and would have really needed Jesus.

To the early Christians, the order of the postmortem appearances of Jesus was significant, with some non-canonical Gospels claiming the first appearance for whomever they admired most. For example, the Gospel of the Hebrews says that Jesus appeared first to James. The importance of the order is not lost on Paul, who doesn't mention Mary Magdalene in that patriarchal society, and goes through the list and concludes with, "and last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared to me also. For I am the least of the apostles, and not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God" (1 Corinthians 15:8-9).

Saul of Tarsus was neither poor nor disadvantaged in any way. He was an upwardly mobile, self-righteous Pharisee, who believed that he was doing God's will by destroying the church. But God could still use him. Paul continues: "But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me did not prove vain; but I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me" (1 Corinthians 15:10, italics added).

And those words highlight what it is that God wants to give us if only we open up our hearts: the grace of God—that is, the power of God through the Holy Spirit. It was the grace of God that changed Paul from a proud, hate-driven man to a humble, hardworking man who called himself the least of the apostles and penned some of the most well-known, eloquent, and powerful verses about the preeminence of love: 1 Corinthians 13. And it is the grace of God that gives Juanetta joy in spite of her circumstances.

But even though Paul was God's chosen instrument for bringing the Gospel to the Gentiles, he continued to struggle with pride, and in 2 Corinthians 12:7-10, he says that he was given a "thorn in the flesh" to keep him from exalting himself. When he asked God to take it away, God replied: "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness." In other words, as great as Paul was, the power of God was greater in him in his weakness and suffering. Then he was able to come to God with empty hands and an open heart and be filled with the power of Christ.

Failed Rapture Notice

2011-05-23T19:02:00.000-07:00

A friend of my husband got this email, and I thought it was pretty funny. Did anyone else get it?

ADDENDUM (5/28/11):

Since the above was admittedly a poor excuse for a blogpost, I figured I would add the following comment on the subject of Harold Camping that I posted on Thoughts from a Sandwich this morning. (Parts of the main post are in red and my response is in black.)

Aren’t [Christians who believe Jesus could come again any time and urge you to "get right with God," yet criticize Camping by stabbing out Matthew 24:36 like a weapon] committing the same error, albeit with slightly less precision? They know it could happen today. Yet, ironically, by such knowledge, seem to have eliminated today as a possibility, pursuant to their own Bible verse.

Most Christians didn’t eliminate May 21, 2011 as a possibility. We just didn’t think it was any more likely than, say, May 25, 2011. It’s the difference between expressing confidence that someone is going to win the lottery and being so confident that I will win the lottery that I take out a loan and spend the money in anticipation.

And Harold Camping’s antics have about as much in common with the position of Christian orthodoxy as the behavior of the Heaven’s Gate UFO cultists had in common with the statements by Stephen Hawking that aliens probably exist somewhere. Whether or not Hawking is right, his statement is not worth laughing at because he has good reasons for saying that. This would be even truer if scientists actually discovered evidence of extraterrestrial life. The fact that most of the people who talk about aliens have been kooks wouldn’t then render scientists kooks.

I know that the idea of Jesus coming again as described in the Bible is bizarre, because something like that has never happened before. But quantum physics is bizarre and so is Big Bang cosmology. The question is whether we have good reasons for accepting those bizarre things as true.

And since Christians have good reasons for believing that God exists and that the Bible is God’s word, and the Bible is very clear that Jesus will come again, our belief is reasonable. However, Camping’s was not—he used completely random calculations to arrive at his date, going against Matthew 24:36, Mark 13:32, and Acts 1:7. What he did has little to do with Christianity—he will now simply take his place in history (once again) as one of a number of failed apocalyptic preachers, not all of whom were Christian.

Yes, he’s right that every day is a good day to get right with God, and in his case that would mean the humility of admitting he was completely wrong (rather than just changing the date) and taking some responsibility for the people he mislead.

Has Jesus been waiting around for 2000 years for people to stop remembering he is coming back?
I wonder if he regrets putting that clause in the contract….

Matthew 24:14 and Mark 13:10 say that the Gospel must first be preached to all nations. That probably has happened by now, but it was certainly not true in the first century when those words were written. So that is a fulfilled prophecy.

The description of the church in Revelation 7:9 has also been fulfilled: “After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and people and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, and palm branches were in their hands.”

There are Christians around the world of all nationalities, races, languages, and cultures, and the Bible is the most translated book in the world, continuing to be translated into new languages all the time.

In the Great Commission, Jesus said, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations” (Matthew 28:19). Surely He wouldn’t come again before that had been accomplished?

Did God Pour Out His Wrath on Jesus?

2011-05-13T09:56:00.000-07:00

I have often heard it said that God poured out His wrath on Jesus on the cross, and afterwards His wrath was appeased. This brings to mind an image of God feeling very angry and having to get it out of His system somehow. Christ was a willing scapegoat who took God's wrath upon Himself, and afterwards God felt much better.

The problem with the idea of God pouring out His wrath on Christ, aside from the fact that it makes no sense, is that the Bible says nothing of the kind. If you do a search on the way the words "the wrath of God" are used in the New Testament, they always refer to Judgment Day, when God will execute justice on the world. The words are never used in connection with the vicarious redemption of Christ.

What, then, does the Bible say about the vicarious redemption of Christ? 2 Corinthians 5:21 says: "For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." Isaiah 53:5-6 prophesies, "But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed."

So God didn't pour out His wrath on Jesus, He laid on Him the sins of the world, so that He might pay the penalty for them through His death. Why? Hebrews 2:14 says, "Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil." So Jesus did not die to appease God the Father, but to defeat the forces of evil.

Before Jesus became sin on our behalf, Satan had no power over Him because it is sin that gives Satan a foothold. This is why Satan could not harm Jesus when He fasted in the wilderness, but he could tempt Him. And if Jesus had succumbed to temptation, then Satan could have destroyed Him. However, in John 14:30-31, Jesus says, "I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no claim on me, but I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father." The "ruler of this world"--this fallen world--is Satan, and he has a claim on sinners. Sin separates us from a holy God, so we don't experience His power and protection.

Although Satan had no claim on Christ, God allowed the sins of the world to be placed on Him, and our sins separated Jesus from the Father. This meant that the spiritual forces of evil could do whatever they wanted to Him--humiliate Him, cause Him psychic torment and excruciating physical pain, and kill Him, and that is what they did. Jesus was punished for the sins of the world, thus paying the penalty that we could not pay, reconciling us to God, and granting us freedom from the power of sin and death.

This is not God demanding a burnt offering, because they never pleased Him. Hosea 6:6 says: "For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings."

Isaiah 1:11, 17 says: "'The multitude of your sacrifices--what are they to me?' says the LORD. 'I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams and the fat of fattened animals; I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats . . . Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.'"

Micah 6:6-8 says: "With what shall I come before the LORD and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."

And Hebrews 10:4 says that "it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins." In other words, this ritual of burnt offerings accomplished nothing, even though the Law of Moses required it. But like the rest of the law, it was powerless to save, and was a mere shadow of what was to come: God sending His own Son to pay the penalty for our sins and bridge the chasm between God and sinners. This means that we may receive the Holy Spirit, who has set us "free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death" (Romans 8:2).

Clamflats was right when he said in a comment, "At least with the word 'appease,' we are following a ceremonial sacrifice script which is recognized cross-culturally." People sacrificed to appease their gods until Constantine, the first Christian emperor, ended the practice in the Roman Empire. Although sacrifice never pleased God and never took away sins, it was within this cultural framework that He worked His plan of salvation. But instead of demanding a sacrifice from us, God turned the "ceremonial sacrifice script" around and sacrificed Himself for us.

Charles Wesley's hymn, "And Can It Be?" aptly says, "Amazing love! How can it be, that Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?" but the sacrifice of Christ was more than just a symbol of His love. Romans 8:3-4 says, "For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit."

Wesley's hymn continues:

Long my imprisoned spirit lay,

Fast bound in sin and nature’s night;

Thine eye diffused a quickening ray—

I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;

My chains fell off, my heart was free,

I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

My chains fell off, my heart was free,

I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

Still the small inward voice I hear,

That whispers all my sins forgiven;

Still the atoning blood is near,

That quenched the wrath of hostile Heaven.

I feel the life His wounds impart;

I feel the Savior in my heart.

I feel the life His wounds impart;

I feel the Savior in my heart.

No condemnation now I dread;

Jesus, and all in Him, is mine;

Alive in Him, my living Head,

And clothed in righteousness divine,

Bold I approach th’eternal throne,

And claim the crown, through Christ my own.

Bold I approach th’eternal throne,

And claim the crown, through Christ my own.

The atonement of Jesus "quenched the wrath of hostile Heaven," by breaking down the barrier between God and humanity. His atoning blood has the power to set us free from the chains of sin, so that we will escape the wrath of God, or His righteous judgment of sin, when He ushers in "new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells" (2 Peter 3:13). Jesus gave Himself for us, giving us His righteousness in exchange for our sin, suffering that we may be healed, and dying and rising that we may live.

Since that was a lot of complicated theology, I also included the clip from The Chronicles of Narnia, which is a simple but theologically accurate allegory of what Christ has done for us.

Glory Rendering, Mother's Day, and Redemption

2011-05-05T19:18:00.000-07:00

Clamflats asked the following question, which I have edited slightly to make it more coherent out of context (but let me know if I changed the meaning, clamflats). And I wrote most of it before Dan answered the question, so hopefully you don't mind, Dan.

The idea that the motive of the crucifixion is glory-rendering makes it seem that we humans are bit players in some divine grand opera. Why would God require glory and why would corporal punishment be necessary? At least with the word "appease," we are following a ceremonial sacrifice script which is recognized cross-culturally.

A couple of hours ago I changed my Facebook profile picture to the above photo with my mother who passed away at sixty-two. My sister Elisabeth was the first to comment, saying: "What a GREAT photo Anette!!! She is missed every day, and was the best MOM ever! Thank you for posting this and Happy Mothers Day to another great mom!" I replied by agreeing with my sister about what she said about our mom, wishing Elisabeth a Happy Mother's Day, and returning the praise.

Now, you would presumably never ask, "Why is Mother's Day necessary? Do mothers raise children so they can be praised by them?" Of course parents don't raise and make sacrifices for their children in order to receive praise, but it still right to praise our parents for what they have done for us. And it makes parents very happy to receive heartfelt praise from their children.

But it is also right for children to honor and respect their parents just because they are they are their parents, just as it is right to honor and respect the President whether or not we voted for him.

So the answer to the question of why God would "require glory" is that it is right to give Him glory because of who He is and also because He deserves it. Jesus deserves glory because although He was equal to God, He emptied Himself and became a mere human, willing to take our sins upon Himself and die on a cross between two criminals on our behalf. "For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Philippians 2:9-11). God the Father deserves glory because He "so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life" (John 3:16).

Although, as I will discuss later, the primary purpose of the crucifixion was not glory-rendering between the Father and the Son, God still deserves glory for doing that for us, in order to bring "many sons to glory" (Hebrews 2:9-10). And that is the other part of this glory-rendering business--that at the coming of Christ, God will glorify the church, the Bride of Christ. That is, if we belong to Christ and allow ourselves to be made like Him in this life, we will share in His glory. Christ made that possible through the cross.

So the Son glorifies the Father and the Father glorifies the Son, in the same way that I would praise my mother, sisters, mother-in-law, and other mothers on Mother's Day, instead of going around saying, "Boy, I am an amazing mother, and since today is Mother's Day, I'm going to tell you all about it." That would be wrong. Praise always flows from one person to another (or at least it should).

But since Jesus loves us so much and has chosen us to be His own, He puts us between Himself and the Father, so that the glory and love that flows between the Father and the Son is ours as well. Jesus says, "No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you" (John 15:15). So although He is the exalted King who will come in glory with His angels, He invites us to be His friends.

But the love of Jesus was costly and sacrificial, and the cross preceded the throne. It led to a staggering promise, that if we are His children, we are "heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ," with the following sobering qualification, "if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him" (Romans 8:17).

Why should suffering have to precede the glory God has prepared eternally for His people? That is something I will discuss in future posts. But in the next post I will address the second part of clamflats' question: Did the sacrifice of Jesus appease the wrath of God?

Dead Man Walking--No More

2011-05-02T06:55:00.000-07:00

My husband Rick purchased this T-shirt after September 11, 2001, and it has been buried at the bottom of one of his drawers for years (hence the wrinkles). But he will be wearing it to work today.

I'll never forget that morning almost ten years ago, when Rick woke me up with the words, "A plane crashed into one of the twin towers!" We watched with horror as first one, then the other building collapsed.

And at some point, Rick turned to me and said, "By the way, happy birthday."

Why Doesn't God Do Something About Evil?

2011-04-23T08:43:00.000-07:00

Many people who find the evidence for a Creator in natural theology compelling have a hard time believing that He could be good. He seems more like a disinterested deity who created and moved on without a backwards glance. As one atheist whose father was dying put it, "If this is the best God can do, he must've taken a half day on Friday."

When he said that, it occurred to me that on a Friday afternoon, God defeated sin, suffering, and death forever on the cross. He finished His work of re-creation and opened up a way that will culminate in a new heaven and a new earth where our humanity is perfected and death and suffering is a thing of the past.

But He also used a powerful symbol to communicate His love for us even when we don't understand why there is so much wrong with the world. God came in human form and took upon Himself our sin and our pain. He died the most shameful and excruciating of deaths, between two criminals. He was present with the lowest of the low, promising Paradise to the repentant sinner (Luke 23:39-43).

From the very beginning, God planned to take responsibility for allowing evil in His creation, by sending His Son to die for us. Contrary to what Christopher Hitchens has said, this is not human sacrifice, something the Bible strictly forbids. It is self-sacrifice by God Himself, the ultimate expression of love and humility.

The Problem of Evil and Suffering

2011-04-21T14:55:00.000-07:00

Masaccio's The Expulsion from Paradise

I had a conversation with Lowell in the comments about a month ago where he asked me about a post that I wrote back in 2009: Venite Ad Me Omnes. It was about a crisis I went through eighteen years ago. I wrote it before I had any inkling that I would ever write apologetics, and reading it again through a skeptic's eyes, I wonder if it was irresponsibly written. I spelled out the gut-wrenching evil in great detail, but failed to talk in much detail about God's great goodness through it all. Just about everything I am today grew out of that experience.

When someone asked me a few days ago why I ended up engaging in dialogue with atheists, I explained that it was because I happened to have a conversation with an agnostic who told me about Atheist Central, and after checking it out I decided to comment. But I realized afterwards that the why goes back much further than that. It started when my five-month-old, Ingrid, had her first seizure the day after I had completed my requirements for graduation from Notre Dame Law School. Before May 12, 1993, Ingrid was developing normally--smiling and babbling to everyone, including stuffed animals and the baby in the mirror. Three months, three hospitals, and countless seizures later, she neither smiled nor cried and her right hand was fisted and unusable.

That's when I started asking the hard questions.

I've only spent a year-and-a-half thinking about the resurrection evidence, the fine-tuning argument, the cosmological argument, and the argument from moral law, but I spent a decade-and-a-half thinking about the problem of evil--called "the rock of atheism" by German playwright Georg Büchner. I don't claim to have all the answers, but I did gain some insights into the relationship between suffering, spiritual growth, and prayer over the years, and I will do a series of posts on that.

But I want to stress that the Bible is never overly philosophical about suffering. John 11:35 simply says, "Jesus wept" when He saw people grieving over the death of Lazarus. Jesus wept even though He knew that Lazarus would not remain dead. Evil is still evil and suffering still hurts even though God has reasons for allowing it. We are not to downplay the suffering of others by offering "helpful" platitudes. Instead, we are to "mourn with those who mourn" (Romans 12:15).

So I don't want to trivialize evil and suffering by a discussion of theodicy. C. S. Lewis said in The Problem of Pain that pain is God's "megaphone to rouse a deaf world." But he later wrote the following in A Grief Observed after his wife died:

Feeling, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead. From the rational point of view, what new factor has H.'s death introduced into the problem of the universe? What grounds has it given me for doubting all that I believe? I knew already that these things, and worse, happened daily. I would have said that I had taken them into account. I had been warned--I had warned myself--not to reckon on worldly happiness. We were even promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, "Blessed are they that mourn," and I accepted it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not in imagination.

Pain is also a megaphone that drowns out reason, and it was not until we had settled into our new life with a severely disabled child that I was really able to reflect on the whys. But explanations are a pale substitute for what I did receive during those months in 1993: God's presence, joy, and peace like never before--the fulfillment of the promise of Jesus in Matthew 11:28: "Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest."

Is Christianity Falsifiable?

2011-03-13T19:37:00.000-07:00

During these discussions about the evidence for the resurrection, I have occasionally been asked what would prove to me that the resurrection did not happen. Or to put the question differently, is the resurrection falsifiable? If it is, then Christianity is falsifiable because Paul states in 1 Corinthians 15:14 that if Christ has not been raised, our faith is in vain. Only if the resurrection didn't happen is Christianity falsified.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a skeptical blogger, addresses the question of whether religion is falsifiable in Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable:

The earliest account I know of a scientific experiment is, ironically, the story of Elijah and the priests of Baal.

The people of Israel are wavering between Jehovah and Baal, so Elijah announces that he will conduct an experiment to settle it – quite a novel concept in those days! The priests of Baal will place their bull on an altar, and Elijah will place Jehovah’s bull on an altar, but neither will be allowed to start the fire; whichever God is real will call down fire on His sacrifice. The priests of Baal serve as control group for Elijah – the same wooden fuel, the same bull, and the same priests making invocations, but to a false god. Then Elijah pours water on his altar… to signify deliberate acceptance of the burden of proof, like needing a 0.05 significance level. The fire comes down on Elijah’s altar, which is the experimental observation. The watching people of Israel shout “The Lord is God!” – peer review.

And then the people haul the 450 priests of Baal down to the river Kishon and slit their throats. This is stern, but necessary. You must firmly discard the falsified hypothesis, and do so swiftly, before it can generate excuses to protect itself. If the priests of Baal are allowed to survive, they will start babbling about how religion is a separate magisterium which can be neither proven nor disproven.

The story of Elijah and the priests of Baal presents a good framework for our discussion of what would falsify the resurrection, and consequently, Christianity. (Although, needless to say, I reached a different conclusion from Yudkowsky about whether Christianity has been falsified. He relied on his interpretation of tangential issues in the Old Testament--not on the resurrection.) Of course if something directly contradicts the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead, then the resurrection would be falsified. However, evidence that actually disproves a supernatural event is not easy to come by.

For example, this website addresses the claim of Joseph Smith that the angel Moroni appeared to him at night when he was a teenager. The author gives a photo of the Smith residence and says that his five brothers would have slept in the same small room, three to a bed, but none of them woke up and noticed the magnificent visitation or even their brother having a conversation (and a powerful spiritual experience) all night. This seems to at least falsify the idea that the angel was present in the room, as opposed to just in Smith's mind. It is consistent with a hallucination. However, it is also consistent with the event in Matthew 2:13, where an angel appears to Joseph, the father of Jesus, in a dream. So the visitation to Smith has not been disproven, but it is consistent with either a normal dream or a hallucination. This means that absent more compelling evidence for Smith's claims, we would be wise to exercise healthy skepticism.

How do we then approach the question of falsification of the resurrection? This is where Yudkowsky's ingenious interpretation of Elijah and the priests of Baal is helpful. Just like God, through Elijah, raised the burden of proof by pouring water onto the wood on the altar and into the trench, it appears that God has raised the burden of proof for the resurrection by leaving no plausible naturalistic explanation for the evidence.

Since the death of Jesus, skeptics have tried to explain away the resurrection--starting with the claim that the disciples stole the body. Since then, they have put forth the swoon theory, the twin theory, the wrong tomb theory, conspiracy theories, and the hallucination theory, among others. All have major flaws and most have been discarded. Some skeptics, like David Hume and Bart Ehrman, have attempted to stay above the fray and simply dismiss the evidence by saying, essentially, that the supernatural is always the least likely. But this approach has been refuted using Bayes' Theorem. To say that the supernatural is the least likely, regardless of the evidence, is mathematically fallacious, as non-theistic philosopher of physics John Earman demonstrates in Hume's Abject Failure.

In 1 Kings 18:20-29, the priests of Baal frantically called on the name of Baal all day long without response, and Elijah began to taunt them: "Shout louder! Surely he is a god! Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened." They shouted louder, leaping around the altar and slashing themselves with swords--to no avail.

This brings to mind the efforts to explain away the resurrection, in the context of Psalm 2:1-4. "Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the LORD and against his Anointed One. 'Let us break their chains,' they say, 'and throw off their fetters.' The One enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them."

In 1 Kings 18:33-39, Elijah prepared his sacrifice, asking God to reveal to the people that He is the God of Israel and that Elijah was His servant. Fire from heaven fell down on the altar and consumed the offering, the wood, the stones, the dust, and the water in the trench. God accepted Elijah's sacrifice.

Likewise, God accepted the sacrifice of Jesus for our sins and proved it by raising Him from the dead. The resurrection confirmed all the teachings of Jesus as being from God, including His claim to deity, and through it, God fulfilled the repeated prophecy of His Son that He would be delivered into the hands of sinners to die and be raised on the third day (Matthew 16:21, Matthew 17:22-23, Matthew 20:18-19, Mark 8:31, Mark 9:31, Mark 10:34, Luke 9:22, Luke 18:31-33, Luke 24:7).

As Paul said to the men of Athens: "God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead" (Acts 17:30-31).

The Easter Faith of the Early Church

2011-03-05T07:32:00.000-08:00

Crucifixion of Peter

As I said before, the resurrection of Jesus is supported by three pillars: the empty tomb, the postmortem appearances of Jesus, and the Easter faith of the early Christians in the face of severe persecution. In order to undermine the historical support for the resurrection, a skeptic has to give viable naturalistic explanations for all three.

We have already discussed the evidence for the empty tomb and examined the possible explanations for why Paul and the other apostles claimed to have seen Jesus postmortem. What remains is a discussion of the Easter faith that sprung up in a climate of severe persecution and grew into the dominant world religion.

The late orthodox Jewish rabbi and theologian Pinchas Lapide came to the conclusion that the God of Israel raised Jesus from the dead, and said in The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective, that if the faith-shattering cry of Jesus on the cross, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" had been the end of the story, the movement would have died right there. The Jews believed in a faithful, just God who never abandoned the righteous.

He concluded: "If the defeated and depressed group of disciples overnight could change into a victorious movement of faith, based only on autosuggestion or self-deception--without a fundamental faith experience--then this would be a much greater miracle than the resurrection itself."

So the final question is this: What caused the Easter faith of the early followers of Jesus that grew into four million Christians by 300 AD? Did a group of simple men perpetrate the most masterful hoax ever, while preaching an ethic of love, faithfulness, and truth? And even if they could and would do it, what would have motivated them?

We know from Paul's letters that he used to be a zealous, successful Pharisee who persecuted the church, and he gave it up for imprisonment, persecution, and poverty. Writing from prison, he said, "But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ" (Philippians 3:7-8).

What could possibly have motivated him? Note that I am not asking what did motivate him--we can never know exactly what combination of factors lead other people to do what they do. However, if Jesus did not appear to Paul as he claimed, there should be other possible explanations for his willingness to sacrifice everything for his hope in the resurrection. What are they?

Liberal theologian and church historian Ferdinand Christian Baur rejected the resurrection and the other supernatural aspects of the primitive church for most of his life. But shortly before he died he concluded that the conversion of Paul was an unsolvable psychological puzzle which was a miracle in and of itself, and according to Philip Schaff, this led Baur to "bow before the greater miracle of the resurrection of Christ, without which the former is an inexplicable enigma."

Why did Stephen, when he stood before the Sanhedrin, gaze into the heavens and boldly report, "Behold, I see the heavens opened up and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God" (Acts 7:55-56), echoing the words that earned Jesus the death penalty? And when they rushed at him as an angry mob and stoned him to death, how could he have cried out, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them!" as he died?

Pliny the Younger describes the Christian martyrs in much the same way in his letter to Emperor Trajan in 112 AD--that true Christians would die before they cursed Christ or worshipped pagan gods, like Pliny ordered them to do. And their conduct was blameless. He wrote:

In the meanwhile, the method I have observed towards those who have been denounced to me as Christians is this: I interrogated them whether they were Christians; if they confessed it I repeated the question twice again, adding the threat of capital punishment; if they still persevered, I ordered them to be executed. For whatever the nature of their creed might be, I could at least feel no doubt that contumacy and inflexible obstinacy deserved chastisement.

And,

They affirmed, however, the whole of their guilt, or their error, was, that they were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god, and bound themselves by a solemn oath, not to any wicked deeds, but never to commit any fraud, theft, or adultery, never to falsify their word, nor deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up; after which it was their custom to separate, and then reassemble to partake of food -- but food of an ordinary and innocent kind. Even this practice, however, they had abandoned after the publication of my edict, by which, according to your orders, I had forbidden political associations. I judged it so much the more necessary to extract the real truth, with the assistance of torture, from two female slaves, who were styled deaconesses: but I could discover nothing more than depraved and excessive superstition.

So eighty years after the death of Christ, His followers were still known for their loyalty to Him. They were still true to His word and fearless in the face of death because of their hope of eternal life.

The movement continued to grow after the stoning of James by the Sandedrin in 62 AD, and after the deaths of Paul and Peter during the severe persecution by Nero, who lit up his 64 AD garden party with torches of burning Christians and put them to death in other horrific ways for the amusement of the Romans. And it continued to grow through many subsequent waves of persecution when Christians were ordered to recant or be executed. As Tertullian observed, "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church."

Paul lays it on the line in 1 Corinthians 15:15 by saying that if Jesus had not been raised, then he and the others would have been "false witnesses of God because we testified against God that He raised Christ." He makes it very clear that the truth of the resurrection is crucial, and if it didn't happen, the apostles would have been false witnesses against God. He leaves no room for any wishy-washy thinking about faith being such a beautiful thing that there is no need to worry about pesky things like facts. And the hope of the later martyrs was grounded in the historical fact of the resurrection that the apostles themselves were willing to die for.

If we take into account the whole panoply of human motivations, how does the Easter faith make any sense if this resurrection did not happen?

The Historicity of the New Testament

2011-02-14T16:17:00.000-08:00

Over the past week or so, I've been part of a discussion on Vinny's blog about the historicity of the New Testament narratives--or specifically, about a book called Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament, by the late A. N. Sherwin-White, an Oxford professor who specialized in ancient Rome at the time of the New Testament.

Vinny has taken issue with some Christian apologists because he feels that they are "abusing" the professor by misrepresenting his position. Well, I have been reading the book carefully, and I've seen no sign of abuse. And unless the author of Sherwin-White's 1993 obituary in The Times was also an abusive apologist, the apologists in question characterize his general position accurately. The obituary talked about "his conviction of the essential historicity of the narratives in the New Testament."

Vinny is correct that the apologists were careless in their choice of words. One of them put a word in quotations that Sherwin-White never used, another one changed a word to mean the opposite, and a third used generally imprecise language. I am familiar with the first two apologists, and they are usually very careful about what they say, so I don't know what happened there. But they captured the general message of Sherwin-White, and if anything, they failed to utilize the strongest parts of the book.

Most of our discussion pertained to the last eight pages of the book, where Sherwin-White criticizes "form-criticism of the extremer sort" and talks about the rate of development of "didactic myths" in historical documents in general, and what this means for the New Testament writings. That is what the apologists and Vinny have focused on. Vinny has argued, based on those last eight pages, that Sherwin-White's statements "do not admit more than the possibility that a historical core within the gospel material can be found."

We have discussed that at length, and I have argued that Vinny is taking Sherwin-White's words out of context, but at this point I would prefer to talk about the substantive parts of the book, which is a detailed analysis of the historicity of the trial of Jesus and the book of Acts from the perspective of someone who has immersed himself in the Roman Empire "until its understanding becomes second nature." He starts with the trial of Jesus, which took place in "the Roman orbit at Jerusalem," and then moves on to the book of Acts.

These are his conclusions: "For Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming . . . any attempt to reject its basic historicity even in matters of detail must now appear absurd. Roman historians have long taken it for granted."

He says the following about the trial of Jesus: "The impression of a historical tradition is nowhere more strongly felt than in the various accounts of the trial of Christ, analysed in Roman terms in the second lecture. Consider the close interdependence of Mark and Matthew, supplementing each other even in particular phrases, yet each with his particular contribution, then Luke with his more coherent and explicit account of the charges and less clear version of the activity of the Sanhedrin, finally John, who despite many improbabilities and obscurities yet gives a convincingly contemporary version of the political pressure on Pilate in the age of Tiberius."

Sherwin-White discusses the trial of Jesus in great detail in lecture two, frequently addressing claims by earlier scholars that certain parts are unhistorical. For example, theologian and church historian Hans Lietzmann argues that Jesus was only charged with insurrection and not with the offense of blasphemy according to Jewish law. In other words, the trial before the Sanhedrin was a fabrication motivated by a desire to pin the blame on the Jews. Sherwin-White explains Lietzmann's logic as follows:

He poses a dilemma: either the Sanhedrin sentenced Christ and carried out the sentence in the Jewish fashion, by stoning, or Pilate sentenced Christ and carried out the sentence in Roman fashion, by crucifixion. Since all the evidence agrees that the execution was in Roman fashion by Romans, then the trial and condemnation by the Sanhedrin is a fabrication. He then presents an alternative proof. The Sanhedrin had the power of capital punishment, and had no need of a fiat from the procurator to carry out its execution.

However, Sherwin-White says that John 18:31 is correct that the Sanhedrin did not have the power of capital punishment. "When we find that the capital power was the most jealously guarded of all the attributes of government, not even entrusted to the principal assistants of the governors, and specifically withdrawn, in the instance of Cyrene, from the competence of local courts, it becomes very questionable indeed for the Sanhedrin." He spends about twelve pages developing this argument because of its centrality.

This is just one example of the kind of detailed analysis Sherwin-White does of the trial of Jesus and the book of Act. He then addresses the argument by Lietzmann that the trial before the Sanhedrin could not have taken place at night, by saying, "The Jews, because of the festival, were in a hurry. Hence there was every reason to hold the unusual night session if they were to catch the Procurator at the right moment."

And he says about the soldiers casting lots and dividing among themselves the clothing of Jesus: "Given the relevant prophecy from the Old Testament [Psalm 22:18], there is every reason to assume that this is one of the evolved myths dear to the form-critics. But, as has been familiar since Mommsen, legal texts confirm that it was the accepted right of the executioner's squad to share out the minor possessions of their victim."

He makes the following general statement about the synoptic Gospel accounts of the trial: "It is noteworthy that though Luke at first reading gives the most intelligible account of the trial as a whole, and Mark the least, yet by no means all the advantages lie with Luke. On certain technical points, such as the reference to the tribunal and the formulation of the sentence, Mark and Matthew are superior. But Luke is remarkable in that his additional materials--the full formulation of the charges before Pilate, the reference to Herod, and the proposed acquittal with admonition--are all technically correct."

He goes on to spend even more time on the book of Acts, affirming the accuracy of the legal proceedings and other details. For example, he points out that the charge against Paul in Acts 24:5 ("stirring up a plague and disturbances for the Jews throughout the world") is "precisely the one to bring against a Jew during the Principate of Claudius or the early years of Nero. The accusers of Paul were putting themselves on the side of the government."

Going back to the last eight pages of the book, where Sherwin-White "discusses the whole topic of historicity [of secular and ecclesiastical documents] briefly and very generally," he says that "a hard core or basic layer of historical truth can be recovered even from the most deplorable of our tertiary sources." (However, in no way does he imply that the New Testament books are "deplorable" sources. He says about historical documents in general that "we are seldom in the happy position of dealing at only one remove from a contemporary source.") This subject of a hard historical core came up repeatedly during our discussion, and one participant asked whether Sherwin-White gave any indication of what he considered the historical core of the New Testament narratives. Would the empty tomb qualify?

Sherwin-White says nothing about the empty tomb, but he confirms the historicity of a great many details, and I have not come across any that he has deemed unhistorical. He confirms minor details like the casting of lots for the clothes of Jesus as well as the political pressure the Jewish leaders put on Pontius Pilate by saying that he would not be a friend of Caesar if he released Jesus. Of course he also affirms the historicity of the Jews not having capital power in the first century. He says that all the details about the trial in the four Gospels are accurate, even though they contain "mild discrepancies." He does not call them contradictions, even though he uses that word to describe the four accounts of the reign of Tiberius Caesar.

And although he says little about the parts of the Gospels that take place in Galilee, he explains the lack of external confirmation as follows: "That the degree of confirmation in Graeco-Roman terms is less for the Gospels than for Acts is due, as these lectures have tried to show, to the differences in their regional setting. As soon as Christ enters the Roman orbit at Jerusalem, the confirmation begins. For Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming."

So I can with confidence say that the apologists did not overstate Sherwin-White's position. As I've said before, they failed to fully utilize this fascinating work by focusing exclusively on the concluding pages, and leaving skeptics to try to read into the qualifying statements something that is diametrically opposed to what Sherwin-White argues in detail in the more substantive parts of the book.

"What's the Son of a Duck?"

2011-01-26T07:55:00.000-08:00

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Bart Ehrman

www.colbertnation.com

According to Bart Ehrman, scholars have for a long time said that the Bible is filled with contradictions, and the central teachings of Christianity, like the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity, are not found in the synoptic Gospels. He said that Jesus was a human Messiah in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and then by the time John was written, He was viewed by the church as divine. Of course, what he means by "scholars" is "the scholars I agree with," but let's ignore that for now, because it wouldn't matter if all scholars really did make unanimous pronouncements about the Bible. What matters is what the Bible says, and Ehrman is just wrong about this. Jesus does not portray Himself as merely a human Messiah in the synoptic Gospels.

Why was Jesus sentenced to death by the high priest and handed over to Pontius Pilate? Matthew 26:63-65 says: "And the high priest said to Him, 'I adjure You by the living God, that You tell us whether You are the Christ, the Son of God.' Jesus said to him, 'You have said it yourself; nevertheless I tell you, hereafter you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming on the clouds of heaven.' Then the high priest tore his robes and said, 'He has blasphemed! What further need do we have of witnesses?'" This incident is repeated in Mark and Luke.

So Jesus was sentenced to death for blasphemy. If the high priest thought that He claimed to be a human Messiah, why would He have been guilty of blasphemy?

And lest there be any ambiguity, in Matthew 22:41-46 Jesus asked a group of Pharisees, "'What do you think about the Christ, whose son is He?' They said to Him, 'The son of David.' He said to them, 'Then how does David in the Spirit call Him "Lord," saying, "The Lord said to my Lord, 'Sit at My right hand, until I put Your enemies beneath Your feet'"? If David then calls Him "Lord," how is He his son?' No one was able to answer Him a word, nor did anyone dare from that day on to ask Him another question."

The clear implication is that He is equal to God, even though He was also a descendant of David. So He said that He was fully divine and fully human, just like Christians have always believed. Jesus was using the Socratic method with the Pharisees rather than announcing to them that He was the Son of God. If He had been more explicit, they would have had Him arrested for blasphemy before the time set by the Father, so He chose His words carefully. They couldn't arrest Him for just asking a question about the Scriptures, regardless of the implications. This sheds further light on Jesus' trial before the Sanhedrin because it tells us that although, as Ehrman said, the Jews expected a human Messiah, Jesus had earlier made the connection to Psalm 110:1, thereby subtly correcting them, but also probably stirring up the suspicions that would eventually lead to His arrest and death sentence.

In Matthew 11:27, Jesus says: "All things have been handed over to Me by My Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him." So the Son has a very unique relationship to the Father--so much so that He is the only one who knows Him and has the power to reveal Him to us--and all authority has been handed to Him. How could He possibly be just a human Messiah?

And in Matthew 28:19, after His resurrection, Jesus says to His disciples: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age" (italics added). That is the Trinity.

Ehrman is right that the Gospel of John is much more explicit about the divinity of Jesus than the synoptics, but Jesus still makes it clear in Matthew, Mark, and Luke that He is the Son of God, and not a human Messiah. Ehrman is also right that it took the church a while to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity into a creed. But all of the elements are in the Bible, including the synoptic Gospels.

Ehrman's words have interesting implications for the dating of the synoptic Gospels. He says that Jesus was "portrayed as a human Messiah in the earliest parts of Christianity" (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), but He eventually came to be seen as divine in the Gospel of John. But Paul makes it very clear that Jesus is the Son of God in the first letter to the Corinthians, which was written around 55 AD. 1 Corinthians 1:9 says that God called us "into fellowship with His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord." And in 1 Corinthians 2:14-16, Paul says that the person who has the Holy Spirit has the mind of Christ. Most scholars also think that the epistle to the Romans was written around 55 AD, and in it Paul says: "He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?" (Romans 8:32). Romans is widely considered the most important theological work in the Bible.

So Paul characterizes Jesus as the Son of God and gives the elements of the doctrine of the Trinity fifteen years before liberal scholars like Ehrman think the first synoptic Gospel was written. How do "scholars" explain this? Could it be that it's their thinking, and not the Bible, that is filled with contradictions?

The Skeptical Response to the Resurrection: The Appearances of Jesus

2011-01-19T13:23:00.000-08:00

As I said before, most scholars accept the historicity of the empty tomb, but virtually all scholars believe
that the apostles had experiences in which they saw Jesus postmortem. Atheist and New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann said, "It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus' death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ."

Why are scholars--even skeptical ones--almost unanimous in the conclusion that the followers of Jesus at least thought they saw Him postmortem?

First, Paul says that Jesus appeared to him personally (1 Corinthians 15:8), and that prior to his conversion, he was a zealous, upwardly mobile Pharisee who persecuted the church (Philippians 3:5-6). After his conversion, Paul gave up prestige and worldly goods, was imprisoned several times, and was charged with treason for his faith. Paul's words about Jesus appearing to him are firsthand testimony, and combined with his actions following his conversion, they are highly credible.

Second, in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7, Paul cites what is widely believed by scholars to be a creedal formula of the Christian faith passed down to him by his predecessors--dated to within five years of the death of Jesus: "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep; then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles."

Lüdemann says in The Resurrection of Jesus that "the elements in the tradition [of 1 Corinthians 15:3-7] are to be dated to the first two years after the crucifixion of Jesus." Jewish scholar Geza Vermes says that the words of Paul are "a tradition he has inherited from his seniors in the faith concerning the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus." A. M. Hunter says, "The passage therefore preserves uniquely early and verifiable testimony. It meets every reasonable demand of historical reliability." Reginald Fuller concludes: "It is almost universally agreed today that Paul is here citing tradition."

This corresponds to the words of Paul in Galatians 1:18-19, where he talks about going up to Jerusalem three years after his conversion to become acquainted with Cephas (Peter), and where he also met "James, the Lord's brother," but none of the other apostles. And in 1 Corinthians 15:5-7, the only individuals he mentions by name are Peter and James, the two apostles he met when he went up to Jerusalem. Gary Habermas, who has done extensive research of the opinions of critical scholars, said: "The most popular view is that Paul received this material during his trip to Jerusalem just three years after his conversion, to visit Peter and James (Gal. 1:18-19), both of whose names appear in the appearance list (1 Cor. 15:5, 7). An important hint here is Paul's use of the verb historesai (1:18), a term that indicates the investigation of a topic."

So in this group that, according to 1 Corinthians 15:5-8, saw Jesus, we have Paul, the intellectual Pharisee who violently persecuted the church; Peter, the coward who denied Jesus three times when He was arrested and then went into hiding; James, the brother of Jesus who was skeptical of Jesus' claims during His lifetime (Mark 3:21, John 7:5); and the five hundred, most of whom were still alive at the time of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, and available for questioning, since the Christians were called to be "witnesses" (Acts 1:8).

Modern scholars have almost unanimously dismissed the idea that these individuals lied about the appearances, because they would not have given up everything, including their lives, for a known lie. The Christian faith is based on the fact of the resurrection, and if the early Christians knew that Jesus had not really risen from the dead, their subsequent behavior would have been incomprehensible. If James did not at least think he saw Jesus, how did he go from being a skeptic who believed that his brother was insane (Mark 3:21, John 7:5) to the head of the early church (Acts 15:13) to being stoned to death by a sanhedrin of judges (Antiquities of the Jews, 20:200)? Why was Paul willing to give up his prestige to suffer poverty, imprisonment, and persecution? And why did Peter overcome his cowardice to boldly proclaim the gospel if he was part of a conspiracy to deceive? Why sacrifice everything to be part of a small Jewish sect that was deemed heretical by other Jews and illegal by the Romans? And how could such a conspiracy survive the severe persecution of Christians by Nero beginning in 64 AD?

One might argue that it is not unusual for religious fanatics to be willing to die for what they believe. The 911 terrorists were brainwashed into thinking that they would get seventy-two virgins in Paradise for killing American infidels. (In other words, if they died killing debauched Americans, their reward would be an eternity of debauchery.) But the faith of the disciples of Jesus was based, not on expectation, but on experience. They claimed to have seen the resurrected Jesus.

The primary hypothesis put forth by skeptics to explain the appearances and the subsequent faith of the disciples is that they all hallucinated. They had some kind of experience that deeply affected them for the rest of their lives, but it was psychological. The proponents of this theory postulate that the disciples experienced grief-related hallucinations after the death of Jesus, and they spread via chain reaction to what Lüdemann labeled "mass ecstasy."

But there are several problems with the hallucination theory: First, hallucinations by their very nature are psychological phenomena, so most psychologists say that they are private experiences. Since they are perceptions independent of external stimuli, it is no more possible to share the exact same hallucination with another person than to share the exact same dream. Second, even if "collective hallucinations" are possible in some situations, as psychologists Leonard Zusne and Warren H. Jones say may have been the case with the Marian visions, the criteria present during those events were not present when the apostles saw Jesus postmortem.

Zusne and Jones say that "emotional arousal is a prerequisite of collective hallucinations," and "all participants in the hallucination must be informed beforehand, at least concerning the broad outlines of the phenomenon that will constitute the collective hallucination."

So with that in mind, I'm going to compare the event at Fátima to the resurrection appearances. First, the large crowd that saw the "miracle of the sun" came expecting to see something miraculous. They had been told that something would happen that day.

The disciples, on the other hand, did not expect to see Jesus resurrected. The Gospels indicate that everybody was initially skeptical. The disciples did not believe the women when they returned from the tomb (Luke 24:11) and Thomas did not believe the disciples (John 20:25). Was their skepticism a later invention? Under the criterion of embarrassment, there is no reason why the faithlessness of the disciples should be emphasized unless it was authentic.

And Paul certainly didn't expect to see Jesus on the road to Damascus. He was probably the last person he wanted to see. Acts 9:1-2 says, "Now Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest, and asked for letters from him to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, both men and women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem." Then he saw a light from heaven and heard a voice, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?" His travel companions heard the voice but saw no one.

What kind of a hallucination turns a murderous persecutor into a peaceful missionary? And who hallucinates a light that is so bright that it leaves him blind?

The second criteria Zusne and Jones give is emotional arousal. Those who witnessed the "miracle of the sun" at Fátima came to see something supernatural, so they may have been in a state of religious fervor, but the disciples had just seen their friend and rabbi being publicly flogged and crucified as a criminal, thus dashing their hopes that He was the awaited Messiah. The normal reaction would be depression and fear for their own lives, and that is exactly how the Gospels tell us they did react.

Also, James and Paul were not exactly the credulous type. The Gospels make it clear that James did not believe during Jesus' lifetime, and 1 Corinthians 15:7 tells us that Jesus appeared to him. Paul must have known everything about the teachings of the Way, including the claims of the resurrection, but that did not stop him from persecuting its followers. He was also highly educated and trained in Greek philosophy, and in 1 Timothy 4:7 he warns his followers to have nothing to do with worldly myths and old wives tales. In no way does he seem like someone who was prone to flights of fancy.

So even if the event at Fátima was, as Zusne and Jones hypothesize, collective hallucination "mingled with some celestial event," they say nothing about the postmortem appearances of Jesus. And with good reason, because the resurrection appearances do not meet the criteria they put forth.

But Lüdemann gives a different explanation. He says that the extreme grief of the disciples led them to hallucinate the appearances. The first point to note here is that Lüdemann is not a psychologist, and Zusne and Jones, who are psychologists, say nothing about grief leading to collective hallucinations. This kind of hallucination may perhaps be experienced by a bereaved spouse, but it doesn't spread to the other family members, neighbors, and treating health care professionals.

Second, Paul felt no grief, nor is there any evidence of guilt prior to his conversion. He persecuted the Christians because he was zealous for his ancestral traditions (Galatians 1:14), and he was faultless in his legalistic righteousness (Philippians 3:6). He was well-educated and rational, and most likely he thought very highly of himself prior to his conversion. And yet he is our primary witness of the resurrection because he speaks of his own first-hand experiences.

The hallucination hypothesis has many problems, but even if it didn't, it wouldn't explain the empty tomb. Another naturalistic explanation is required to account for that, and as I have attempted to demonstrate in a prior post, none fit the evidence.

The question then remains: Why should we prefer one apparent violation of the laws of nature (the resurrection of a dead man) to others like mass hallucinations under impossible circumstances? That is a question of applying Bayes' Theorem to all the salient facts and weighing the probability of the resurrection against the naturalistic explanations. Several people have already done this and found that given the vanishingly small probability of the naturalistic explanations, the probability of the resurrection is high even if we assume that it has a very low prior probability apart from the specific evidence.

And the prior probability is not as low as some may think. As I pointed out in my post about Hume and Bayes' Theorem, it is not simply the probability of a violation of the laws of nature, but the probability of God raising His Son from the dead in order to prove His deity and victory over death. And in order to do that, He has to exist, so we have to view the prior probability in the context of arguments in natural theology for the existence of God. That is, the stronger the fine-tuning argument, the cosmological argument, the argument from moral law, and other arguments for God's existence, the higher the prior probability that God exists and therefore the more likely that He raised Jesus from the dead. Conversely, the stronger the atheological arguments, like the problem of evil, the less likely that God exists and therefore the lower the prior probability that He raised Jesus from the dead.

In the same way that the evidence in natural theology increases the prior probability of the resurrection, the resurrection is one more argument for the existence of God, specifically the God of the Bible. God intended it as proof to all (Acts 17:31). Thomas Arnold, former Professor of History at Oxford, concluded: "I know of no one fact in the history of mankind which is proved by better, fuller evidence of every sort, to the understanding of a fair enquirer, than the great sign which God hath given us that Christ died, and rose again from the dead."

When the Transcendent Fills the Ordinary

2010-12-21T16:16:00.000-08:00

I will soon write my post on the resurrection appearances of Jesus, but first I wanted to post something more appropriate for the season. The above video has been watched almost 25 million times on YouTube. Water Russell Mead wrote the following in his blog post, "The Kingdom of God in a Food Court":

To hear this music in that place, and to see this spontaneity breaking forth in the midst of life at its dullest, most routine is to see what the Gospel really is. Just as the Hallelujah Chorus erupts into the food court, changing everything, Jesus was born into the dreary history of a defeated people while his parents were fighting the seasonal crowds in Bethlehem like shoppers hunting for a table in the food court of an overcrowded mall.

When the miracle happens, the ordinary life of ordinary people is transformed. This solid and often dull world of work and worry suddenly moves onto a new plane: infinitely richer. We look up — not in duty or obligation or in moral resolve — but in sheer, surprising joy.

The juxtaposition of the ordinary and the transcendent is a recurring theme in the Gospel. We have this heavenly treasure in jars of clay, says the Apostle Paul--just like the blessed Virgin Mary, a humble girl who was chosen to bear the Messiah. When the King of kings came to live among us, He was born in a stable among the animals, and the glory of the Lord lit up the night for a group of shepherds as a multitude of the heavenly host proclaimed the good news that a Savior had been born for them (Luke 2:11).

He was born for them--and for us--ordinary people who experience the prosaic drudgery of human existence, like shepherds working the night shift. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: "God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them." Like in a food court.

Skeptical Response to the Resurrection: The Empty Tomb

2010-11-30T17:12:00.000-08:00

The resurrection of Jesus is supported by three pillars: the empty tomb, the postmortem appearances, and the birth and growth of the church in the face of severe persecution. In order to undermine the historical support for the resurrection, a naturalistic theory has to explain all three in a way that is scientifically and psychologically viable and not excessively ad hoc.

A greater assortment of sledge hammers have been taken to the empty tomb than either of the other two pillars, but even so, most critical scholars accept its historicity. Jewish scholar Geza Vermez concludes: "But in the end, when every argument has been considered and weighed, the only conclusion acceptable to the historian must be that the opinions of the orthodox, the liberal sympathizer and the critical agnostic alike . . . are simply interpretations of the one disconcerting fact: namely that the women who set out to pay their last respects to Jesus found to their consternation, not a body, but an empty tomb."

But some skeptics try to characterize the story of the empty tomb as legend, so I will start by addressing the historicity of the empty tomb.

Is the empty tomb a legend? Skeptics argue that, unlike 1 Corinthians, the Gospels were written by anonymous authors at least thirty years after the death of Jesus, so enough time passed for legendary embellishment to develop. But there are three major reasons why the empty tomb is not a legend:

First, according to the late historian of ancient Rome and fellow at Oxford, A. N. Sherwin-White, "even two generations are too short a span to allow the mythical tendency to prevail over the hard historic core of the oral tradition." And with respect to historical reconstruction, he says that "we are seldom in the happy position of dealing at only one remove with a contemporary source." But the first Gospel was written while many of the original eyewitnesses were probably still alive. So that is not enough time for legend to have replaced the historical core of the stories of which the Gospels are composed.

Sherwin-White is one of a number of historians who have confirmed the historicity of the book of Acts "even in matters of detail." And he concludes that the reason why the "degree of confirmation in Graeco-Roman terms is less for the Gospels than for Acts is due, as these lectures have tried to show, to the differences in their regional setting. As soon as Christ enters the Roman orbit at Jerusalem, the confirmation begins. For Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming" (italics added). So because of the regional setting of most of the Gospel stories, we cannot directly confirm their basic historicity in the way that we can the book of Acts. But since Acts is by all appearances "no less of a propaganda narrative than the Gospels, liable to similar distortions," there is no reason to think that the Gospels are less historical.

Second, in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7, Paul recites a creedal formula which most scholars, including skeptics like Gerd Lüdemann, date to within a couple of years of the death of Jesus, and in it he says, "and that [Jesus] was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:4). Paul's statement (and by extension, the statement of his predecessors shortly after the death of Jesus) that Jesus was raised on the third day implies that the tomb was empty because otherwise the creed could not have said that Jesus was raised on the third day. If a body remained in the tomb or rotted in a common grave, the day of his resurrection would have been unknown.

The words "according to the Scriptures" do not help here because Hosea 6:2, the Old Testament reference, would be too subtle unless Paul knew of the empty grave on the third day. Hosea 6:2 says "He will revive us after two days; He will raise us up on the third day, that we may live before Him." Unless the early church knew that the tomb was found empty on the third day, it would be too much of a stretch to say that this verse is a Scriptural reference to the day of the resurrection.

This further undermines the theory that the empty tomb was a legend, since the early Christians would have preached it from the very beginning.

Third, critical scholars employ historical criteria to determine whether parts of the Bible are true, and two of them are the criterion of multiple attestation and the criterion of embarrassment. The criterion of multiple attestation is met because the story of women finding the tomb empty is told in each of the four Gospels. (And of course they were not originally part of a compilation labeled the "New Testament." They were the earliest and most reliable documents about Jesus.)

The criterion of embarrassment is met because the male disciples fled in fear after Jesus was arrested, while women, who had virtually no status in first century Palestine, and were not considered reliable witnesses, stayed and went to pay their last respects to Jesus. They were the star witnesses to the empty tomb, something that the authors would be very unlikely to fabricate.

Someone suggested in a previous thread that Mark invented the empty tomb to fill in a gap in his story of what happened to Jesus, and that 16:8 was Mark's way of explaining why the story of the empty tomb had not been told earlier. ("They went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had gripped them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.") That is, the "unreliable" women who said nothing were a later invention. However, the context indicates that the women were only silent temporarily because they were terrorized by their experience. In Mark 16:7 the angel tells them to go tell Peter and the other disciples, and in Matthew, Luke, and John they do exactly that. Most likely Mark just left that part out and instead focused on the women's state of mind immediately after their encounter with the angel.

Numerous theories have been put forth over the years of natural explanations for the empty tomb, and I will briefly mention the major ones:

Did the disciples steal the body? Matthew 28:11-15 says that a story of the disciples stealing the body of Jesus circulated among the Jews. Although we don't have independent corroboration that first century Jews made this arguments (but I'm aware of modern Jews who have been given that explanation growing up in Jewish schools), it is unlikely that Matthew invented this, since he brought it up for the purpose of refuting it. If another argument had been widespread among the Jews at the time, why did he not focus on that on instead?

This argument concedes the empty tomb because if there was some way of denying that the tomb was empty in the first place, the detractors of Christianity would have taken that approach. They could have produced a body, argued that the body was one of many in a common grave, or claimed that the story of the empty tomb was invented later. But instead of denying the empty grave, they chose to explain it away.

The stolen body hypothesis has been rejected by modern critics because the disciples would not have been willing to die for a known lie. Something changed the followers of Jesus from doubting cowards to courageous proclaimers of the Gospel who were willing to die for their faith.

Did Jesus not really die? This was a popular hypothesis around the beginning of the nineteenth century, but like the stolen body theory, it has been almost completely abandoned by modern scholars. It states that Jesus did not fully die on the cross and recovered in the tomb. This hypothesis has major problems. First, since Jesus was at least severely wounded from the crucifixion, there is no way He could have removed the stone covering the entrance to the tomb, so the apparent death theory has to be in part conspiracy theory. Second, as the very liberal scholar David Strauss argued, how did a half-dead Jesus stumble into a meeting of His doubting and fearful disciples and encourage them with the news that He had conquered death and someday they would have a body just like His? Third, numerous studies show that medically there is no way He could have survived the crucifixion. Skeptical Jesus Seminar co-founder John Dominic Crossan has stated that the fact that Jesus died by crucifixion is as sure as any fact could ever be.

Did the women visit the wrong tomb? This hypothesis, put forth in the early twentieth century, says that the women lost their way to the tomb and ended up at one that was unoccupied. A caretaker said to them, "You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth. He is not here," and the women were so unnerved that they ran off without hearing the rest of the explanation. When the disciples started talking about appearances of the risen Christ, the women embellished the story into the account found in Mark.

This hypothesis never took off in large part because it cherry picks certain parts of the Gospel account and dismisses others without giving good justification. And it doesn't explain why nobody, including the Jewish leaders, ever set the record straight.

Did Joseph of Arimathea remove the body from his tomb? One hypothesis states that Joseph was not a follower of Jesus, but that Joseph placed Jesus in his rock-hewn tomb in observance of the Jewish laws that a body had to be buried within 24-hours and that burial was prohibited on the Sabbath. Since Jesus died shortly before the start of the Sabbath (from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday), there was no time to dig a grave. Joseph temporarily stored the body in his tomb, and then removed it after the Sabbath. The women later discovered the tomb empty.

There are several problems with this explanation: First, since Joseph was a member of the Sanhedrin and a devout Jew, why did he not announce what he had done when the early Christians began proclaiming that Jesus had risen from the dead? He could have done much to nip the movement in the bud. Second, if Joseph had taken the body, there is no reason to think that the followers of Jesus would have concluded that He had risen. According to John 20:2, Mary Magdalene immediately assumed that someone had taken the body of Jesus. Third, Joseph must have removed the body after sundown on Saturday and before dawn on Sunday, which is when the Gospels tell us the women arrived. Why did he not wait until daylight before he removed the body? If he was not sympathetic to Jesus, it seems reasonable that he would remove the body, but it makes no sense that he did it after dark and that he failed to later announce what he had done.

Every naturalistic explanation of the empty tomb has serious problems, and even if they can be overcome, another major hurdle remains: the appearances of Jesus as the risen Christ in such a convincing way that his followers--including those who started out as skeptics--were willing to sacrifice their lives for their faith. The subject of my next post will be the skeptical response to the appearances of Jesus.

An Invincible Unbelief?

2010-11-14T18:59:00.000-08:00

A few months ago, I spilled a glass of water on my daughter's book. I quickly wiped it off and put it down to go clean the area where I spilled. But when my daughter came to look for it later because she needed it for school, it was gone. We searched everywhere to no avail, so I just bought her a new book. It never reappeared, and at this point I would be surprised if it ever does.

How could that book have completely disappeared? Did the water have magical properties? Do we have a gnome infestation? That thought has occurred to me a few times when socks go into the laundry chute and never, ever make it out. Maybe the book went the way of those socks, whose partners have taken up permanent residence at the bottom of the clean laundry basket in the hopes that they will someday return.

But enough about my laundry woes, the point here is that in spite of my speculation, I know that we don't have gnomes. I also know that the water did not make the book disappear. In fact, I know that even if the book never shows up there's a natural explanation for its disappearance. I have an invincible unbelief in gnomes and magic water and I believe that to be a rational position.

I used the words "invincible unbelief" because during a debate between Antony Flew and Gary Habermas on the resurrection of Jesus, they agreed on the relevant historical facts, but Flew said that he had an almost invincible unbelief in the resurrection because it was so wildly different from our experience of how the universe functions. Flew agreed with David Hume's argument against miracles in the article "Of Miracles," which states, in a nutshell, that no matter how improbable a naturalistic explanation, a miracle is even less probable. Hume defines a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature and argues that experience is proof against them.

There are several problems with Hume's argument. First, the definition he gives of a miracle is a poor one. A better definition is the one given by J. L. Mackie: "The laws of nature . . . describe the ways in which the world--including, of course, human beings--works when left to itself, when not interfered with. A miracle occurs when the world is not left to itself, when something distinct from the natural order as a whole intrudes into it." That definition is not theologically precise, but it works for the purposes of this discussion.

The example I gave about gnomes stealing my daugther's book or water causing it to disappear would be a violation of the laws of nature in that the universal laws would suddenly not apply. However, the resurrection would be a miracle according to Mackie's definition because God raised Jesus from the dead; this was not simply a violation of the laws of nature, but an intrusion from beyond nature.

This distinction is significant because it is reasonable to believe that the laws of nature are constant. If they were not, the universe would be incomprehensible to us and science would be impossible. We know from experience that the laws of nature are predictable. However, this does not mean that it is reasonable to have an invincible conviction that nothing exists beyond nature. That is a different question altogether.

Second, Hume's argument may be reasonably applied to the disappearing book, but it is not reasonable to apply it to the resurrection of Jesus, which, if true, would be an argument for a God who exists beyond nature. In other words, if God raised Jesus from the dead, then that is an argument for theism, like the fine-tuning argument, the cosmological argument, and the argument from moral law. The argument is not just that a violation of the laws of nature took place, but that God intervened from beyond nature to raise Jesus from the dead, and He would have to exist to do so. And not only is it an argument for theism in general, but it is an argument for the Christian God.

In fact, I have frequently heard non-believers say that they would believe if they witnessed a miracle. Of course, if God had to perform a major miracle in the presence of every person who ever lived, then miracles would be the rule rather than the exception and therefore not evidence for His existence. Instead, He entered His creation in the flesh and did one major miracle that is supported by historical evidence: He rose from the dead. And His resurrection from the dead is the lynchpin of the Christian faith.

So Hume commits the fallacy of begging the question by rejecting the central claim of Christian theism without even considering the evidence. He dismisses the possibility that we could ever have evidence that a God who exists outside of nature revealed Himself to us within nature by doing something that is normally impossible.

Third, Hume's argument is essentially probabilistic, and it has been refuted by Bayes' Theorem. William Lane Craig explained this in his debate with Bart Ehrman, who used a variation of Hume's argument. Craig sets it up as follows:

Calculating the Probability of the Resurrection:

B = Background knowledge
E = Specific evidence (empty tomb, postmortem appearances, etc.)
R = Resurrection of Jesus
Pr (R/B & E) = ?

As I said before, Hume ignores the specific evidence for the resurrection, and says that the probability of the resurrection is R/B, with B representing our background knowledge about the laws of nature and the likelihood of a violation. Of course the probability is very low, in part because of his definition of a miracle and in part because he does not take into consideration the evidence for the resurrection and the plausibility of naturalistic explanations. Agnostic philosopher of physics John Earman (not to be confused with Ehrman) did not mince words in calling Hume's argument fallacious in his book Hume's Abject Failure.

Since Hume's argument is about the probability of a miracle, Earman and Craig used Bayes' Theorem to refute it. Craig argued that the equation has to look like this:

Pr (R/B) x Pr (E/B&R)
Pr (R/B & E) = ____________________________________________
Pr (R/B) x Pr (E/B&R) + Pr (not-R/B) x (E/B& not-R)

The numerator is the probability of the resurrection given our background knowledge and the specific evidence for the resurrection. The denominator reproduces the numerator and adds the probability and explanatory power of all the naturalistic explanations. So the lower the probability of those explanations, the higher the probability of the resurrection. But if the naturalistic explanations [Pr (not-R/B) x (E/B& not-R)] are plausible and have explanatory power, then the probability of the resurrection goes down.

If that is not clear, Craig spends more time (and does a much better job) explaining it here.

The point here is not to give a probabilistic value to the resurrection but to demonstrate that Hume's argument is fallacious because he oversimplifies the probability of the resurrection. Instead of dismissing the resurrection as always the least probable, we also have to take into consideration the specific evidence for the resurrection and the probability of the naturalistic explanations, like numerous people--including skeptics--having the same hallucination in different situations and at different times, and being willing to give their lives for the truth of what they perceived.

But even if we ignore the evidence for the resurrection and just go back to the original equation Pr = R/B, then Hume's argument still fails because the arguments for theism in general make the inherent probability of the resurrection greater. If the existence of a God who created ex nihilo is the best explanation for why the universe emerged out of nothing, and an Intelligent Designer is the best explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe, then the probability that God raised Jesus from the dead increases. So the background knowledge is not just the probability of a violation of the laws of nature--it is the probability that God raised His Son from the dead, and the probability of that increases if the evidence in cosmology points to a Creator. Pr = R/B is affected by the probability of the existence of a Creator.

In the introduction to "Of Miracles," Hume says, "I flatter myself, that I have discovered an argument . . . which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures."

Although those of us in the throes of "superstitious delusions" are eternally grateful to Hume for his thoughtful gesture, the problem is that his argument is far too ambitious because it is only useful with respect to true superstition. For example, if I were tempted to plug in my gap of knowledge about the missing book with an explanation like gnomes, then his argument would be a "check" to that kind of a "superstitious delusion." But it tells us nothing about the probability that a God beyond nature would identify Himself to us within nature by superseding its laws, because for Him to be able to do that the laws of nature would have to be predictable in the first place.

Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus

2010-11-05T15:16:00.000-07:00

In his autobiography Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis wrote:

Early in 1926 [when Lewis was still an atheist] the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. "Rum thing," he went on. "All that stuff of Frazer's about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once."

What does it mean to say that there is historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus? It means that historians agree on facts about Jesus that strongly point to His resurrection from the dead. It does not, however, mean that the majority of scholars conclude that Jesus was raised from the dead. They would be at least nominally Christian if they believed that. (And in spite of his off-hand comment, Lewis' friend never since showed any interest in Christianity.)

Over the years, critical scholars have not so much disputed the facts as sought naturalistic explanations, like the swoon theory, the stolen body theory, and the mass hallucination theory. But as we will see in the next post, none of these theories are medically or psychologically plausible, nor do they explain all the facts. Only the bodily resurrection of Jesus explains all the known facts.

These key facts are:

First, Jesus was buried in Jerusalem, in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the Sanhedrin.

Second, the disciples lost hope when Jesus was arrested.

Third, the tomb was found empty by a group of Jesus's female followers on the morning of the third day after He was crucified.

Fourth, over a period of time a variety of people had experiences where Jesus appeared to them postmortem, including James, the skeptical brother of Jesus and Paul, the Pharisee who persecuted the church.

Fifth, the resurrection was the central message from the very beginning, and the disciples courageously preached it in Jerusalem, the city where Jesus was crucified, willing to forfeit even their lives.

Why do most historians agree on these facts?

The "honorable burial" by Joseph of Arimathea in Jerusalem. Most historians agree that the Gospel accounts are correct about the honorable burial for the following reasons: First, the burial is independently attested in several early sources. Skeptical scholar Bart Ehrman acknowledges that "the earliest accounts we have are unanimous in saying that Jesus was in fact buried by this fellow, Joseph of Arimathea, and so it's relatively reliable that that's what happened."

Second, Joseph was a member of the Sanhedrin, which means that he was a celebrity at the time. The authors of the Gospels could not have made this up and not been called on it because many people would have known, at the time when the Gospels were written, whether or not it was true. And the Jewish leaders certainly would have set everyone straight if this had been fabricated.

Third, it seems unlikely that the Christians would have made this up. The Jewish leaders are the villains in the Gospel accounts, and the early Christians blamed them for Jesus's death (Acts 7). So how likely is it that the Gospel authors would all agree to fabricate this ironic twist--that a good and honorable Jewish leader would bury Jesus in his own tomb?

The historicity of this fact is significant because it tells us that Jesus was buried in Jerusalem, in the very city where the message of the resurrection was initially proclaimed. So if any body remained in the tomb, the authorities could have produced it and the message would have been disproved immediately. But there is no evidence of any body having been produced. Gary Habermas says, "We certainly would expect to have heard from Celsus, the second-century critic of Christianity, if Jesus' corpse had been produced. When he wrote against Jesus' resurrection, it would have been to his advantage to include this damaging information, had it been available." But neither he nor any of the Christian apologists of the second or third centuries mentioned it.

The disciples' initial doubt and fear. One of the criteria Bible historians use to determine whether an event in the life of Jesus really took place is the criterion of embarrassment. That is, if it is embarrassing and still included, it is most likely true because why would someone fabricate something to make a significant person in the early church look bad? Well, Peter's denial of Jesus makes him look really bad. First we have the initial bravado: "I'll never deny you, even if I have to die for you!" Then after Jesus was arrested, we have the cowardly denial to a servant girl who recognized him. And when they didn't accept his denials, the future St. Peter the great church leader started cursing and swearing: "I do not know the man!"

This story clearly qualifies under the criterion of embarrassment, and it tells us that the budding ministry started to collapse when their Leader died. As Peter demonstrates, the disciples were stricken with fear and began to doubt everything they had seen and experienced. And this incident is told in all four Gospels so it also qualifies under the criterion of multiple attestation.

The discovery of the empty tomb by female disciples. Was the tomb really empty? This is probably the most controversial fact of the five, and even so, William Lane Craig says: "According to Jacob Kremer, a New Testament critic who has specialized in the study of the resurrection: 'By far most exegetes hold firmly to the reliability of the biblical statements about the empty tomb.' In fact in a bibliographical survey of over 2,200 publications on the resurrection in English, French, and German since 1975, Habermas found that 75 percent of scholars accepted the historicity of the discovery of Jesus' empty tomb. The evidence is so compelling that even a number of Jewish scholars, such as Pinchas Lapide and Geza Vermes, have declared themselves convinced on the basis of the evidence that Jesus' tomb was found empty." And Bart Ehrman admits, "We also have solid traditions to indicate that women found this tomb empty three days later."

The main reason why most scholars accept the historicity of the empty tomb is because each Gospel account insists that women were the chief witnesses. It is not strictly true that they were not permitted to testify, but they were never called upon as witnesses in important matters. So if the story of the empty tomb was legendary, the male disciples would have almost certainly have been the ones to discover it. There is simply no reason to fabricate such a detail.

Some critical scholars, like Gerd Lüdemann, believe that the account of the empty tomb is a legend, but the canonical passion story is too unembellished to read like a legend. Contrast the understated passion story of the Gospel of Mark to the dramatic non-canonical Gospel of Peter, where a gigantic Jesus emerges from the tomb before a vast crowd of witnesses, including the villainous Roman soldiers and Jewish leaders. Two enormous shining men carry Jesus off in glory as a talking cross follows them. A voice from heaven proclaims: "Thou hast preached to them that sleep, and from the cross there was heard the answer, Yea" (10:41-42). Now that's a legend for you!

A variety of people had experiences, at different times and in different ways, in which Jesus appeared to them postmortem. Scholars are virtually unanimous in their acceptance of this fact. Gerd Lüdemann, an eminent atheistic scholar who has written a book seeking to prove that the resurrection did not take place, has said, "It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus's death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ." As I will discuss in the next post, Lüdemann contends that everybody who thought they saw him actually hallucinated. However, for now it is significant that just about all scholars accept this fact, including those who are strongly biased against Christianity.

Why would an opponent of Christianity say that this is historically certain? In the first letter to the Corinthians, written by Paul around 55AD, he says: "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to the twelve. After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep; then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles; and last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared to me also" (1 Corinthians 15:3-8).

So at the time when Paul wrote this, there were hundreds of people still alive claiming to have seen the risen Christ and willing to testify as witnesses. Were they all friendly witnesses? No, James the brother of Jesus was a skeptic until He saw Jesus postmortem, and that is when he was converted and became one of the leaders of early church. And, according to Josephus, James and some companions were stoned to death by the Sanhedrin of judges in 62 BC (Antiquities of the Jews 20:200).

Paul himself was certainly no friendly witness. Until his conversion on the road to Damascus, Paul was a Pharisee who violently persecuted the church, having been commissioned by the Sanhedrin. "For you have heard of my former manner of life in Judaism, how I used to persecute the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it; and I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries among my countrymen, being more extremely zealous for my ancestral traditions" (Galatians 1:13-14).

So Paul was well-respected among the very people who sought to destroy the Christian movement, but he gave that all up after Jesus appeared to him. Instead of prestige and money, he chose ridicule, imprisonment, and poverty for the sake of the Gospel. Why did he do that? If he had really seen Jesus, he did it for the hope of his own resurrection and the resurrection of others. But if the incident on the road to Damascus never happened, what then could possibly have motivated him?

The resurrection of Christ was the central message of Christianity from the very beginning, and the disciples courageously preached it in Jerusalem, the city where Jesus was crucified. In 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, Paul sets forth the creed that he received, "that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures." This is an early creedal formula that most critical scholars believe Paul received in 35 AD, during his visit to see Peter and James in Jerusalem three years after his conversion (Galatians 1:18). So within five years of the resurrection, the beliefs of the early church had been formulated into a creed and passed on to Paul. German historian Hans von Campenhausen says of the dating of the creedal formula: "This account meets all the demands of historical reliability that could possibly be made of such a text." However, this does not mean that the creed was formulated as late as 35 AD; it simply means that it already existed at that time.

It is well established that the early church flourished in Jerusalem, the city where Jesus was crucified and buried. If the tomb had not been empty and the Sanhedrin had produced a body--any body--it would have significantly weakened the movement if not disproved the claim that Jesus had been raised from the dead. But the early Christians boldly proclaimed the resurrection in Jerusalem, willingly facing torture and death for their conviction.

Those historical facts have stood immutable as a rock in spite of many attempts to explain them away. Did Jesus not really die? Did the disciples steal the body and conspire to deceive? Did everybody who thought they saw the resurrected Christ hallucinate? Were people in first century Palestine so superstitious and ignorant of science that they readily believed that someone could be raised bodily from the dead?

The last point was raised in the comments to the prior post, so I'll reply to that here. In The Resurrection of the Son of God, N. T. Wright said that the idea of a bodily resurrection was considered impossible among the pagans. They might not have been very scientific (and they may have believed in ghosts), but they knew that dead people stayed dead. Wright says: "Not even in myth was it permitted. When Apollo tried to raise a child from the dead, Zeus punished them both with a thunderbolt." In 1 Corinthians 1:23, Paul says that the Gospel is foolishness to the Gentiles, and that is probably because they had no belief in the possibility of a bodily resurrection of the dead. In Acts 26:24, the Roman governor Festus accuses Paul of being out of his mind when he tells King Agrippa about the resurrection. The Jews, on the other hand, believed only in a resurrection at the end of time, and they had no concept of a dying and rising Messiah.

The skeptic who rejects the resurrection will have to propose an alternative explanation for the evidence, and I will elaborate on some of them in the next post. Lüdemann has argued that those who believed they saw Jesus really hallucinated, a problematic hypothesis given the nature of hallucinations. Bart Ehrman relies on David Hume's argument that the supernatural is inherently the least probable explanation, but that argument has been refuted using Bayes' Theorem. And Anthony Flew admitted, in a debate with Gary Habermas in 1993, that he had an almost invincible unbelief in the resurrection because it seemed to him so "wildly inconsistent with everything else that happens in the universe."

Flew is right that the resurrection is wildly inconsistent with everything we know; people have always known that dead people stay dead. But that is precisely why it would be logical for the Creator of this ordered universe to reveal Himself to us in that way, as a miracle within His original miracle--creation itself.

Did Jesus Really Exist?

2010-10-30T15:33:00.000-07:00

No serious contemporary historian questions the historicity of Jesus, and that includes skeptical scholars like John Dominic Crossan, Gerd Lüdemann, and Bart Ehrman, so this may be a redundant post. But a few atheists--like Dan Barker and Christopher Hitchens--have publicly disputed His existence. So for the sake of completeness, I will briefly state some of the extra-biblical evidence for Jesus's existence.

First century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus mentions Jesus twice in Jewish Antiquities:

At this time there was a wise man called Jesus. And his conduct was good and (he) was known to be virtuous. And many people from among the Jews and other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. And those who had become his disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and that he was alive; accordingly he was perhaps the messiah concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders.

The original version had unfortunately been interpolated later to include questionable phrases like "if it would be lawful to call him a man," and "he was the Christ." However, the above translation is of the Arabic version, which was found without the interpolated parts. It has been translated by Schlomo Pines, professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The second mention of Jesus by Josephus is as follows:

Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others.

Jesus (Yeshu) also appears to be mentioned in the Jewish Talmud, in Sanhedrin 43a:

On the eve of the Passover Yeshu was hanged. For forty days before the execution took place, a herald went forth and cried, "He is going forth to be stoned because he has practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy. Any one who can say anything in his favor, let him come forward and plead on his behalf." But since nothing was brought forward in his favor he was hanged on the eve of the Passover.

This tells us several things: First, this Yeshu was accused of practicing sorcery, which sounds like a derogatory characterization of the miraculous. It is also consistent with Luke 11:15, which says that some of the Jewish leaders accused Jesus of casting out demons by the power of Beelzebub, the ruler of the demons.

Second, he "enticed Israel to apostasy." This indicates that he had a strong following among the Jews and that he taught something the Jewish leaders disapproved of and labeled "apostasy."

Third, he was hanged on the eve of the Passover, just like Jesus. The word "hanged" was also used for crucifixion, in the sense that someone was hanged on a cross.

Wikipedia adds the following: "In the Florence manuscript of the Talmud (1177 CE) an addition is made to Sanhedrin 43a saying that Yeshu was hanged on the eve of the Sabbath." So this Yeshu was hanged on the eve of the Sabbath and on the eve of the Passover, just like Jesus in the Bible. It is rare for the Passover and the Sabbath to fall on the same day; for example, in the twentieth century it only happened ten times.

Fourth, the herald that went out before the hanging said that Yeshu was to be stoned, which was the penalty for blasphemy. However, he was not stoned--he was hanged.

Although the Talmud does not mention Pontius Pilate, Cornelius Tacitus, one of Rome's greatest historians, does. He wrote in his Annals about the great fire of Rome in 64 AD, which had been blamed on the emperor Nero, and explained:

Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate, and a deadly superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but also in the City [Rome], where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world meet and become popular.

Some skeptics have claimed that this part of the Annals was a forgery added later by Christians. But most scholars have concluded that the passage was written by Tacitus, including the skeptical Bible scholar Bart Ehrman, who said, "Tacitus's report confirms what we know from other sources, that Jesus was executed by order of the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, sometime during Tiberius's reign."

Pliny the Younger described more persecution of the early Christians in his lettters to Trajan around 110 AD:

In the meantime, the method I have observed towards those who have been denounced to me as Christians is this: I interrogated them whether they were Christians; if they confessed it I repeated the question twice again, adding the threat of capital punishment; if they still persevered, I ordered them to be executed. For whatever the nature of their creed might be, I could at least feel no doubt that contumacy and inflexible obstinacy deserved punishment.

Lucian, a second century Greek satirist, wrote:

The Christians, you know, worship a man to this day--the distinguished personage who introduced their novel rites, and was crucified on that account . . . You see, these misguided creatures start with the general conviction that they are immortal for all time, which explains the contempt of death and voluntary self-devotion which are so common among them; and then it was impressed on them by their original lawgiver that they are all brothers, from the moment that they are converted, and deny the gods of Greece, and worship the crucified sage, and live after his laws.

Second century philosopher Celcus, an opponent of Christianity, wrote a book about the Christians in which he said that Jesus was a sorcerer. In other words, in his effort to discredit Christianity, he unwittingly affirmed that Jesus did perform extraordinary works, because rather than denying them, he explained them away.

These and numerous other sources indicate that Jesus really existed. There is simply no dispute about that among historians. In fact, atheist New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann has written a book in which he explicitly tries to disprove Christianity by arguing that the resurrection never happened, but not only does he concede that Jesus existed, he also says that there is no question that Jesus actually died on the cross, and that his disciples "had experiences after Jesus's death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ."

In the next post I will discuss the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. And in the following post, I will discuss the response of skeptical scholars.

Evidence for the Supernatural?

2010-10-20T16:28:00.000-07:00

Wolfgang asked an interesting question: "Do you think that two intellectually honest people can arrive at contradictory conclusions?"

Of course it is possible to honestly reach different conclusions if the evidence is inconclusive, but the interesting question is whether it's possible when the evidence strongly supports a particular conclusion. I think it is possible when people start with presuppositions.

For example, Answers in Genesis (AIG) presupposes that the Bible clearly teaches a recent creation and they therefore interpret scientific evidence in a way that supports that conclusion. (However, many Christians, including St. Augustine who lived in the fourth and fifth centuries, reject that presupposition and hold that the Bible says nothing about the age of the earth.) AIG maintains that everyone has presuppositions, and that there is nothing intellectually dishonest about them.

Is it intellectually honest to have presuppositions? Well, it is a form of question-begging because the presupposition itself determines our conclusion. So if the highest level of intellectual honesty is an honest search for truth, then any presuppositional bias undermines it. However, I would not say that presuppositions are necessarily a sign of intellectual dishonesty because they are so common. As Winston Churchill said, "Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened." But although presuppositions are common, they keep us from engaging honestly with the evidence.

Skeptical Bible scholars tend to presuppose that the supernatural is impossible. And if a Bible scholar starts out with the presupposition that nature is all that exists, then of course it follows that it would be impossible for God to raise Jesus from the dead because that would be a supernatural act. Any natural explanation, no matter how tenuous, would then be preferable.

For example, atheist New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann maintains a priori rejection of the supernatural and yet he says, "It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus's death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ." Although he accepts the historical evidence he concludes that the best explanation for it is that everybody who thought they saw the resurrected Jesus actually hallucinated. Peter hallucinated because he was overcome by grief for denying Jesus, Paul hallucinated on the road to Damascus, James the skeptical brother of Jesus hallucinated, and all the five hundred who saw Jesus at one time hallucinated.

As I'll discuss in a future post, this hypothesis betrays a lack of understanding of hallucinations, but the question is whether, based on my limited mind-reading abilities, I think that conclusion is intellectually dishonest. Although I disagree with Lüdemann's presuppositional bias, I think that his inability to believe in the supernatural is sincere. He started out as a liberal theologian who didn't accept the supernatural, and he became an atheist when he concluded that it is not possible to be a Christian and not believe that Jesus rose from the dead, and I think that decision was an honest one. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:14, the resurrection of Christ is the bedrock of Christianity, and if it didn't happen, our faith is in vain.

But I think it would have been even more honest to question the presupposition that the supernatural is impossible, because there is no logical reason to conclude that. We only assume that a person cannot rise from the dead because we have never heard of a medically documented case. Dead people stay dead--at least if they've been dead for over two days.

However, that is an empirical conclusion, not a logical one. The fact that the laws of nature are predictable tells us nothing about whether anything exists beyond nature. We are like the primitive person from a tropical climate who doesn't believe that it is possible for a lake to be solid. And of course it is impossible in a tropical climate, but not in parts of the world where the temperature drops below freezing. The conclusion that water can never be solid is an empirical one that only holds true if the temperature never drops below freezing. Sub-zero weather adds a contingency that negates the conclusion that water is never solid.

In the same way, what is true within our space-time is not necessarily true beyond it. Lüdemann objects to miracles because they're unscientific, and since science depends on the predictability of nature, it is certainly true that miracles are unscientific. But since science cannot explain why the natural laws on which it depends exist in the first place, this doesn't mean that miracles are logically impossible--it means that the explanatory power of science is limited.

But if we left it at that, we could just as easily believe in pink unicorns; there is no reason to believe something just because it's logically possible. However, it is rational to believe something if it is the best explanation for the evidence given the context, particularly if there is no viable alternative explanation.

And what is the context? John 1:14 says, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us." The Greek word translated "Word" is "Logos," which means "reason," "rationality," "order," or "word." John tells us that Jesus is the transcendent, creative Mind that became flesh. He existed in the beginning, and everything came into being through Him.

The laws of physics break down at the Big Bang singularity, so speculation as to what caused it goes beyond the reach of science into metaphysics. The predictability on which the scientific method depends comes to an abrupt end at the beginning of time. We know nothing of a beyond, so a naturalistic cause is not inherently more parsimonious than a supernatural First Cause.

If anything, an eternal, immaterial, transcendent, and all powerful Mind is the simplest explanation that explains the scientific evidence without the need for further assumptions. If this universe consists of all nature, then the Creator would be supernatural; if the Big Bang marked the beginning of time, then the Creator would be eternal; and if the universe is all matter, then the Creator is immaterial. This fits what we know about the universe and explains what we don't know. Unless we assume as a premise that nothing exists beyond nature, it is the most parsimonious explanation.

So in the context of this Grand Miracle--an ordered universe emerging from nothing--we ask ourselves whether it is reasonable to conclude that the power behind this universe also has power over death. And if that power is a Mind, then He certainly does.

But we don't have to accept anything on blind faith; we just have to examine the historical evidence carefully and reach an honest conclusion. In the next posts, I will examine facts that have been widely accepted by historians, and I believe the best explanation for those facts is that God raised Jesus from the dead.

How Independent Were the Four Gospels?

2010-10-18T16:37:00.000-07:00

In the previous post, I said: "The four Gospels agree on the important details"

John on the Isle of Patmos

And Clamflats replied:

There is a bank robbery. Four tellers are interviewed by investigators. At the trial, the investigators state, “The four witnesses agree that the bandit wore a red shirt and black pants.” The defense attorney asks the investigators if they interviewed the tellers independently or as a group. I think you'd agree that independent corroboration should be considered more potent and that a group interview brings in questions about groupthink errors, such as, one teller remembered the clothing and the other three agree with him. Don't biblical scholars agree that the Gospels show signs of having some common source? I believe it is known as Q. And given the time difference between the events and the documentation, should we at least suspect that a number of the “important details” had already been accepted?

The three synoptic Gospels--Mark, Luke, and Matthew--include the same stories, often in the same sequence, but the Gospel of John is different. Scholars believe that Mark is the earliest Gospel, followed by Matthew and Luke, and then John.

The reason why scholars have hypothesized a Q source is because Matthew and Luke contain material that doesn't exist in Mark, and the idea is that Q is a collection of sayings and quotations by Jesus. However, they are not entirely happy with that hypothesis because it seems unlikely that such an important document would have been entirely lost and never referenced.

But for the purpose of answering your question about groupthink, I'm going to focus on Luke and John. Luke wrote both the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles to "the excellent Theophilus." Luke 1:1-4 says: "Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, it seemed fitting for me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in consecutive order, most excellent Theophilus; so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been taught."

So we know that he is writing to someone who is important enough to need his excellence affirmed in the salutation, and that he is purporting to give a detailed, consecutive account of the events of the life of Jesus. In other words, Luke probably held himself to a high standard in researching and writing the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles.

The question then becomes whether we have more than Luke's word for his factual accuracy. The world-famous archeologist, Sir William Ramsay, has said, "Luke is a historian of the first rank . . . This author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians." Do we have reason to accept his assessment of Luke? Yes we do, because the historical accuracy of the book of Acts is indisputable. For example, according to Professor A. N. Sherwin-White, author of Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament, "For Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming. Any attempt to reject its basic historicity even in matters of detail must now appear absurd."

Also, Luke begins to use the first person plural starting with Acts 16:11, indicating that he joined Paul in an evangelistic tour of Mediterranean cities. This is consistent with his statement at the beginning of the Gospel of Luke that he got his information from eyewitnesses and "servants of the word."

Whereas the Gospel of Luke purports to be a detailed, chronological history of Jesus, the Gospel of John is a deeply spiritual, reflective work with a high Christology, which means that it is more concerned with the nature of Jesus than with the details of His life. Rather than starting with the beginning of the life of Jesus, it starts with the beginning of time, and talks in a simple, mystical way of how the logos--the eternal transcendent Mind--became flesh and dwelt among us.

John is an entirely independent source, and scholars are split in terms of whether they think it was written by the apostle John himself or a follower. Although I see no reason to doubt the authorship of John (the work was attributed to John as early as the second century), even if one of his disciples wrote the Gospel the material would have originated from John himself, who was an eyewitness and very close to Jesus, calling himself "the disciple whom Jesus loved." In no way is he claiming that Jesus loved him more than the other disciples; he is basing his identity on his deep, personal awareness of God's love for him. In his epistles he emphasizes love as the essence of God's nature, so it is fitting that John's Gospel would focus on Christology.

So although the two Gospels cover the same events, Luke and John are very different in terms of their focus and style. Most likely they had little, if any, influence on each other.

Many people knew about the events (in Acts 26:26, Paul says that he's confident that King Agrippa knew about the events, because they did not take place in a corner), so it would have been very difficult for groupthink about important details to emerge so soon afterwards. And the fact that even the synoptic Gospels differ in the minor details indicates that there was no collusion. Even if Luke and Matthew based their account in part on Mark, they included details that were not found in Mark.

The Most Important Fact in the Bible

2010-10-10T12:40:00.000-07:00

The resurrection of Jesus is the fact on which Christianity stands or falls. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:14, "If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, your faith also is in vain." And in Romans 10:9 he says, "If you believe in your heart that God raised [Jesus] from the dead, you will be saved."

Without the resurrection as a factual, historical event, nothing else in the Bible matters. All the prophecies and typology in the Old Testament would be in vain--as Paul states, our faith would be entirely in vain.

But the evidence supporting the resurrection looks like a carefully orchestrated litigation strategy by God Himself to make His case to those who honestly seek the truth. He does not call us to believe "what you know ain't so," in the manner of Mark Twain's definition of faith. Instead, He rewards the diligent seeker of truth. Proverbs 8:17 says, "I [wisdom] love those who love me; and those who diligently seek me will find me."

Before I get into the evidence for the life, deity, and resurrection of Christ in future blog posts, I want to address the fact that each Gospel gives a slightly different account of what happened at the empty tomb. Why does Matthew only mention Mary Magdalene and "the other Mary," while Mark adds Salome to the two Marys, Luke omits Salome but mentions Joanna, and John mentions only Mary Magdalene? I have heard numerous attempts to reconcile these discrepancies and some of the explanations are persuasive. For example, in John 20, Mary Magdalene is the only woman mentioned but she says, "They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have laid Him," (John 20:2, italics added). So the authors may have chosen to omit extraneous details and focus on some things and not others.

However, I'm not going to attempt to reconcile these facts, because this "problem" is no problem at all--in no way does it undermine the central question of whether Jesus rose from the dead. If anything, it provides additional evidence that the tomb was indeed empty because it makes it clear to us that there was no collusion between the authors of the four Gospels, nor did anyone edit the manuscripts afterwards to make them consistent. The rawness is a sign of authenticity.

And even if these are actual human errors, they do not undermine the Bible's claim to divine inspiration, because God can and does work through human weakness to accomplish His goals. These discrepancies assure the reader that no conspiracy or editing took place.

In spite of minor discrepancies, the four Gospels agree on the important details, including the fact that the chief witnesses to the empty grave were all women. Women had so little status in first century Palestine that such a detail would not have been fabricated. First century historian Josephus said that the prevailing attitude was, "From women let not evidence be accepted because of the levity and temerity of their sex." So the only reason to mention the women was that they really did discover the empty tomb.

The Gospels also all agree that Jesus was buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Sanhedrin. Joseph would have been very well known, so this detail could not have been fabricated. And the tomb was in Jerusalem, not in some obscure place where nobody would know it if the tomb was empty.

So unlike the question of how many women were present at the tomb, these are important details, because they help us determine whether deception was likely, so an honest skeptic can weigh these and other factors in order to determine whether Jesus did in fact rise from the dead. This will be the subject of my next several blog posts.

Rick Acker's New Novel--And First Forty Pages

2010-09-15T20:58:00.000-07:00

When the Devil Whistles

Coming soon – When the Devil Whistles

Description

Allie Whitman and Connor Norman loved making the devils of the corporate world pay. Now, it’s their turn. And the price could be their lives.

“I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t.” That’s what Allie Whitman tells herself every night as she lies awake. Sometimes she even believes it. But mostly she knows deep down that her inability to make a hard choice has put millions of lives at risk, including her own. Now the only one who can help her is her lawyer, Connor Norman. Unfortunately, Allie’s actions have destroyed Connor’s trust in her—and may destroy much, much more.

Praise of When the Devil Whistles

“Gripping, edge-of-your-seat fiction. When the Devil Whistles is a fast mix of suspense, compelling characters and legal intrigue as only Acker can write it. I dare you to try to put this book down.”- Tosca Lee, author of Demon: A Memoir

“More than once while reading When the Devil Whistles, I had to remind myself that I wasn’t reading John Grisham. Rick Acker’s pacing and plot are terrific, and I found myself rooting for Allie and Connor even when they made mistakes. A wonderful read from a writer I wish I’d discovered sooner.” – Angela Hunt, author of Let Darkness Come

“High stakes intrigue that will keep you flipping pages long into the night.” – James Scott Bell

“Rick Acker has done it again! He’s become one of my favorite suspense novelists by the simple expedient of delivering the goods . . . in every book. This time, a federal whistle-blower may have blown her whistle one time too many. Is she in too deep this time? This book kept screaming my name every time I tried to put it down.” – Randy Ingermanson, Christy award winning author of Oxygen

Check out the first forty pages or so below:

Open publication - Free publishing - More rick acker

Crimes of Hate

2010-09-11T13:04:00.000-07:00

I have recently talked with a few people who consider religion dangerous, and they point to 9/11 as an example. But was religion really the problem there, and would the absence of religion solve it?

No, religion has nothing to do with it. In the first five years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 priests. The Soviet Union considered religion harmful to the people and acted much like Islamic terrorists in an effort to eradicate it. This kind of evil can express itself through religion, but it thrives without it as well.

The problem is self-righteous hate, and it can be found among Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheists, and true believers of any ideology. It is the sense that other people are morally inferior to us and it is therefore our right and duty to punish them. The 9/11 terrorists really believed that God would reward them in heaven for destroying "corrupt" Americans.

Self-righteousness blinds us to our own moral failings, so Jesus aptly called it a plank in our eye. It is like an insidious poison because it masquerades as moral superiority. Jesus treated the notorious sinners with love and gentleness, because they knew they needed forgiveness. But he gave it to the hypocrites right between the eyes.

And just like self-righteous atheists killed Christians in the Soviet Union, self-righteous Christians have killed Jews, and self-righteous Muslims have killed Americans. Religion or its absence is not the issue; hypocritical self-righteousness combined with a foothold of power caused the most notorious events of human destruction in history.

Hate and self-righteousness is the problem, and love and humility is the solution. It is the only true moral superiority.

Is Vicarious Redemption Immoral?

2010-09-02T21:05:00.000-07:00

In this video, Christopher Hitchens argues that the doctrine of vicarious redemption--which he calls human sacrifice--is immoral. He concedes that a person can pay the debt of another, but he doesn't believe that one person can relieve another of his or her responsibilities. However, he appears to agree with C. S. Lewis that it is morally acceptable for us to forgive offenses against ourselves.

He frames the discussion in the context of Lewis' argument that if Jesus was just a man and not God, it would be preposterous of Him to claim to be able to take our sins upon Himself and forgive offenses against others. Lewis explains that Jesus cannot be just a good moral teacher--He has to either be a lunatic, a devil from hell, or the Son of God. Hitchens says: "Lewis, who had argued so well up until then can't complete a syllogism. Poor guy, he never quite could do that. He said, 'Since I don't think He was a devil from hell, I have to conclude that He was the Son of God.'"

I find it ironic that Hitchens accuses Lewis of failing to complete a syllogism, since Hitchens himself does exactly that--in several different ways.

Hitchens very correctly states that human sacrifice is "revolting." God calls it "detestable" in the Old Testament, so the two of them are on the same page so far. However, the sacrifice of Christ has about as much in common with human sacrifice as a heroic act of self-sacrifice has in common with premeditated murder. Both involve death, but that is about it.

First, the sacrifice of Jesus was voluntary--He could have chosen not to go through with it (Matthew 26:53), and He denounced all violence against His aggressors (Matthew 26:52). Human sacrifice, on the other hand, is an act of violence against an unwilling victim. Second, God never commanded anyone to kill His Son; His executioners simply acted according to their evil inclinations, and God permitted it and used it for good. Human sacrifice, on the other hand, is ostensibly at the command of the gods. Third, the redemption was an act of self-sacrifice by God, while human sacrifice is the selfish taking of someone else's life.

Hitchens also failed to complete his syllogism with respect to the Lewis quote by concluding that the redemption is immoral without even addressing the point Lewis made about Jesus being God. He simply assumes throughout the video that even if Jesus existed, He was only a man, and therefore what He did was immoral.

If Jesus had in fact been just a man, even the Bible admits that He would have had no power to redeem someone else. "No man can redeem the life of another or give to God a ransom for him--the ransom for a life is costly, no payment is ever enough--that he should live on forever and not see decay" (Psalm 49:7-9).

So Lewis and Hitchens are both in full agreement with the Bible up to this point. Then Hitchens claims that Lewis failed to complete his syllogism by concluding that Jesus was not a devil from hell and is therefore the Son of God. And Hitchens fails to complete his syllogism by never even addressing the issue of whether Jesus was the Son of God and simply concluding that Jesus was either evil or deluded. This is circular reasoning. "If Jesus was only a man, it would be immoral for Him to pay the penalty for someone else's sin. He was only a man. Therefore, His redemption was immoral."

If Hitchens wants to argue that Jesus never existed or that He was not God, that is one thing, but if he is going to argue that some aspect of Christian theology is immoral, he has to allow for the sake of argument that the claims of Christianity are true. Otherwise he cannot address the issue in a logical way.

Finally, Hitchens concedes too much upfront. He allows that one person can pay another's debt. He also concedes that we can forgive others for offenses against us. But he says that we all have to take responsibility for our own actions. However, if I forgive someone a wrong against me and also pay the person's debt, I have effectively absolved the person of responsibility. Hitchens has no problem with the first clause of that sentence, but he strongly objects to the second clause. Since the second clause follows logically from the first clause, Hitchens appears to have failed to think through his logic.

Still, he has a good point about taking responsibility, but the Bible never teaches that vicarious redemption absolves us of responsibility. Even though God has in Christ forgiven our sins, we still have to be reconciled to those we have wronged (Matthew 5:24). And even though we are saved by faith, good works are evidence of true faith (1 John 2:3).

So God has simply leveled the playing field by offering a fresh start and His enabling power to anyone, regardless of genetics, environment, or past sins. Only humility will give us an advantage. But ultimately He will judge us all impartially (1 Peter 1:17).

The Dying God

2010-08-29T12:26:00.000-07:00

The aspect of the Moral Law that is most difficult to explain in naturalistic terms is the kind of altruism that makes a person willing to die for a stranger and even an enemy, or to suffer scorn and rejection for the well-being of others. In my previous post, we discussed possible natural explanations, like evolution or culture. Now we will discuss the possibility of a divine Lawgiver.

If there is such a thing as an objective Moral Law, this Lawgiver would have to epitomize it. The imprint of the Law on the human heart would have to match His nature in every way, like Cinderella's glass slipper fit her foot.

A few weeks ago, a non-Christian asked me why Jesus had to die on the cross. He couldn't see why an omnipotent God, who presumably had an unlimited number of options at His disposal, would choose such a barbaric method. There are a number of important reasons, but for the sake of this discussion I will focus on Jesus having to fulfill the Moral Law on our behalf.

Although God is certainly omnipotent, He cannot do that which is logically impossible. That is, He cannot be holy and not holy at the same time. And if He is holy, He cannot be capricious; He has to have integrity. Because God epitomizes moral perfection, there are certain things He cannot do and still be true to His nature. This does not diminish His omnipotence, because, as C. S. Lewis says, "omnipotence means the power to do all that is intrinsically possible." That does not include making 2 + 2 = 5 or being both holy and not holy. If something is logically impossible, then being able to do it is not omnipotence, it is nonsense.

The Bible says that God is holy, and in order to determine whether this is true, we should compare His nature to the Moral Law within us. But we do not look at the nature of God in the Old Testament, where He was the Head and Commander in Chief of a political system (a theocracy) that functioned in an Ancient Near East culture. Like any political system, this theocracy had to take into account practicality and culture. As Jesus explained, the Law of Moses made allowances for human nature and the hardness of unredeemed hearts (Matthew 19:8). Instead, we have to look to Christ, in whom "all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form" (Colossians 2:9). Christ is God, and as such He perfectly represents God's nature (John 1:1, Hebrews 1:3).

Jesus came to "fulfill all righteousness" (Matthew 3:15), so a look at His life, as manifested in the Gospels, will give us the Christian standard for righteousness. Jesus condemned religious hypocrisy more than any other type of sin (Matthew 23:27-28, Luke 11:44); and the religious hypocrites--His chief enemies--ultimately crucified Him. He befriended sinners, but transformed them rather than learning their ways (Matthew 11:19). He broke through social barriers by treating women and foreigners with respect (John 4:1-26). He valued marriage (Matthew 19:8) and sexual purity (Matthew 5:28). He taught peaceful resistance (Matthew 26:52) and respect for government authority (Matthew 17:27), but He also had the courage to speak truth to power (Luke 11:45-46). He combined justice (John 12:48) and mercy (Luke 18:13-14).

But most of all, His message was one of altruistic love, including love for our enemies (Luke 6:35). And the greatest act of love is to lay down our lives for our friends (John 15:13), so in order to fulfill all righteousness, Jesus had to do that. But He went beyond that--laying down His life for His enemies. When His enemies slapped, mocked, and scourged Him, pushing a crown of thorns into his head and nailing his hands and feet to a cross, his blood covered every sin that has ever been and will ever be committed.

He died on the Preparation Day of the Passover, when the Passover lambs were being slaughtered. And when He breathed His last, the heavy veil of the temple tore in two from top to bottom, granting sinners free access to the inner sanctuary of God.

Skin Stories by Becky Fox

2010-08-28T20:39:00.000-07:00

Skin Stories from Becky Fox on Vimeo.

A stop motion of approx 1,500 photos by my talented blogging friend, Becky.

Verses on skin:

"All things were made through Him and without Him was not anything made that was made." - John 1:3

"Creation was subject to futility." - Romans 8:20

"My grace is sufficient for you; for my power is made perfect in weakness." - 2 Cor 12:9

"We have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us." - 2 Cor 4:7

"Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day." - 2 Cor 4:16

"Those who wait for the Lord will renew their strength, they will rise up with wings like eagles, they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not grow faint." - Isaiah 40:31

"Freedom for captives." - Isaiah 61:1

"I am making all things new." - Rev 21:5

Tune: The John Slaughter Blues Band

The Moral Law

2010-08-06T18:32:00.000-07:00

An atheist told me that in order to seriously consider Christianity, he would have to believe or assume certain things:

1. There is a non-material element of each human being, the soul, which is created at conception and continues to exist after the death of the individual.

2. There exists two places, heaven and hell, that are or will be eternal repositories for souls rejoined with their physical bodies at some point in the future.  

3. There exists a single set of immutable rules governing all human activity, morals.

4. Transgressions against these morals, sins, are punishable by eternal extreme torture in hell.   

5. Mitigation of this punishment and attainment of heaven is only available through belief in and practice of a particular religious doctrine.

In my first post, "A Skeptic's Guide to Faith," I set forth what I consider to be the best conceptual framework for deciding whether Christianity is true. Mathematical or scientific proof is not possible for reasons we have already discussed. This means that we are left with the legal standards of proof: "the preponderance of the evidence" (civil) or "beyond a reasonable doubt" (criminal), or we can see if the Bible is consistent with the evidence. According to Denis Alexander, this is the standard often used by scientists: "Scientists habitually use that little phrase 'consistent with' in the discussion sections of our scientific papers. We don't 'prove things' in biology, but we do gather data that can count for or against a theory."

I decided to go with the latter standard. If the Bible is the true inspired word of God, it will be consistent with reality, and it will be the best explanation for reality. But if it's just the best explanation for a few aspects of reality, then it fails. The Bible, properly understood, has to be the best explanation for every aspect of reality.

Next, I discussed what the Bible says about an "immortal soul" and eternal punishment. My approach was to put aside cultural assumptions and study everything the Bible says about the soul and hell. Although we have no way of proving whether or not this is true, we can determine whether the Bible is internally consistent, including whether its teaching about hell is consistent with its teaching that the Moral Law is written on our hearts. That is, is the Bible's teaching about hell moral? I reached the conclusion that, properly understood, it is. In a future blog post, where I will discuss God's solution to the problem of evil, I will also argue that it is necessary.

In this post, I will address the issue of Moral Law and examine whether evolutionary or cultural factors provide a better explanation than the existence of a divine Lawgiver. Again, the question is which explanation fits best. One might argue that a sense of right and wrong is a by-product of evolution, since animals also exhibit care for members of their group. But what about altruism? Why do humans almost universally agree that it is right to risk one's life in order to save or protect someone else? And why do we feel particularly inclined to protect the vulnerable or disabled? These things are universally considered morally right—not simply wise or expedient. Altruism is by its very nature the unselfish giving of oneself for the benefit of someone else.

When our oldest daughter Chelsea was about nine and Ingrid was seven, we took the family out to the California coast for a day trip. Rick had the boys elsewhere on the beach and Chelsea, Ingrid, and I waded into the water (but it was too cold for swimsuits, so we just rolled up our pants). Ingrid is disabled and could not walk without support at the time, so I held her hand, and Chelsea was a few feet away. When a large wave suddenly pulled the sand out from under our feet, Ingrid and Chelsea both started to lose their footing. Although I was able to quickly stabilize Ingrid, a man standing nearby grabbed her other hand as Chelsea fell into the water and got soaked.

Well, Chelsea was very indignant on the drive home because she could not see the logic behind this man's actions. "Why did he grab Ingrid's hand and not mine when you had her other hand? She wasn't going to fall anyway." We tried to explain that it was because he could see that Ingrid was disabled and he just reacted instinctively—if he had had time to think about it, he probably would have grabbed Chelsea's hand. (Chelsea only reluctantly gave me permission to use this story because it made her "seem obnoxious," so I want to make sure that everyone knows that she is a very nice girl who isn't the slightest bit obnoxious. This attitude was cold- and wetness-induced. Also, it was years ago.)

This was just a normal human reaction to seeing a vulnerable person in danger, but some will risk everything, including their lives, for other people. And even if we are not capable of that kind of altruism, we admire those who are. Is Darwinian evolution responsible for the instinct to protect a stranger even at the cost of one's own life? How could the "selfish gene" have evolved in such a way? Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project says:

One proposal is that repeated altruistic behavior of the individual is recognized as a positive attribute in mate selection. But this hypothesis is in direct conflict with observations in nonhuman primates that often reveal just the opposite--such as the practice of infanticide by a newly dominant male monkey, in order to clear the way for his own future offspring. Another argument is that there are indirect reciprocal benefits from altruism that have provided advantages to the practitioner over evolutionary time; but this explanation cannot account for human motivation to practice small acts of conscience that no one else knows about.

But maybe the Moral Law has nothing to do with evolution; perhaps it's just cultural. People almost universally agree that integrity, justice, and courage are admirable qualities. But why do people choose to act in this way? Is it for social approval? No, it goes far beyond that, because we admire those qualities even more when someone does the right thing in the face of persecution. In the movie A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More had been imprisoned awaiting execution for refusing to swear an oath supporting the divorce and remarriage of King Henry VIII. When his family came to visit in order to convince him to swear the oath, his daughter Meg accused him of playing the hero, and he said:

If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we'd live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose to be human at all . . . why then perhaps we must stand fast a little—even at the risk of being heroes.

The Moral Law calls us to act with courage and integrity even when nobody approves. It means staying on the path of truth and justice when it leads to social rejection and even death. And although we can watch the movie about Sir Thomas More and admire his actions, his peers (those whose approval matters most) stripped him of his title of Lord Chancellor and executed him.

In the movie To Kill a Mockingbird, attorney Atticus Finch defended an African American man who had been wrongly accused of raping a white woman. His decision to promote justice made him a pariah in his small, racially bigoted southern town and even put his children in danger. He lost the trial due to the lies of the prosecuting witness and the corruption of the jury. When he packed up his briefcase and left the empty courtroom, all the African Americans who sat crowded together up in the balcony stood up as he passed. But the most powerful part of that scene is that he never looked up and saw it.

The Moral Law at its purest calls for this kind of selfless dedication to doing what is right regardless of consequences. Few are willing to make the sacrifice when following it becomes hard. It doesn't promise popularity, power, or wealth. But as much as we may try to squash it, every human heart bears its imprint. Why is this? C. S. Lewis says:

If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe—no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves. Surely this ought to arouse our suspicions?

The Sign of Jonah

2010-08-03T20:27:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I discussed what the Bible says about hell, and I would like to continue that subject by addressing one traditional view that holds that Jesus went down to hell and that it is in the center of the earth. This is based in large part on Matthew 12:40, which says, “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”

There are two major Scriptural problems with this view. First, Jesus died on the day before the Sabbath, or Friday at the ninth hour, and He rose again on Sunday morning. That is not even close to three days and three nights. Second, nowhere in the Bible does it say that the dead go down to the heart of the earth. The Old Testament says that the dead go down to Sheol, and the New Testament calls it Hades, but the context indicates that the Bible is referring to the grave.

The Lord’s Prayer says, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven,” (KJV) so the earth is not synonymous with the grave. Other than Matthew 12:40, the only times the Bible ever mentions the "heart of the earth" in any translation are Isaiah 19:24 and Isaiah 24:13, and each time it pertains to something happening to the living on the earth.

However, John 14:30 gives us a hint at what Matthew 12:40 means, where Jesus calls Satan the ruler of this world and says that he had no power over Him. Jesus was able to walk right through hostile crowds and nobody could harm Him until Thursday in the Garden of Gethsemane. Until then, Satan, the ruler of the world, could do nothing to Jesus because He was without sin. It is sin that gives Satan power over us.

But on Thursday Jesus became sin for us. "For He has made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Cor 5:21). That is when Judas betrayed Him with a kiss, and the flogging began. Like Jonah was inside a whale, Jesus was at the mercy (or rather lack thereof) of Satan, who gave Him his absolute worst. Satan reigned for three days and three nights, which is the amount of time that the redemption took. The flogging was an important part of it: “He was wounded for our transgressions” (Isaiah 53:5). So when Jesus was in the heart of the earth He was under the power of Satan, the ruler of the earth.

Whenever Jesus prophesied about His redemption, He always included the rejection, betrayal, being delivered into the hands of men, the suffering, etc., that which led up to His death. He never mentioned His death in isolation. (Matthew 16:21, Matthew 17:22, Matthew 20:18, Mark 8:31, Mark 9:31, Mark 10:34, Luke 9:22, Luke 18:31, Luke 24:7.) So His full redemption took three days and three nights, but He died and rose again on the third day.

The redemption of Christ was also prophesied through typology in the creation story. The text says that God finished His work of creation on the sixth day and He rested on the seventh day. St. Augustine says about the creation account, "On the seventh day God’s rest is emphasized as something conveying a mystic meaning." Exodus 20:11 ties this rest to the Sabbath: “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy."

Holy week is the week when God did His work of re-creating. “Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5). On Friday (the sixth day), He declared, “It is finished!” He rested in the grave throughout the Sabbath, and He rose again before dawn on the first day of the week. This symbolizes a new beginning that will culminate in new heavens and a new earth where death and evil will forever be a thing of the past.

Will Lost Souls Be Tormented Forever in the Lake of Fire?

2010-07-30T10:26:00.000-07:00

The two most prominent trees in the Garden of Eden were the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life. God said to Adam and Eve, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die" (Genesis 2:16-17). A loving and generous God gave them everything freely except one thing.

Satan makes his first appearance in chapter three, giving us a picture of his modus operandi of maligning God and twisting His words. "Indeed, has God said, 'You shall not eat from any tree of the garden?'' (Genesis 3:1). Was that what God said? No. Eve didn't fall for that. So Satan tried again: "You surely will not die!" (Genesis 3:4).

And Eve believed that lie, as have many other people. Most Christians will say that everybody lives forever; it's just a question of where. I believed that myself until recently when I studied what the Bible actually says. The Bible states very clearly that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), not eternal life in torture. God told Adam that if he sinned he would die. Psalm 37:20 says, "But the wicked will perish; and the enemies of the Lord will be like the glory of the pastures, they vanish--like smoke they vanish away." Malachi 4:3 talks about the Day of Judgment when it says, "'You will tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day which I am preparing,' says the Lord of hosts." They will be completely destroyed--dead forever when God ushers in "the new heavens and new earth in which righteousness dwells" (2 Peter 13). No sin or evil can mar His perfect new creation where He will live among His people (Revelation 21:3).

After Adam and Eve sinned, God forced them out of the Garden of Eden so they would not eat from the tree of life and live forever. This was an act of mercy because to live forever in a sinful state would be eternal torment. So God specifically withheld eternal life from fallen humanity, until He could purchase our redemption with His blood. To His redeemed, He will grant access to the tree of life (Revelation 2:7), and they will live forever in a glorified state, crowned with glory and majesty (Psalm 8:5).

The idea of an inherently immortal soul was alien to the ancient Hebrews. They believed that the dead went down to Sheol, or the grave. Psalm 146:3-4 says, "Do not trust in princes, in mortal man, in whom there is no salvation. His spirit departs, he returns to the earth; in that very day his thoughts perish." And Ecclesiastes 9:5 says, "For the living know they will die; but the dead do not know anything."

Did the New Testament change this perception? No. In Acts 2:29, Peter quoted Psalm 16:8-11, and explained that David was talking about Christ. “Brothers, I can tell you confidently that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this day.” And Acts 2:34: “For it was not David who ascended into heaven.” David is dead and buried and will rise again at the resurrection. John 3:13 states clearly, "No one has ascended into heaven, but He who descended from heaven: the Son of Man."

The Bible does not teach that disembodied souls live forever in heaven or hell, because a soul is not inherently immortal. The words "immortal" or "immortality" are only used in the context of God and the redeemed on the day of judgment (Romans 2:7, 1 Cor. 15:53-54, 1 Tim. 6:16-17, and 2 Tim. 1:10). The soul that sins will die (Ezekiel 18:20). 1 Timothy 6:16 says that God alone possesses immortality. If He alone possesses immortality, and the redeemed will receive immortality when Jesus comes again, then immortality is not something we all possess. It is a gift of God's Spirit.

Instead, the Bible teaches that Jesus will come in glory with the angels for the Great White Throne Judgment, and the dead will rise from their graves. 1 Thessalonians 4:16 says, "For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first." If they rise, they are in the graves. All the dead will rise and stand before Him. "Do not marvel at this; for an hour is coming, in which all who are in the tombs will hear His voice, and will come forth; those who did the good deeds to a resurrection of life, those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment" (John 5:28-29). Matthew 10:28 says that God is able to destroy both body and soul in hell. If the soul is destroyed, it ceases to exist. "Our God is a consuming fire" (Hebrews 12:29). How does a fire consume? It destroys completely and leaves nothing except ashes, which is consistent with Malachi 4:3.

Where then did this idea come from that souls are immortal and we will all live forever in eternal bliss or eternal torture? Greek mythology taught that the immortal souls of the dead go down to Hades, and when the Hebrew Old Testament was translated to Greek in the Septuagint, the word "Sheol" was translated "Hades." Also, the Greek philosophers like Plato heavily influenced a number of the church fathers. So hell came to mean conscious, unceasing punishment in a lake of fire. When we think of it that way, we read "death," "destruction," "perish, "consume," etc. to mean something other than what those words actually mean. They have become euphemisms for eternal torture.

Now, of course the idea of hell as eternal, conscious torture is the traditional view, and there are a couple of passages that have given me pause because they have convinced many that hell is conscious suffering, in spite of all the parts of the Bible that tell us the wages of sin is death. They are the story of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16:19-30, and the account of Judgment Day in Matthew 25:31-46, where Jesus separates the sheep from the goats on the basis of what they did or didn't do for the least of His brothers.

Before I begin to analyze these passages, I would like make one general observation. In both of these passages, the lost souls were not terrible people by any stretch of the imagination. The "goats" may even have been professing Christians, because they called Jesus "Lord." (It's not much of a stretch to conclude that since Matthew 7:21 says that only those who do the will of God will enter the kingdom of heaven.) The text doesn't tell us one way or the other. The only thing we know about the rich man and the "goats" is that they lacked love. In other words, they failed to do God's will to love their neighbor as themselves (Matthew 22:37-40, Galatians 5:14, James 2:8). The rich man didn't kick Lazarus when he walked past him. He just ignored him. Likewise, we don't get a laundry list of the sins of the "goats"--all we know is that they didn't seem to care about those who suffer.

So if we want to ignore everything in the Bible that say that the wages of sin is death in order to focus exclusively on these two passages, we have to face the fact that lovelessness will put us squarely in the goat camp. If we don't feel tremendous relief at the idea that nobody will be eternally tortured, we should examine our hearts and ask ourselves whether our relationship to a God of love is what it should be.

This reminds me of the story of Solomon and the two women who fought over a baby because one the women's babies died. When Solomon suggested that they cut the baby in two and give one part to each of them, one woman readily agreed and the other one asked Solomon to give the first woman the baby instead of killing him. Solomon immediately knew that the baby belonged to the last woman because of her love for him.

Likewise, our love for other people (or its absence) should tell us if we really belong to Christ. If the idea of the vast majority of people suffering excruciating pain forever and ever with no relief doesn't trouble us deeply, we either don't really believe it, we don't want to think about it, or we know nothing of love. If it's the latter, Matthew 25 and Luke 16 give us no assurance that they are not describing us.

However, I think these two passages are consistent with the rest of the Bible, and do not teach unrelenting conscious torture for the lost. In Matthew 25:46, Jesus says, "These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life." The same word for "eternal" is used in both instances, so the argument goes that if the righteous will live forever, the others will also be alive and punished forever. However, the word for "eternity" is "aion," which according to Strong’s Concordance means 1) for ever, an unbroken age, perpetuity of time, eternity 2) the worlds, universe 3) period of time, age. So it doesn't definitively mean forever and ever. In fact, the word "aion" is used in Hebrews 11:3: "By faith we understand that the worlds ("aion") were prepared by the word of God." And the Bible clearly states that this universe is not forever.

A form of the word "aion" is also used in Jude 1:7 when it says that Sodom and Gomorrah were an "example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire." But Sodom and Gomorrah were completely annihilated. The inhabitants of these cities are not still being tortured in an unrelenting fire. If, as Jude said, these cities were an example for us, and the traditional view is correct, then we would expect to read about screaming ghosts in the fire after they died. But all we know is that the "smoke of the land ascended like the smoke of a furnace," and that "God destroyed the cities of the valley" (Genesis 19:28, 29). This is how the Bible illustrates what it means by destruction by eternal fire.

As for Luke 16:19-30, it is important to remember that since Jesus always taught in parables, this is also a parable. And that means that we have to think about what it means rather than taking everything at face value. All the parables contain symbolism. If we read this in the context of the rest of the Bible, we know that this does not represent something that has already happened. Why? Because nobody except the Son of Man has gone to heaven (John 3:13). This means that Lazarus is not a real person who went to heaven. But some say that "Abraham's bosom" is a pre-heaven for the redeemed, a place where they stay in a disembodied state until the resurrection. However, Hebrews 11:8, 13 tells us that Abraham was a great man of faith who has not yet received the promise. He is still awaiting its fulfillment, like all those who are symbolically in the bosom of Abraham, the man of great faith. Like David (Acts 2:34) and Daniel (Daniel 12:13), he is dead and buried--or rather "asleep" and awaiting the resurrection. Most likely this is a picture of Judgment Day, and the rich man would not be quite so loquacious in the real lake of fire, because, like all the examples in the Old Testament of death by divine fire, it would be sudden and complete (for example, Leviticus 10:2 and Numbers 16:35). There is no example of slow torture anywhere.

Speaking of Abraham, he said, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?" (Genesis 18:25). Most of us fallen creatures would not torture an animal for even a few seconds. Would the God of love, who is the source of the moral law written on our hearts, torture billions of people throughout all of eternity, just for failing to receive His gracious gift of eternal life? Job 4:17 says, "Shall mortal man be more just than God? Shall a man be more pure than his maker?" The obvious answer is no.

This is the conclusion I have reached after studying for myself what the Bible has to say on the subject. But my objective is always to get you to think and never to indoctrinate. Although the word of God is infallible, I am not, and I invite you to study this subject for yourself. I welcome your thoughts, and any correction, in the comments.

A Skeptic's Guide to Faith

2010-07-02T14:43:00.000-07:00

In the comic strip Bloom County, Oliver Wendell Jones was the child prodigy who would sit on his roof and ponder the cosmos when he wasn't busy hacking into computers.

One night the stars suddenly formed the words, "REPENT OLIVER."

Oliver said to himself, "Bloody difficult being an agnostic these days."

Difficult, maybe . . . but not impossible.

A skeptic asked me to do a post about rational steps to faith, and the Bloom County comic reminded me of something not to do: If we start out with a philosophy that excludes the possibility of the supernatural, it is impossible to find evidence for God's existence. This may seem self-evident, but it's easy to lose sight of, and if we do we will commit the fallacy of begging the question without even realizing it.

We may decide that we will not believe without evidence, but whenever "evidence" comes along, we'll interpret it in light of a naturalistic philosophy (the belief that nature is all that exists). So if we start out with the conviction that nature is everything, we will always reach the conclusion that everything, no matter how vanishingly small the odds, has a natural explanation. The issue of whether God exists is a yes/no question, but if we operate from this conceptual framework, the answer will always be no, even if He does in fact exist. It is circular reasoning.

In our scientific age, this is a very easy mistake to make because we are used to explaining things by science, but its scope is limited to nature--it cannot tell us whether anything exists beyond nature. Science never gives "God" as an answer. It tells us how the world came into existence but not why we are here. So the dichotomy is never between theism and science, but between theism and atheism. Science is simply an explanation of how things are, but it doesn't tell us whether it happened by design or as a result of a cosmic accident. If we allow science to become synonymous with atheism in our minds, we posit a false dichotomy: science versus religion. But the Creator of this universe would have used quarks, genomes, and the elements of the periodic table as His building blocks, leaving us with the task of discovering and naming it all. He has to be the Great Scientist. Everything around us would reflect His qualities, and the natural world and its laws would be one great miracle even though it operates in highly organized ways.

This doesn't mean that we cannot look to science to make the determination whether the Bible is true, but we have to keep two things in mind: First, we may have a faulty image of God as a distant, alien deity who occasionally intervenes by breaking the laws of nature, and if we do, we will never find evidence of such a deity because he doesn't exist. The biblical God is always present in His creation and He never breaks the laws of nature; He only redeems nature and exercises dominion over it. In the Gospel accounts, He restored the brokenness in nature by healing the sick, and He exercised dominion over it by walking on water, turning water into wine, multiplying bread, and calming the storm. This was in keeping with His mission as Redeemer and as the Second Adam who would have full dominion over nature (Genesis 1:28). But He refused the suggestion of Satan that He turn rocks into bread (Matthew 4:3-4). That would have been a radical breach of the laws of nature. Still, the works of Jesus were true miracles by any definition; they superseded the laws of nature. So although God created nature and declared it "good," He is not limited by its laws.

Second, instead of looking for "evidence" without defining what we would consider evidence, we would be better off asking two thing: whether the Bible is logical and whether it is consistent with reality. This is a question that takes a while to answer because it means asking a lot of different questions within this framework. But this is the general approach I take when I comment on Atheist Central. In my opinion it is the only way to prove that the Bible is more likely true than not. We cannot conclusively prove that the Bible is true any more than we can conclusively prove a scientific theory. But we can determine whether the evidence fits.

Everything we can experience with our senses or test scientifically is within space and time, and the Bible tells us that God exists outside of that (1 Corinthians 2:7, Titus 1:2, Jude 1:25, 2 Timothy 1:9). So the universe is like the underside of a dome that contains all of nature, and all the rest of reality is outside of the dome--unknowable except through revelation. But never fear; since this blog post is about a rational approach to faith, we will examine the revelation of the Bible critically to see whether it lines up with science.

And in making this determination, it makes sense to start at the beginning and look at the greatest miracle of them all: creation (or if you prefer--the origin of the universe). And then we can examine the revelation of the Bible (the outside of the dome) and science (the inside) and see if they match up.

Genesis 1:1-3 says about creation, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light."

What, then, does creation look like from inside the dome, from a scientific perspective? When I said that scientists never give "God" for an answer, I might have lied. After the NASA satellite Cosmic Background Explorer confirmed the Big Bang theory in 1992, George Smoot, who led the thirty American astronomers who made the discovery, said, "What we have found is evidence of the birth of the universe. It's like looking at God." Geoffrey Burbridge, an atheistic member of the team, complained that all his colleagues were rushing off to join the "Church of Jesus Christ of the Big Bang." Psalm 19:1-2 says, "The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hand. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge." So it seems rather prophetic that astronomers are the ones flocking to the "Church of Jesus Christ of the Big Bang."

How does the biblical creation account line up with science? First, astronomer Robert Jastrow said that the universe began suddenly "in a flash of light and energy." So this fits with the biblical description of God saying, "Let there be light."

Second, most scientists believe that the Big Bang marked the beginning of time. Since God exists outside of time and created the heavens and the earth "in the beginning," this is also consistent.

Third, cosmologists tell us that the universe emerged out of nothing, and Hebrews 11:3 says, "By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible." God created ex nihilo, or out of nothing.

Fourth, the fine-tuning of the laws and constants of the universe is such that it led astrophysicist Michael Turner to say, "The precision is as if one could throw a dart across the entire universe and hit a bulls eye one millimeter in diameter on the other side." I discuss the Big Bang and fine-tuning in more detail here.

Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who is most closely associated with the steady-state model of the universe (which posited that the universe had always existed), said: "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question." He was an atheist at the time of this statement but was "severely shaken" by the suggestion of a guiding hand, and abandoned his atheism.

And astronomer George Greenstein said, "The thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency--or rather Agency--must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being?"

Fifth, science tells us that the laws of physics break down at the Big Bang, so this ordered universe was born out of chaos. The split second after the Big Bang was a state of "lawlessness" which is inherently unpredictable. Anything could have emerged out of it. Some say that this evidence goes against the design argument. But does it? It certainly goes against the idea that the universe is wholly deterministic, but that is not the same thing.

In 1799, physicist Pierre Laplace gave copies of his Treatise on Celestial Mechanics to Napoleon Bonaparte, seeking to explain the universe purely in terms of natural gravitational forces. Napoleon asked him what role God played in his theory, and Laplace reportedly replied, "Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis."

Laplace believed that the universe was completely deterministic, an idea that has been overturned by quantum mechanics. Traditional physics said that the laws of nature are fixed, and therefore miracles are impossible. Quantum physics says that nothing is impossible--some things are just very, very improbable. There is a very small, non-zero chance that we can walk through walls. Danish physicist and father of quantum mechanics Niels Bohr has said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum mechanics has not understood it." Physicist Alvaro de Rujula of Cern was asked whether there was a possibility that the Large Hadron Collider could produce a world-ending black hole. He replied that it was extremely unlikely but "the random nature of quantum physics means that there is always a minuscule, but nonzero, chance of anything occurring, including that the new collider could spit out man-eating dragons."

So the universe is not wholly predictable and the God hypothesis is back.

If we once again picture the universe as a self-contained dome where the underside represents science and the physical universe, and everything above is eternity, then that moment of "lawlessness" would correspond to God creating by fiat. And physicists hope to someday understand it better by using a combination of general relativity and quantum mechanics called quantum gravity. If quantum mechanics says that nothing is impossible, is it so farfetched to say that the lawlessness may represent the physical properties of the miracle of creation? Physicist Paul Davies said that the Big Bang "represents the instantaneous suspension of physical laws, the sudden, abrupt flash of lawlessness that allowed something to come out of nothing. It represents a true miracle--transcending physical principles."

So the revelation of the Bible tells us that the moment of creation was a divine miracle, and science reveals that the normal laws of physics break down at that moment. Something else was at work in that apparent chaos, but from it emerged a universe that still rests on a razor's edge of finely tuned laws and constants. And science would only be able to detect the lawlessness, but not the Guiding Hand.

The question of creation is of course fundamental, but we should evaluate all theological questions on the basis of whether the Bible is logical and whether it corresponds to reality. It is within this context that I will next discuss what the Bible says about the nature of a soul.

Why is Faith Necessary?

2010-06-15T19:11:00.000-07:00

Mark Twain said, "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." And that is a common perception: faith is the ability to tenaciously suspend incredulity, to maintain one's convictions in the face of pesky things like facts. I've even heard it said that faith is not so bad as long as believers just acknowledge that it's not reasonable. These individuals seem to be telling us that we should concede Twain's point.

But there is absolutely no reason to believe what ain't so. I never understood the effort some parents go to in order to keep their children believing in Santa Claus. Or all the Christmas movies that hail "faith" as a virtue in and of itself. Faith is only as valid as the object of our faith. This means that we should only believe in the truth. Anything less is misplaced faith.

According to the Bible, faith is the means by which we arrive at the truth about God. But that seems somewhat backwards, because generally we determine the truth first and then believe. Seeing is believing. But the Bible turns that around and says that believing is seeing. Why is that? Because in our natural state we are cut off from God, and none of our faculties can bridge the gap. 1 Corinthians 2:14 says, "But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised." Faith means a spiritual awakening that removes the veil from our eyes, so that we can perceive spiritual realities.

Why is this spiritual rebirth necessary? Let's look at some of the other ways we might go about arriving at the truth about God: science, experience, and reason.

Science: The Bible is God's message of salvation rather than a science textbook; however, it does clearly state some things about the universe. Genesis 1:1 says, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." So the Bible says that it had a beginning. And Hebrews 11:3 says, "By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible." God spoke the universe into existence out of nothing. He created space, time, and matter by fiat.

In our scientific age, we have an advantage over prior generations in that we have substantial evidence to support the biblical account. The big bang marked the beginning of time, the universe emerged out of nothing, and it was finely tuned for life. It appears to have been purposefully created with us in mind.

So does this dispense with the need for faith? No, because one can always argue that we simply don't know enough yet. Maybe there is an infinite number of universes, and this one just happens to be the one where everything went exactly right. Never mind that there is no evidence for that; if we have a naturalistic mindset, we will choose any explanation rather than the supernatural, no matter how improbable.

Experience: I've heard non-believers say that they would believe in God if they witnessed a miracle. But is that really true? C. S. Lewis said the following:

In all my life I have met only one person who claims to have seen a ghost. And the interesting thing about the story is that the person disbelieved in the immortal soul before she saw the ghost and still disbelieves after seeing it. She says that what she saw must have been an illusion or a trick of the nerves. And obviously she may be right. Seeing is not believing.

For this reason, the question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience. Every event which might claim to be a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our senses, something seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. And our senses are not infallible. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we shall always say.

A miracle is by definition a supernatural event, but unless we know everything about the limits of nature, how do we know if something was supernatural? If a person is healed of an incurable disease, we will most likely interpret the event according to our preexisting philosophy. So if we assume naturalism, we will either try to give a natural explanation, or we will just accept that we don't know. We will not consider the event to be evidence for the existence of God.

Reason: I am a firm believer in critical thinking and sound logic, and I believe it reinforces faith. Critical thinking cannot destroy true faith, which has to be built on truth. Of course, if we craft an idol out of select parts of the Bible and mistake that for God's revealed truth, that idol can easily be shattered by a well-aimed argument. But the word of God itself, understood accurately in context, can withstand intense, honest scrutiny.

Logic is a useful tool, but one problem is that none of us are pure rationalists. Most of the time there are certain things we want to believe and other things we don't want to believe. We are invested in our philosophies of life because they define us. So if we lose a debate, we don't necessarily modify our views--we just walk away. And next time we'll come up with better arguments.

Another problem with logic is that it is very difficult to arrive at the truth by way of deductive reasoning because we don't always recognize our own assumptions. Like I said before, people often assume naturalism, which means that their conceptual framework excludes the possibility of a God. So deductive reasoning will never lead them to conclude that God exists whether or not He does.

Bertrand Russell said: "The question is how to arrive at your opinions and not what your opinions are. The thing in which we believe is the supremacy of reason. If reason should lead you to orthodox conclusions, well and good; you are still a Rationalist." As a relativist, Russell had no problem with this, but if rationalism can lead us to all kinds of different conclusions it is not the ideal tool for discerning truth. Most of us are not capable of the kind of objectivity that would lead us step by step toward truth.

In light of all this, it makes sense that God would choose a method of revealing Himself to us that transcends our intellects and our senses, because these are fallible. That is why the Bible talks about being born of the Holy Spirit, who leads us into all truth. 1 Corinthians 2:16 says, "For who has known the mind of God that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ."

When Christ died on the cross the heavy veil keeping all but the high priest out of the inner chamber of the temple tore in two, symbolizing the penalty for sin having been paid, granting us free access into God's presence. But it also symbolizes the "veil" being removed from our eyes, so that we may see God.

Isaiah 25:7 prophesies: "And on this mountain He will swallow up the covering which is over all people, even the veil which is stretched over all nations." The veil is that which blinds us to God. But 2 Corinthians 3:16 says, "whenever a person turns to the Lord, the veil is removed."

Back when I experienced this spiritual rebirth, I became very conscious of God in nature, like I was seeing everything for the first time as part of God's creation. Nothing had changed, except the lens through which I viewed the world. I saw that God is indeed present in His creation.

Someone might argue that my experience was subjective, and that would be true. Everything we perceive with our minds and through our senses is subjective. But we can still know that they are very real. The times when Christ was closest to me have left no doubt in my mind that He is real. C. S. Lewis says in his novel Till We Have Faces: "I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words."

However, faith is always a matter of degree, so in order for it grow stronger we have to allow it to be tested. We should embrace truth of every kind, and never hide from challenges to our faith. Faith is not a fragile object to be hidden away someplace safe. We have to reinforce it with reason, experience, and truth, knowing that "this is the victory that has overcome the world--our faith" (1 John 5:4).

Does God Hide in the Gaps of Science?

2010-06-04T10:28:00.000-07:00

Atheists often claim that God is merely a stopgap for the next scientific discovery. Science has demystified the marvels of creation one by one, forcing God out of the narrowing gap of knowledge. In spite of the frenzied efforts of theists to stop scientific progress, they argue, God is disappearing in a puff of science.

Scientists have traced the biological chain of causation back with only one remaining frontier: the origin of life. And since they are nowhere near discovering how life could emerge from non-life, it is tempting for Christians to stake a flag of victory in that scientifically barren ground.

But why should we peg our hopes on scientific ignorance, when an entirely different picture is emerging in the field of cosmology? Biologists may be plugging in gaps, but cosmologists are creating a mosaic that is looking a lot like the face of God. Self-described agnostic astrophysicist Robert Jastrow said in God and the Astronomers: "Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements are the same; the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy."

Compelling scientific evidence supports the Big Bang theory, which says that the universe began approximately 14 billion years ago as an infinitely dense point of pure energy that marked the beginning of time. But the laws of physics break down at this point, so scientists do not know what caused it or what came before, or if it even makes to sense to speak of "before" the beginning of time. According to Jastrow, it looks like they will never know, because "in the searing heat of that first moment, all the evidence needed for a scientific study of the cause of the great explosion was melted down and destroyed."

However, we do know that the laws and constants of the universe had to be very precisely fine-tuned for it to come into existence. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, said:

When you look from the perspective of a scientist at the universe, it looks as if it knew we were coming. There are 15 constants--the gravitational constant, various constants about the strong and weak nuclear force, etc.--that have precise values. If any of those constants was off by even one part in a million, or in some cases, by one part in a million million, the universe could not actually have come to the point where we see it. Matter would not have been able to coalesce, there would have been no galaxy, stars, planets or people. That's a phenomenally surprising observation. It seems almost impossible that we're here. And that does make you wonder--gosh, who was setting those constants anyway. Scientists have not been able to figure that out.

Jastrow confirmed this:

Suppose, for example, that the density one second after the Big Bang had been less than the critical density by one part in a million, then the elements of matter in the Universe would have flown apart too rapidly for galaxies, stars and planets to form. That means we would not be here today. Suppose, on the other hand, that the density of matter at that early time had been greater than the critical density by one part in a million; then the expanding Universe would have come to a halt and collapsed on itself too rapidly for life to evolve on any planets that formed. Again, we would not be here.

What we have here is positive scientific evidence for a Creator. This is not a God of the gaps argument, because that depends on a knowledge gap. Stephen Hawking said in A Brief History of Time: "It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us."

However, none of this constitutes proof of the existence of a God. Science cannot prove or disprove God. It is more akin to the following illustration by Canadian philosopher John Leslie: Suppose a man is sentenced to be executed by a firing squad of fifty expert marksmen. All of them fire from less than ten feet away, and yet they all miss. It is technically possible that all fifty of them would miss, but it is far more reasonable to conclude that it was intentional.

Well-known atheist and biologist, Richard Dawkins, agreed in a 2007 video that the cosmological argument for a God is the strongest:

There may be good reasons for believing in a God, and if there are any I would expect them to come from, possibly, modern physics, from cosmology, from the observation that, some people claim, the laws and constants of the universe are too finely tuned to be an accident. That would not be a wholly disreputable reason for believing in some form of supernatural deity. I think there's a very good argument against it and I developed much of my chapter four to, as I think, refuting that argument.

So let's examine his arguments in chapter four of The God Delusion.

Dawkins made two major arguments: First, he hypothesizes that there are many universes, which he calls a "multiverse," and we just happen to be in one where the laws and constants were just right. We are like the lottery winner; regardless of the improbability of winning, someone won. Since we are here discussing this, we won. Second, he claimed that God "must be a supremely complex and improbable entity who needs an even bigger explanation than the one he is supposed to provide."

Note that Dawkins hypothesizes the existence of a multiverse. There is no evidence whatsoever that another universe than the one we occupy has ever existed. This is philosophical speculation without a shred of scientific evidence to back it up. (Scientific hypotheses that challenge the Big Bang theory in various ways are likewise merely proposals, unsupported by evidence. Stephen Hawking said of his no boundaries model: "I'd like to emphasize that this idea that time and space should be finite without boundary is just a proposal.")

Dawkins acknowledged this weakness in his multiverse hypothesis: "It is tempting to think (and many have succumbed) that to postulate a plethora of universes is a profligate luxury which should not be allowed. If we are going to permit the extravagance of a multiverse, so the argument runs, we might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb and allow a God."

And this leads him to his second argument, that God would be a complex and therefore improbable explanation. This argument fails for the following reasons: First, the scientific evidence itself points toward a God, and specifically, it is consistent with Genesis 1:1: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." The Bible teaches that God created ex nihilo--out of nothing--and the scientific data supports this. It further teaches that God created the universe at the beginning of time and that he exists outside of time. The data likewise tells us that the big bang marked the beginning of time. Arno Penzias, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who codiscovered the cosmic fireball radiation that provided strong evidence for the Big Bang theory, said: "The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five Books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole."

Second, the "complexity" of God has no bearing on the probability of his existence. There is no inherent reason why a complex entity is less likely to exist, unless it requires us to make a lot of complex assumptions, which is what Occam's Razor says. So Dawkins's multiverse hypothesis fails Occam's Razor, because it is not the simplest and most logical explanation for the data supporting the Big Bang theory. However, the biblical explanation passes Occam's Razor because it meshes neatly with the evidence, without requiring speculation or complex assumptions. Unless someone presupposes naturalism, a Creator is the most logical explanation.

Dawkins said that those who "succumb" to the "temptation" of raising the aforementioned objection to his multiverse hypothesis "have not had their consciousness raised by natural selection." That reminds me of the following quote by Jastrow:

There is a kind of religion in science; it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the Universe. Every event can be explained in a rational way as the product of some previous event; every effect must have its cause; there is no First Cause. Einstein wrote, "The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation."

This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized. As usual when faced with trauma, the mind reacts by ignoring the implications--in science this is known as "refusing to speculate"--or trivializing the origin of the world by calling it the Big Bang, as if the Universe were a firecracker."

Jastrow ends his book on the following note:

At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Why is the God of the Bible Superior?

2010-05-24T05:02:00.000-07:00

I've had a few conversations on Atheist Central about evidence for the existence of a Creator, and that will be the subject of my next post, but the question inevitably then becomes why they should accept that he is the God of the Bible. Why is the God of the Bible "superior to any of the other gods in the pantheon of past religions?" as somebody asked.

That is, of course, a valid question, and to address it I will first briefly discuss some other religions and and why I would not accept them as true. Then I will give a few reasons why Christianity does the best job of explaining what we see and experience, and why it is the best fit from the standpoint of rationality and morality. Of course this is going to be very cursory because the subject matter is so broad, but I would be happy to discuss it further in the comments.

Deism: Deists believe that an intelligence designed the universe, but they do not believe in a personal God who intervenes in his creation. The supreme being of deism simply created the universe and left it alone.

The chief problem of deism is that it leaves so many unanswered questions, like why a creative intelligence would have no revealed purpose. In spite of the problem of evil, this universe is pretty impressive. Would a supremely high intelligence create and then simply not care? I suppose that's possible, but then he would be nothing like us, his most intelligent creatures (as far as we know), because we have an innate sense that our actions should be purposeful and life should have meaning. And most talented creators put much of themselves into their creations, so we would expect that the intelligence behind this universe would reveal himself in his creation, and particularly in his intelligent creatures.

Primitive polytheistic religions: These are probably the easiest to dismiss because most modern cultures have outgrown them. If a religion is true, even the most highly developed intellect would be stretched in trying to understand it. It has to be "higher" than our ways, but not "different" in that it violates the rules of logic or our sense of morality. Since civilization has outgrown these religions, that indicates that they are manmade.

Judaism: Judging from the comments on Atheist Central and Dwindling in Unbelief, I don't expect that Judaism appeals much to most atheists. They often use the Old Testament as ammunition against Christianity, particularly by claiming that it violates a modern sense of morality.

This is a valid argument, because the Old Testament laws were often strange and problematic, and they seemed based on primitive cultures. I recognize, of course, that this is a potential problem for Christianity as well as for Judaism, so the question is how each religion addresses it.

Jews differ in terms of how literally they interpret the Jewish law, with Orthodox Jews taking it the most literally while Reform Jews consider the Jewish law to merely provide guidelines. But what is the point of the Jewish law if it can be watered down however we want? This is moral relativism, and it also conflicts with the nature of YHWH, who had very strict rules and clearly established his holiness in the Old Testament.

Christianity does not allow for watering down of any of its teachings, but the New Testament instructs us on how to interpret the Old Testament. This is a more rational and systematic approach than simply glossing over difficulties.

Luke 24:27 says, "Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, [Jesus] explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures." The entire Old Testament is full of symbolism or prophesies of Christ, starting with the very first chapter of Genesis. Colossians 2:16 says that the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament "are a mere shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ." Jesus said, "Do not think I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill." So even though none of the Old Testament authors understood it at the time, because it was a hidden mystery (Colossians 1:26), they all wrote of God coming in the flesh, and he was the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets.

Islam: The Qur'an was dictated by Mohammed, who claimed to have received it as a direct revelation from the angel Gabriel. Mohammed is considered the greatest of a number of prophets, including Moses and Jesus.

There are several ways in which Islam has less of a ring of truth than Christianity. First, it seems unlikely that God would entrust his entire revealed word to one person. The Bible, on the other hand, consists of writings by at least forty authors. (This criticism extends to Mormonism as well, which I will not discuss further.) Second, Mohammed was supposedly the greatest and most virtuous of all the prophets, and close to perfection. Still, he married a nine-year-old girl, which may or may not have been a problem in that culture, but now we know how psychologically damaging that would be to a child.

Compare that to Jesus, who challenged all social convention with a transcendent and timeless morality. In spite of his culture, Jesus treated women with respect (John 4) and children with the love and acceptance they need (Matthew 19:13-15). He had the courage to stand up to hypocritical scribes and Pharisees (Matthew 23). He ate and drank with prostitutes and notorious sinners, but instead of conforming to their behavior he transformed their lives (Matthew 11:19). He was sexually self-controlled without being uptight (Luke 7:37-48). He was, as Mahatma Gandhi said, "a beautiful example of the perfect Man."

Another problem with Islam is that the Qur'an makes specific scientific allegations that are known to be false while also claiming a high level of infallibility. For example, it tells a story of how a Muslim discovered that the sun sets in a pool of murky water. It also says that the earth is held in place by mountains, and that Allah holds up the sky so that it doesn't fall on us. These are explanations, not poetry, and they clearly indicate that the sky is a hard dome and the earth is flat.

Chapter 1 of Genesis, on the other hand, contains semi-poetical language, and the first few chapters of Genesis are full of deep symbolism of free will, sin, Christ and the church, redemption, and eternal life--and much of the same symbolism continues in Revelation. The message is primarily theological, and any cosmological or biological truths would be secondary. Unlike Mohammed, Jesus never teaches anything about science. All his teaching pertains to the kingdom of God. Nothing in the Bible has been falsified by science because the controversial passages are so highly symbolic.

Buddhism and Taoism: These are more philosophies than religions, in the sense that they do not teach anything about God or gods. So if someone suspects that the universe was created, Buddhism and Taoism do not give further information.

Hinduism: Hinduism is amorphous, in that it encompasses polytheism, monotheism, atheism, and pantheism. I think it would appeal more to someone who is looking for self-fulfillment than someone who is searching for objective truth.

Hindus also either believe that the universe is eternal or that there is an endless cycle of universes. The idea that the universe is eternal is inconsistent with modern science, and the notion that any other universe than ours has existed is not supported by evidence.

New Age spirituality: This is a make-it-yourself religion that retains the spiritual mysticism that deism rejects. Again, there is no objective truth to be found in this type of spirituality.

All of these religions are either a) too rigid and therefore dated, or b) too amorphous and therefore whatever we want to make them. Judaism and Islam are too rigid and they can also seem harsh and legalistic. The others are too soft and let us shape our deity into whatever we want him to be. The god of these religions never offends and never makes difficult claims, nor does he seem to care much.

Why is Christianity more consistent with the evidence?

The moral standard: Jesus said, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets" (Matthew 22:37-40).

So on the one hand, Jesus set a very high moral standard, but on the other hand, it is not rigid or harsh. In other words, we are not to live according to the strict rules of the Old Testament, but by the wisdom that comes from faith in Christ, and that always has as its chief goal the glory of God and the good of others. And the New Testament elaborates on what that means in practical terms. Galatians 5:22 says: "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law." These qualities are indisputably good by any standard.

Furthermore, Christian theology also recognizes that we do not naturally have the power to love like this, so we need to be born of the Spirit of God who will do the good work through us. This is the nature of faith. Galatians 5:6 says, "The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love." In other words, salvation is by faith, but love is the evidence of faith. If we belong to Christ, we will resemble him, because his Spirit will work in and through us.

The combination of complexity and simplicity: The message of salvation is very simple: We are to come to Christ as broken sinners and he heals us by the power of the Holy Spirit. The more humble and needy we are, the better qualified we are to receive this gift of eternal life. Pride is the only barrier.

However, Christian theology is also extremely complex and nuanced. It never oversimplifies what is not simple, and God is not simple, nor is human nature. The Bible is inherently logical, but the logic is not evident on a superficial level. It contains many subtleties and paradoxes that make more and more sense over time, like an infinitely complex puzzle that we will never solve in this life, but which has a very definite order and logic. It mirrors the natural world in this respect, which would indicate that the Christian God is the creator of the world.

A holy God of love: The God of the Bible is holy and he "dwells in unapproachable light" (1 Timothy 6:16), but he loves us so much that he uses the imagery of marriage to describe the fulfillment of his plan of redemption. This begins with Adam and Eve foreshadowing Christ and the church (Ephesians 5:32), it is further symbolized in the Song of Solomon, and it reaches its fulfillment in Revelation (Revelation 21:9-11).

The idea that a god should be loving comes from Christianity. No other religion talks about a personal God whose nature is love, and certainly not a holy God who is so humble that he assumed the role of a servant and washed his disciples' feet.

Freedom: Muslim extremists have come under fire for threatening violence against anyone who draws Mohammed. In defense of Islam, they prohibit drawing any of their prophets, including Moses and Jesus. However, this kind of legalism is antithetical to Christianity, which calls us to freedom, even with the associated consequences. No other church was rebuked more severely by Paul than the one in Galatia, which had fallen from grace into legalism.

2 Corinthians 3:17 says, "Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." Where Christianity is practiced the way it should be (i.e., where the Holy Spirit is leading) there will be no coercion, manipulation, or brainwashing. Free will is central to our humanity, and in salvation that humanity is perfected, so we become more and more free the more we become like Christ. But freedom in Christianity doesn't mean lawlessness--it means being governed by an internal law that comes from the presence of the Holy Spirit. Galatians 5:13 says: "For you were called to freedom, brethren; only do not turn your freedom into an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another."

This premium on freedom is consistent with what we see, and it indicates that the Christian God is our creator. We have free will and recognize its importance, but it is also the source of much of the evil and suffering in the world.

The problem of evil: After Anthony Flew became a deist, Christianity was the religion he considered most seriously, but he rejected it because of the problem of evil. The problem of evil is the major reason why deists believe in an intelligence that created and left us to fend for ourselves. If he exists, they reason, he couldn't possibly care.

But the God of Christianity does care; the entire Bible is about the problem of evil. In the opening chapters of Genesis we see its cause: free will and sin. In the Gospel accounts we see its cure: the cross. And in Revelation 21:3-4 we see the final outcome: "Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away."

Christianity is the only religion that takes the problem of evil so seriously that God himself became one of us and died the most profane death possible so that he could solve it. He satisfied the requirements of the Law on our behalf and paid the penalty for the sins of the world, and in that sacrifice he bridged the gap between a holy God and fallen humanity. This means that we can all receive his Holy Spirit, who will make us like him while preserving our individuality and our freedom.

God has freely chosen to give us abundant life that not even physical death can sever, and some day he will create "new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells" (2 Peter 3:13), where he will fulfill the deepest human longings. Nobody who does any harm can have a place in that new creation (Isaiah 11:9, 65:25), because otherwise the problem of evil would persist. But God has, through the cross, solved the problem forever, and the suffering of this life will become just a faint memory.

Can We Lose Our Salvation?

2010-05-14T09:11:00.000-07:00

A number of commenters on Atheist Central used to be Christians and de-converted to become atheists. So the question often comes up whether they were real Christians. Can a real Christian lose his or her salvation? And what is a real Christian?

The Bible uses the word "elect" to describe real Christians, but although this involves being chosen and redeemed, it doesn't necessarily imply determinism. So I will sidestep the perennial debate between Calvinists and Arminians and simply say that God who sees to the end of time and throughout all eternity knows exactly who they are. He has always known who they are, even before he created the world. So of course the elect cannot lose their salvation. That would be a logical impossibility, because if they do they would not be among the elect. 1 John 2:19 says: "They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us." Anyone who leaves the faith permanently is by definition not one of the elect.

However, those of us who are living out our lives in space-time still have to "overcome," according to Revelation 2:7. Matthew 24:12-13 says: "Because lawlessness is increased, most people's love will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end, he will be saved." So most people will not finish the race, and the evidence of that is simply love that has gone cold. No de-conversion is necessary. This makes sense, because Matthew 25 tells us that Jesus will judge us based on our acts of love or their absence.

Does this mean that those who "shipwreck" their faith were never truly converted? Although that is the modern conventional wisdom, I don't think it's biblical, and this is why: In 1 Corinthians 9:27, Paul says: "I discipline my body and make it my slave, so that, after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified." So Paul himself was not completely sure that he would finish the race. If he had not finished, it is true that he would not have been one of the elect, but would his conversion have been real? Well, how many of us saw a flashing light, heard an audible voice, and were struck blind only to have the "scales" physically removed from our eyes upon conversion? And if that's too subjective, he had independent confirmation. Ananias heard an audible voice telling him that Paul was God's chosen instrument. So it is possible to have a real conversion and fall away.

However, although Paul considered apostasy a possibility, he had complete faith in God that he would bring him "safely to his heavenly kingdom" (2 Timothy 4:18). He expressed the same faith in God's work in the lives of the Philippians, saying, "For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ" (Philippians 1:6). But if we read the context, we see that the Philippian church was thriving and bearing much fruit, so Paul's confidence was well-founded.

The Galatians were a different matter, because they had allowed a spirit of legalism to take root, and it is the most deadly and soul-destroying. We know that they were originally true converts because Paul says: "Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?" (Galatians 3:2-3). They had begun in the Spirit. And yet in verse 4 Paul expresses fear that it would all be in vain. Galatians 1:6 says, "I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel; which is really not another." They were on their way to apostasy, and it is no wonder because legalism cannot produce the fruit of the Spirit, and therefore love would be absent. Paul uses strong words like "foolish" and "accursed" in this letter because their danger was so great. Compare that to the affection with which he addresses the Philippians.

The parable of Luke 13:6-9 illustrates this issue of Christians who do not bear fruit: "A man had a fig tree which had been planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and did not find any. And he said to the vineyard-keeper, 'Behold, for three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree without finding any. Cut it down! Why does it even use up the ground? And he answered and said to him, 'Let it alone, sir, for this year too, until I dig around it and put in fertilizer; and if it bears fruit next year, fine; but if not, cut it down."

We have an immediate hint that there is something amiss: What is a fig tree doing in a vineyard? Fig leaves represent dead works in the beginning of Genesis, where Adam and Eve cover themselves with fig leaves after the fall. And Jesus curses a fig tree when he sees only leaves and no fruit. So we suspect that this fig tree in the parable represents a Christian who will not ultimately prove to be one of the elect. But in the parable, Jesus, the "vineyard-keeper," doesn't give up. He does whatever possible to encourage growth. However, in spite of all his efforts, apostasy may be the end result. That is represented by the words, "cut it down." It is no longer part of the vineyard, or the living church of Christ.

So what does this mean for us? If you are an ex-Christian atheist, your conversion may have been every bit as real as it seemed to you at the time. And you may have abandoned your faith because of intellectual questions that were never answered. There is no reason to conclude otherwise. However, as the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin illustrate, Christ is always seeking to bring you back.

And as Christians, we have to distinguish between complacency and faith. Philippians 2:12-13 says, "Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you both to will and to act according to His good pleasure." "Fear and trembling" means "no complacency." It's very easy to conclude that there are a lot of false Christians out there, but we couldn't possibly be one of them. If we believe that many will be told "I never knew you" on the day of judgment, it logically follows that we could be among them. We need to ask ourselves honestly whether Paul would use the same words with us as he did with the Galatians.

However, if we feel convicted, that is always a sign that God is at work within us, bringing us to repentance. It means we are not hardened. And true repentance always leads to surrender and trust in Christ, letting him do the good work within us. We can't possibly fix ourselves by deciding to behave better next time. What is in us will always come out, and Jesus deals with what is in us.

This reminds me of our youngest son's solution to the problem of strawberry seeds that were not growing (in the interest of full disclosure, I think we had been forgetting to water). He simply attached some nice ripe strawberries to a couple of chopsticks, stuck them in the planter, and voila! we were "growing" strawberries. However, those strawberries were not receiving nourishment and therefore wouldn't last very long.

We cannot produce good fruit without staying close to Christ. We are only called to abide in him like a branch on a vine, and he will by his Spirit produce within us the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22).

And he alone is able to keep us from stumbling and make us stand in the presence of his glory blameless with great joy (Jude 1:24).

Have We Outgrown Christianity?

2010-05-05T16:13:00.000-07:00

Dr. Arend Hintze and I had a conversation on Atheist Central a few months ago about whether or not theology is logical, and we decided to continue it on our blogs. Although this is a fascinating subject to me, it occurred to me that a blog post titled, "Is theology logical?" would probably bore most people to tears, so I decided to take it in a more relevant direction (hopefully you don't mind, Arend). Have we outgrown Christianity, and what role does logic play in making that determination?

The issue of whether we take the Bible "literally" often comes up, but this is a misleading question because nobody takes the Bible completely literally. For example, when we read John 6:61, where Jesus says, "I am the living bread that came down out of heaven," none of us (I think) pictures a winged loaf of bread soaring down from the sky. We all know that it is symbolic, and a literal interpretation would be incorrect. The correct way to interpret it would be to look at it in the context of the whole Bible, and if we do so we will understand the deeper meaning, that Christ is our spiritual sustenance. In the Old Testament, he was the manna the Israelites ate in the desert, and in the New Testament, he is the bread of Holy Communion. But Deuteronomy 8:3 and Matthew 4:4 tell us that bread is just symbolic: "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God." We live physically by food, but spiritually by the word of God.

The correct interpretation of that verse was not literal; it was symbolic. And we interpreted it in light of the Old Testament as well as the New Testament--in the context of the whole Bible. We didn't just take it at face value.

So the question really should be whether or not we take the Bible seriously. Is it the inspired word of God? That is, do we think it's objectively true or do we dismiss what we don't like or understand?

That is fundamentally a logical question, because if we don't think it's true, why do we believe it? There is absolutely no reason to believe something false, and the Bible makes significant statements of fact. It says that Jesus was the Son of God and that he rose from the dead. Furthermore, it claims that he is the Way and the Truth and the Life--not just a Nice Idea.

A while back I read an interview of Christopher Hitchens where the interviewer claimed to be a Christian. But she didn't really believe that Jesus was the Son of God or that he had risen from the dead, so Hitchens had to break the news to her that she was not a Christian. And I relate more to his logical thinking than to her mishmash of vaguely Christian ideas. As C.S. Lewis said, "Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important."

So for Christians to pick and choose what to believe in the Bible is not logical because it implies that it doesn't contain objective truth. And if it isn't objectively true, we might as well reject the whole thing.

Is the alternative to take everything literally? No, because not everything is intended to be literal, and some things may be both symbolic and literal, with an emphasis on the symbolic. The New Testament is a fulfillment and interpretation of the Old, which foreshadows, typifies, and prophesies Christ. If we read the whole Bible we will understand the context and interpretation of many difficult parts. There is an objectively correct way to interpret everything and we can find it if we read the Bible, letting the Holy Spirit instruct us.

The question often comes up whether something in the Old Testament actually happened, and although I generally assume that it did, logically that is not the important thing (nor can we prove or disprove it). When Jesus said in his parable, "A certain man had two sons . . ." we don't immediately start asking, "Is this really certain? Who is this man? Are you sure he didn't have three sons? Why no daughters?" Some will even say that if something didn't happen exactly the way it's portrayed in the Old Testament, God lied. But that is a false dichotomy, because a literal interpretation might be incorrect, like the "living bread out of heaven" example. The Bible is exactly the way God wants it, but we have to read it correctly, without logical fallacies. Logic has been defined as "a tool for distinguishing between the true and the false," so of course we have to use good logic while studying the word of God. And when we do, it makes a lot more sense.

If a particular interpretation of the Bible is self-evidently inconsistent with reality, we have two options aside from rejecting the Bible: We can pretend that the problem doesn't exist or we can take that as a clue that our interpretation might be wrong. To me the latter option is a greater expression of faith than the former, because it says that the Bible can withstand our most rigorous and honest scrutiny and will only bring us into a deeper and more consistent understanding of it. The former attitude is to shrink back from what such scrutiny might reveal. How can we insult God by doing that? Hebrews 10:38 says: "But My righteous one shall live by faith; and if he shrinks back My soul has no pleasure in Him."

The word of God has to be fundamentally logical if it is true, and it has to make more--not less--sense the more we grow up intellectually. This is why nobody seriously considers the primitive polytheistic religions when they are searching for truth. Holding to a childish faith after we reach adulthood is like trying to squeeze into the clothes we wore as children. We will look ridiculous and it will garner us no favors with God. 1 Corinthians 14:20 says: "Brethren, do not be children in your thinking; yet in evil be infants, but in your thinking be mature." And mature thinking will, with the help of God, bring us ever closer to the true meaning of his word.

Does Our Sinful Nature Come from God?

2010-04-13T12:56:00.000-07:00

Y=X asked:

According to Christian theology the sacrifice of Christ is necessary for us to be saved. This appears to imply that no human can live sin free. This suggests to me that humans are sinful by nature. Is it correct to say that this nature comes from God?

The power to choose comes from God, and with it the power to do evil. There is no possible way for us to have free will without the ability to abuse it. And the abuse of free will leads to evil in the world. C.S. Lewis explains it this way:

"We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void; nay if the principle were carried out to its logical conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to frame them."

However, free will is not absolute because we inherit the sinfulness, or brokenness, of our ancestors. Their propensities to addiction become ours, and we take on their personality flaws. I was just reading that there is a new field called "epigenetics," where scientists are finding that choices we make affect the expression of our DNA even for the next generation. So there is actually a connection between choice and DNA. As the narrator of the novel Gilead says, we "live in the ruins of other generations." None of us have within us the potential to reach our full humanity.

But God planned from the very beginning that he would take upon himself the consequences of free will by giving full reign to evil during his passion. The penalty for every sin that was ever committed or will ever be committed was paid in full by him. He did for us what we could not do for ourselves, and "rendered powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil" (Hebrews 2:14).

He also broke the domino effect of generational sin by becoming the first perfect human. Not only was he fully God, but he represented humanity at its highest and best. And by his blood we were redeemed from the "futile way of life" handed down by our ancestors (1 Peter 1:18), to receive his Holy Spirit and become like him--the "firstborn of many brethren" (Romans 8:29).

But in order to receive his Holy Spirit, we have to surrender the will that is set against him. "Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me" (Revelation 3:20). And the more we yield to his Spirit, the more our will conforms to his. He will give us his shalom--or harmony with him, ourselves, and other people, and he makes us fully human and fully free.

The Sacrifice of Christ

2010-04-04T14:17:00.000-07:00

I answered the following question on Atheist Central and figured that I would cross post on my own blog:

If God forbids human sacrifice, why did he allow Jesus to be a human sacrifice?

Although human sacrifice is wrong, self-sacrifice is the highest virtue. Just about every culture recognizes this, and John 15:13 says, "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends."

God was not the one who killed his Son on the cross. He simply gave him over to the forces of evil in order to pay our debt, letting evil run its course, and thereby defeating it. When he died, the veil of the temple tore in two, and we can now partake in his victory over sin and death by entering the "Holy of Holies" through faith.

But in addition to the theological significance of the cross, it was a dramatic expression of God's love for his enemies. Before his death, Jesus said, "Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34). And 1 Peter 3:18-20 tells us that after his crucifixion, Jesus went straight to the "spirits in prison" who rebelled against him during the days of Noah and died in the flood, and he made his proclamation of peace to them. So the cross was the pinnacle of self-sacrificial love, where the King Kings died willingly between two criminals.

And although God desires all to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth, each one of us is like one or the other of the criminals. One said, "Are you not the Christ? Save Yourself and us!" But the other said, "Do you not even fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed are suffering justly, for we are receiving what we deserve for our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.' And he was saying, 'Jesus, remember me when You come in Your kingdom! And He said to him, 'Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise'" (Luke 23:39-43).

The Prism of Faith

2010-02-20T15:40:00.000-08:00

If salvation is by faith, what do we make of Matthew 12:50: "For whoever does the will of My Father who is in heaven, he is My brother and sister and mother"? And 1 John 2:4: "The one who says, 'I have come to know Him,' and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him; but whoever keeps His word, in him the love of God has truly been perfected"? And James 2:19: "You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder. But are you willing to recognize, you foolish fellow, that faith without works is useless?"

Does it mean that salvation is by faith and works? No, it simply means that faith which doesn't produce good works is not real faith. Good works is evidence of faith, and we will ultimately be judged by our works (1 Peter 1:17). Galatians 5:6 says: "The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love." And John 14:15 says: "If you love Me, you will keep My commandments."

Faith is like a prism that separates white light into a spectrum of colors. Just like the colors of a rainbow are evidence of light shining through a prism, good works are evidence of the Holy Spirit working through faith.

That means that trying to earn our salvation by good works is like drawing a rainbow with crayons. That's not what God is looking for because it is not evidence of his Light in our lives. And it leaves us feeling either self-righteous or discouraged because it has no power to change our hearts.

The absence of good works likewise means that our lives are devoid of his Light. Faith without works is dead (James 2:26). And dead faith is no faith at all.

God invites us to come to him and receive what he has to give. He wants to give us his love, so that doing his will comes naturally. He wants to give us his peace, so we are no longer at war with ourselves. And he wants to give us his joy, to empower us to live fully.

And he will give us the prism of faith if we ask him for it.

God's Nature

2010-02-12T15:43:00.000-08:00

One of the most terrible examples of God's judgment of sin is the story of Noah's ark. Even though it has inspired the decor of many a nursery with pictures of a bald, bearded man squeezed into the ark with cartoon-eyed animals, it is anything but sweet. When the earth had become too violent and corrupt, God decided to destroy all flesh, except those in the ark.

The water came from the "fountains of the great deep" as well as "the floodgates of the sky" (Genesis 7:11). What is this "great deep"? Other Bible passages indicate that it is the ocean. Wikipedia confirms this event:

Burckle Crater is an undersea crater likely to have been formed by a very large scale and relatively recent (c. 2800-3000 BC) comet or meteorite impact event. It is estimated to be about 30 km (18 mi) in diameter ^[1], hence about 25 times larger than Meteor Crater.

The comet would have struck the Indian Ocean, between Madagascar and Australia, causing a mega tsunami.

But I digress, because I've spent so much time talking with atheists recently that I can no longer say anything without backing it up. As soon as I had written the first sentence I heard voices in my head insisting that scientifically the flood couldn't have happened.

I really wanted to talk about the two parts of God's nature that are so closely intertwined that we cannot separate them: his justice and his mercy. First, there is God's justice. Victims require justice. Nobody sins in a vacuum--sin not only affects other people, but it spreads like a cancer. "The sins of the fathers" are truly visited upon the children, as psychotherapists can attest to. The children bear the scars and inflict them on their own children.

Although our justice system recognizes that criminals are often deeply broken, crime has to be punished and society has to be protected. But sin injures even when no punishable crime has been committed. And sin and suffering are inexorably linked, even where the link is not direct.

So God who is just and good will some day do away with all sin and evil. Nothing and no one who causes people to stumble can have a place in the New Earth (Matthew 13:41). In the same way that God flooded the earth during the time of Noah, he will put an end to the current earth. And in the same way that he gave Noah clear instructions on how to build the ark, he gives us clear instructions in his word on how to receive "the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 3:15).

After the flood, he put his rainbow in the sky as a sign of his covenant of peace and mercy. And after his crucifixion, when evil seemed to have prevailed, he went "and made proclamation to the spirits now in prison, who once were disobedient, when the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah" (1 Peter 3:20). At that darkest moment of human rebellion, he extended his offer of peace to the corrupt people who died in the flood, demonstrating that his mercy triumphs over judgment.

Letting Our Light Shine

2010-01-12T16:22:00.000-08:00

In Matthew 5:14, Jesus says to his disciples: "You are the light of the world." What is our calling as followers of Christ? It is very simply to let his light shine in and through us, so that people will see our good works and glorify our Father in heaven. Nothing more dramatic than that.

But we're not the ones doing the good works and therefore deserving the glory. We are to be vessels for God's light, so people will see him. That means abiding in him and resting in his will. He will take care of the rest.

Jesus also told his disciples: "You are the salt of the earth," and followed up with the sobering warning, "but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men (Matthew 5:13)." Imagine going through life being "trampled under foot by men" for our faith, and having it all be for nothing. Our spiritual vitality has to be powerful enough to transform us and those around us. If our faith is just a hollow creed, we're worse off than without it.

But if we can stay close enough to God to maintain our "saltiness," he will take care of all the rest. We don't have to worry about the barriers we face. God will break them down. Even when every foe is aligned against us, we must remember that although we are utterly powerless, he who is in us is greater than he who is in the world (1 John 4:4). We are called only to abide in Christ and be vessels for his pure light.

The Interpreter's Bible says:

There is no despair because the group is small: a pinch of salt is effective out of all proportion to its amount. There is no hermit strategy: the disciples are to stay in the world, touching even its unworthy life, if they would redeem it. There is no call to a sensational witness; salt is inconspicuous, ordinary, and admixed with common things.

A sensational witness is not necessary, but the steady light within us is.

Will We Have Free Will in Heaven?

2009-12-03T19:03:00.000-08:00

The agnostic blogger I mentioned a few posts ago just made an excellent argument that I would like to address here. I said: "Inherent in the power to choose is the power to choose evil. There's no way around it. To say that God could have given us free choice and also made it impossible to choose evil is like saying that he could have made 2 + 2 = 5. It is intrinsically impossible."

He replied: "I think you just proved that Heaven cannot exist!"

On the face of it, he certainly seems right, and a few months ago his response might have stumped me. If God can give us free will in Heaven while still making sin impossible, he could have done it on Earth. And if we don't have free will in Heaven, why do we have it here, with all the evil and suffering it entails?

This is actually a question that I've already given some thought to in the past few weeks, in an effort to reconcile the Calvinistic-leaning and Arminian-leaning Bible passages in my mind. I've arrived at a conclusion, although I am by no means saying that this is the full answer. I'm only saying that although the blogger made a good point, it didn't put me into checkmate. There is a theologically accurate way out of the logical dilemma.

Not only will we have free will in Heaven, but we will be perfectly free; however, we will not choose evil. How can these two things coexist, particularly given my earlier argument? Because a redeemed believer is a completely new creation that exists only by virtue of having surrendered the will and let God fill him or her. This also leads to perfect freedom, which I discuss here. When God fills us, he changes our hearts and minds, so that we want to do his will. If we desire to do his will, that means we will not sin. Why would we do something wrong if we are not tempted? However, this gift of a new heart is contingent on surrendering the will freely, because God did not create robots.

So every person in the world has a will and can choose to rebel against God. But since we are born into original sin, nobody can choose to fully obey him. Sin in our hearts makes it impossible. However, we can surrender to him when he draws us to himself--that is, we can give ourselves to him and let his Spirit fill us. And when we do, he changes us from the inside, which means sin loses its grip.

Everybody in Heaven has a completely surrendered will, which allows Christ to fill them and work through them. And because their hearts and minds have been renewed, they have no desire for sin, even though they started out with the same propensities for sin that we all have. They have lived through the curse, and sin no longer has any power over them.

So on the one hand, God works through us when we surrender the will, but on the other hand, this sets us completely free. God's sovereign grace and perfect human freedom meet at the apex of absolute surrender. And that is how we will spend eternity.

Who Benefits from Our "Perfection"?

2009-12-02T08:40:00.000-08:00

I read a blog today where the author announced a very painful development in her life, and it struck me how apologetic she sounded. The whole post was about how she expected to be judged. A reader commented by saying that she wondered if Facebook does more harm than good because people are always bragging about their perfect lives. I also have a few perfect Facebook friends, so I thought that was a good subject for a blog post. I told Rick, "You know how some people try to seem perfect on Facebook by talking about everything they accomplish, the gourmet meals they've prepared, and how well their kids are doing? That's going to be the subject of my post."

Rick stared at me blankly. "They're trying to be perfect? I thought they were just being boring."

So maybe this post is only for those of us who are tapped into feminine culture, where we often feed our own insecurities by accepting the image of perfection as the reality. When we look at that woman on the cover of Cosmopolitan, we know that she's been airbrushed. So why do we always forget? Why did I think, "Wow, Demi Moore is really thin. Not fair," until Yahoo! news brought to my attention that someone had butchered her airbrushing by cutting off her hip? Did I really not know that she was airbrushed until then? (Of course she still looks great, airbrushing or not.)

But the more important question is why we do it to other people. If we can deceive someone into thinking we have it all together, who benefits? We know the truth of it. All we've done is made the other person feel bad and participated in an endless cycle of pride, insecurity, and deception.

If we could just break free from that and be transparent, maybe people who are hurting would speak up before the problem gets out of control. "Perfection" creates a barrier between us and other people, but transparency is a point of connection. It is a bridge between us and other people that enables them to be real. It tells them that we're not too "perfect" to understand. We've shared all the struggles that define the human experience, right?

John Wesley said, "Let your words be the genuine picture of your heart." The condition of our hearts is all that ultimately matters anyway, so we might as well take off the mask. Are we just silver plated or silver straight through? God wants to bring all our flaws and impurities to the surface, so he can deal with them.

And that is the beauty of transparency--it shows the power of the cross in a flawed human being. On the one hand, we are fallen, but on the other hand, our hearts are being renewed day by day. (2 Cor. 4:16) Why not let people see this process, so they know it's real?

The Veil That Separates, by F.B. Meyer

2009-11-20T14:54:00.000-08:00

Have we cheapened grace so much that we don't see the thick curtain that hangs between God and us? Is the presence of the Holy Spirit merely a theoretical concept? Here is a very biblical explanation (not often heard today) for the spiritual numbness we may feel.

What is the veil that hangs between you and the presence of the Holy Spirit? It is probably some misunderstanding between yourself and another. What veils man from man also veils man from God. He who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God who he has not seen. Perhaps you are unwilling to forgive someone who has wronged you; or you will not ask forgiveness from one whom you have wronged. Perhaps you owe restitution money on a debt or a theft of twenty years ago. The conviction that you ought to make it good forms a thickly-woven veil between your Lord and you. Or perhaps there is some duty, some obedience to a positive command that you ought to perform but that you have evaded and shirked. Any of these things is enough to curtain off the filling of the Holy Spirit and make it a dim uncertainty.

Oh, let God reveal to you the cause of your shadowed experience! Then dare to obey Him at whatever cost. Make right what is wrong, repay what is owing, obey what is incumbent. Do it though it cost you an earthquake and a crucifixion. The peace of God will immediately settle upon you, and the light within will break forth speedily.

Fountains of Water

2009-11-18T19:06:00.000-08:00

Recently it seems like everywhere I turn I hear of people who have sought God and not found him. It makes me almost feel guilty that he has always been there so very real whenever I have needed him. I know what an undeserved gift that is. My heart really goes out to those people, and I've been praying for them a lot throughout the day today. And then I opened the Bible and came across this passage:

The afflicted and needy are seeking water, but there is none,

And their tongue is parched with thirst;

I, the Lord, will answer them Myself,

As the God of Israel I will not forsake them.

I will open rivers on the bare heights

And springs in the midst of the valleys;

I will make the wilderness a pool of water

And the dry land fountains of water.

Isaiah 41:17-18

Such a beautiful picture of God's living water, available to all who thirst. I know that the reason why my heart goes out to them is because his heart goes out to them. And he's calling me to come before his throne in prayer on their behalf.

Who can understand the mystery of prayer? When God wills something, he calls us to pray. It is the means by which we lay hold of the victory of God in all earthly battles.

In prayer we can carry each others burdens when we are otherwise powerless to help. We can give immeasurable secret gifts that transcend time into eternity. We can make fountains of water available to the many afflicted and needy.

And, when we do, that living water satisfies our thirst as well.

Are We Brainwashed?

2009-11-18T13:32:00.000-08:00

Those of you who read my last post might recall that an ex-Christian told me that Christianity is a "huge brainwashing operation," but he also said that he admired Christians like myself who take our faith seriously. I asked him why he admired those who were more fully brainwashed. Wouldn't it be healthier not to internalize it?

It might have occurred to you that there was an easy way for him to get out of that trap: Take back the compliment. And he did. He admitted that I'm brainwashed but wouldn't concede that "half-Christians" who just "go with the flow" are better off. They really make him mad.

But it seems to me that a fully brainwashed Scientologist like Tom Cruise is much worse off than someone like Katie Holmes who just married into it and seems basically anchored in reality. When . . . ahem . . . if they split up, I'm sure she'll go back to being Catholic or whatever she was before. Nothing against Tom Cruise (I'm sure he's a nice man), but I would never tell him that I admire his conviction. (His hair, maybe, but not his conviction.)

But you'll be pleased to know that I didn't press the issue with the ex-Christian, even though I'm confident that I could have succeeded in getting him to admit that I'm completely nuts.

Still, the issue of brainwashing is an interesting one. Is Christianity just mass brainwashing? The mere fact that it's the majority religion in our country doesn't prove that it isn't. Not even its Founder teaches that majority rules when it comes to truth. He says that the way is narrow that leads to life, and few are those who find it. (Matthew 7:14)

So what is brainwashing? Wikipedia gives the following definition:

Mind control (also referred to as brainwashing, coercive persuasion, and thought reform) refers to a broad range of psychological tactics thought to subvert an individual's control of his or her own thinking, behavior, emotions, or decision making.

And the following definition appears in the body of the article:

Philip Zimbardo discusses mind control as "the process by which individual or collective freedom of choice and action is compromised by agents or agencies that modify or distort perception, motivation, affect, cognition and/or behavioral outcomes."

I think that there's definitely brainwashing in the church; however, true Christianity is the opposite of brainwashing, because we are called to freedom.

There is often psychological pressure (blatant in some types of churches and subtle in others) to believe things that are not entirely true. We are supposed to be peacemakers, so we would much rather pat backs than challenge. Christian communities are often like cocktail parties, where a dissenting voice is like the person who jumps up on the table and does a little dance. I've been that person sometimes and felt the crushing hangover afterwards: "Oh, no, I disagreed. I'm so bad!"

During the first ten years after I became a Christian I never questioned anything. I would sit in the pews on Sunday mornings with my mouth hanging open while the pastor planted his ideas into my brain. If someone with the right credentials (read: a conservative evangelical) said something with an air of authority, I would be willing to fight to the death for it. When Rick and I met in college, he was more of a critical thinker, and I was somewhat disdainful of that: "Everybody knows this, Rick! I don't have to defend it!" I preferred osmosis.

But sixteen years ago during a multifaceted crisis, God taught me that osmosis is not the way to truth. If we believe everything we're taught by fallible Christian men and women, we will approach the Bible with preconceived notions that blind us to the plain meaning of the text. It's sort of like the telephone game where the message gets distorted a little each time. What a dangerous way to handle God's inspired word! You could say that my deprogramming began at that point.

According to Philip Zimbardo's definition of brainwashing (compromised freedom of choice), Christianity is the opposite because we are called to freedom from all encumbrances of the will. A mature Christian is neither slave to sin (Romans 6:6) nor to the law (Romans 7:6). He or she cannot be manipulated but does everything freely and without compulsion (2 Cor. 9:7). A Christian is to be truthful to the core (Psalm 51:6) and have an undivided heart (Psalm 86:11). All of this is a free gift from God through faith (Ephesians 2:8).

In true Christian churches, the dignity of the human will is respected. The less psychological pressure to do what everybody else is doing, the better. Pressure enslaves and therefore hinders the spiritual growth God desires. Love, on the other hand, liberates and ennobles.

As Christians, we can fall prone to legalism, something that is fatal to faith. Paul devoted the entire letter to the Galatians to warning them about the "false gospel" that had enslaved them. Is legalism so bad, if it keeps people behaving properly? Yes, it is so bad, because spiritual freedom is at the heart of our salvation. A Christian is called to echo the psalmist: "I run in the path of your commands, for you have set my heart free." (Psalm 119:32)

So there may be brainwashing within the church, in the sense that we can be blinded to the truth or stripped of our freedom of choice, but that is not the true gospel. "Where the Spirit of God is, there is liberty." (2 Cor. 3:17)

Is It Real?

2009-11-14T09:09:00.000-08:00

I've been in dialogue with an atheist this past week. He came from a Christian family and was a Christian himself until about ten years ago. He is very polite and honest but militantly against Christianity. He believes that no deity could possibly be more tyrannical than the biblical God, and he's convinced that all religion is brainwashing. Furthermore, Christians are guilty of cognitive dissonance.

During the course of the conversation, he told me that nobody in his family has seemed very concerned about his soul in the past few years, and although that didn't bother him, it was proof that it wasn't real to them. But he admired Christians like myself on the strength of our convictions. I asked him why, if he thought Christianity was brainwashing, he admired those who were more fully brainwashed. I reminded him that to him Christianity was not just a perspective he disagreed with but "a huge brainwashing operation." So presumably the less we internalize it, the better, right? Did I detect some "cognitive dissonance"?

My husband Rick questioned the wisdom of taking a compliment and using it against someone to win an argument, which got me thinking about whether theological debate ever wins any converts at all. Does any unbeliever ever say, "That's an excellent point. Thank you so much for pointing out the flaws in my reasoning. I believe now"? There's usually so much ego in those discussions that it seems virtually impossible to persuade.

Then it occurred to me that all my encounters with atheists in the past year had one common denominator: Even though they had rejected Christianity, they all had a very sensitive radar for whether it was real to someone who professed it. In fact, some of them were very honest about that, and when they determined that it was real, they actually asked questions.

That makes sense to me. When it comes right down to it, only a few questions really matter to them in those discussions: Does the biblical God exist? Is he good? And does he have the power to save souls in a way that is noticeable to the world? The most compelling evidence for God is his love in a human heart because it answers all those questions affirmatively, at least as a starting point. But when the discussion turns into debate, people immediately classify it as two egos wrangling over words, and it's over. Few things are more human, and less divine, than that.

I think that when this man talked about the "strength of my convictions," he really meant that my faith looked real to him. That would have been a good time to leave it alone and declare a small victory, instead of proving to him with my arguments that I was no different from anyone else.

I should have taken the words of 2 Timothy 2:23-25 more seriously: "But refuse foolish and ignorant speculations, knowing that they produce quarrels. The Lord's bond-servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition."

It is so easy to take the words of life and use them as a dagger, doing more harm than good. All we have to do is look at the Inquisition and other less-than-glorious moments of church history to see that this is one of Satan's most powerful weapons.

We may think we're immune to that, but those words turn into a weapon whenever the ego takes over. One of the pastors at our church said that the opposite of love is not hate but Self, and I think he's right. The ego is always a barrier to God's love working through us. And every human soul bears the imprint of its Creator and therefore recognizes his love.

What a difference it would make if we always remembered that.