Ruth, My Hero

The Old Testament saint named Ruth is not too often held as a hero for a Christian man.  She exemplifies a good many feminine traits and the romantic story of her and Boaz is a tremendous thing in itself.  But there is one thing she did that continues to impact my life.  While Boaz was sleeping she committed an act of contrition and submission that is at once daring in the face of social norms among the people of God and yet novel in Scripture; she curled herself up at his feet.

I suppose one must have a pretty innocent view of things to appreciate the intimacy of that act, especially these days, but the thought of my unmarried daughter sneaking off to do that with any mortal man irks me.  But that she loved Boaz purely and saw him as her master seems clear to me, and a lot has been said and written about the grandioseness of her acts toward him.  Yet I am stricken by propriety of her humility.  Other than terrific and great and awesome, it was proper.

Again in the New Testament Ruth’s image is reborn as the sinful woman who brought alabaster for Christ’s feet which, blended with her tears, she wiped with the long hair God had given to her for her glory.  Christ testified to the witnesses  that by committing this act “she loved much.” (Luke 7) and she was forgiven and reconciled to him.

I am reminded of Ruth when my head has grown large, when I am impressed enough with myself to feel that God needs me.  Then I remember her.  I recall what an intimate and honourable place I have simply to be low at his feet.  This is my place and in my life I have needed Ruth, my hero, to remind me that the uplifting, ennobling power of a saint of God is there in a place of penitent, submissive humility.  It is the right place for me to be with my master.

Theonomy Is One Thing

Perhaps the worst thing that ever happened to theonomy is American Reconstructionism.  In the minds of millions of people theonomy means one thing, the rule of an American theocratic federal government over US citizens.  Those millions are wrong.  Theonomy is one thing and it is far larger and more powerful than any U.S. Government can ever be, and it already rules the earth.

Theonomy as I conceive it should not first be thought of as a particular form of national governance such as American republicanism or Saudi absolute monarchy or British constitutional monarchy.   It is a way of thinking about anything, anything at all.  Theonomy simply means rule of the law of God.  Even the atheists accept natural law, which is theonomy.  Laws of logic and the inescapable laws of thought are theonomy . They all even accept moral law, such as a person should not murder innocent little children, which is theonomy.  They don’t know these laws come from God and are shed abroad in the hearts and minds of men, but they do accept them as governing our lives.  Understanding that God has made every righteous law there ever was or ever will be, laws governing anything in the universe or realm of man’s meaningful experience, is theonomy.  This knowledge I call the theonomic way.  That is what theonomy is…it is a way.  It is a way of thinking.  It is a way of thinking about laws.  It is a way of thinking about laws in America, or anywhere in the universe.  In the end, theonomy is really just about God’s sovereignty over his creation, which is the prince of all Christian doctrine.

What separates the rebellious Christian from the rebellious heathen is that the latter has no intellectual or spiritual scheme in which to acknowledge the true God as sovereign.  What unites them is that both reject God’s sovereignty as having application to them, at least from time to time.  When one is intent on following the rules God has set in the universe and knows that it is indeed this God who sets them, one is thinking in a theonomic way.

Then there’s politics.  The most common problem of thinking theonomically is inconsistency.  In our homes we Christians set laws of God quickly to work.  We are rigourous about them in governing our church, and we certainly accept God’s rule in our personal lives as his elect children.  The realms of the personal, the familial, and the ecclesiastical are all theonomic practically everywhere in Christendom.  But not the civil. In the civil realm we finally come in direct contact with the interests held by that rebellious heathen and the question of who rules, and ought to rule, the earth.

Theonomy is not just American Reconstructionism nor is it a Canadian theocracy, nor the regime of theocrats in any country.  It is a manner of thinking about all moral law based on the fact that the Christian God is who he says he is and who has not repealed his moral law in any realm, nor can he.  Those laws are necessary laws, not contingent such as the old covenant ceremonial law or the law of gravity.  Civil law is but one component that must suffer, and glory, in the implications that God is sovereign and has not repealed his moral law anywhere.  All that’s left is to go forward into the arena of implication and discover what this means for our country and what we Christians ought to be doing about it.  That is the right place, the right scheme, for the body politic to exercise itself.

None of this denies or affirms American Reconstructionism.  Every Christian in every country ought to be for the rule of the King of Kings in their nation and that needs a lot of work.  There are bound to be great strides and great mistakes made, nuances that need to be corrected, and even tragic consequences to errors made by theonomists.    But theonomy proper is far greater than one nations politic.

Politics ought to be serving the theonomic way, not evaluating it.  For the Christian the question of HOW a theonomic way should be implemented, not IF, is always at hand, for the person, the home, the church, and even in civil politics.  Theonomy is one thing after all, one coherent, universal way of thinking that presupposes the sovereignty of God in law-giving, including the realm of civil law of a particular country.  It is down there in the particulars, not the universal, that one may finally speak of reconstructionism in American politics, which is so much smaller than the one thing of theonomy.

Biblical Inerrancy And What Fundamentalists Forget

The complete and total depravity and wickedness of the heart of a person is an important doctrine in Calvinism.  In the acrostic TULIP it’s the first one; T is for total depravity.  So we Calvinists thank God that he has delivered the revelation of Scripture to us, to all mankind, which while it depicts our depravity in the context of a salvation message, is not evil at all. In fact, we don’t even believe the original revelation contained any errors.

Isn’t it nice that we can know the Bible perfectly?

I suppose putting the question that way gives away my thesis that we may not perfectly know the Word of God just because it is shown to us inerrant.  Maybe that seems obvious, but I am perplexed that the hoy polloy of contemporary ‘evangelical’ Christianity, and more so it’s leadership, actually believes they can know God’s Word because the Word is perfect and perfectly revealed.

It struck me one day as I was driving one evening and listening to the radio, which brings in faraway stations at night, some distant preacher.  He was trying to comfort his sheep by saying, as he wrapped up his sermon, that because the Bible contains no mistakes we can fully rely on it and not worry about people who tell us we’re wrong.  Tsk tsk, I thought.  Such thinking leads to personality disorders.

You see, fundamentalist Christians, good solid Christians without a full, reformed theology, do not take adequate account of two things in this mix of the perfect Word and our perfect understanding; people make mistakes, and people are evil.  They forget that while God is infallible, we are not and instead of working to deal with the problems of knowing (or epistemology) they let the problems cause disorder by ignoring them.

I can forgive them for forgetting the first mistake because, well, people make mistakes.  We’re not perfect.  We can’t always read perfectly, hear perfectly, and we can’t always think or understand perfectly.  That’s the way it is for all of us in this universe.  But I struggle with that second problem because, you see, their message is that the Word of God informs them perfectly, and so in their silly logic it follows that they are perfectly informed.  To avoid corrupting their perfectly informed minds, they enter into psychological castles, thick-walled with sniper slits.  They become stupid oafs and saltless salt.

Yet if they were perfectly informed, they would know about the Bibles instruction about total depravity and would include it in part of their consideration as to why people make mistakes; because they have evil about them.  It’s called the “noetic effect of sin” and it is the ever-present, ever-humbling fault line in our otherwise perfect Christian continent. Having been saved from the judgement of our sin, we have, alas, not been saved yet from the effect of our sin.  That means the rebellious soul we were before salvation is still fractured in it’s ability to avoid rebelliousness after salvation, which arises because we fail to know things perfectly, which is due in part because we have a rebelliousness about us, which affects our ability to understand things perfectly.  I trust you see how this circle goes.  Our current state is not wholly purged of either error or rebellious thinking, two things that go together in a fallen race living on cursed ground, and because of that our problem of knowing God’s revelation is not overcome by the fact that the word of God is perfect.

Why else would the Bible, in  John 4:1, tell us to first test the spirits that come to us to see if they come from God?  If we just knew infallibly, there would be no point to such further evaluation.

Think of it this way; set an unconscious person in front of a moving bus and see if the perfectly knowable situation of a bus moving toward them has any effect on their understanding of it.  An actual bus is actually moving toward them but they have no knowledge of the thing.  Their ability to understand is removed from them; there is a total failure on their own part to know what they ought to know to survive.  So is man in the face of the Word of God.  Knowing God’s word aright takes more than simply reading it, or hearing it.  Yet it is perfectly knowable.

Here’s my own lifetime example of this problem.  I was a child when I began to read the Bible, which in those days was the King James version almost everywhere in the English speaking world (talking the 1970’s here, not the 1770’s).   Boy was it hard to understand and, for that reason, frustrating to read.  Here I had the Word of God in my palms and I had no clue what it just said.  I believed the Word was right and pure and perfect and from heaven but I knew, even as a little boy, that my ability to understand it was limited.  It literally seemed like Greek, like another language.  I was humble about my immature ability to read this old language, to understand these high thoughts, to know.  You see, it doesn’t take Calvinism to inform a Christian that the problem with knowing the Word of God is not with God or his message, but in us and our limited, fallible ability to hear it and understand it.  The childhood song was not “We are strong because He is strong” but “We are weak but He is strong.”

What is the solution to this problem of knowing?  Like the song says, it has to do with God’s strength.  Now isn’t that just like Calvinism?

Arminian Christianity has no well articulated solution because they have no clear conception of the problem.  The more biblically rigorous system of Calvinism has a not-so theological answer because it is a more coherent theology.  So here’s the take of one Calvinist;

I spent time as a boy growing into a man, reading the Bible.  My ability to understand grew.  I was patient.  I did not abandon the Word, nor disparage it by blaming it for being hard to understand.  I understood my weakness and worked to overcome it, to understand the old language, to grasp higher thoughts, to know.  God’s revelation to me about what the Bible said occurred in just the same way he revealed to me everything else I knew, which also took time; sometimes reading words, sometimes hearing them, sometimes having to go back and correct my errors, with some errors painfully learned.  What I know now is that I will never stop in that process of becoming sanctified so long as I remember that just because God is perfect, just because his Word is inerrant, I am not.  He delivered his perfect Word to an imperfect, sometimes rebellious little boy who runs in little steps to become a perfect man.  That’s sanctification.  That’s biblical.  That’s Calvinism.

Sacrament Doctoring and Spin-Doctoring; Samples of Presbyterial Cross-Threading

(updated Oct 16)
I’m a big fan of the late Greg Bahsnen’s work, but I simply had to post here a quirky quote he made that displays that no matter how bright the Presbyterian is, when the matter turns to defending Presbyternianism things have a tendency to simply not click together so well. But I love them anyway, those Presbyterians.

In speaking in defence of the Presbyterian view of sacramentalism in the Lords Supper, the late Dr. Bahnsen wrote:

“Notice how Paul speaks of the sacrament: “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ?” (I Cor. 10:16) The sacrament actually does something in this case blessing covenant-keepers; ” (emphasis his, http://www.cmfnow.com/articles/pt069.htm)

Maybe for breakfast I can explain how this happens, and show that regardless of how bad it is, things could be worse for presbyterial types.

CROSS-THREADING WITH SCRIPTURE

First, I’m surprised how Dr. Bahnsen quotes the Bible in one sentence, speaking of the cup “which we bless” and in the next sentence doctor that to read the opposite, that the cup is “blessing covenant-keepers” without dealing with the contradition; an explanation would have been reasonable. Why no explanation? Because in the manner in which Presbyterianism defines sacrament no explanation would be necessary, which is a problem I examine next.

CROSS-THREADING WITH ITSELF

I believe the problem with how the Presbyterian view can contradict scripture without seeming like it to a Presbyterian may be a problem in kind. Bluntly put, I’m seldom sure what they mean whenever Presbyterians speak of sacrament. Here’s why;

Paul in Scripture is referring to the cup being the spiritual communion. We know that because it says so; “The cup….is it not the communion of the blood of Christ?” Indeed, our cup is the communion together of believers over the sacrifice of Christ. Us with Him, that is the cup spoken of in this verse, much as Christ prayed with the sweat of blood, “Let this cup pass from me”, that cup now passes to us.

By “cup” Dr. Bahnsen means the physical, outward act of an individual performing the ritual; that is the sacrament, the act of a person partaking. Or he may mean the physical cup, the actual bread or the actual wine. The uncertainty is that sometimes Presbyterianism means the performance act proper and sometimes the ingredients. But there is a third sense they sometimes mean when referring to sacrament, when they refer to the rituals as institutions in and of themselves. Speaking in terms of capitalized letters of the “Sacrament of Baptism” they do not speak of the act of an individual, nor of the grape juice or bread, but of the whole item as an institution within Presbyterianism, Thus when it is spoken of in the PCA Book of Church Order, for example, as a thing to be “administered”, one is left uncertain whether they always mean the handing out of the elements to individuals, or the dissemination of the ritual throughout and within the churches; both are legitimate, but the ideas are separate. The minister in charge of the Ministry of Health is not a doctor, although he administers health care in our province, but doctors administer health care in our province. I used the same words, and did not mean the same thing. The Presbyterian definition of ‘sacrament’ is multitudinous and yet it is nowhere adequately defined, often leading to confusion in both teaching and learning by leaving it up to the questioner to first define the context, and then applying the word. Presbyterians think Scripture also means the word in their various ways, and so in their thinking you must first find out which of the three meanings is intended, and approach it that way. There is no concept in Presbyterianism for communion meaning just ‘communion’ in the raw definition of the word, as it does for Baptists. Communion is only captured in the idea of the “sacrament of communion”, which takes it hostage to one of the three contrived meanings; the ingredient, the act, or the institution. None of those, in and of themselves, thread directly with the idea in “communion”. The idea in “communion” is morphed by Presbyterian doctrinal wrangling into the issue of how grace is dispensed (the ingredients), to whom it may be dispensed (the act), and who may dispense it (the institutional ritual). It ceases to be communion proper. In this manner the Presbyerian doctrine of sacrament annihilates the Scriptural doctrine of communion as ordained by Christ and will simply pass right by it, as Dr. Bahsnen did with Paul above.

EXAMINING THE CREED

Such confusion arises because before the Westminster Confession of Faith, the creedal statement of much of Presbyterianism, goes on to use the word sacrament, it fails to define it adequately; we never learn from the very statement of Presbyerian sacraments, what it is. From it’s best definition in Chapter 27 can we be certain whether sacrament means the bread, the performance of the act of eating the bread, or the institution?

Sacraments are holy signs and seals of the covenant of grace, a immediately instituted by God, to represent Christ, and his benefits; and to confirm our interest in him: as also, to put a visible difference between those that belong unto the church, and the rest of the world; and solemnly to engage them to the service of God in Christ, according to his Word.

In the same Chapter the WCF seems to embed this confusion by subtly shifting the readers understanding from the notion of “S”acrament, the performance act of physically doing the eating and drinking, to “s”acrament the physical cup, by putting it this way:

There is, in every sacrament, a spiritual relation, or sacramental union, between the sign and the thing signified: whence it comes to pass, that the names and effects of the one are attributed to the other. The grace which is exhibited in or by the sacraments rightly used, is not conferred by any power in them; neither doth the efficacy of a sacrament depend upon the piety or intention of him that doth administer it: but upon the work of the Spirit, and the word of institution, which contains, together with a precept authorizing the use thereof, a promise of benefit to worthy receivers.

The mention of “used”, “use thereof” and “in them” suggest the physical things; it is the bread and wine that are referred to as sacraments, sacraments exuding grace from their material elements not because the elements themselves are holy things, but because they are being “rightly used” and now the Holy Spirit is making them exude grace to us. That is why Dr. Bahnsen taught that the wine, which he called the sacrament, “actually does something”…he was speaking of the literal, physical cup on the table as Scripture was talking about the cup being the communion occurring during the ceremony.

Yet in the very next item in chapter 27, the WCF says, using the same small s sacrament:

“There be only two sacraments ordained by Christ our Lord in the gospel; that is to say, baptism, and the Supper of the Lord”. Here Presbyterianism seems to means the institutions of baptism and the supper.

Bear in mind, it is not wrong to have more than one meaning in one word. We all do this with reference to, say, ‘breakfast’. A search of the definition reveals two meanings:

1, the first meal of the day; morning meal: “A hearty breakfast was served at 7 a.m.”
2. the food eaten at the first meal of the day: “a breakfast of bacon and eggs.”
(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/breakfast)

The context in such word usage is usually left up to the enquirer, who is supposed to have figured out ahead of time what we are talking about. When we ask “what’s for breakfast”, we’re not expecting the answer “the first meal of the day.” The question set the context, not about the first meal, but about the food proper.

Presbyterians are thus able to avoid setting the context of any discussion because the doctrine waits to see what the reference already is. Where that has not been clearly set, confusion arises and mere assumption sets in, the reader is allowed to pick which definition they feel works. It works for breakfast because of the sheer force of common usage gives us the context we need to be sensible. The statement “We’ll have breakfast before we leave” makes sense to us as the ‘first meal of the day’ definition. But such does not apply for sacrament. Forcing the presbyterial doctrine to provide the definition of sacrament is not possible….it must first be asked, “that depends on the context”. It can mean this, or it can mean that, much like the word breakfast. There is no one meaning. Usually without being aware of this, Presbyterians switch meanings to support the doctrine, which is a contrived way of supporting anything, but do not always let the reader know when it is happening. Therefore, in order for us to keep our thinking from winding-up cross-threaded, it helps to be several things when encountering the Presbyterian doctrine: be well educated about the doctrine; be versed in the manner in which the words can be applied; be on guard.

Here is a further example, a definition of the Presbyterian view of sacrament from PCUSA…can you tell with certainty whether the act or the ingredient is meant from one sentence to another?

“Presbyterians believe that Christ is present with believers in the Sacraments just as he is in the written and preached word. In celebrating the Sacraments instituted by Christ, the Church commemorates the redemptive acts….” (http://www.kirkofkildaire.org/gen/presbysacraments.html)

(As an aside, I will only briefly mention the questions that arise from such a description: if Christ is present in the actual letters of the written word, ie a Bible, just as he is in the bread or wine, then why would reading a Bible not be another sacrament? Why isn’t hearing a sermon? Is reading or studying Scripture not a ‘means of grace’ to a Presbyterian and if it is, how is it not sacramental in nature also? Has God not promised to bless the hearing of his Word? Is he not communing with two or more gathered together in his name and if so, why isn’t church-going a sacrament? This, by the way, is where the Roman Catholic like to step in with their multitude of ‘sacraments’)

I get confused because the first sentence includes reference to things like “present” and physically “written”, physically “preached”, and the second into commemorating, and “acts”. One sounds like it’s speaking of something physical. But the second sentence seems like it’s probably speaking about Sacrament as an act, yet we weren’t told that the meanings switched. Adding to the confusion is that a capitalized word means it has been given a singular definition. How could they use the same capitalized defined term, which must mean one thing, and yet use the same term to convey a separate meaning without a cue for the reader?

All this subtle word play, intermingled in doctrine, leads to confusion especially in exegesis, which is where presbyteriasm’s self-contradictions and slippery word slopes become extremely complex and problematic and lead to outright doctrinal error; there simply is no grace exuding off bread and wine and cups and Scripture does not teach it.

Paul did not mean the cup, he meant the communion, as I’ve noted. The presbyterial error is a problem of kinds of cups.

Of course, if by cup Dr. Bahnsen meant the act and not the cup itself, he is correct. That cup, which Paul says we bless, presumably by submitting ourselves by partaking in it, does in turn bless us. The mutual blessing is part of what makes this a communion, a togetherness. But when Presbyterians speak of the efficacy of the sacrament, they are speaking of the efficacy of the hardware itself shedding grace to believers. Dr. Bahnsen speaks further in the article on this point, writing that “the sacraments (are) a true “means of grace” which, through the efficacious work of the Holy spirit, convey a blessing”. I think we must here assume he means the elemental cup and elemental bread.

BAPTIST RESPONSE

Baptists recoil at such notions. We agree, of course, that it is indeed the efficacious work of the Holy Spirit in communion that blesses us….no notion of communion in Christendom is without that. But that is because we are in the midst of the obedience of the command to “do this in remembrance of me” from the God who utters “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not” with authority throughout the ages. It is God who said “do this” and his elect who obey, which is sufficient for the Holy Spirit, in the context of that act, to impart the grace of communion, from who He is as God to who I am as his elect and those with me. These are the communers. All else, the wine, the bread, the pew, the church building around me, are incidentals to the obedient “I do” to the great I Am.

PRESBYTERIAL PRIDE?

In the movie “Welcome to Macintosh”, one man interviewed said, “PC users get off on complexity. Having all the knowledge to fix and run PC’s is important to their self esteem.” What Macintosh users have long held as contempt against the PC users, is that PC users like their difficult and prolix way of computing precisely because it was difficult and prolix…it made them seem superior to Mac people with their simpleton way of just getting things done, a way that Apple would later leverage in it’s advertising against the PC. I wonder, sometimes, if we’re dealing with the same dysfunction with Presbyterians. Is there pride in perpetrating a prolix and diffuse doctrine when it can be simple instead? See how Dr. Bahnsen speaks of the Baptistic view from the same article quoted above:

“Baptists take a minimalist, subjective view of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, seeing them merely as “ordinances” (not “sacraments”) which are nothing more than a memorial to the work of Christ, a testimony to the gospel truth and visible sign of a person’s (subjective) faith in it. “ Perhaps I think it is because of simplicity that the idea of the meaning of communion is set aside in favor of this sort of “demeaning”.

THE TRUE MEANING OF THE ORDINANCE OF THE LORD’S SUPPER

Baptists take communion because we were told to. As regards the meaning of the Lord’s supper, as the great, Calvinistic-baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon has said:

“What does this supper mean? It means communion: communion with Christ, and communion with one another.” (http://christianbookshelf.org/spurgeon/till_he_come/communion_with_christ_and_his.htm)

IT GETS WORSE: PAEDOCOMMUNION SACRAMENTALISM

Yet there is far worse being said and done by presbyterial types who are confused about what sacrament means or ought to mean, things that are funnier and also sadder. Having put itself at terrible risk, the presbyterian definition of sacrament here reaches desperate depths to uphold it’s cross-threadings. For example, what does it sound like when Presbyterians cross-thread with logic itself, with sheer rationality, to uphold their sacramentalism? Paedocommunion, a variance from traditional Presbyterianism that teaches infants should take communion also, stretches the imagination.

In this Youtube video is a man absolutely straining at how to justify his paedocommunion view. We see how he feels forced to uttering absurdity, striving to explain the fact that an infant need not remember things even though it is a remembrance meal, and even though he himself says in this clip that “the meal reminds us….”. He has to deal with this conflict because Scripture makes it clear that we are supposed to be recalling in our minds the sacrifice of Christ when we partake and to consider our own worthiness, which is something, of course, an infant cannot do. This is why Presbyterians of the late Dr. Bahnsen’s ilk do not believe in sharing communion with baptized infants. In order to get around this dilemma this paedocommunionist Presbyterian ultimately has the meal doing the remembering. Conveniently, this lifts any requirement for an infant, or anyone else for that matter, to do any remembering of anything at all during the remembrance memorial. As he says at 1:16 in this Youtube clip, “the meal remembers it to us”.

One must wonder how a meal does that? By cross-threaded spin-doctoring…..

By this logic we should be able to park a baby under a World War I memorial and the War memorial will remember the war to the baby.

This must be application of the latter half of the word “sacra/mental”. Friends, if anything on your plate is still having memories about anything, you shouldn’t be eating it at all, especially at communion.

What really bakes my noodle is that I have to agree with the spin-doctor’s very scriptural premise that everyone who is baptized into the body should partake of the communion meal; a peculiar group of people are spiritually baptized into Christ and they all, always, commune with Him. From these teachings from Scripture we know that only converted believers ought to be baptized and partake of communion, ie people who have their own capacity to do things like repent and remember, and physical baptism being the mark of a spiritual baptism, entry into an unending covenant that begins when both parties have covenanted together. I digress.

CONCLUSION

Because I work in analyzing contracts all day it helps me to be reminded, so I put it on my office wall, this wise byte: “A well conceived idea is easily spoken.” The late Dr. Bahnsen could not see that the Bible speaks of communion when it speaks of the cup in that verse because the complex cross-threading of presbyterial linguistics simply got in his way and railroaded Scripture’s simple’s simple idea expressed in raw beauty and power. Instead all he had to offer was a contrived, pre-conceived notions that grace pops off cups because the Holy Spirit has to respond to rightly administered rituals. Because he has less work to do, the good doctor only has to apply extremely high-minded doctrinal doctoring done, but the presbyterial paedocommunionist must run to sheer lunacy to support his concept that the baptized infant should also partake of the meal; to him I say just become a Reformed Baptist already and stop eating things that remember death to you.

Sam Waldron’s Theonomy Article

I recently read part of Dr. Sam Waldron’s article concerning theonomy (http://www.reformedreader.org/rbs/tarba.htm)  and I would like to illustrate why it is more theonomic than not and make a quick comparison to one by Dr. J. Ligon Duncan ( http://www.the-highway.com/recon_Duncan.html).  I say I read ‘part’, because I was only reading for one purpose; to see if I could glean whether Dr. Waldron is a theonomist or not.  You don’t have to read the whole article for that, and the answer may surprise you;

He is.

He’s hesitant to the point of making himself  inconsistant and I think along some points in his thinking contradictory, and his monotonous reluctance makes him moot as an apologist for the theonomic approach to civil government. But I have no doubt about how he is thinking when he thinks about civil government and he thinks just like a theonomist.  THAT, brothers and sisters, is what makes you a theonomist.

I look to determine whether the author, or the person I am speaking with, is thinking in a God-centred or man-centred way as they discuss the applicability of biblical law as applied to contemporary society.  The rest is usually lower level (not necessarily in importance, just categorically) subject matter.   For example, whether or not you believe the moral laws in the bible apply to civil society today is a different level of argument as to whether the death penalty should apply to adultery or not.  Usually the latter level is reserved to those who already are theonomists.

It’s toward that end that I approached Dr. Waldron’s article and which I reviewed Dr. Duncan’s already .  In my analysis at http://faithtoreason.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/the-duncan-quote-the-way-of-theonomy/  my sensibilities were offended by a high level overview of Dr. Duncan’s approach.  I spotted his waywardness quickly, and gave up on the rest of the article, which is lost on me.  I’m not much interested in what non-theonomists think about the detailed propositions of theonomy.  At best, the rest of the article would show Dr. Duncan was conflicted and at worst hostile about biblical law for today.  I had found what I was looking for, and then I wrote against his non-theonomic way of thinking.  I did not find the same concern in the Waldron article.

Some good thinkers who have read and analyzed Dr. Waldron’s article may find that last sentence a bit odd, for there is much about theonomy that he seems to struggle with and even oppose.  That is how I think I would characterize Dr. Waldron’s approach to theonomy; conflicted.  I say that because we simply do not find the intellectual abandonment of the rightful place of Gods law for society as we do in the Duncan article.  Dr. Duncan openly shows man not God makes those decisions and man may take God’s old rules into his consideration.  But in Waldron, we find that he does always rely on the idea that there is no place left to go other than God for moral correctness for a civil government.  He seems to sense the chaos that resides for us when we do that.  He doesn’t make any statements as Dr. Duncan does, and is careful in positional statements which make me think he is thinking theonomically and is conscious about it; he doesn’t want to abandon that.  For example, he writes  “If, however, we over-react to Theonomy, we may well throw out several babies with the bath water….I personally have been surprised with how much agreement I had on the theoretical level with many Theonomic perspectives.“  That kind of language is all the proof I need that we may give him that benefit of the doubt that he is thinking theonomically.  This is the power of the theonomists case.  To think like a Christian you simply have to be thinking theonomically; they are the same thing.  When there’s conflict over this subject, it’s like magnet’s that oppose; get them too close and they quickly slip by each other.  The closer the two antithetical ways of thinking come together in the same mind, the more slip that can occur.   Dr. Duncan falls off his own thinking.  If the non-theonomist get’s close to having to admit to theonomic thinking, he rushes to chaos.  Dr. Waldron does not wind up in chaos, having avoided much talk about the philosophical foundations for law.

Dr. Waldron expresses a whole paragraph of appreciation for the philosophical and theological groundwork upon which theonomy rests and indeed forms, and then offers a summary “Areas of Criticism” which are only ever about those policy and regulatory matters I earlier spoke about, things lower in the taxonomy.  Plus, Waldron openly states that the Decalogue still applies for modern societies and, as mentioned, does not elsewhere make irreconcilable statements about theonomy.  Alternatively, when Dr. Duncan says that the Bible makes good “suggestions” about civil law that we can use, he also says, without typing, that man is the final arbiter of what shall pass as “good” law for society.  That is the antithesis of a Christian way to think, and thus a Christian approach to civil government and like that opposing magnet that kind of thinking by Christians is quickly in turmoil philosophically.

You might note that I haven’t yet delved into that lower level of discussion, whether any specific regulation Dr. Duncan may have proposed is good or bad.  No, the issue for me is not about the policies, laws, or regulations that we could discuss at that level.  That discourse must go on long past us, if Christ should tarry.  Setting aside a good discussion about policy and regulation, if we just look at the approaches taken then I say we see critical, core differences between the articles because the central tenets are antithetical; God is the determiner of the civil moral realm vs. man is the determiner of the civil moral realm.  This accounts for why Dr. Duncan’s article is internally more coherent than Dr. Waldron’s, which has an air of opposing by testing and probing vs. making determinations.

I’ve heard of people rejecting theonomy for numerous reasons but the most difficult to hear are when Christians say its reject-able because of some squirly idea some theonomist blurted out.  I’ve heard of one Reformed Baptist who become even more vehement in his rejection of theonomy because some Presbyterian told him that under theonomy all Baptists would be put to death.  “There”, goes the thinking, “I am against theonomy because of that.”  Well, that’s rather like a murderer saying that because the conservatives and liberals in the House are debating capital punishment for murder he must reject democracy as being altogether wrong for society.  It’s a fallacy for the murderer to think that way about democracy even though he did commit a crime for being a murderer, and more so it’s fallacious for a Baptist to reject theonomy as legitimate when he has committed no crime at all!   The form of civil governance called theonomy is legitimate despite illegitimate political tactics and specific political ideas of theonomists, and despite the fact that poor bureaucratic theory exists now and will always exist in this world’s every jurisdiction and every political theory.  I say if you are rejecting theonomy it is always because of much more profound issues than fallacies such as these, because to reject theonomy is to embrace autonomy and be antithetical to Christian thinking.  Otherwise, every claim against theonomy coudl also apply to whatever political theory currently rules in your country right now, and so you must reject it, too.  Showing how rejecting theonomy leaves one with no philosophical and religious alternatives, however, is beyond the scope of this post.

Perhaps I’m being too easy on Dr. Waldron and too hard on non-theonomists.  Certainly he gets severe with theonomy as he rejects the degree to which we say biblical law applies.  Dr. Bahnsen is fond of pointing out in his literature how some Christians reject theonomy, not on theological or philosophical grounds, but because they find it’s rules so yucky.  They don’t like the laws, never mind whether it is right to follow them or not.  Like the man who does not murder, not because it’s against the Ten Commandments but because he hates blood and gore and corpses.  Dr. Waldron carries on against theonomy so much it begins to sound like he’s backtracking and suddenly saying  it is altogether to be rejected.  But he offers no viable alternative and no sufficient philosophical groundwork that would grant that the civil realm should reject God’s biblical law.  He caveats his rejections with so much acceptance of the virtue of theonomic “way of thinking”, that I suspect he simply believes there is just some work to be done in the area of trying to figure out how God can still be enthroned in man’s civil law.  That, by the way, is the mark of a contemporary theonomist, not an anti-theonomist.  I don’t believe Dr. Waldron will ever get there in rejecting theonomy yet establishing a way to enthrone God as lawgiver in the hearts of man, because they are the same thing.  We have Bahnsen to thank for this emphasis and for teaching us so clearly why that is.   The Waldron approach to theonomy is only conflicted theonomy, and not rejection.  I think a lot of Christians are there already, and I find the rest are easy to bring to that point in a discussion.  What remains is the hard work of clarification, that’s all.

Maybe I’m willing to give Dr. Waldron a pass into the theonomists club solely because he didn’t get explicit about his rejection.   “Man not God should decide the moral laws for society” would have been a clarifying statement.  Yet maybe he would say he rejects theonomy, by a thousand qualifications.  In his article he has in view all manner of contemporaries and their proposals and he does pass some judgments against them for sure.  He gets into the muddy details down there with the ‘full blood’ theonomists and what they have to say.  My point here is that you can be opposed to specific regulations another theonomist supports while wholeheartedly being a theonomist.  Do you think Bahnsen and Rushdoony agreed on everything?  In this article, Waldron has stepped too far into our intramural debate to sound like he is working on theonomic clarification, without sufficiently rejecting our thesis.  So he is talking like one of us, even if he is sitting a little further to the edge of the camp.  There is enough opposition to this thing or that thing in his article to, perhaps, convince even himself that he is not a theonomist.  But I think he is.  I see his thinking in his article, and it looks like theonomic thinking in immature form, struggling with how icky the law is to the contemporary societal mind, with inner conflict being the prime symptom of that.  It looks like he acknowledges and is consistent that there will be no place left to go apart from God for definitions of good; he never really violates that central tenet to reformed, presuppositional thinking that leads one to, in the final analysis, be thinking like a theonomist.  That is my central concern at this point, not whether he agrees with Gary North on the role of postmillennial eschatology, which I do not accept at all as being necessary since an amillenial interpretation also works with theonomy (maybe because it is a form of postmillennialism).  I think about whether  people are doing their thinking in a theonomic, and not autonomic, fashion.  Anything after that is ok and may be called ‘intramural’.

I understand how someone may conclude from the article and say Waldron isn’t a theonomist because he spends so much time and words in the article being critical of theonomic things.  If you look closely, there is a lot more education and explication of what theonomists are thinking than rejection.  In some cases, I think he talks just like one of us who wants to further refine how a good theonomist ought to be thinking.  If he’s engaging, then it’s less because he’s non-theonomic and more because that is quite simply the evolutionary stage we are at in this whole idea of God entering the civil realm.  We’re talking to one another about biblical law for society and issues of how, and what, and where, and when.  To me, Waldron is too much in that vein.  But about whether or not God has that place, we do not speak nor does Waldron seem to.  We assume that in our thinking. I find Waldron assuming the same thing, and I find Dr. Duncan explicitly not.

I didn’t read all of Waldron’s article (it’s huge).  I would have preferred one that simply said and defended whether he was or wasn’t.  This “third party” analysis that some commentators seem to want to take is both boring and unnecessary.  We need position and apologetic, not more waffles.  The antithetical natures of theonomy vs. autonomy demand it.

If I’ve overlooked some statement somewhere in the Waldron article then I could stand to be corrected.  But I will point out that if he did reject theonomy at some point, that he is still only conflicted about it and did not want to land himself too squarely anywhere.  From my reading, Dr. Waldron is like a lot of Christians these days I suspect, truly sick with how atheistic thinking is ruining human institutions and lives in his country, and he might feel just fine with a little hard-nosed Biblicism at the moral helm of his country at least for a while.  But reactionary politics aside, his article is one of exploration and wonderment about the thing versus a summary and rejection of it.  For that reason, his article is conflicted, satisfied with theonomic thinking and unsatisfied with it’s articulation.  Dr. Bahnsen, I am quite sure, would (and has already I think, though I have more to read) make very short work of the detractions by Dr. Waldron.  As for today I know enough to feel comfortable judging for myself whether a person is thinking theonomically or not and I count Dr. Waldron as a theonomist who should continue to work out his inconsistencies, or be explicit about rejecting theonomic thinking altogether.  So long as he refuses to do that, he’s in the club in my books.

The Nominalist Sneak; Why There’s No Such Thing As A CNN Blogger

RE: this CNN blog proposing there is and never has been a Bible.

The author of that blog entry, Mr. Beal, has, IMO, attached his rickety philosophy to the worn-out donkey called “nominalism”.  But what the hay, hey?  It makes for attention grabbing.

I mean, you can image the scandal among conservative Christians over the suggestion that there has never been a Bible.  It is in that initial reaction that Mr. Beal’s philosophical ship passes by silently and untouched by Christian concerns.  In this article Mr. Beal flings a 2300 year old philosophical problem onto the internet and into the face of God-fearing people, and provides a conflicted example of the haphazard use of the empty philosophy of nominalism, which will not solve for him the question of whether or not there is a Bible because it can not solve any questions at all.  But Mr. Beal hopes we don’t know that or perhaps he, like his readers, is not aware of that vanity, which is the purpose of this blog.

The author has not been unique, or even creative in my opinion, in laying the groundwork for his thesis.  Yet Plato and other Greek philosophers, who took upon themselves the yoke of making sense of a universe without the Biblical concept of God, never did solve Mr. Beals regurgitated problem we now know as “the one and the many”.  It’s a fun one, and we who like to tinker with philosophical puzzles enjoy this one.  Let me explain what it is, and then show how Mr. Beal is only offering nominalism to solve the problem, which is really like saying nothing at all, which is precisely how he can make the argument that, according to his suppositions, there is no Bible and no CNN blogger.

It's not a pumpkin, it's a computer

Imagine “computer”.  Not a particular computer, just “computer”.  Whatever your conception, there are a thousand qualifications I could now make to your thought “computer” and then challenge you by asking “so is it still a computer?”.  For example,  “computer” is typically conceived as some type of electronic device that runs software through use of a CPU, graphics card, sound signal processing ability, and lots of wires, all in a plastic box connected to a keyboard and monitor.  But if we remove the monitor, is it still a computer? Sure.  You can buy a computer with no keyboard and no monitor at any electronics store that sells the Macintosh Mini for example.  And if I removed the external housing from the Mac Mini, is it still a computer?  Sure it is.  People stick their computer guts in all kinds of configurations, even in motorcycle frames (http://www.mofocases.com/cases.php?case_id=130).  I can challenge your conception of “computer” even further when I say that even in ancient Greece near Plato’s time they used a computer, called the Antikythera mechanism, which computed calculations for astronomical positions. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism)  I’ll bet that one wasn’t in your head when I first asked you to imagine “computer”.

Now we seem to have the same problem with “computer” that Mr. Beal has with “Bible”.  Not only is there no universal concept of “computer” in existence, even the particular computers we  know vary so wildly in configurations that it is tricky to even conceive of a single conception.  Yet without a single conception, it makes no sense, in Mr. Beal’s world, to talk about it.

You see, in short order a consistent nominalist approach to knowledge reveals that nothing at all in his experience is grounded in any kind of universal meaningfulness.  Everything just disappears, for all intents and purposes.  Of course, the nominalist will try to deny that because he is trying to live his life.  But as he tries to live it without the Bible, he finds some use in being inconsistent.

“Bible”, suggests Mr. Beal, is nothing at all, but as a result so is everything else in his impoverished view.  That view, by the way, is the thesis that only particulars are real.  That’s a critical component of nominalism.  There is no “Bible” there are only “particular Bibles”.  It’s a kind of word game. It takes on the presupposition that only particular things that we can experience are things we can use in our discourse because only particulars have meaning, which is because they give us some physical sensation or another.  “Bible” or “computer” “CNN blogger” does not.

THE ONE AND THE MANY

You see, whenever we consider a word representing some conceptual idea in our scheme of things in this time-space continuum that we live in, like “frog”, “blog”, “lamp” etc., we always take make sense of it by thinking of a particular instance of that general concept, so when you think about “lamp” you always think about a specific lamp you’ve had experience with.  Wait a minute.  Is that right?  A moment ago I wrote “frog”.  Did you have a conception of what that is when you read it?  I bet you have a good and right conception that”frog” is not only something real, but knowable. It’s more than just it’s definition.  You and I both know frog yet neither of us are thinking of a specific frog, never mind the same specific frog that defines the word for us.   We’ve never laid eyes on the same one.  This is how we illustrate that the “one” frog we all know is truly knowable as the one and universal thing, and yet we are also able to know individual, particular frogs without confusing those two things.  When I wrote the word frog I didn’t have to say “the frog I plucked from the pond behind our house when I was 8”, because “frog” is universal to and known to us all, and that frog in the pond when I was 8 is not.  How then is the universal frog ever knowable if only particular frogs exist, and we have never known the same particulars?  Ah, the problem of the one and the many.  We can know “frog” in God’s universe because God makes objectively real the universal (“frog”) while also making real the particulars (a frog)….they have their unity in the Christian conception of God.  It is a problem in what is called “epistemology”, and Mr. Beale is playing tired, old epistemology games that the godless have played unsuccessfully for too long.

Be careful not to assume that we are just talking about definitions here.  When I said “imagine ‘computer’” I didn’t mean think of the definition of computer, I meant think of “computer”, which is a thing and not just a definition.  Oh, it has a definition, like frog does, but the definition of a thing is separate from the thing itself,  which lies beyond and is more than pure language definition and extends really and actually into the realm of the real world.  This is exactly what upsets the cynics like Mr. Beal, especially the nominalist skeptics.  For you see, he is not just challenging the notion that there is or ever was a “Bible”, he is challenging the notion that there is any universal AT ALL.  He must make that challenge, or risk being arbitrary and contradictory and, ultimately, irrational.  He is reiterating the old philosophical problem of how to speak of any one universal thing without making reference to a particular instance of it.  This problem plagued Plato, who developed a famous philosophy called the “world of the forms”.  Google it.

No secular philosopher has solved the problem of the “one and the many” and it remains a problem in secular philosophy even today.  They are still trying to account for how a person can know something  universal like “person” when to them “person” has no reality!  It makes as much sense as “glymorx”…it’s just nothing at all.   Oh, there are lots  of particular “ducks” but there is no incarnation of the great and universal “DUCK” or even “person” or computer or glymorx or CNN blogger or anything at all.  There are only particulars they say and if Mr. Beal were consistent with the bankrupt philosophy he now hurls at the Bible, he would readily admit that there is nothing in his experience that makes any sense to him at all.  But he is not consistent.  Since Mr. Beal winds up his very old argument with the idea that nothing but particular Bibles exist and there is no “Bible”, then we may well ask him the same challenging questions that have plunged secular philosophers into their skeptical doldrums since the beginning; if only particulars exist, then how do we account for knowing universals at all?   Or how do we attribute such universal characteristics of “duckness” to ducks and “bibleness” to Bibles if “duck” and “Bible” are really nothing at all?  Nominalism was defeated as a bankrupt philosophy a long, long time ago.  We know universal anything the same way we know the universal Bible; by revelation.

HOW SUNDAY SCHOOL SOLVES THE RIDDLE

In the Christian God we have the ultimate solution to the one and the many problem, for He is three in one who, having made us in His image, shed to our understanding a revelation of knowing things as He knows them in broad understanding, and yet grants us the sensational experience to interact with iterations of those things in the universe He has made real, and to which He grants such reality by His power, instant by graceful instant.  For that, the God-fearing Bible believers give thanks.  We “know” there is a Bible and a CNN blogger because of Him who made knowable things, who made our knowing selves after His image, and by the revelation of knowable things through our interaction with the materiality of all those incarnate things like particular Bibles and particular bloggers.  I realize this is Sunday school stuff, but once rejected it leaves every knower in utter confusion, says the Bible, as exemplified through the silly confusions of Mr. Beal’s recent and ancient article.

Christians need not fear Mr. Beal, but the godless should panic altogether.

The Art Of Questioning: How A Healthy Skepticism Never Is.

I’m enjoying the writerly helps from a book“The Daily Writer: 366 meditations to cultivate a productive and emaningful writing life” by Fred White.  But I have been thinking about what to say on a healthy approach to the human endeavour of enquiry and have decided to pick on the author, Fred White, for a recent daily mediation he wrote for the writing life:

March 16

The Art of Questioning

“Here is a rock-solidbit of writerly advice: Question everything.”

When you have finished reading this blog post I hope you will have learned that whenever you read or hear this phrase “question everything”, you will understand that it has two fundamentally opposing approaches.  One you’ve probably learned, and one you probably haven’t.  One is right and good for your chicken soup soul, and the other pure avian bird flu…for your soul.  The latter is the devil you know.

First, let’s look at a bit more from the article, because quite likely you you were once taught or believe or once believed wholeheartedly in “questioning everything”.  I remember them teaching us that very thing in the government-owned public school system and university where I learned to be a teacher.  Even if you believe in questioning nothing, you should hear this, for it is the common thinking around you:

“Resist passively accepting received truths without thinking them through.”

(Let’s assume that “thinking through” here means not just applying good intellectual power but specifically doubting and questioning.)

Here’s the first rub:  if we have received “truths” why question, why doubt further?  The whole purpose of getting to the bottom of things is to discover if they are truths or not.  So if we start there, why continue questioning as if we still doubt?  The logic is as inconsistent as the language.  Let’s give the author the benefit of the doubt then, that he does not really mean “truths”.  When people say such things they mean “ ‘truths’ that are not yet known to be truths”.  OK, so bad word choice.  Perhaps it should have read:

“Resist passively accepting suggested truths without thinking them through.”

But there is an infection in humanity that accounts for why the author has spoken the way he did.  More on that in a moment.  More illustration of the problem from the article:

“This is not a symptom of paranoia, but of healthy, critical skepticism – the kind of skepticism that gives birth to scholarly inquiry.”

PHILOSOPHICAL SKEPTICISM

Friends, philosophical skepticism never gives birth to anything worth the title ‘scholarly’.  Yet there we have it, the crux of the carnal mind’s overthrow of God’s place in human thought. From this point, the author continues in some also-conflicted examples of such skepticism and inquiry, but spiritually and philosophically the problem has been defined by the words shown.  To spot the problem and to understand why that crux is so terrible for our souls one must understand something about philosophical skepticism and something about the opposite, about what the Bible says about testing ideas.  You might be surprised, so hold on.

Skepticism, as is commonly suggested in society (I used to be a high school teacher), is not mere ‘questioning’, ‘doubting’, or ‘challenging the status quo’.  Certainly it leads one to do these things.  But it is not what it is, as most people think.  That is a mistake about skepticism that leads to philosophical chaos and really bad thinking and poor advice, not rock-solid and definitely not scholarly.  People seem to know just enough about skepticism for it to be harmful to them.  Eve assumed that the critical enquiry of the snake was acceptable, for she never rebuked him for being ‘skeptical’.   Pity.

Skepticism is a philosophy, a philosophical approach to life that sets up to destroy life. It is not just “questioning everything”.  Nobody can be a consistent skeptic and live.  There is only one kind of skepticism despite what the writerly author has suggested, but deep in the idea is the notion we can borrow from it just a bit, as if a little bit of bleach is good to drink or a bit of bird flu is good for the constitution.

Skepticism is a philosophy.  It’s a philosophy that says we can know nothing.  Nothing!  Why does it say that?  Because it thinks we’re stupid?  No.  Because there is nothing in the universe to know?  No.  It says that because it holds that there are no certain philosophical grounds, no thinking scheme, that will allow us to reasonably and consistently believe anything is, with certainty, knowable. It says “maybe there is truth, but you can’t know it“. When the subject is God that sort of thinking is called “agnosticism”, but it’s really just skepticism picking on religion.  We may have brains and minds which can know, and there may be things to know, but there are no solid thinking grounds to be sure that we do, in fact, know anything at all.  This is how we defeat non-Christians in debate; they apply skepticism to God but then want to stop at other points of their lives and suddenly say they can know with certainty.  That’s an olive loaf you can pull from their shopping bag and pummel them with.

Everything must be doubted, says skepticism, because everything is doubtable…there is no such thing as certainty.  It is not certain that murdering babies in their sleep is morally wrong, says skepticism.  But we have to live our lives.  Act like it’s “wrong” if you wish, to lead a successful life, but don’t believe you can know anything for certain.  Skepticism is not a questioning spirit, it is a position about knowing and it falls into that field of philosophy called epistemology.  It says with absolute certainty that nothing at all can be known with absolute certainty.  And now you begin to sense the predicament, the poison it seeps into our thinking process.  The author of the Daily Writer is simply dead wrong about what skepticism is, and blind to how devastating it’s effect is in human thought, like bleach to the throat or flu to the forehead.

A little is still all bad.

BIBLICAL TESTING

What is goal of scholarly inquiry?  Is it not to discover truth?  Yet given the bitter pill from the Daily Writer, once I finally have “received truths” all that scholarly inquiry can offer is to continue in my doubt, and question, and question, and question.  At some arbitrary point I presume the scholar is supposed to just stop, perhaps so he can eat or sleep.  Arbitrariness is the chaotic symptom of godless thinking and if we were consistent with it, we would die.

The Bible says this in 1 John 4:1: “Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God,…”  Fascinating isn’t it?  Ask someone “Where in the Bible does it say to not immediately accept what God says but to hold off on God’s word and test it first?”  The text teaches that only once we have proven the word of God should we accept it.  God is not ok with doubting that there is truth (question everything, period) but he is ok with testing truth (to see whether it is from God).  These ideas are totally opposed to one another.  One annihilates thought, the other gives it a foundation.  One destroys the soul, one ennobles it.    Now by definition this means that God does send his word to us and we are to keep it on our intellectual patio for a moment before letting it in the door, while we prove it.  Simply questioning because we “question everything”, simply doubting because of “healthy skepticism”, is not the Christian way.  There is in Christendom much more work involved, the chores of testing and proving.  This takes both prior knowledge (remembering Scripture) or the means of acquiring knowledge (studying Scripture) plus a means of testing.   And God is not only ok with this practice of not immediately accepting but parking his God-given word to us, he commands it!  Too bad for the spiritistic and mystical Christian types who say they are downloading answers direct from God’s mind to theirs.  That heresy is the result of not engaging in the hard work of learning good religion and proper methods of exegesis; bypass these and you get stupid, fast.  Yes God still speaks by revelation, but just as he always has; by getting his fingers dirty.  Just he healed the blind man by spit and dirt and rubbing (repeat) so God uses the things of his universe to bring us knowing through things, like books and teachers (an oh so humble bloggers.)

Christians, in the arena of ideas about things, believing that God bypasses your intellect just doesn’t work and for a very, very good reason; “…because many false prophets have gone out into the world” says the end of the verse.  The assumption is, of course, that you can’t tell that they are false yet; we don’t test their blurbage when we know they’re false already, we just reject it out of hand.  Because we don’t know yet who all the liars are, all knowledge proposed as truth is suspect.  That’s quite different than saying “truth is not knowable” as skepticism says.

Christianity says we must question proposed truth because there are liars proposing lies intended to lead us astray and into destruction, and the world says question truth because nobody can give you a foundation for truth at all.  One of these is a narrow way and one is far too broad already.  Thankfully, Scripture teaches that God’s truth will bear testing in a “bring it on” challenge, so that his own will know it.  By such assurance, we can have peace about knowing answers, which is the fruit of the Christian way of questioning.  Be strong in your endeavour and confident, for God wants you to know the truth, but he sends them a disturbing spirit of skepticism.

The Bible further teaches that such testing comes from reading and knowing the Bible.  Part of that “hard work” I mentioned.  It is the standard by which we test, and a few simple testing rules accomplish this rather swiftly.  Truth to be known is established by truths already known and good testing methods.  It is the heart of all teaching, all pedagogy; children learn by attaching to what they already know.  This is also in accord with good philosophy, which teaches that is is impossible to know any one thing in abstraction (ie pulled from all context).  These truths, though they do not appear necessarily as religious truths, all come from the same place: the nature and mind of the Christian God of the Bible.  All truth everywhere is his, and his alone.  ”I am the truth,” said the God of the Christians to the world he judges.

QUESTIONING WHY WE QUESTION

Why do we need “skepticism” then?  Why should a Christian think there’s any benefit in words like “question everything” spoken from a godless world lost in contradiction when we already have our own loving Lord looking out for our minds by giving us the faith to reason.  Why test things to see if they are true?  Because the Bible tells me so, silly.  Were you not paying attention in Sunday School?  Why does it tell me so?  Because people make mistakes but worse than that, there are liars out there itching to deceive.

Christians believe truth is one, and we believe Jesus is the truth.  God simply looks to his own self, his own nature, to declare what is right and good.  He does not go searching into the ideas behind things as we must.  Those are all his ideas anyway.  He starts with himself and then he makes the declaration, and the product of his efforts returns to him to glorify.  The rest is chaff.  When he does declare (and he is always declaring), it’s called truth and even the most godless men can know truths.  1+1 still equals 2 behind prison walls. Nothing about prisoner’s wrongdoing changes that truth.   Serial rapists can do nothing to change the gravitational constant and are speaking God’s truth when they say it is 9.8 metres per second squared, and ancient Greeks sometimes gave good advice about things.  Why, even Paul quotes their pagan poet when he preaches to them on Areopagus.  Truth is always just truth, but it sometimes comes with untruth hanging around to be swallowed like sickness on a mission.

PEACE FOR THE BIBLICAL MIND

So we accept the good idea from The Daily Writer when it says it is good to question things in the sense of testing them against the truth (which is revealed from God, however it comes to us) and we reject the idea from The Daily Writer when it says that the reason is because there is a kind of healthy skepticism we aught to adhere to.  We will not swallow that bitter pill.  Skepticism is all and always evil.  It is not mere questioning (“Did God say…” asked the serpent in the garden), but it is a rebellious spirit that likes to hang around our educational institutions.  It is simply not truth and it should be rejected by all humanity.  Teachers will be judged more severely, says the Bible, and this skeptical rebelliousness is a yoke about their neck I’m afraid.  Christians can know skepticism must be rejected because we tested skepticism’s assumptions and found those assumptions lacking, resulting in rebellious foolishness.  It contains a devastating self-contradiction like a letter bomb ticking away our peace.  “The fools says in his heart there is no God.”  As always the fool begins with what cannot be true, and tries to derive truth from that so he can go on living his lies.  He starts with his own reasoning, and tries to discover a reason to be faithful to God.  But faith comes before reason, thus the title of this blog “Faith to Reason.”  To be successful in his life the fool is inconsistent with his presupposition.  Go ahead, see how long your boss at work will abide by you constantly questioning everything that’s told to you.   Often people act differently from how they think and believe, just to survive.  Pragmatic dogs chewing their own vomit.

We do not begin with skepticism and go forth questioning everything.  It was not good advice for writers, but deadly for both mind and soul.  Rather, we take the word of God to heart and thereby test what is  proposed to be true because it is God who said to do so.  So long as he is the cornerstone of my thinking, biblical questioning is safe for me; I am not afraid to ask or to be answered.  All truth is from this one God and so we need not fear such testing.  For such work he gave us minds and shared his laws of thinking so we may accomplish it.

I don’t pray to receive revelation as the vain mysticists do, I pray for the strength to keep up the work ethic that sustains good testing, good and right questioning and I know that God adds his blessing to that.  He promises to add his blessing and not withhold the certainty of knowledge.  And what better thing to know that the God who is impossible to know?  Again from 1 John, Chapter 2:

“This is how we know that we know him: if we keep his commandments. The one who claims, “I know him,” while not keeping his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in this person. But the love of God is truly perfected in whoever keeps his word.”

CONCLUSION

In the end, The Daily Writer writes “Resist the temptation to pass it off as, say, “God’s creation”.  That may well be the cause, but it begs the question.  “How did God use the forces of nature to create the mountain?”.  (In fact, that’s not true ‘question-begging’ which is an assertion that relies on the very premise the assertion is trying to prove).  He’s quite right that it is ok to ask how the mountain was created, and quite wrong that asking so takes rejecting an assumption that it is indeed his creation.  But see how he is now willing to allow real “skepticism” to slip into what is really just good and healthy learning.  Somebody has taught him how to rebel against God while we learn about God’s creation and now, without trying, his words lets slip contagion into our soup.  For if we are to be skeptics, when we received the answer as to how the mountain arose, we must for skepticism’s sake “question” that answer.  And when that next answer arises, we must “question” that also, and so on into infinity, because no foundation for accepting answers can stand when blended with vile skepticism lest we be found out to be self-conflicted.  In the skeptical mind there is no “truth” to test anything against and that is why I say there is no health in skepticism.    That kind of questioning is pure sin and degrades humanity.  Christian thinking asks how the mountain forms because our worldview supports the idea that there is an answer knowable for certain, and that learning about God’s creation is good and our souls are ennobled.  The skeptic can never get to such an answer, not even by questioning anything at all.

The New Astonishment: Impossible Christianity

RATIONAL RELIGION, POSSIBLE RELIGION

Contemporary Christianity,  Christianity of the last 100+ years let’s say, has taught the world that Christianity is possible. Not only is Christianity possible, says this teaching, but it is possible for people to join the religion and become Christian.  Some make it three steps, some make it one.  Christendom has preached the realm of the feasible faith.  The outright rational, that which corresponds to the definitions and meets us in the carnal realm, is at the heart of rational faith and the so-called faithful have rushed in these latter years to be just that rational (see an article illustrating pure rational religion here).

Thus rational religion, appealing to holiness by appealing to humanity for the purpose of making some difference in the carnal realm of this world, becomes possible religion.

IRRATIONAL RELIGION, POSSIBLE RELIGION

Alternatively, as a reaction against the this-worldliness of carnal religion, some have suggested surrendering the notion of rationality completely, as in Tertullians Credo quia absurdum, and opted instead for a religious form of insanity, which is really just regular insanity.  I wonder how Tertullian would have felt about modern-day adherents to that idea:

Thus irrational religion, trying to prove holiness by the suggestion to simply bypass the use of any reason, becomes possible religion.

EVERYTHING ELSE, STILL POSSIBLE RELIGION

And then there are the “possibilists” who occupy the in-between.  Here, Christianity is presented as a ready-made route to heaven, prepared like turkey dinner with all it’s complexity and dressed up as a simple pill, requiring one tiny act of a singlar person.  Eat the pill and you swallow the meal and how easy is it to just eat a pill?  The faith is shown to be a ready and completed part of the regular, the normal, and the mundane things of life that have this in common; they simply have to be decided on by deciders.  Should I do my laundry today, are we out of peanuts, and should I become a Christian or not?  True faith is presented as some “ought” to be done like other oughts, and because it ought to be done, therefore, many mistakenly assume, God must therefore make it possible.

Nothing astonishing about that… unless you are a Christian of the impossible Christ who still must work miracles to save souls.

THE POSSIBILISTS

It almost hurts me to say it, being a good Baptist boy and all, that in the Southern Baptist Convention in the US they really make it simple for everyone, down to one verb, as posted in this statement on their website on How To Become A Christian:

“All that’s left for you to do is to accept the gift(pill) that Jesus(Morpheus) is holding out for you right now.”

Of course I added in the parentheses for effect, which make more sense if you’ve seen the movie, The Matrix.  But how frustrated that poor Jesus must feel these days, so many rejecting his pills.  Not like Morpheus.  Either the author of that web page or the writers of the movie should be charged with plagiarism, because one of them was ahead of the other to think up this approach to entering the path of knowing mind-blowing reality by simply making a rational choice to accept what’s in a palm.

At the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry (CARM), there a bit more to do in their description, with all kinds of verbs applied, like how it’s incumbent upon the hoy polloy to turn, believe, receive, and trust:

“Turn from your sins.  Believe and trust in Jesus.  Receive Jesus…..  Ask Jesus to forgive you of your sins”.

The Alliance Church in Canada has no way to be saved on their website, but some member churches do, where again the list of to do’s seems rather doable, if not a little more extensive, and the whole thing is presented as entirely within my ability to accomplish.  This time they even have the tact to be organizational by numbering the easy steps to salvation, without explaining what might happen to my soul if I should forget the numbering and mix up the order:

“First, we need to believe…… Only as we allow ……. can we know that we will to heaven.  Next, we must admit ….. and ….confess …  and turn. Then we must receive …”.

You get the picture.  There is nothing in any of the text offered by these institutions that suggests, “Oh and ps none of this is even possible for you.  It would take a miracle.”

Impossible Christianity suffered a last nail with Billy Graham, who peddled “accepting Jesus” without so much as repenting first.  Impossible Christianity is not popularly preached anymore, probably not since Spurgeon; it is becoming rare even among the elect.  So some of us blog, where I suppose we have little left to lose.

IMPOSSIBLE CHRISTIANITY: USELESS RELIGION?

We know that such a Christianity has not been preached publicly, because the heathen believe that Christianity is possible.  Poll the godless and they can recite fairly well what they think it takes to be Christian, and they’ll tell you it’s possible for them, they just choose not to.  They assume it’s possibility, because they see so many Christians who are just regular people who happen to have chosen the lineage of verbs which they happen to have not followed: turn, believe, trust, receive, ask, confess, admit, allow.  Oh, and of course, “accept”, I almost forgot.  Muslims do it.  Jews do it.  Hare Krisha’s do it.  Unbelievers understand our religion to be one of the many religions, another view of God to be selected among the doors of blind leaps.  It has never been suggested to them that to become a Christian is not possible, that they are not Christians precisely because it is NOT an option open to them like any other in their daily experience.  They have not been told that while blind faith for blind leaps is very common in the matrix of linear thinking, the rules of true conversion to Jesus Christ are not to be found among the rules that bind this universe to order.  It is a break of natural law, a miracle, to be a Christian.  The message they’ve heard came from the pulpit of the possible being pounded in the field of the feasible. “Just take the Jesus pill” says the contemporary Arminian.

pshaw!

I once told a young lady who was considering Christianity that only God selects those who will be saved, and nobody selects Jesus because the Bible teaches the world is dead in committing its sin and sinners can not turn to God on their own thoughts and intents about Jesus. Her friend pulled me aside and asked me not to say such things, because he was trying to convert her to Christianity.  I asked him if he believed they were true, and he did. He just didn’t think they were very acceptable things to non-Christians and she might get scared away. He was trying to “trick” her into accepting a more possible, less astonishing Christianity.  In this kind of religion, only later will she be told it was impossible all along.  Now won’t that just set up some contradictions? Yes, contradictions that pew-fillers to this day have not worked out.  This is the salvation fallacy of contemporary, mundane Christianity, and the legacy of Arminianism.

IMPOSSIBLE CHRISTIANITY, MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY, TRUE CHRISTIANITY STILL

I say believing in God is as impossible as ever, and is an astonishing and impossible thing; this is the almost-lost message of Christianity.  The message of an impossible Jesus is not part of contemporary Christendom because it is not a useful thing for anything in the world, especially for conversions to carnal religion.  For if Jesus cannot be reached, then salvation cannot be attained, and that’s a sad thing.  It seems it’s easier on the possibilists nerves to bring false religionists into the pews to worship with them, than to reject them as non-Christian for being the heathen that they are.  We were called out to live separately from the world not because it’s expedient for us or because it makes for great religion, but because we were already separate, having become so when struck with regenerated life and then saved.  This faith was always that way and has never been any different, thank God.

I hope the message is becoming clearer.

JESUS CHRIST, THE IMPOSSIBLE SAVIOUR

The great lesson of what constitutes true faith goes back to biblical times of Christ and the lectures about camels and needle-eyes, blowing wind, and the irresistible urge to repent to Go.  The only reaction people ever had to Christ’s presentation of conversion was how utterly impossible it was; they were stunned at Christ’s notions of salvation.  High-brow religionists raised their brows higher, astonished, or furrowed their thick brows in perplexity, neither of which is the response found anywhere today:

• Take Nicodemus’ response: “How can these things be?” (John 3)
• The Pharisees: “Who is this which speaketh blasphemies?”
• The people of the city of Capernaum: “And they were astonished at his doctrine”
• Sergius Paulus, Greek deputy in Paphos, though he saw amazing things from the Christians, thought of the things he heard:  ”Then the deputy believed… being astonished at the doctrine of the Lord….”(Acts 13).

Finally, in the example of Christs own disciples, upon hearing of the impossibility of salvation: “When his disciples heard it, they were exceedingly amazed, saying, Who then can be saved?” (Matthew 19) “And they were astonished out of measure, saying among themselves, Who then can be saved?” (Mark 10)

Astonishment out of measure!  Is that how anybody would describe the peddled religion of the possibilists which I outlined above?  Do we ever hear “You mean if I accept Jesus I can join your religion and go to heaven?  I am astonished out of measure at your doctrine!!” This is not the astonishing part of our message.  At every turn Jesus presents himself, and so we must present him,  not as the believable saviour just a single leap ahead or just a pill-method away, but rather as something astonishing, out of your carnal reach and rational decision-making, and even impossible. That’s how far salvation is from the human race.  Upon hearing our message of salvation people should be left wondering, who can possibly be saved?

But they’re not left wondering that.  And I had to wonder why.   What, in the contemporary message, is missing?

The disciples of Jesus, upon hearing that the wealthy have as much chance of going to heaven as camels have as walking through the eyes of needles, simply wanted to know how it could be possible that anybody could be saved from hell.  It is a profound commentary on our era that the once astonishing lesson from our Master that converting to God was impossible for man has been swept aside by possibilists who now teach that any human being simply leaping from the tip of rational reason to blind faith can become a disciple of God.  Now our heathen age assumes this, but the former age assumed it was not so.  Now our pews are filled with the refuse of a humanized Christianity that is anything but “extreme” so long as it provides for the success of whatever definition the putrified pragmatist has defined it to be for himself.  A hell-bound pagan limiting life to the falsities of carnal philosophy makes sense, but a so-called Christian syncretizing the Jesus of heaven-borne miracles with those same man-centered philosophies is to be rejected by the Church, separated from us, and to be despised everywhere lest they repent.

I made allusion to the popular movie the Matrix.  Let me salvage something of that simile now.  Like Neo in the Matrix, the ones chosen from among the hoy polloy can not understand how to be saved on their own.  Without the blue pill of revelation from God, that Jesus is the Messiah, this truth can be appreciated by just regular people trying hard to think about it.  The chosen ones had their eyes opened to the knowledge that breaking free of the bonds was not what they thought it was.  God’s chosen were receiving a very special revelation, that it was impossible for anybody at all to know Jesus is the Messiah and go to heaven just as Neo came to understand that without the blue pill you can’t ever get out of the matrix.

Where my analogy now fails is that for the elect of God, even swallowing the pill is not possible.  In our movie, the Neo’s are already dead and the movie is over.  He is unable to attend the blue-pill meeting his corpse has been invited to.  Not a gripping plot.  Wait.  In our movie, Morpheus finds Neo in his coffin and first brings him back to life by a miracle, and injects the blue-pill serum intravenously.  Neo never picked the pill.  But now that he is alive again and knows the truth, and now that he has every capacity to go forward with the plot, it is absurd to think he would simply return to his coffin, dead to what he knows is the realm of the Architect.  Everybody knows that would be ridiculous; there would have to be something wrong.  Scripture reveals that regeneration and new life by the Holy Spirit is never wrong, never a mistake, never “almost sufficient” in bringing his elect to the truth.  Rather God is powerful and sovereign, his Spirit moving over the masses like the wind, just as Jesus said, and nobody can predict who will be taken up by it.  The church preaches the message of a miracle, things that are impossible with man but possible with God.  When the Holy Spirit moves upon his dead child, coffined in his carnality, it’s as if God’s first words are “I told you so.”  He redeems the publicized message that formerly passed by dead ears that salvation is impossible, and that it was always going to take a miracle from God alone.

That is the definition of a miracle; work done by God alone outside the laws of nature.

By God’s power, not ours, you would consume the life he gave you and never go back.  There is no turn, believe, trust, receive, ask, confess, admit, allow, or accept.  Christians are the elect, the chosen, of the impossible religion of God.  That is still astonishing and perplexing.

PREACH THE IMPOSSIBLE CHRISTIANITY

“I don’t believe in God” should quickly be answered by the elect by affirming the very impossible nature of true faith in the true God.  Accepting  religion is not impossible, clearly.  Look around.  Having blind faith in a god or a philosophy or even in science is not impossible.  Only an appreciation of the drastic gulf between rejection of Jehovah and faith in Jehovah through Christ can inform the lost of how lost they truly are.  Yet the lost can not have that appreciation, because their fallen minds refuse to comprehend the truth; theologians call it the noetic effect of sin and we’re helpless to get beyond it.  It would take a miracle.

Only preaching miraculous Christianity will astonish the people now as ever and it is not a new Christianity, it’s the old, old religion.  Only through preaching the message of the total deadness of the dead will the world once again hear about the impossible “choosing” to become a Christian.  Such preaching also means that many Christians will understand for the first time  how truly miraculous their salvation was, how amazing the grace, in the miracle of God in bringing them to new life and a state of faith.  There never was a single “turn, believe, trust, receive, ask, confess, admit, allow” and of course, “accept”.  The spiritually dead can do none of those things.  Not then, not now, not ever.

TO THE FAITHLESS

What astounds me every time I preach Christ to the lost is that the people who  most often understand the message of the deadness of humanity and the miraculous Jesus I’ve described here are non-Christians.  They understand miraculous, impossible Christianity, just like the atheist skeptic David Hume did.  The ones who really get upset about this message are, you guessed it, the pew warmers.  Traitors to the true faith, I call them.

You don’t believe in the Christian God of the Bible? Of course you don’t.  It’s not possible to because you are dead to things of God and that’s just how a dead person would respond; nada.  It wouldn’t take Christian upbringing, or church attendance, a Christian spouse, or Bible reading, or helping the poor, or just being nice all day to be made alive again.  It would take a God-ordained miracle of that wind that moves you-know-not-where.   Until your selection, you can not turn, believe, trust, receive, ask, confess, admit, allow or accept.  Now as always it would take a miracle, a miracle of God.  But baby, when the power falls there is only one step to take and God quickly pronounces to new ears that he took it for you already a long, long time ago, and the deal is already done.  You’re impossibly reborn a child of the one true God by the atoning work of the miraculous Jesus.

We call it amazing grace.

That news, not that you can turn to Jesus and be saved but that you can’t, is the new astonishment that’s really just the old astonishment and just like always the possibilists are as up in arms as ever.  Everything else is just regular religion and possibility thinking, and empty.

Not Many Mighty, Not Many Noble

I’m listening to the Bible on CD these days on the daily commute and I laughed yesterday listening to the beginning of the book of Joshua.  We’ve been taken through the wilderness, and we’re camped on the Jordans shores.  Moses has been told his time is almost up, that he must anoint Joshua, and give a final address to the people.  It’s moving.  And then your heart breaks when he speaks about how terribly we..ahem, they…. will behave, and how God will deal with them with a firm justice for their blasphemous betrayal of their true love.  Sigh.

Moses dies.  Scripture has the most profound way of articulating the death of his children, I love it….”…and he was gathered to his people.”  Joshua prepares the people after the mourning.  He’s a natural orator and a charismatic leader.  Behind him the Jordan flows south and further on the land beckons full of milk and honey, a special place in the middle east, profoundly abundant and a perfect incubator to grow a civilization under God.  The whole scene is powerful.  The holy nation God loves so much has gathered to Joshua while the land promised to them by the Sovereign One holds it’s breath at their coming.  Anticipation fills the air.

Today’s Israeli Mossad is a well-reputed spy agency, among the best, if not the best, in the world.  What we read next in Joshua might be called  the first organized military action of that institution, the progenitor institution called Joshua’s army.  He sends in spies as the first conduct of his campaign, “especially survey Jericho” he tells them, and they depart on their holy mission.

The people of Israel are ready to move.  All preparations have been made, sacrifices offered, and the spies have entered enemy territory.  The land they are about to own is already abundant with fat cattle and plump sheep.  Grapes so big and ripe they’re popping off the vine.  And the spies of the Lord?  They went….

“…..and came into the house of a prostitute called Rahab and lodged there.”

I laughed.

It’s like, “Ooh, enemy territory, promised land, flocks of livestock, grapes are popping….hey look a whorehouse!” and “they lodged there.”

I wonder what the military commander of any spy agency might think if he knew the first act of his spy campaign wound up within a few hours simply hanging out in a whorehouse? These two spies invaded enemy territory and their first military act is to “lodge” with a prostitute.

Anyway, for all it’s tactical brilliance it still struck me as funny in the abruptness of it’s novelty and how Scripture presents it….two funnelling opposite concepts that smash together in a single sentence; two men of God surrendered to holiness on a military mission and a single hooker looking out for herself.  It just seemed like such an anticlimax, and those can be so funny.  Those men of God….send them on a mission for the Almighty and like a sixth sense they pick up on where to find nudge nudge, wink wink.

I know, I know.  There is nothing in the text that suggests they visited her for her services.  In fact her home was strategically placed right on top of the defensive establishment for the city, it’s huge wall.  Firstly, a whorehouse is not exactly on the military radar of anyone as a strategic objective, except perhaps to be strategically kept quiet about.  Yet this entrepreneurial lady set herself right next to a great market; the soldiers of Jericho who patrolled that wall.  Suddenly she has something in common with the spies; cunning smartness.  But all this means that this “hideout”, however strategically positioned, is not as low profile as you might expect.  She’s not exactly hidden away in some distant back alley.  And sure enough that very night the spies get found out.  The Jericho military establishment, it turns out, is not at all a stranger to Rahab or her inconspicuous place of business.  Oh dear.

This might at first seem to detract from her place as a good place for enemy spies to hide.   Whatever other bonuses it presents, risk of easy exposure is not one of them.  Unless, of course, that exposure can result in another twist in your favour, for Rahab is in tune with the city and, as all prostitutes are likely to be, she is a pragmatic survivor looking to take care of herself and hers.  Why wouldn’t she be in tune with the place?  She can see probably all of it from her doorstep as well as surrounding countryside.  And soldiers who visit prostitutes, I understand, can be notoriously loose-lipped.  Rather than selling her services to the Israelite men, Rahab buys an insurance policy from them.  She has heard the intelligence reports that they have a powerful force nobody has matched so far (Israel was an armed citizenry in one group that was totally mobile…this tactical concept would be largely lost on the world until shortly before WWII when “blitzkrieg” was invented and even then soldiery was a totally separate profession).  She bought safe passage, and so lied to her government and the same military she had serviced now served her and the spies hidden away in her attic by marching away in the wrong direction.  Just who was controlling the Jerichoan military?

It’s a great example how quickly a military situation becomes fluid.  The effect is to involve everyone and everything in it’s path-war is that devastating- and those become part of the action Nobody could operate in such battle conditions as Israel could.  They were second generation nomad-warriors who had no wandering DNA in their system; they wanted to settle.  They were civilization builders with the Almighty God on their side.  And the most unlikely reaches of civilization, a humble whorehouse in enemy territory, was prime battlefield terrain in the new wars about to be unleashed on the wickedness of this world, a war that continued to Jesus’ day and even to today.

Isn’t that just like Jesus?   God invades the world with his humbly presented power, and the first act in levelling the strongholds is to burrow into the humble lives of select, dysfunctional sinners who always seemed perched so precariously between this world and that.

God still chooses certain of the low-hanging fruit and gathers them to his people, for it’s in the New Testament that he writes to his flock, his chosen people:

“For you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should glory in His presence. “

Meaning Under A Sovereign God

We’ve all seen pictures of earth from space and wondered about how small we are as individuals.

We contemplate how little we matter in the grand scheme of such a large picture.

But we know God has a big brain and can handle all that,

still finding a way for us to matter

in all that’s the

matter.

In recent years, scientists pointed the Hubble telescope, a massive scope set in orbit around the earth, at a tiny little speck of black space.  They left the aperture open for 11 days, kind of like the way they took pictures in the olden days, everybody frozen still as light trickled onto the photo paper.  What Hubble revealed is sometimes called the most important photograph the human race has ever taken, called the “Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF)” photo.  There are thousands upon thousands of galaxies revealed, each holding millions of stars like our own sun, many with circumnavigating planets, like our own earth.  And that was a but a tiny little spot of the sky, not the whole breadth.   It begins to stretch any conceptual understanding of “big brain”.

At this point, many who hold a view of God founded upon materialistic principles struggle to hold on to their personal meaningfulness.  A person is so mind-blowingly tiny.  To any thing or any body who could grasp such a universe, how could I possibly be meaningful?

I think that the degree that we struggle with this is the degree to which we have a fault in our view of God.  It’s so easy for human beings  to think, to assume thoughts, in material terms about anything including God and meaning.  After all, how materialistic was the experience of your life today?  Unless you slept through it all, it’s pretty tough to avoid the materiality.  Such is the world.

For the brothers and sisters in Christ who’ve ever felt a loss of significance as they contemplate the universe, I write this post.

Imagine sitting in the nosebleed seats while a person stands in the middle of a large stadium between two very large tables:

On one table sits a real-life, full size dump truck.  On the other table, is a yellow Tonka Truck toy.  He asks you if you have any sensation of the difference in size between these two things.

Do you?

Sure you do.  You can see how large the dump truck is next to the very small yellow toy you can hardly see.  You can tell what they look like next to one another, and get a perspective on how they vary…one feels very large next to the other that is less significant in size.   You could do the same with a beach ball and a golf ball. You can make some meaningful sense of the difference in sizes, you comprehend it, fathom it, appreciate it and can speak about what you are seeing.  You could say things like “from what I saw you could put about 100 golf balls in that beach ball”, or you could answer the question, “Which one would be harder to fit in your pocket?”  You can answer such questions intelligently simply based on what you saw, your sensation, of the size differences.

Next scenario.

The person, still way down there in the middle of the field, pulls out of his pocket a microscopic piece of dust a nanometer in diameter and sets it on one table. He reaches into another pocket and pulls out a microscopic piece of lint a micrometer in diameter.  Then he sets down a measuring cup that can measure up to one picolitre.  From way up in the nosebleeds you take his word for it.

Now he asks you again, do you have any sensation of the difference in size between those two things?

Mindful that you can’t see these things from the nosebleeds at all, and smart enough to realize that even if you were standing right next to the microscopic particles there would still be no way to see them unaided, you give him the obvious answer. Of course the difference in their size is meaningless to your senses.

He yells at you through a bullhorn “Based on what you see, which item is more likely to fill the the cup?”  Because of how you are experiencing those two things, you’re unable to speak meaningfully about such a difference since your sensations are removed due to the size of the things, due to your distance from them, and due to the dulness of your senses.  Though the lint spec is a thousand times bigger than the dust spec you still have no meaningful experience of that size difference.

So it is, I say, for God as he sees you vs. the breadth of the entire universe; the difference is not worth talking about.

You see, it is the result of our size sitting in the nosebleeds, the space between us and the trucks, the scale of difference between them, and our so-so ability to see that we have a sensation about the difference between the real truck and the toy.  But the Christian God of the Bible is of infinitely large size.  To a person of such magnitude, the size of the universe, now estimated at some 45 billion light years in radius, is still so infinitesimally small that it has no real meaning to God to speak of the universe as being “bigger” than you; he is so large it all seems microscopic to him in terms of material size.  The difference doesn’t matter to him as it does to us, he simply can’t be impressed by it because of his perspective of things much like your perspective of lint vs. dust, micro vs nano.  God never describes himself as filling the vast gulf BETWEEEN the first and the last or all points BETWEEN the beginning and the end of all things, rather he speaks like an infinite God of Revelation in Chapter 22 verse 13 when he says “I am the Alpha AND the Omega, the first AND the last, the beginning AND the end.”  That’s how BIG God’s perspective is.  He isn’t between anything.

Yet the Bible says he is very, very near.  Unlike us up in the nose bleeds he has his eyeball right on top of us, and right on top of the universe so that his perspective is also infinitely small. As a human being, a million light years really doesn’t “feel” any smaller than 45 billion light years…you can’t sense the difference.  An octillion dollars is a lot more than a quintillion, but you have no sensation or meaningful experience of that difference; it’s as if we’re standing far too close and can’t see the edge of those things.  Likewise, God is so close up to us we “seem” as huge as the entire universe to him, as if he had no capacity to sense the difference, he is so, so near.  This nearness is a profound basis for the Great Commission, and for all the beckoning calls that he makes: “Seek the LORD while he may be found; call upon him while he is near” (Isaiah 55:6), and his promise in Psalm 34:18 ”The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.”

Finally, there is the human problem of visual acuity.  We simply couldn’t see the lint and dust because our eyesight is too poor.  Our eyes simply won’t let us spot a fish in the ocean from hundreds of feet in the air, but we know it can be done….eagles do it without trying. God, says the Bible, sees all things perfectly because his eyesight is infinitely great.   Remember that Google image of earth from space?  Just imagine…….“The LORD looks down from heaven; he sees all the children of man” Psalm 33:13.

Only when we think of the Christian God in carnal and material terms will we struggle with our ultimate meaningfulness.  In fact, in material terms small and huge is EXACTLY how we should think of ourselves and in material terms we should always be mindful of our important, tiny footprint.  It is proper and right to do so and God intends for us to feel the sensations we feel of large and small and far and near as we contemplate his creation and the scope of it, for it ushers us to humility.  But it is a sin to despair from the perception of such things, for that is consideration of God as bound to the limits of materiality since the Christian God of the Bible has already revealed who he is and how he sees us.  When we diminish our physical place in his plan and sense a void of meaningfulness and purposefulness, we cast aside his revelation that this God, and only this God, is the standard of meaning by which all meaningfulness is judged and not the realm of the universe.

I understand that the heathen struggle with meaning in a universe like this. Einstein observed “If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight” and he was startled by that revelation.  We lose ourselves when we can not sense our selves in relation to the space around us.   But Einstein was a pantheist, believing that all of materiality and all the universe made up his “god” and did not believe “… in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”, just as he learned it from one of his favourite philosophers, the pantheist Spinoza.  Such impoverished conceptions of deity gives way to impoverished thinking of self, and everything else.

But I am perplexed when Christians worry about such things and it disturbs me when a child of God fears for meaning.  Perhaps this blog post lends a little “perspective”.

“Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God.  Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows.”

-Jesus of Nazareth.