p

p

p

p

p

p

p

p

p

p

p

p

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“Where do I go from here?

Alas, I am stuck in the land of fear.

Wondering as I wait, one minute closer draws near

p

How do I study for this next test

And allow myself to rise above the rest

Where do I lay my pencil to read the best 

p

Oh, how I am disenlightened right now

Oh, the warm embrace of my bed and how

No, I must not give in or soon I might lose my vow

p

Though, sleeping in does sound great

If I soon awake so late, then maybe I will be irate

What then if I walk in, mate

p

Should I sit with the best?

Write with the worst?

or else, perhaps I should let the test triumph over me

p

No, I do not think this way

as only I can obey

My will and that of my great father

that of which I do to him pray

p

To believe in something better when I’m lost

and still, to not falter when I’m tossed

To be still living does not exhaust

as soon I will triumph over and be the boss

p

So, midterms midterms come my way

and I will show you the power of who I am today

But only shall I be backed as long as my great father keeps me on track!”

[C.A.S.H 10/10/11]

God gives us age to mark experience on Earth.  As we grow up, the experiences and the lives that we have touched will be numerous, but age forces us to look at the quality of those interactions.  As the sands of time pass, the physical opportunities to carry out God’s Will decrease and so the effort and depth of interactions must increase to counterbalance this change.  Wisdom teaches us that anything worth doing is worth doing well.  Even though society paints the idea of growing older as limiting (at least from the mid 30′s and on), there is no need to buy the idea that society sells.  Have faith in God’s plan for you to carry his message.

Age also opens us to new ailments or growth dependent on how far we are along the road.  For myself, I am still growing, but as more people enter the age of geriatrics, the possibility of newfound energy or muscular growth slows.  When we are young, dreams can grow and seem ever expansive, and we can help others make it to where they need to be, but we lack a great perspective of the world.  However, in the elderly world, dreams may still be just as big and a world perspective seems to be a bit more established, but the elderly lack the mobility to act upon some of their fantasies.  Age helps bring these two parallel paths of youth and senescence together.  Age reminds us of how connected humans are in this world we have inherited from our Lord, for our destinies are bound and dependent on each other and only when we co-operate can we combine the world perspective of our elders and the vigour of the young to move forward as a society.

Lastly, age lets us count our blessings.  As we grow into the world of wisdom and experience, every day allows a new opportunity to praise God.  As we gain experience, new ways of helping others open up.  The world is subject to our creative potential and is only limited by what we perceive and feel for others.  As we age, we grow closer to our fellow man and affect the lives of others in a manner that cannot be reversed.  Every time we see the sunshine of a new day, we are walking into the opportunity to prosper the lives of others and ourselves and as we do, God’s mission is fulfilled.  In this way, age sets our soul free from jealousy and selfishness as we embrace the love of Christ and therefore age can’t be all that bad.  When we allow ourselves to age with dignity and use the facilities that God has provided us with, we move one day closer to eternal life as well as furthering God’s love!  Go on and age with grace now, forever, and always!

In working my way through Blaise Pascal’s illuminating Pensees (“Thoughts”), I was struck by his evaluation of the moral unseriousness of certain skeptical atheists he was familiar with in his day.  In many ways, these exact words could be used to describe the attitude behind much of the currently popular atheism on tap for us.  (Warning: this is a long passage I have quoted, but I consider it worth reproducing in full):

“427. Let them [skeptics] at least learn what this religion is which they are attacking before attacking it.  If this religion boasted that it had a clear sight of God and plain and manifest evidence of his existence, it would be an effective objection to say that there is nothing to be seen in this world which proves him so obviously.  But since on the contrary it says that men are in darkness and remote from God, that he has hidden himself from their understanding, that this is the very name which he gives himself in Scripture: Deus absonditus [the hidden God]; and, in a word, if it strives equally to establish these two facts: that God has appointed visible signs in the Church so that he shall be recognized by those who genuinely seek him, and that he has none the less hidden them in such a way that he will only be perceived by those who seek him with all their heart, then what advantage can they derive when, unconcerned to seek the truth as they profess to be, they protest that nothing shows it to them?  For the obscurity in which they find themselves, and which they use as an objection against the Church, simply establishes one of the things the Church maintains without affecting the other, and far from proving her teaching false, confirms it.

In order really to attack the truth they would have to protest that they had made every effort to seek it everywhere, even in what the Church offers by way of instruction, but without any satisfaction.  If they talked like that they would indeed be attacking one of Christianity’s claims.  But I hope to show here that no reasonable person could talk like that.  I even venture to say that no one has ever done so.  We know well enough how people in this frame of mind behave.  They think that they have made great efforts to learn when they have spent a few hours reading some book of the Bible, and have questioned some ecclesiastic about the truths of the faith.  After that they boast that they have sought without success in books and among men.  But, in fact, I should say to them what I have often said: such negligence is intolerable.  It is not a question here of the trifling interest of some stranger prompting such behavior: it is a question of ourselves, and our all.

The immortality of the soul is something of such vital importance to us, affecting us so deeply, that one must have lost all feeling not to care about knowing the facts of the matter.  All our actions and thoughts must follow such different paths, according to whether there is hope of eternal blessings or not, that the only possible way of acting with sense and judgment is to decide our course in the light of this point, which ought to be our ultimate objective.

Thus, our chief interest and chief duty is to seek enlightenment on this subject, on which all our conduct depends.  And that is why, amongst those who are not convinced, I make an absolute distinction between those who strive with all their might to learn and those who live without troubling themselves or thinking about it.

I can feel nothing but compassion for those who sincerely lament their doubt, who regard it as the ultimate misfortune, and who, sparing no effort to escape from it, make their search their principal and most serious business.  But as for those who spend their lives without a thought for this final end of life and who, solely because they do not find within themselves the light of conviction, neglect to look elsewhere, and to examine thoroughly whether this opinion is one of those which people accept out of credulous simplicity or one of those which, though obscure in themselves, none the less have a most solid and unshakeable foundation: as for them, I view them very differently.

This negligence in a matter where they themselves, their eternity, their all are at stake, fills me more with irritation than pity; it astounds and appalls me; it seems quite monstrous to me.  I do not say this prompted by the pious zeal of spiritual devotion.  I mean on the contrary that we ought to have this feeling from principles of human interest and self-esteem.  For that we need only see what the least enlightened see.

One needs no great sublimity of soul to realize that in this life there is no true and solid satisfaction, that all our pleasures are mere vanity, that our afflictions are infinite, and finally that death which threatens us at every moment must in a few years infallibly face us with the inescapable and appalling alternative of being annihilated or wretched throughout eternity. 

Nothing could be more real, or more dreadful than that.  Let us put on as bold a face as we like: that is the end awaiting the world’s most illustrious life.  Let us ponder these things, and then say whether it is not beyond doubt that the only good thing in this life is the hope of another life, that we become happy only as we come nearer to it, and that, just as no more unhappiness awaits those who have been quite certain of eternity, so there is no happiness for those who have no inkling of it.

It is therefore quite certainly a great evil to have such doubts, but it is at least an indispensable obligation to seek when one does thus doubt; so the doubter who does not seek is at the same time very unhappy and very wrong.  If in addition he feels a calm satisfaction, which he openly professes, and even regards as a reason for joy and vanity, I can find no terms to describe so extravagant a creature.

What can give rise to such feelings?  What reason for joy can be found in the expectation of nothing but helpless wretchedness?  What reason for vanity in being plunged into impenetrable darkness?  And how can such an argument as this occur to a reasonable man?

‘I do not know who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I am myself.  I am terribly ignorant about everything.  I do not know what my body is, or my senses, or my soul, or even that part of me which thinks what I am saying, which reflects about everything and about itself, and does not know itself any better than it knows anything else. 

‘I see the terrifying spaces of the universe hemming me in, and I find myself attached to one corner of this vast expanse without knowing why I have been put in this place rather than that, or why the brief span of life allotted to me should be assigned to one moment rather than another of all the eternity which went before me and all that which will come after me.  I see only infinity on every side, hemming me in like an atom or like the shadow of a fleeting instant.  All I know is that I must soon die, but what I know least about is this very death which I cannot evade. 

‘Just as I do not know whence I came, so I do not know whither I am going.  All I know is that when I leave this world I shall fall for ever into nothingness or into the hands of a wrathful God, but I do not know which of these two states is to be my eternal lot.  Such is my state, full of weakness and uncertainty.  And my conclusion from all this is that I must pass my days without a thought of seeking what is to happen to me.  Perhaps I might find some enlightenment in my doubts, but I do not want to take the trouble, nor take a step to look for it: and afterwards, as I sneer at those who are striving to this end—(whatever certainty they have should arise despair rather than vanity)—I will go without fear or foresight to face so momentous an event, and allow myself to be carried off limply to my death, uncertain of my future state for all eternity.’

Who would wish to have as his friend a man who argued like that?  Who would choose him from among others as a confidant in his affairs?  Who would resort to him in adversity?  To what use in life could he possibly be turned? 

It is truly glorious for religion to have such unreasonable men as enemies: their opposition represents so small a danger that it serves on the contrary to establish the truths of religion.  For the Christian faith consists almost wholly in establishing these two things: the corruption of nature and the redemption of Christ.  Now, I maintain that, if they do not serve to prove the truth of the redemption by the sanctity of their conduct, they do at least admirably serve to prove the corruption of nature by such unnatural sentiments. 

Nothing is so important to man as his state: nothing more fearful than eternity.  Thus the fact that there exist men who are indifferent to the loss of their being and the peril of an eternity of wretchedness is against nature.  With everything else they are quite different; they fear the most trifling things, foresee and feel them; and the same man who spends so many days and nights in fury and despair at losing some office or at some imaginary affront to his honor is the very one who knows that he is going to lose everything through death but feels neither anxiety nor emotion.  It is a monstrous thing to see one and the same heart at once so insensitive to minor things and so strangely insensitive to the greatest…

Now what advantage is it to us to hear someone say he has shaken off the yoke, that he does not believe that there is a God watching over his actions, that he considers himself sole master of his behavior, and that he proposes to account for it to no one but himself?  Does he think that by so doing he has henceforth won our full confidence, and made us expect from him consolation, counsel and assistance in all life’s needs?  Do they think that they have given us great pleasure by telling us that they hold our soul to be no more than wind or smoke, and saying it moreover in tones of pride and satisfaction?  Is this then something to be said gaily?  Is it not on the contrary something to be said sadly, as being the saddest thing in the world?…

There is no surer sign of extreme weakness of mind than the failure to recognize the unhappy state of a man without God; there is no surer sign of an evil heart than failure to desire that the eternal promises be true; nothing is more cowardly than to brazen it out with God.  Let them leave such impiety to those ill-bred enough to be really capable of it; let them at least be decent people if they cannot be Christians; let them, in short, acknowledge that there are only two classes of persons who can be called reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart because they know him and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him.

As for those who live without either knowing or seeking him, they consider it so little worthwhile to take trouble over themselves that they are not worth other people’s trouble, and it takes all the charity of that religion they despise not to despise them to the point of abandoning them to their folly.  But as this religion obliges us always to regard them, as long as they live, as being capable of receiving grace which may enlighten them, and to believe that in a short time they may be filled with more faith than we are, while we on the contrary may be stricken by the same blindness which is theirs now, we must do for them what we would wish to be done for us in their place, and appeal to them to have pity on themselves, and to take at least a few steps in an attempt to find some light.”

“[The people around me in my youth] led me to the conclusion that I had to learn my catechism and go to church but that it was not necessary to take it all too seriously…My break with faith occurred in me as it did and still does among people of our social and cultural type [i.e. the intellectual elite].  As I see it, in most cases it happens like this: people live as everyone lives, but they all live according to principles that not only have nothing to do with the teachings of faith but for the most part are contrary to them.  The teachings of faith have no place in life and never come into play in the relations among people; they simply play no role in living life itself.  The teachings of faith are left to some other realm, separated from life and independent of it.  If one should encounter them, then it is only as some superficial phenomenon that has no connection with life…[A person] can live dozens of years without once being reminded that he lives among Christians, while he himself is regarded as a follower of the Orthodox Christian faith.  Thus today, as in days past, the teachings of faith, accepted on trust and sustained by external pressure, gradually fade under the influence of the knowledge and experience of life, which stand in opposition to those teachings.  Quite often a man goes on for years imagining that the religious teaching that had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time there is not a trace of it left in him. 

A certain intelligent and honest man named S. once told me the story of how he ceased to be a believer.  At the age of twenty-six, while taking shelter for the night during a hunting trip, he knelt to pray in the evening, as had been his custom since childhood.  His older brother, who had accompanied him on the trip, was lying down on some straw and watching him.  When S. had finished and was getting ready to lie down, his brother said to him, ‘So you still do that.’  And they said nothing more to each other.  From that day S. gave up praying and going to church.  And for thirty years he has not prayed, he has not taken holy communion, and he has not gone to church.  Not because he shared his brother’s convictions and went along with them; nor was it because he had decided on something or other in his own soul.  It was simply that the remark his brother had made was like the nudge of a finger against a wall that was about to fall over from its own weight.  His brother’s remark showed him that the place where he thought faith to be had long since been empty; subsequently the words he spoke, the signs of the cross he made, and the bowing of his head in prayer were in essence completely meaningless actions.  Once having admitted the meaninglessness of these gestures, he could no longer continue them.

Thus it has happened and continues to happen, I believe, with the great majority of the people.”

This passage haunts me.  I find it terribly accurate, possessing a vivid ring of truth possible only to those who have firsthand knowledege of such internal events.  I have myself felt nauseatingly near to this situation in seasons when certain vague moods were present, brought on by the seeming unreality of faith in antithetical dissonance with my experience of the world.  I have also witnessed many fellow believers slowly, unremarkably walk away from Jesus as a result of such perpetual disenchantment, barely even aware of what was happening to them at the time. 

Tolstoy reminds me of several important insights here.  First, nominal Christianity, for all of its seemingly unthreatening ordinariness, is the most spiritually destructive dynamic in the world.  Nominal Christianity receives its birth in the pits of hell, and tends to produce offspring in accordance with its own ghastly origins.  It breeds despair in those who are aware of the complexities, difficulties and moral darkness of the world.  It encourages the abstracting of faith from “real life” and thus prepares the way for apostasy when suffering or internal angst arise.  Those who confess with their lips that Jesus is Lord over all, but who deny him by their actions, are the greatest hindrance to the kingdom of God in the universe.  Nietzche is not nearly the obstacle to the gospel that Joel Osteen is to most people, nor Richard Dawkins in comparison to the health-and-wealth “gospel” of the modern suburban church.  You know the breed of which I speak–the kind of church which enthusiastically proclaims a sort of emotional well-being which can avoid the nasty dark nights of the soul, promising instead the pyschological dimensions of the American dream, if not the financial ones.  The already/not yet tension of the apostolic testimony becomes simply “already,” “now.” 

One of the most important lessons I have ever learned is that the gospel simply doesn’t “work” if you don’t take it seriously, on its own terms, submitting to its demands within its own narrative framework and construal of life’s meaning.  Christianity will not do anything to alter our existence in the least,  if we limit it to the realm of mental ideas alone, or subordinate its exclusive claims for loyalty to more important aspects of life such as politics, marriage, economics, the desire to be safe and comfortable, or personal ambition.  While horrifying to experience, the seasons in which faith seems full of unreality and fantasy ought not to surprise us.  God is not mocked; we reap what we sow.

Second, Tolstoy reminds me that doubt and apostasy are rarely only, or primarily, matters of intellectual coherence and argumentation.  When the paradigm shift (to use Thomas Kuhn’s marvelously helpful terminology) takes place in which the permanent transition from faith to unbelief becomes real, it is not usually a single idea or new insight that causes such jarring movement in a person’s life.  Rather, it is the quite obvious result of the comprehensiv, long-term internal pressure of a thousand experiences of unreality, irrelevance, and disquietude finally boiling over to the point where it is no longer tolerable to the human spirit to say that the gospel is the power of God for salvation to all who believe.  Faith simply does not explain or help to manage my perceptions and experiences of the world any longer.  It is not tenable.  “So you still do that” is now a compelling existential argument over against the unconsciously discredited vision of Paul in his letter to the Romans.

Lastly, Tolstoy demonstrates that what we need most in the Christian life is an ongoing, tangible, Spirit-produced sense of the reality of the gospel’s beauty and power as we follow Jesus together in community with others.  Just as doubt can be encouraged and provoked by seeing that faith is just as unreal and nominal for others as it is for me, so the life-giving power of faith can be nurtured not only by my own experience and knowledge and seeking after God, but also by experiencing God through others who are legitimately sharing in and actively connected to His divine life.  Tolstoy motivates me to pray Paul’s request on behalf of the Ephesians with new zeal and intensity:

“For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 1:15-20)

There is, after all, nothing inherently reasonable in the conviction that all of reality is simply an accidental confluence of physical causes, without any transcendent source or end.  Materialism is not a fact of experience or a deduction of logic; it is a metaphysical prejudice, nothing more, and one that is arguably more irrational than almost any other.  In general, the unalterably convinced materialist is a kind of childishly complacent fundamentalist, so fervently, unreflectively, and rapturously committed to the materialist vision of reality that if he or she should encounter any problem–logical or experiential–that might call its premises into question, or even merely encounter a limit beyond which those premises lose their explanatory power, he or she is simply unable to recognize it.  Richard Dawkins is a perfect example; he does not hesitate, for instance, to claim that ‘natural selection is the ultimate explanation for our existence.’  But this is a silly assertion and merely reveals that Dawkins does not understand the words he is using.  The question of existence does not concern how it is that the present arrangement of the world came about, from causes already internal to the world, but how it is that anything (including any causes) can exist at all.  This question Darwin and Wallace never addressed, nor were ever so hopelessly confused as to think they had.  It is a question that no theoretical or experimental science could ever answer, for it is qualitatively different from the kind of questions that the physical sciences are competent to address.  Even if theoretical physics should one day discover the most basic laws upon which the fabric of space and time is woven, or evolutionary biology the most elementary phylogenic forms of terrestrial life, or palaeontology an utterly seamless genealogy of every species, still we shall not have thereby drawn one inch nearer to a solution of the mystery of existence.  No matter how fundamental or simple the level reached by the scientist–protoplasm, amino acids, molecules, subatomic particles, quantum events, unified physical laws, a primordial singularity, mere logical possibilities–existence is something else altogether.  Even the simplest of things, and even the most basic of principles, must first of all be, and nothing within the universe of contingent things (nor even the universe itself, even if it were somehow ‘eternal’) can be intelligibly conceived of as the source or explanation of its own being…

Reason leads different minds to disparate and even contradictory conclusions.  One can, I imagine, consider the nature of reality with genuine probity and conclude that the material order is all that is.  One can also, however, and with perhaps better logic, conclude that materialism is a grossly incoherent superstition; that the strict materialist is something of a benighted and pitiable savage, blinded by an irrational commitment to a logically impossible position; and that every ‘primitive’ who looks at the world about him and wonders what god made it is a profounder thinker than the convinced atheist who would dismiss such a question as infantile.  One might even conclude, in fact, that one of the real differences between what convention calls the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason is actually the difference between a cogent intellectual and moral culture, capable of considering the mystery of being with some degree of rigor, and a confined and vapid dogmatism without genuine logical foundation.  Reason is a fickle thing.”

–David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, pp. 101-04

What is the empirical evidence for evil?

What scientific proof would demonstrate humanism?

What test may be run to prove injustice?

Or even, how can you scientifically prove the authority or validity of science? (qua Hume’s criticism of induction)

Fry concluded with a quaint sentiment: “It is not the job of an atheist to be smug, to hold the truth, to bull, tyrannize, dominate arguments, to say that we have the truth of the universe.” And yet he lambasted religion throughout his speech, discussing “some God whom they cannot prove exists, and whom they cannot with any reason, be convinced to believe in.” Fry must then think that Galileo, Newton, Bacon, Francis Collins, C.S. Lewis, the list goes on and on, must all be quite unreasonable men. Yet his butchering of intellectual history didn’t stop there.

Fry announced that “it is one of the most piteous facts in the world that the country founded in the greatest spirit of the Enlightenment and the age of Reason, of education, of principled free thought, should be perhaps, in all the Western world, the country now most threatened by spirits who are working actively and urgently and self-consciously against the sights of this country, who are active to extinguish the light that lit America, that lit Harvard, and that lit the world for 150 years.”

This is historical reaching on Fry’s part at best. The founders of the American Revolution – Washington, Adams, Franklin, Jefferson – were all deists, if not Christian. Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes were all Christian men. The ideas which sparked the American Revolution were all grounded in ideas about God. The founders believed not simply in human rights, but that men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Harvard was not founded by humanists for the purpose of promoting Enlightenment principles, but by Puritans to devote mens’ minds to the service of God. Our motto is Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae. The first rule of Harvard’s first student handbook was about admission, and the second two rules were as follows:

“2. Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning. And seeing the Lord only giveth wisedome, Let every one seriously set himself by prayer in secret to seeke it of him (Prov. 2:3).

3. Every one shall so exercise himselfe in reading the Scriptures twice a day, that he shall be ready to give such an account of his proficiency therein, both in Theoreticall observations of Language and Logick, and in practical and spiritual truths, as his Tutor shall require, according to his ability; seeing the entrance of the word giveth light, it giveth understanding to the simple (Psalm 119:130).”

Stephen Fry is flat out wrong. I cannot demonstrate this with the empirical evidence that he demands, but I can rely on the testimony of historical sources. I must reject the principle “I will not be told” that he so lauded, for it is better to trust the annals of history than to simply invent facts to suit my needs.

The saddest part is that his ideals of Truth, of Injustice, of religious Freedom and Tolerance – they all come from thinkers who grounded these ideals in God. It’s like building up a skyscraper and then removing the foundation. Fry’s secular humanism is little more than the incoherent rubble that he tries to pass off as the tallest building in history.

I would have asked him about these contradictions and accuracies, were I given the opportunity. Alas, I was the fifth person in line, and the questioners in front of me decided instead that knowing Fry’s favorite type of cheese was more important than actually using their free thought to disagree with him. I would be interested in hearing how a secular humanist would respond to such criticisms, but in my experience, the secularist spends more time attacking perceived flaws in religion than actually questioning his own beliefs. And I say that humbly based upon my own experience as an atheist during the first 18 years of my life. If Fry is the best that secular humanism has to offer, it looks like I’ll be sticking with Christianity.

As with the student, we don’t have control of the entire format of the future.  We must put our faith in God and in God’s ability to attract the right people to us at the right times.  For long-term plans and guidance are nice, but even more righteous is our ability to confront any adversity that the Devil may bring into our world.  In this case, worry is the main mode of transportation for the devil.

How do we combat the worry that we face in an ever more secular society?  Well, I can offer a few bits of advice that I saw on a t-shirt a little while back.  The t-shirt was on a stranger walking by, and immediately caught my attention so much so, that I asked the person to stand still.  I wanted to write down the message on the back of the shirt.  The shirt had a USB port on the front with a USB cord running along the right backside of the shirt that was attached to the following words:

“Up Grade

your schedule

finances

relationships

faith

thoughts

hope

impact

outlook

peace

influence

diet

mind

health

attitude

adventure

joy

service

communication

perspective

purpose

love

value

time

feelings

beliefs

involvement

self

patience

life”

I thought that this was one of the clearest messages that I had ever seen.  The message was that by becoming more involved in our own lives and solidifying our own values, then we could in turn up-grade our own life.  I think the message that God wanted me to take from this shirt was that I should not worry when I am in his arms; by upgrading my faith, hope, and outlook to a more solid standard, then I shall not be tempted by the doubt that surrounds me in the secular world.

As such, I have been doing the above for a very long time.  I am often asked on a daily basis why I don’t worry so much.  My answer always is that God knows where I’m going, and I do not fear where his shepherd-like hands will take me to as long as I know he is with me.  I hope you also realize that God is with you always as long as you put your faith in yourself, and you accept that whatever may happen will be fine as long is God is alongside you.

If you ever find yourself falling into doubt, remind yourself of how lucky you are by reciting the following passage from Psalm 23:

“The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want;
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters;
He restores my soul.
He leads me in paths of righteousness
for His name’s sake.

Even though I walk through the valley
of the shadow of death,
I fear no evil;
for You are with me;
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life;
and I shall dwell in the house of the
Lord forever. “

I hope all of you continue to trust in the power of the lord and continue to be comforted by his guiding force.

However, God often has other plans for us.  He gives us inclement weather to remind us just how fragile our existence really is and how we should cherish every moment we have with those that we love.  Even though we may loathe bad weather, I believe these storms serve to give us time to reflect on how lucky we are in this millennium.  We are able to complete a trip across the country in a mere six hours where a couple hundred years ago, that same trip may have taken a few weeks or even a few months.

Modern technology connects the world in a way that has never been seen before, but this technology is no match for the power of God.  He does not provide us with weather to punish us, but help us remember that we are moving way too fast, and that maybe we need to look at our priorities more.  Just like the travelers who crossed the country hundreds of years ago, we must have faith in God that we will get to our destination.

Life is only worth so much because it is short and unpredictable.  Next time, a storm comes through town and pushes back your travel plans, remember to thank God for everything he has given you.  All He is asking for is a few moments of reflection on what you have been given.  When you are finally re-united with your family, then you will realize the wait was worth it and the time you spend with them will be all the more precious.  Have faith and know that God is not testing you, but is simply asking for your time to help you realize how blessed you really are.  Peace and Love and great wishes for this holiday season!

As I was perusing A Testament to Freedom (a compilation of Bonhoeffer’s writings), I came across a 1928 essay called “Jesus Christ and the Essence of Christianity.” One point that struck me in particular was his argument concerning the directionality of faith—that God seeks us out, and instead we are simply open to him as opposed to truly active seekers of His presence. Bonhoeffer elucidates it far better than I can, so I will reproduce a section here:

And yet the correct meaning of the cross of Christ is nothing else than radical development of the concept of God held by Jesus himself. It is, so to speak, the historically visible form which this concept of God has assumed. God comes to people who have nothing but room for God—and this hollow space, this emptiness in people is called Christian speech, faith. This means that in Jesus of Nazareth, the revealer, God inclines to the sinner; Jesus seeks the companionship of the sinner, goes after him or her in boundless love. He wants to be where a human person is no longer anything. The meaning of the life of Jesus is the demonstration of this divine will for sinners, for those who are unworthy. (Bonhoeffer 52-53)

I don’t know about you, but I had always conceived of faith as something active—a “knock and the door shall be opened” mentality, though I realize now that that particular verse (Luke 11:9) was used out of context by the vast majority of my pastors and actually refers to prayer, not faith. I conceived of faith as a self-made project, a one-way belief in God that required constant maintenance and development. But here, Bonhoeffer seems to indicate that the “seeker’s” mentality isn’t necessarily the correct (or Biblical) way of going about faith, as it ignores God’s “personal,” if you will, stake in us.

What Bonhoeffer brings to light is the possibility that God comes to us, that God, somehow, humbles himself before the sinner. It just seems like such an impossibility to me—the greatness of God seeking me out? How? Shouldn’t I be seeking Him? I know it’s the heart of Christian faith, but it’s difficult to fit my “seeker” mentality into a “receiver’s” construct. I am the recipient of God’s attention, not one of many vying for His “time.” Bonhoeffer manages to capture messages we’ve heard over and over again—that God wants a relationship with every one of us—and state it in a new (and clearer) light.

I know seeking is an inherent part of faith, but it appears that I’ve ignored the other direction as well: that God desires to fulfill something in me as much as I desire to find something in Him. This directionality of faith may seem like something obvious, but I know I’ve forgotten it in my dogged pursuit of perfect faith. Perhaps I need to do a little more reflecting, allow God Himself to come to me, and somehow meet Him in the middle.

The Claim

Some people believe that the Bible is inerrant. By this they mean that what the Bible says is invariably true, or that the Bible never goes wrong with respect to what it says, or that the Bible, properly interpreted, is always reliable, or any number of equivalent alternatives. This claim does not usually function as an epistemic primitive; instead, it is generally seen as a consequence of the fact that the Bible is inspired, or is the word of God, or is a divine revelation, or any number of equivalent alternatives.

My aim in this post is to clarify, examine, and ultimately reject the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.  But before I take a single step in that direction, I want to affirm the central intuition that lies behind it: the intuition that the Bible is an inspired and authoritative document, a document that makes true and centrally important claims about the nature of reality and the way we ought to live. This is a constitutive Christian claim; if a person does not affirm it, he or she is in virtue of that very fact not a Christian. So we should be concerned to affirm it. In fact, one of my aims in this series is to show that rejecting the doctrine of inerrancy gives us a much more credible and convincing basis for affirming the centrality of the Biblical witness to Christian faith.

I will begin by proposing a clear and (I hope!) minimally tendentious way of understanding the concept of inerrancy. Then I will present what I take to be the two best arguments for the thesis that the Bible is inerrant, along with the reasons why I think each is unsuccessful. These will be followed by a discussion of the evidence suggesting that the Bible is errant. Finally, two responses open to the friend of inerrancy will be discussed and found unsuccessful.

The Claim Revisited

Galileo presents the external witness to Catholic officials.

The claim is that the Bible is inerrant. But what is meant by ‘inerrant’? Lack of clarity in this area is the source of a great deal of confusion and fallacious argumentation. The believer in errancy has often directed his criticism towards a straw man version of inerrantism representative of the beliefs of few or no actual defenders of that position. Usually, he conflates inerrantism with a form of naive literalism and then argues that the former commits its proponent to some absurd conclusion: “You think the Bible is inerrant? Well, right here it says that the earth is a footstool (Isa 66:1)! You don’t believe that, do you?” Here the errantist has forgotten that his opponent may avail herself of the helpful notion of a proper interpretation. By helping herself to such a notion, she becomes immune to criticisms founded on the more superficial falsehoods and contradictions in the Biblical text.

Indeed, the notion of a proper interpretation allows us to get much clearer about the concept of inerrancy. The science of exegesis is extremely complex and still incomplete. At the same time, we must suppose that we have some handle on the meaning of any text we want to call inerrant. But providing a specification of the numerous rules according to which we decide exactly what our inerrant text is actually saying is not a feasible exercise. Must we complete the project of Biblical exegesis before even starting in on the question of Biblical inerrancy? Certainly we will have to find a way of specifying the set of propositions the inerrantist is concerned with labeling inerrant. This is where the notion of a proper interpretation comes into the picture. Instead of listing the rules for finding the relevant propositions, we can just say that they are the propositions implied by the text as properly interpreted. In fact, to make things even clearer, we can introduce an ideal observer, the Historically Omniscient Perfect Exegete (HOPE), and specify that the relevant set of propositions is just the set our HOPE would identify as being implied by the Biblical text. (Being a perfect exegete, our HOPE takes into consideration factors like genre, cultural context, semantic shifts, etc.) There is still room for disagreement about what our HOPE would include or exclude from the set, but now we have neatly distinguished between two kinds of concerns: concerns about exegesis – in our new way of talking, concerns about which propositions our HOPE would identify – and concerns about inerrancy – concerns about whether the propositions our HOPE would identify are true.

In conclusion, then, let us say that a given text T is inerrant just in case each proposition our HOPE would identify as implied by T is true.

(There will still be some who call themselves inerrantists or something similar but do not believe in the truth of some of the propositions our HOPE would say are implied by the Biblical text. They might, for example, say that they believe the Bible is inerrant on issues of faith and practice, but not generally. Some of these people will call this the doctrine of the infallibility of scripture, to be contrasted with the doctrine of the inerrancy of scripture. I think this is a corruption of language– ‘infallible’ and ‘inerrant’ are properly synonyms; one of them cannot correctly describe a text where the other does not. But there is no deep objection to be found in terminological disagreements. I will prescind from treating the ‘doctrine of infallibility’ at length, stopping only to say 1) that I think it is substantially closer to the truth than the ‘doctrine of inerrancy,’ and 2) that I think the two are susceptible to analogous criticisms. The rest of this post will therefore be directly relevant to ‘infallibility’ as well as bona fide inerrancy.)

The Philosophical Argument

I use the label ‘the philosophical argument’ to denote a set of arguments that seek to derive the inerrancy of the Bible from premises relating to the doctrine of inspiration and God’s character. In the following, I will not be proceeding with reference to any particular author or authors because I have not yet encountered an attempt to formalize the philosophical argument. Instead, I will begin by myself stating the argument I see implicit in much contemporary dialogue about the Bible. It proceeds as follows:

1. The Bible is the inspired word of a perfect God.

2. If God is perfect, then God would not have inspired an errant text.

3. Therefore, the Bible is an inerrant text.

Rejecting premise 1 is not a move open to the Christian, or at least it is a move the Christian should try to avoid if at all possible. If we are to reject the conclusion, then, it will be because premise 2 fails to withstand close scrutiny.

Now, it is not immediately clear why it should be that God’s perfection precludes his inspiring an errant text. Certainly the consequent in the conditional is not found merely by reflecting on the idea of perfection. Rather, it seems to me likely that premise 2 is actually a consequence of some suppressed premise or premises which are not usually brought to the front of debates about the Biblical text. In particular, it seems to me that the truth of premise 2 is supposed to follow from the notion that an errant Bible would make God either a deceiver or a poor communicator; thus in either case an imperfect being. Let us consider each alternative in turn.

Would an errant Bible make God a deceiver? Well, a person is a deceiver just in case he intentionally brings it about that we believe something that is 1) false and 2) harmful. (I include criterion 2 so as to exclude cases in which the falsehood is either irrelevant or necessary for conveying a more important beneficial truth.) Now suppose the Bible is errant. Does it follow that God is a deceiver? Not unless we can prove that it contains some harmful falsehoods that God wants us to believe. Now, I do in fact think the Bible contains some harmful falsehoods (some of which Peter van Inwagen has written about in the print journal), but I would by no means say that God wants us to believe them. Why would one believe that if the Bible contains harmful falsehoods, God wants us to believe them? Only if one first believes that the Bible is supposed to convey only truths. In other words, we must presuppose inerrancy in order to make sense of the claim that an errant Bible would make God a deceiver. But then we cannot use our conclusion as evidence for the Bible’s inerrancy; to do so would be begging the question.

Would an errant Bible make God a poor communicator? Well, a person is a poor communicator just in case he sets out to communicate something and then fails, to a greater or lesser extent, to do so. Now suppose the Bible is errant. Does it follow that God is a poor communicator? Not unless we can prove that God set out to communicate only truths in the Biblical text. But this is just the inerrancy thesis– once more, we must presuppose inerrancy to make an argument from errancy to God’s being a poor communicator. Again, our argument begs the question.

In general, I think we can say the following: any attempt to deduce Biblical inerrancy from God’s perfection will proceed by calling into question either the virtue or competence of a putative God who inspires an errant Bible. But in order for such an argument to be successful, we must include presuppositions about God’s intentions in inspiring the Bible, which will be based on a prior conviction that the Bible is inerrant. And so all such arguments fail; every one of them begs the question in one way or another.

The Appeal to Scripture

There is a second type of argument for the inerrancy of the Bible that is popular in contemporary circles. It has two varieties, a weak one and a stronger one. The weak variety may be stated and refuted rather quickly:

1) The Bible claims that it is inerrant.

3) Therefore, the Bible is inerrant.

The discerning reader will notice that I have numbered this argument to suggest that there is a suppressed premise. That is because the argument as it stands is quite obviously invalid. Consider the analogue – Skippy claims that he is inerrant; therefore, Skippy is inerrant – which is clearly not sound. In order to fix it up, we need to add:

2) The Bible is inerrant.

But then, of course, our conclusion is one of our premises, and we have failed to provide an argument at all.

Let us move quickly onward. The stronger form of the argument from scripture is similar in that it, too, begins with the Bible’s own claims about its inerrancy. But it proceeds differently, by premising that if the Bible is importantly true, it will be true in its central themes, and that the Bible’s own inerrancy is one of its central themes. The conclusion then, is that the Bible is either inerrant or not importantly true. Given that no Christian, even the errantist, will want to say that the Bible is not importantly true, we have a rather stronger case for inerrancy.

Notice that one of the premises in this argument does not admit of prima facie acceptance or rejection. The claim that the Bible’s inerrancy is one of its main themes is a question of exegesis. Our HOPE would know whether to accept or reject this premise, but we, being neither historically omniscient nor exegetically perfect, will have a much harder time of it. But say that we charitably agree that the Bible’s own inerrancy is one of its central themes. The stronger argument from scripture still fails because we have no reason to accept the premise that if the Bible is importantly true, it is true in each of its central themes. Indeed, why would someone think this premise true? Only if she is subject to one of the confusions about the implications of God’s perfection that we uncovered in our discussion of the philosophical argument. (I have already granted, of course, that as long as we are Christians we believe that the Bible is importantly true, and this surely implies that at least some good portion of its central themes are true. But there is no magicking an ‘all’ out of a ‘some’, and the argument from scripture needs an ‘all’.) Once again, we find ourselves with no reason to believe in the doctrine of inerrancy.

Evidence Against Inerrancy

So far, we’ve seen the failure of the two most promising classes of arguments for Biblical inerrancy. But why do we need arguments, anyway? Biblical inerrancy seems a natural and congenial position. Even if there’s no knockdown argument for it, is there any reason to let it go?

I say that there is. In fact, I say that there are two related categories of reasons: reasons having to do with the contradiction of the Scriptural witness with itself, and reasons having to do with the contradiction of the Scriptural witness with things we have independent reason to believe. Call these the internal and external witnesses.

Of course, the very existence of the internal and external witnesses has been hotly debated. Such debate is possible because, given any particular false proposition or pair of contradictory propositions, it will always be open to the inerrantist to deny that the one or the pair is implied by the Biblical text. The fundamental problem is this: we don’t know what our HOPE would think about the Biblical text! There isn’t any such thing as a HOPE, after all, and so we’re left with our own imperfect exegetical skills. Accommodation is unimpeachable as long as it keeps itself within the boundaries of good exegesis, but we aren’t fully equipped to tell where those boundaries lie or when they’ve been transgressed. Thus, for example, we find authors (and teachers of my church membership class) denying any contradiction between the accounts of the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew and Luke by positing a linguistic backstory according to which they make no attempt at recording the same information. Similarly, we have John Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis One, in which he attempts to use valid exegetical principles to establish that the Genesis does not, in fact, describe God’s creation of the universe de novo. This method of response to proposed contradictions runs into problems when it strains our exegetical instincts. No single such strain will be a reason to reject inerrancy, but if the internal or external witness forces us to knowingly and systematically set aside our better exegetical impulses, then I say that we have reason to believe that the Bible, properly interpreted, is errant.

I will now present a selection from the internal and external witnesses:

1. The accounts of the events leading up to and immediately following the birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke are contradictory.

2. The genealogies of Jesus presented in Matthew and Luke are contradictory.

3. The dates given for the last supper in John and in the synoptic gospels are contradictory.

4. The chronologies of the calling of the disciples in the four gospels are contradictory.

5. The chronologies of the major events in Jesus’ life presented in the four gospels are contradictory.

6. The accounts of the Israelites’ history in Kings and Chronicles are contradictory.

7. The story presented in the Pentateuch is, in numerous places, internally inconsistent.

8. The stories of Genesis 1 and 2 are incompatible with discoveries of modern biology, geology, and cosmology.

9. The New Testament’s spiritual explanations for psychological disease are incompatible with a modern medical understanding of the same conditions.

10. The genocidal commands of God depicted in the Biblical histories are incompatible with what we now know it means to be a morally perfect being.

The friend of inerrancy may be tempted to begin going down the list, offering rebuttals to each of my claims. But let us take a step back and reflect on the dialectic. We have already defeated the two most promising arguments for Biblical inerrancy. The only reason to believe in inerrancy, at this point, is that it is in some nebulous sense a congenial thing to believe. Strong attachments to the position are not warranted. Now we are presented with a list of prima facie reasons to believe that Biblical inerrancy is false. It is appropriate to descend into the trenches, so to speak, in defense of inerrantism? The best possible outcome would be a thorough defense of one’s nebulous sense that inerrantism is a congenial position. Moreover, it looks (at least from my perspective) like there isn’t much hope for the project of trying to show, through valid exegesis or empirical argument, that every item on the list, and indeed every other item that could possibly be produced as evidence against inerrancy, is a chimera. It is not good enough, after all, to show that there is some interpretation of the text according to which the contradictions do not arise. It must be further demonstrated that each such interpretation accords with the best exegetical standards. And insofar as these clearly include not interpreting the text with the prior aim of ironing out contradictions, it is difficult to see how competent exegesis could favor the inerrantist. To struggle against the internal and external witnesses here would be both purposeless and hopeless, thus irrational.

Accommodation

There remains one further approach the inerrantist might take in defense of his position. Perhaps he disagrees with the assumption that one should only be allowed to resolve contradictions in the text through standard exegesis. Perhaps he thinks we are meant to be clever with the Bible, to make it work, because God has graciously provided us with just enough information to recover the truth. This approach has the benefit of dealing tidily with the list of complaints against the doctrine of inerrancy that I presented in the last section, and indeed nearly any such list I could conceivably present. For one must only be sufficiently creative to see how, for example, it could have been the case that Jesus’ birth was attended by the shepherds and the wise men, and that he both fled to Egypt and received the blessing of Simeon, and so on, and so on…

But to take this approach is to build the walls out of the foundation stones. The reason we were attracted to inerrancy in the first place was that, in some vague way, we thought that God’s perfection implied that he would communicate to us clearly. But the extreme species of accommodation now under discussion takes as its point of departure the premise that the truth is cryptically concealed in the Biblical text. And to accept as a premise that the Bible is cryptic is to deny that God’s perfection entails his communicating clearly, and to deny the latter is to give up the central motivation for the doctrine of inerrancy. So this last avenue of escape for the inerrantist is, like all others, a dead end.

Inerrancy Rejected

There is no good reason to think that the doctrine of inerrancy is true. There are many good reasons to think that the doctrine of inerrancy is false. It is a rational requirement, then, that we reject it. A rational requirement is binding on all rational agents. So we reject the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy.

I would like to conclude with a personal note to the reader: If you found my argument convincing and are now terribly concerned about where that leaves us as faithful Christian believers, or whether we can even rationally continue as such– to you, as the angel says, “Do not be afraid!” It will turn out that, once we’ve arrived at a proper understanding of Biblical interpretation, everything will fall into place and the central tenets of Christian faith will emerge all the stronger for their new foundations. This promissory note will have to suffice for now. Next time, we will settle on a way of determining which parts of the Bible we ought to believe, and then in subsequent posts we will see how our new method justifies our acceptance of the Apostle’s Creed as a statement of faith.

Until then, soli deo gloria.