Fear and Trembling

“[This] age extols no virtue so much as “liberality,” and condemns no vice so fiercely as bigotry, alas honesty. If you believe anything and hold it firmly, all the dogs will bark at you. Let them bark: they will have done when they are tired! You are responsible to God, and not to mortal men. Christ came into the world to bear witness to the truth, and he has sent you to do the same; take care that you do it, offend or please; for it is only by this process that the kingdom of Christ is to be set up in the world.” – C. H. Spurgeon

I have recently shared much of my experience growing up in an evangelical church . I had many experiences, both good and bad, but by and large the experience was positive. I was raised Christian, and I am Christian today. Does this mean I am biased? Yes, but that does not mean I am wrong . The strength or weakness of an argument should be evaluated independent of the circumstances of the person giving the argument. Besides, we are all biased in some way or another, if we are honest with ourselves. The accusation that “you believe only because of your circumstances” goes both ways. After all, we all have faced and are facing circumstances that shape our views. I am an intelligent adult. I am not now a “product of my raising.” I am a Christian by choice, and my religion is my own. I like the way Cornelius Van Till addresses concerns on bias here . I urge you to review the arguments I give critically on their own merits. Let them stand for themselves.

A Christianity Today article piqued my interest: “The Missionary Who Wouldn't Retire: Lesslie Newbigin, born 100 years ago today, launched a new career at age 66 by calling Western churches to act like they were in the mission field,” by Krish Kandiah posted 12/08/2009 10:07AM. I wrestle often on this blog and others who argue that religion is a matter of “faith,” or personal preference. This “faith” is supposedly opposed to reason and science, which present objective, verifiable facts. This notion escapes me. I present reasoned arguments for the faith that do not precede from unverifiable assumptions (see this series of posts  for an example). I present a Jesus who acted in history, a history that is verifiable in the same way the most important decisions in our culture are: eye-witness testimony and historical witness (see here ). This is in line with Newbigin’s recommendations as expressed in the article: [Newbigin] challenges the post-Enlightenment separation between s...

I recently read the Kindle for iPhone Edition of Unfashionable by Tullian Tchividjian . This is an excellent book written at a popular level to help Christians see that they “make a difference in this world by being different from this world; they don’t make a difference by being the same” (Location 284). That makes sense. If you want to change something, you have to make it different in some way. If what you want to change is a culture / people group / nation, you have to create a different culture within it. One excerpt: Ironically, the more we Christians pursue worldly relevance, the more we’ll render ourselves irrelevant to the world around us. There’s an irrelevance to pursuing relevance … To be truly relevant, you have to say things that are unfashionable eternal, not trendy. It’s the timeless things that are most relevant to most people, and we dare not forget this fact in our pursuit of relevance. (Location 405) There is another way to look at this. A subject’s relevanc...

Two of my favorite modern parables are printed below. The first is one of my favorites not because I agree with its conclusions, but because I admire the way its point is made. From Anthony Flew: Let us begin with a parable. It is a parable developed from a tale told by John Wisdom in his haunting and revolutionary article "Gods." Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, "Some gardener must tend this plot." The other disagrees, "There is no gardener." So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. "But perhaps he is an invisible gardener." So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H. G. Well's The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movement...

I am currently reading a book by Tony Jones called The New Christians: Dispatches From The Emergent Frontier (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008). I understand what Jones is reacting to, and I share many of his concerns, but some of his “dispatches” give me a splitting headache when I think about them. Take for example Dispatch 13, delivered after a brief discussion of Stanley Fish: Emergents believe that truth, like God, cannot be definitively articulated by finite human beings (p. 153). So, Tony, is that a definitive truth? It seems that you cannot escape a truth claim even when you claim to have no truth claims. The notion is self-defeating (or self-refuting ). If Dispatch 13 is false, then there is some truth. If Dispatch 13 is true, then it proves itself to be false, because it is a definitively true statement. He states the notion another way on page 154: "…“truth” is not the hinge on which the biblical narrative turns." There’s only one response to that from some...

Stand to Reason’s blog contains a great post on the new video from our modern aethiest group. Here’s a sample from the post. Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris are actually doing us a favor. The thing I appreciate about these men is that they don't view religion as a relativistic, subjective enterprise. They take the claims of Christianity seriously by addressing them as truth claims, not preferences. In the first ten minutes of a video they've titled The Four Horsemen , they express frustration about the fact that people have made religion untouchable--that if a person tries to argue against the truthfulness of a religion, even the non-religious will shake a finger at him for criticizing it. I couldn't agree more with their frustration... I agree. I dislike the way most people in the modern church make religion subjective. When religion moves into the are of “blind faith,” our critics are right to ridicule us. The Christian faith...

Greg Koukl at Stand to Reason has a helpful post on how we recognize the truth when we hear it. Here’s a section from the article here : ...I outlined three basic ways we know things are true…Incidentally, this is what epistemology deals with…Epistemology deals with the field of knowledge. It answers the question: How do we know what we know? So when asked how we test religious truth claims, I give some epistemological tools. These tools are nothing fancy, nothing out of the ordinary. Basically, you respond to religious truth claims in the same general way you deal with any other claims…

I am a Master’s degreed industrial engineer. I make my living by using a problem-solving method called Six Sigma . In short, this is a detailed problem solving methodology based on statistical methods. I spend my days looking at manufacturing and service processes and analyzing their performance with 2-sample t-tests, ANOVA tables, Chi-squared tables, Factoral Experiments, and many other scientific methods of designed experimentation. I have grown to see many things in life through the window of hypothesis testing , the most often used scientific research method. I have a supreme respect for the scientific method, but there are things that science cannot prove. It must assume certain foundational principles. Science assumes an external world that is orderly. By orderly, I mean a world that is organized according to basis principles. This assumption cannot be proven by science because the only way that science can explain order is to find more order. The law or theory is explained by an...

Theology is a worthy pursuit because its goal is simply for the individual to know God. But concepts, theories, and abstractions do not excite or ultimately satisfy me. I must know the God who is alive, who is real, who relates to me in my life. – R. C. Sproul in The Character of God p. 16. I love to think about abstract concepts. I spend much of my time inside my head pondering concepts and theories. I am comfortable there. It’s not that I am uninterested in the ‘real world;’ I find that the theoretical often has obvious implications for life in the real world. These implications seem to be more obvious to me that they are to others. I can ponder God’s attributes, the concepts that define God’s being and essence, and I often do so. But the hard work of applying these concepts to my life is where I get the most benefit. I find that God’s love for me helps me to cast all of my cares on Him. God’s justice leads me to turn to Christ for mercy. God’s wrath makes me run to Christ...

It is discouraging to see the Christian church in America abandoning whole-sale the pursuit of doctrinal education. I find the remarks below to be a firm prophetic voice. “… It is the neglect of dogma [or, doctrine, the official teaching of the church] that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man—and the dogma is the drama… That Jesus Bar-Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, was in fact and in truth, and in the most exact and literal sense of the words, the God “by whom all things were made.” His body and brain were those of a common man; his personality was the personality of God, so far as that personality could be expressed in human terms. He was not a kind of demon pretending to be human; he was in every respect a genuine living man. He was not merely a man so good as to be “like God”; he was God… So that is the outline of the official story—the tale of the time when God was the underdog and got beaten, when he sub...

“Christianity is a rational religion. If it’s not rational, it’s not Christian.” – John Wesley “That knowledge [knowledge of God] is at least rational knowledge.” – Francis Schaefer , commenting on John 17:3 According to one online service , something is rational when it is “consistent with or based on or using reason.” Examples of the word’s use are: "rational behavior"; "a process of rational inference"; "rational thought." Christianity is the most reasonable of religions. In fact, I would call it the only reasonable position to take. We have nothing to fear from the facts. Unbelievers have good questions, but I find that those questions are rarely, if ever, new questions. The answers have been around for a long time. Many of them were answered by the Apostle Paul , and he used answers given him by study and meditation on Old Testament texts. There is another part of this. A part that does not reflect well on American Christianity. Another definition of ...

I found a great sermon by C. H. Spurgeon on the web today. If we would influence thoughtful persons it must be by solid arguments. Shallow minds may be wrought upon by mere warmth of emotion and force of excitement, but the more valuable part of the community must be dealt with in quite another manner… This is a lesson for the ministry at large. Certain earnest preachers are incessantly xciting the people, and but seldom if ever instructing them; they carry much fire and very little light. God forbid that we should say a word against appealing to the eelings; this is most needful in its place, but then there is a due proportion to be bserved in it… The preacher may touch the feelings by rousing appeals, as the harper touches the harpstrings; he will be very foolish if he should neglect so ready and admirable an instrument; but still as he is dealing with reasonable creatures, he must not forget to enlighten the intellect and instruct the understanding. And how can he appeal to the unde...

Logic and Thought Have you ever spent an afternoon thinking about thinking? Most people I know would quickly answer with a resounding “no.” Some would throw in an expletive. I am afraid I am the type of person who thinks about thinking, and I am grateful to know I am not alone . One aspect of thinking is our ability to determine the internal consistency of ideas. We need to be able to know whether our thinking method itself is accurate. This is the realm of formal logic. Formal logic has always fascinated me. The laws of logic shape the way we think. They are an open window to the Christian God’s world. Take one for instance: the law of non-contradiction. It says that something can not be both A and Non-A at the same time, in the same relationship, and in the same sense. This law cannot be denied. To deny it is to affirm it. If you say, “The law of non-contradiction does not apply,” you could mean, “The law of non-contradiction does indeed apply.” The meanings would be the s...

I had promised a series of posts on this subject earlier . I have modified the outline somewhat. This is the first of a series of posts outlining the reasons I have chosen to remain within the faith of my childhood. I was raised in a Christian home, by Christian parents. With the exception of several years in college, I have attended church my entire life. Does this mean I am biased? Yes, but that does not mean I am wrong . The strength or weakness of an argument should be evaluated independent of the circumstances of the person giving the argument. I am an intelligent, independent adult. I am not now a “product of my raising.” I am a Christian by choice, and my religion is my own. I have come to believe that God has changed my heart to allow me to believe in Him against my natural inclinations . I like the way Cornelius Van Till addresses those concerns here . Here is a revised outline: 1. God is who He is. 2. He has done what He has done. 3. He makes possible logic, rationa...

I found an interesting article by Greg Koukl over at Stand to Reason . It’s an interesting discussion of intuition from a philosophical perspective. I’m a big fan of intuition, and I make many decisions based on it. Here’s an excerpt: I'm convinced that many of the things essential to a Christian world view are things all human beings already believe without being told: the idea that human beings are special, valuable, made in the image of God and have transcendent value; that there's purpose in life; that man is not only valuable, but twisted, sinful, and guilty and deserves to be punished; that God is real and has made an orderly universe and designed it for a purpose … Some of these things I mentioned are known through the faculty of intuition. When I say "intuition," I mean something very particular … I don't mean a hunch about something. I mean a way of knowing which is immediate and direct. It's knowledge you start with, knowledge that's already ...

How do we know what we know? How do we know what is true? How do we evaluate one idea against another? How do we interpret the information our senses provide us? What do we see? Hear? Touch? Smell? Taste? These questions fascinate me. I first began to ask questions like this as I studied Human Factors Engineering (HFE) in graduate school. HFE is a branch of engineering that studies how a human being interacts with their environment, usually with respect to how we obtain information and how we perform work. We looked at basic types of mistakes that people make, the way we obtain information from our senses, the way we process that information, the way we decide to act, and the way we activate machine controls to act on that processed information. The field includes ergonomics , but it included much more than that. One of the things we learned right off the bat was that the way we interact with our environment is a process. Think of a black box with arrows going into the lef...

Certainty is a noun describing what is “established as true or sure” ( The New American Webster Handy College Dictionary ). Large segments of our society see this freedom from doubt as the height of arrogance. We are constantly told, especially with respect to religion, that we cannot know the truth, communicate the truth, or expect others to follow the truth we know. It is refreshing to find a book like The Truth War by John MacArthur (Nashville, TN: Nelson Books, 2007). This book is really a short commentary on the book of Jude. MacArthur is an able polemicist, and his writing is at its best when he forcefully conveys a point. He begins by expounding on the ground of truth, how we can know anything at all: Of course, God and truth are inseparable. Every thought about the essence of truth – what makes it “true,” and how we can possibly know anything for sure, quickly moves us back to God … it is not particularly surprising when someone who repudiates God rejects truth as well. ...

There is something profoundly wrong with death. I am not talking in abstract terms here; I am talking about the death of my Mother last year. My Mom was the one who I could always count on to be there for me, even when I had done wrong. She was the one who dried my tears from my eyes with a dishtowel when I cried. She was the one who brought joy to my life as a child. I was very ill when I was a kid. I had a severe case of histoplasmosis of the lungs at age one. This was not as treatable a condition then as it is now. My parents were told at one point that I had only a few months to live. I was fourteen before I really grew out of it. Mom was the one who held me in her arms when I could not get my breath and rocked me back and forth to help me breath. She made my early life special. She took me to see what corn was, how it grew on the stalk, and how it had hair that grew on the end. She showed me many things. She channeled my intelligence into productive things and always seemed to ha...

Rick Warren's Ministry Toolbox Issue #314, an e-mail publication , contained a link to a reading list recently discussed on his podcast. It includes some great titles. It is a reminder to stay knowledgeable of the world around us so we can be articulate in our conversations. I was especially pleased to see " Freakonomics " listed. This is a great read. I should say “listen” as I heard the book on tape. As an industrial engineer, I have a special affinity for the man that the book follows. He uses statistical techniques to study things considered by some to be off-limits. I have used Six Sigma often professionally. This is an application of many of the same statistical techniques, like regression and chi-squared, to industrial and business problems. Especially interesting to me is the chapter on “Superman vs. the Klu Klux Klan.” I would have never credited a fictional hero with the demise of a terrible evil, but there is a case presented for just that.