Friday, August 20, 2010
How do you know you're right? (Schill)
Has anyone else ever wondered if we, as Christians, are really right about all this "stuff" about God and Jesus? What if we have completely missed the mark? I mean really though, if the Bible was just made up and God was just a "being" that we, as humans, thought we needed to help answer questions about where things came from...we might feel pretty stupid.
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well we wouldn't feel stupid... we would just cease to exist.
ReplyDeleteCheck this out.
http://jay-miklovic.blogspot.com/2010/06/horton-on-inerrancy-at-ligoner.html
could be helpful.
Ok, I am not quite ready to answer this at length yet, but I will start.
ReplyDeleteFirst, the idea of a believing in a "god" that created the cosmos is pretty universal across all cultures humanity. Of course there are exceptions, and I do believe that most atheists genuinely do not believe in a god. Nonetheless the atheist position comes about by actively suppressing belief in God. It is hard to chalk up a universal belief is some 'god' as creator to mere chance, or mental crutch that someone comes up with.
The more difficult portion of your question is how do we know that the Christian faith is the 'right' faith. The video I posted above is excellent in dealing with this, but I understand that you'd rather hear it from a believer you know vs. some random smart guy on the web.
Before we even get started, notice that the bible pretty much assumes a belief in God as creator. The bible is not primarily a book about creation or metaphysics or whatever... it is a story... in fact it is rarely even a book of instruction, it presents realities and assumes the instruction will come from the Spirit. The only place where we see lot's of specific instruction is in the Law, the rest of the bible is pretty much narrative, prophecies, letters, or apocalyptic writing. Notice that the Law (the primary place of instruction) comes only to show us that we cannot be brought to God via instruction, thus showing us the need of grace.
The reason I bring all this up is because it is foundational to why the Bible and the Christian faith stand apart as the lone unique and true source of revelation.
All other 'faiths' require the action of man for his own salvation. Both Judaism and Islam affirm obedience as the pathway to mercy from god. The eastern religions with their very impersonal, surreal gods, set fate in the hands of ideas like karma wherein good and bad are weighed out and some divine justice that just somehow just exists evens things out. In the heathen religions of the Native Americans, Australian Aborigine, Mayan, etc... peoples there is human and animal sacrifices and such to appease the god(s) of their understanding. (Notice that the heathens are actually closer to the kingdom than most people realize, at the very least they see the need that a human had to die.)
Christianity stands alone as the one faith in which humanity must stand upon the merit of another man.
I realize at this point I have not answered your question, but at least I lay the groundwork to show that Christianity is indeed entirely unique to all other religious positions.
This will not be my last post on this thread, but chew on that a minute. I hope to speak to how the Biblical Texts actually came into being, it is a fascinating and something we should all know as believers, in fact maybe I should spend a few weeks on it in youth fellowship.
Peace for now.
I would say that we have lived in a time (the past couple hundred years) where it is popular to bring into question all matters of faith, matters that have been long since established. Now, I do not say that to blow off criticism, yet at the same time we are exceedingly arrogant in our day as we assume that we have greater knowledge on nearly every subject than those who went before us. I am not back peddling here, but I do intend to slightly sidestep the question and bring in a few more questions to consider.
ReplyDeleteIn the biblical text there are certain points that we just cannot seem to reconcile with our exegesis. There are gray areas that we do our best to cover up and rationalize but any on looker can see that we are dealing with apparent discrepancies that we have no answer for. This is a fact, and we would do well as 'conservative' and bible believing Christians to admit to this fact. WE ARE NOT BOUND TO HAVE ALL THE ANSWERS IN ORDER TO VALIDATE OUR POSITION. (Caps for emphasis not emotion.)
We live in an age of criticism, but it is an unbalanced form of criticism. If something is unexplainable it does not mean it does not exist. For instance, there is debate as to whether light travels as waves or photons, clearly light has the properties of both, but the nature of a wave is such that it cannot be a photon and vice versa. Our understanding of light is contradictory, but I would not throw away my solar powered calculator because of the contradiction. It would be absurd for us neglect what we know about light even though our study of it has produced contradiction. Now we know that light is light, and the only contradiction is the simple fact that we do not full understand it.
In the medical field we have countless contradictions of the same manner... so do we throw out medicine altogether?
Even in evolutionary biology (I'm young earth creationist btw) we see contradictions a plenty, but I am not willing to part with the gains in the medical industry that we have achieved through it's study. The point is that there are elements of truth discovered in the study of evolution about similar body systems among different types of animals and other things. Minor contradictions do not disprove the theory of evolution anymore than minor contradictions disprove the faith.
My point is that in our age of criticism we have applied very different standards of critique to various disciplines, and it has infiltrated our own minds more than we know. As Christians we feel a pressure to defend faith on the terms of this criticism, yet other areas of life that have far more apparent contradictions enjoy relative ease. We have been affected far more than we know by this post-enlightenment age of critical thought, I often think that we Christians have allowed ourselves to be affected more than anyone else.
The point is that most of us as believers have experienced more than enough to be confident in our God, and in the scriptures, but because of the pervasive post-enlightenment cultural tendency to question all things Spiritual we find ourselves asking questions like the one you have asked in this post and then feel we obliged to produce an answer as though the whole viability of Christianity depends on it.
A great thing to study if you are into these types of discussion is "presuppositional apologetics"
That's all for now, sorry for the book, and for not answering your question, which, by the way, I do not feel bound to answer :)
It was not my intention, necessarily, for anyone to answer this question...it was more meant to be a "have you ever?" type thing. I did, however, find this very interesting and helpful. This isn't something I am struggling with, just something that I thought of while reading.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the time and effort put into your book, Jay.
well it is good for me to articulate in writing what I think.
ReplyDeleteHave I ever? Yes, but less and less it seems as time goes by.