Christmas Truth - Day 4

"I will proclaim the decree of the Lord: He said to me, 'You are my Son; today I have become your Father. Ask of me and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession. You will rule them with an iron scepter; you will dash them to pieces like pottery. Therefore, you kings, be wise; be warned you rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son lest he be angry and you be destroyed in your way, for his wrath can flare up in a moment. Blessed are all who take refuge in him." Psalm 2:7-12

Jesus of Nazareth, born in Bethlehem was Lord and Christ. Messiah, Savior and God become man. This prophecy was fulfilled at the birth of the child, and referenced in New Testament scripture many times:

Hebrews 1:2-3,6 says, "but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word...And again, when God brings his firstborn into the world, he says, 'Let all God's angels worship him.'"

Romans 1:2-4 says, "the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures, regarding his Son, who as to his human nature was a descendent of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with his power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord."

All I wish to add to that reading of the Word is that Jesus claimed to be God, nothing less. At Christmas time as we sing the songs of the Christ child and celebrate the birth of the Savior, what strikes me is how completely unfathomable is the means by which God chose to provide for our salvation. We are never told in scripture so it would be only a guess, but I can't imagine that at some point Luke, after having questioned so many people about the birth of Jesus, would have run across someone who would have said something like, "I always thought the Messiah would have just appeared on the scene, straight from heaven in a flash seen by a multitude strong and powerful, marching into Jeruselum to claim His rightful place as King and ruler over the whole world. Never would I have guessed that He would have come into the world as a baby. Perhaps a baby like none other in the history of the world, but a baby nonetheless. I just never would have guessed."

That's the way I feel. I am expecting a new baby this Christmas. It is amazing enough that God would send His Son to be fully human, but to send Him as a baby, having gone through a full 9 months in the womb of Mary, fully Man in the truest sense of the word. A descendent of David in His human nature, but full of power and majesty as the very Son of God. In light of this Christmas truth two more scripture passages come to mind:

1 Corinthians 1:26-30 "Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of nobel birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things - and the things that are not - to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God - that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: "Let him who boasts boast in the Lord." In this time when children are not even considered fully human that I put my faith in God, who used the very basic humanity of a developing child in the womb of a virgin to give His Son as a gift for the salvation all who would belive on Him. I boast in that truth this Christmas, that that which no one would plan and see as foolishness (a King coming as a child), in the weakness of a baby and lowly in stature (born in a manger, son of a carpenter) is the very righteousness, holiness, and redemption for my soul.

John 3:16-17 "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him."

Christmas Truth - Day 3

"But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from old, from days of eternity." Therefore Israel will be abandoned until the time when she who is in labor gives birth and the rest of his brothers return to join the Israelites. He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God. And they will live securly, for then his greatness will reach the end of the earth. And he will be their peace." Micah 5:2-4

"In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governer of Syria.) And everyone went to his own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David." Luke 2:1-5

We have seen where history is important in the prophetic scheme. Isn't it fascinating that some 700 years before the birth of Jesus, a prophet in Judah told of the new ruler of Israel being born in Bethlehem Ephrathah and that a census (the first one inacted by the governer in authority) prompted Joseph to take Mary from Nazareth to Behlehem in Judea, the precise location prescribed. So it turns out not only history is important but geography as well.

It is also important to note that the prophecy says the ruler was tapped from eternity. Again the doctrine of the Trinity is on display. The Son has eternally existed, and will come to the town of Bethlehem (and not just any Bethlehem, but the particular town in Ephrathah). The significance of this cannot be overstated as we see elsewhere in scripture (Isaiah 9:6) that the son was given, it was the child that was born. The Son of God eternally exists, the earthly manifestation was for a specific and pre-determined time. More on this another time.

Finally, even the town is of significance as the name Bethlehem means "house of bread". So the one who is called the Bread of Life in John's gospel comes from the house of bread. "I am the bread of life. Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die. I am the living bread taht came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." John 6:48-51 Once again we see the promise in the Old Testament (namely God sustaining His people physically) fulfilled in the person of Jesus who is THE eternal sustanence for those who would seek to turn from death and accept God's offer for life.

This bread that will sustain for eternity was offered to all not just for a day or a season, but for all time as Jesus (the Bread of Life) willfully chose to "...give for the life of the world." I hope if you have read this far that you either have already partaken of this Bread, or you would consider believing on Jesus the Christ, the Messiah as the source for eternal life and in so doing receive the portion offered to each one of us by our Heavenly Father.

Christmas Truth - Day 2

"A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him- the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of power, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord- and he will delight in the fear of the Lord. He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears; but with righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked. Righteousness will be his belt and faithfulness the sash around his waist." Isaiah 11:1-5

Such is the word from Isaiah the prophet sometime close to 700 B.C. Some 750 years later, Matthew records the lineage of Jesus of Nazareth in the opening of his gospel and we read:

"A record of the geneology of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham...Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of King David...Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Christ." Matthew 1:1-17

History is important in the prophetic scheme and as we see from this example the fulfillment of the prophecy that the lineage of the Messiah would be preserved. This is even more significant when we consider the tumultuous events that took place in the time period between Jesse and Jesus. We look at God's judgement of disobedience on the part of His people, the Babylonian captivity and exile from the promised land and see an example of God's faithfulness toward His covenants.

The passage in Isaiah also speaks to the responses of the Messiah when questioned by the people. It says He will not judge by what He sees with His eyes nor by what He hears with His ears. We see this very thing time and again in the gospels when Luke, for example, records things like "When Jesus saw their faith...", "Jesus knew what they were thinking...", "But Jesus knew what they were thinking...", "He saw through their duplicity...They were unable to trap him in what he had said there in public. And astonished by his answer, they became silent."

And so we remain today; silent and astonished before a man who did not judge by what He saw with His eyes, nor with what He heard with His ears, but who knew the very heart of man and spoke the truth with righteousness, precisely because this was no mere man, not just another great teacher, but because this was the Messiah son of David, son of Abraham, a shoot from the stump of Jesse.

Christmas Truth - Day 1

Well it happened again this year, thankfully. It has happened every year right around this time of year since I can remember and i've been happy to see it come each time. I am speaking of A Charlie Brown Christmas, of course. I watched a really nice cartoon with my wife and children, which is always time well spent. Something new occurred to me this year, however, that spurred my thinking and inspired me to a series of posts which will be forthcoming in the days leading up to Christmas day. The central theme of the cartoon was the real meaning of Christmas, something that is missed by the vast majority of Americans each and every year. Critical to answering the question about the real meaning of Christmas is truth.

Truth is correspondence. By that I mean that we know that something is true because it corresponds to reality. If I were to say that I am 6'-4" tall with dark hair, you would know that to be true by investigating those measurable attributes and comparing them to my statement. If my statements correspond to the real measurements, then my statement is truthful. This is critical to those of us who are followers of Christ because we don't follow His teaching because they make us feel good, or because we like most of what He says, or because our family always has; we follow Christ because we believe His teaching to be true. Due to that belief, we find the joy of the Lord that gives us comfort no matter the circumstance, we find the knowledge that the Lord will do what is right and can appreciate even the hard parts of His teaching, and we can appreciate the blessings that our progenitors have passed on to us.

So what is true this Christmas? Jesus says in John 14:6-7 "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him." Jesus is the truth. God has given us the privilege of providing the truth in the form of the Word that we can measure against reality. John 1:1-2 says "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning."

These two scriptures point to the first truth i'd like to bring out, and that is the doctrine of the Trinity. The more I study and think about the Trinity the more beautiful a concept it becomes in my heart. Jesus claims to be God, not a mere man, not just a great teacher, but God. We see from scripture the concept of the triune nature of God (namely God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit). The first four words in the Bible say "In the beginning God...". The reality is that this universe is finite, and no matter the circumstances surrounding it's propagation the beginning was a caused event. The explanation that best fits reality is that the caused event of creation is due to God, the uncaused agent. Also, creation (which includes mankind) is the choice of the Creator. Because God exists eternally in three persons, He didn't need to create us for company. We need not think too highly of ourselves. There was unity in diversity from eternity in the community of the Trinity. We are created in God's image so it comes as no surprise that each one of us desires to be a part of a community. Companionship, support groups, families, gatherings of all kinds reflect the reality of the Trinity in each of our image-bearing attributes. Loneliness is always considered a bad thing, because it opposes the truth of the community.

When Jesus was ready to begin His earthly ministry we read in Luke 4:14-21 that He went to the synagogue and opened the scroll of Isaiah and He read, "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has annointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he began by saying to them, 'Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing'." Jesus said that He was the fulfillment of the prophecies concerning the Messiah.

In the life of Christ (that is, His birth, life, death and resurrection) represents a fulfillment of several hundred Old Testaments prophecies. I thought it would be a good idea to bring just a few of these to bear at this time to remind us that Christianity is not just a fanciful notion, but the TRUTH. Lord willing, tomorrow I will post on the fulfilled prophecy of the family line of Jesse.

What Does Being a Christian Really Mean?

An article in the local paper caught my attention today. It was a story picked up from the associated press and was entitled "Survey:Americans Mix and Match Religions". Four thousand people were surveyed who claimed to be Christians but also expressed a belief in New Age and Eastern mysticism, Casting spells, Astrology and Reincarnation. I think this article is critical in understanding the times in which we live, and in being able to answer the question "What does this mean?"

In our contempoary post-modern culture in the United States of America, language is less and less important. More specifically, the importance of words having real substantive meaning is becoming non-existent. With the advent of text-messaging and twitter a premium has been placed on shortcuts and expediency. Combine that with a mindset that the meaning of words change based on the situation, that the original intent and context have no bearing on word usage, and we are faced with a tenuous situation. We see this fleshed out in common terminology like 'abortion', 'politically correct' and 'progressive'. In this country we attempt to change reality by substituting abortion for murder or infanticide, which would be more appropriate and accurate. We say people are progressive when progress means moving to what is better and we only mean they promote change. We say people should be politically correct when any action is either correct or incorrect whether in politics or any other arena.

This is absolutely crucial when looking at the survey. When anyone today claims to be a Christian (or asks us if we are a Christian), the first question we must ask is "What do you mean by Christian". We must remember that instead of everyone considering the original context and meaning of the word Christian, in this culture what is probably assumed is "Do you consider yourself a Christian as you choose to define what a Christian is at this particular moment and in this situation." In that sense a Christian could be anything that pops into a persons head.

Acts 11:26b says "The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch." The term Christian originally meant a disciple of Jesus Christ the Messiah, a follower of Christ, one who belonged to Christ, one who followed the teaching of Jesus of Nazereth, one who followed those teachings so closely he became a 'little Christ'. The disciples of Christ (Christians) had another unique quality that becomes clear in this context (See Acts 11:19) "Now those who had been scattered by the persecution in connection with Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, telling the message only to the Jews. Some of them, however, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, went to Antioch and began to speak to the Greeks also, telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus." We learn elsewhere is the book of Acts that Stephen was stoned to death. In fact, in Hebrews 11 we are told of other things those earlier in the faith dealt with: jeers and flogging, imprisoned in chains, stoned, sawed in two, put to death by the sword, left destitute, persecuted and mistreated. So, if we are to be correct in things and combat this post-modern tendency to make of a word whatever we wish, the next time we are asked if we are a Christian perhaps we can remember the only legitamite meaning of the word and say that we are disciples of Jesus Christ, ready to face persecution and death for the sake of His Name.

If this is in fact the case, then we cannot associate with any other faith, religion, belief, etc. because Jesus Himself said in John 14:6-7 "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him." Truth by definition is exclusive, so when Jesus says He is THE way and that NO ONE comes to God except through Him, then any other way is false. Therefore a follower of Jesus cannot hold any other view in addition to the one offered by Jesus.

Notice I have not spoken of denominations or the state of salvation of any of the survey participants. This is intentional. No one knows another's heart and the issue of salvation and devotion to the Lord is not denominational. What I am saying is that more and more as we move farther into post-modernity true believers in Jesus must be increasingly careful to notice how words are used and demand that the terms be defined in any discussion. Christian means only one thing in truth, namely a disciple of Jesus Christ. One may make the word situational and change the meaning in any way he wishes, but he will not be a Christian in the true sense of the word.

Who is our Benefactor?

“Thanksgiving Day is a harvest festival. Traditionally, it is a time to give thanks for the harvest and express gratitude in general. It is a holiday celebrated primarily in Canada and the United States. While perhaps religious in origin, Thanksgiving is now primarily identified as a secular holiday.” So says Wikipedia, the cultural standard bearer of definitive information in contemporary culture. Secularization of American culture is most definitely a significant force in our land, but in thinking about our upcoming Holiday I gave a few minutes thought to the outworkings of secular ideology as it relates to thanksgiving in general.

According to the given definition, tradition has held that on Thanksgiving we express general feelings of gratitude. Many times this tradition is manifest in the form of persons in a gathering taking their turn expressing gratitude for that one particular thing for which they are most thankful in the past year. “My new set of golf clubs” says one, “Keeping my job in difficult times” says another, “Just getting together with family” still another. Around and around we go, expressing our gratitude. But gratitude to whom? Gratitude is not a general statement to no one in particular; rather it is an expression of thanks to a person.

These expressions of gratitude are very basic, but what about the most important things in life; namely our life and health. If we can be grateful for golf clubs or a continued place of employment or the opportunity for a family gathering, then how important is giving thanks for the breath we draw each day, waking up every morning, or the good health most of us enjoy to go about our daily activities. To whom do we give thanks for those things that we often express are most important?

This issue is especially poignant for me this year as my wife and I are expecting our fourth child. Ultrasound technicians have told us that it appears we will be having a healthy little girl (our first as we currently have three boys at home). The secularist would tell me to be generally grateful for that little girl, but it would seem they do not tell me to whom to be thankful. Based on the worldview behind secularism, however, they do give an answer. Secularism would tell me that my little girl is a new happy accident and my thanks should go to the beneficent hand of the evolutionary process of time and random chance. The point I wish to make, and the problem that secularism would have us ignore, is that without God, gratitude as a real response for things we would hold up as most important in this world is lost.

Perhaps instead of settling for a secular idea of an expression of “gratitude in general”, we should consider giving a more specific thanks as King David implored upon beginning a monumental building project, “But who am I, and who are my people, that we shoud be able to give as generously as this? Everything comes from you, and we have given you only what comes from your hand. We are aliens and strangers in your sight, as were all our forefathers. Our days on earth are like a shadow, without hope. O Lord our God, as for al this abundance that we have provided for building you a temple for your Holy Name, it comes from your hand, and all of it belongs to you. I know, my God, that you test the heart and are please with integrity. All these things have I given willingly and with honest intent. And now I have seen with joy how willingly your people who are here have given to you. O Lord, God of our fathers Abraham, Isaac and Isreal, keep this desire in the hearts of your people forever, and keep their hearts loyal to you.”

During this season of Thanksgiving, let us all give some consideration not just to the act of being generally grateful, but to whom we are giving our thanks. It has been said that if we can tell our children to thank santa claus for putting goodies in their stockings, is there no one we can thank for putting two feet into ours? I cannot speak for another, but as for me and my house, from the most important things to the least, we give our heartfelt thanks not to a great perhaps of indifference, but to an infinite personal Creator God from whose hand all blessings flow.

Critique Two - Part Seven - Heart and Soul

As the final principles of "loose consensus" presented by Mr. Kurtz (reason, science and education) are those which i've commented at length in recent posts, i'm going to address one final point and then a brief summary of this reading in secular humanism.

Mr. Kurtz states in a section entitled "Religious Skepticism" that "We have found no convincing evidence taht there is a seperable 'soul' or that it exists before birth or survives death." This statement is intriguing to me coming from the secular humanist camp because it so blatantly and opening argues in a circle. Mr. Kurtz has gone to great lengths to describe how the secular humanist feels that everything is knowable by human intellect and reason. Tell me, can the soul of man ever be detected by human intellect or reason? The answer of course is no. The humanist has here begun by assuming nothing supernatural exists and everything that can be known is discovered through the cognative abilities and physical investigations of man. So, in essence he says that only measureable things exist, we cannot measure the soul, and therefore the soul doesn't exist.

This is quite telling, because I believe this is the point with the vociferous atheist and secular humanist, namely that in the realm of the religious there is no amount of evidence that would be accepted. As a believer in Jesus and one who is comitted to the Biblical-Christian worldview, I cannot prove that God exists. I can provide evidence (Cosmological argument, Teleological argument, Existence of Morals, Ontological argument and arguments from specified complexity and irreducible complexity) that when gathered together to answer in a cogent and comprehensive manner the most important questions in life, namely origin, meaning, morality and destiny, end up being the most compelling and lucid. I also can bring the real and personal experience of the change in my life that has come from a personal relationship with Jesus Christ in a daily walk.

It is important to remember that every worldview must answer those most important questions in life. If someone were to ask: Where did I come from? Why am I here? How should I behave and interact with others while i'm here? What will happen to me when I die? The secular humanist would have to respond, in simple form: You originated from a random collocation of atoms, a happy accident, a pure product of time and random chance. Based on the answer to question number one, there is no good reason why you are here as opposed to not being at all. You can do whatever you like as long as you don't hurt anyone, to the best of your definition of hurt. Nothing happens when you die, we have asked dead people what happens and they didn't say anything.

These are not trite, false or overexaggerated answers. If pressed on these points the secular humanist would have to answer this way or betray the worldview he/she espouses. What is lost therefore is meaning, hope, love, justice, freedom and gratitude; a high price to pay to satisfy the desire to reason among themselves to cast off all restraint and do what seems right in their own eyes.

In contrast, when asked the same set of questions, the Biblical-Christian turns to the Word of God (for perspective in this life) and answers as follows: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in this body, this will mean fruitful labor for me." "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind...Love your neighbor as yourself." "After that, we who are still alive will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage each other with these words." If we submit ourselves to Jesus we are offered love, joy, peace, contentment, hope, justice, freedom and meaningful and consistent answers to the most important questions in life.

Ultimately it comes down to a simple choice: we tell God "Thy will be done", or we tell ourselves "My will be done."

Critique Two - Part Six - Building without Foundations

Education is a topic of great importance to me as I have been blessed with four children, one which I look forward to meeting for the first time in early February, all of which my wife and I have chosen to homeschool. Mr. Kurtz makes a few remarks in his sixth principle of “loose consensus” among secular humanists whose logic is blatantly circular and specifically ignores an issue of great difficulty. In this single paragraph synopsis of his beliefs regarding moral education, Mr. Kurtz states the following:

“It should be noted that secular humanism is not so much a specific morality as it is a method for the explanation and discovery of rational moral principles,” and elsewhere, “We do not believe that any particular sect can claim important values as their exclusive property; hence it is the duty of public education to deal with these values. Accordingly, we support moral education in the schools that is designed to develop an appreciation for moral virtues, intelligence, and the building of character…We do not think it is moral to baptize infants, to confirm adolescents, or to impose a religious creed on young people before they are able to consent.”

There are many issues that are of great concern to me in this area, but I will deal with only two herein. Firstly, on the statement that secular humanism is merely a method of explanation and discovery of rational moral principles. There seems to be one glaringly obvious omission in this statement; namely, does the secular humanist never ask from whence those moral principles came? Secondarily, with reference to the previous discussion on ethics, on what basis would a secular humanist decide what makes a moral judgment rational? The fatal problem in the secular humanists’ position here is that he or she has to first assume that moral choices exist and that they can be rationally determined without ever asking from whence they came. Is the origin of morals irrelevant to the pronouncement and instruction of them? The humanist is trying to build a house without a foundation. It occurs to me the position is the same with young people today and the use of calculators. Why don’t we only teach children the use of calculators in math classes? After all the children would receive perfect marks in their primary math courses of study. They would know to match up the numbers and symbols on paper with those on the calculator and the teachers in class could simply instruct the students on the sequencing of the keystrokes, or “explain and discover the rational calculative principles in math”. I would submit it is because we know that when they enter reality and are working part time behind the register at a local fast food chain and the computer goes down they would be crippled intellectually.

If the origin of ethics is ignored or purposefully excluded in the instruction of children of all ages, in time what we will have is not a society of free-thinking rational moral agents, but rather a generation of adults who are ethically crippled. You can attempt to show people intellectually the how’s of making moral choices, but without origins you cannot tell them the why’s of making moral choices. Relative to morality this is precisely what the Biblical-Christian offers, the why’s of moral choices. Jesus taught exclusively on the why’s of ethics and morals. Jesus did not spend his approximately three years of active ministry holding seminars on the specifics of moral behavior; instead He walked and talked with people, showed them why their actions were sinful, forgave them and left them with the simple instruction: “Go and sin no more.”

The secular humanists' duplicitous position of attempting to smuggle in an ethic and then proposing to have discovered a moral principle using pure intellect carries over into the issue of education. Mr. Kurtz makes the assertion, quite rightly, that no group can claim as their property important values. However, he then makes the unsupportable claim that therefore public education is the only valid arena in which to deal with the issues of morality. Mr. Kurtz has stated that it is not moral to impose any kind of moral creed on young people before they are of consenting age, but this completely negates his statement on public schools, and is contrary to reality. Wouldn’t public schools be a body of adults (Boards of Education, Principles and classroom instructors) teaching children the ‘right way’ to deal with moral issues? Besides we have already established that the instructors could not even address where those morals came from in the first place. What Mr. Kurtz is promoting is not that children be free from indoctrination, but that they be indoctrinated with secular humanist beliefs as opposed to religious ones, with the hollow justification that religions 'force' morals on people and secular humanism is no religion.

Religion is defined by the unabridged random house dictionary as the following: “concern over what exists beyond the visible world, differentiated from philosophy in that it operates through faith or intuition rather than reason; a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects; a body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and practices.” Although Mr. Kurtz tries very hard to classify secular humanism as something other than a religion with his usage of wording such as “loose consensus”, “method” and “develop an appreciation;" make no mistake, secular humanism is a religion based on ideas established on faith, seeking to make disciples through evangelistic efforts and proselytization. More on this next time.

Critique Two - Part Five - Perspective on Ethics

"Ethics Based on Critical Intelligence" is the next in the line of principles that form the secular humanist "loose consensus". Religion is waved aside in the ethical discussion with the statement "Thus secularists deny that morality needs to be deduced from religious belief or that those who do not espouse a religious doctrine are immoral." Ethical discussion are, in my opinion, the weakest of all the humanist positions. It is one of a few areas where they attempt to make a short leap over an uncrossable divide. Because the point is so obviously weak with a little thought, I won't spend much time on this point, and only give a few illustrations for clarity.

This issue is one of perspective and brings to mind the arctic. I have read that in the history of arctic exploration whole parties would be lost. They would be walking along a sea of white and happen upon a crevasse and summarily fall in to the huge split in the ice. The party never saw the crevasse because they were looking on a 2-dimensional plane. With the perspective of the third dimension they could have seen the crevasse and avoided the pitfall. Ethics for the humanist is like this crevasse. The humanist approaches the idea of ethics from a 2-dimensional grid of the cognative and the emotive and try to make the short step to morality. However, real life shows that no amount of reason or emotion can lead to an ethical decision, rather an ethic has to already be in place to make an ethical decision.

C.S. Lewis describes it this way: he says that the humanist is like a person in a hallway devoid of any previous ethical bias and has a series of doors of ethical decision from which to choose. But which door will he choose? He has no ethic to call on to decide which door in correct. One cannot make the ethical decision without first having an ethical intimation of which door is right before choosing. The humanist is left with only selecting one door and waiting to see if he or she happened upon the correct door by chance, and must then live with the consequence of leaving such an important decision to chance.

For the secular humanist the apparent short step from the cognative and emotive to the moral, without the perspective of a transcendent ethic, ends up being a fall into the morass of "grey areas", exceptions, and a wait-and-see consequentialist approach.

For the follower of Jesus with the biblical-christian worldview this problem does not exist.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning." John 1:1-2
Providing the perspective on the cognative and emotive grid is the Word of God. Notice carefully that it does not say 'In the beginning was the feeling..." or "In the beginning was the reason...". No, rather "In the beginning was the Word..." The Word of God is the transcendent ethic that provides perspective that guides humankind to moral choices on the intellectual and emotional grid. Those in Nazi Germany who abandoned the perspective of the transcendent ethic reasoned and felt like they should help evolution along in creating a better race of man. They had the majority and were the most cultured and educated in Germany at the time. Even if reason and emotion led the whole world to follow that line of thinking, it was ethically wrong and immoral to attempt to exterminate an entire race of people because the Word of God stands above us all, sees the great cravasse of death, destruction, bloodlust and greed for power and says "Thou shalt not kill" because "...God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."

Critique Two - Part Four - Autonomy Assumed

"As democratic secularists, we consistently defend the ideal of freedom of conscience and belief from those ecclesiastical, political, and economic interests that seek to repress them, but genuine political liberty, democratic decision-making based upon majority rule, and respect for minority rights and the rule of law." This statement is part of Mr. Kurtz' opening remarks for the third position of "loose consensus" for a good majority of secular humanists. There is much to say, but I believe it really comes down to two really problematic considerations at which humanists must simply wave their hand, but cripple this mindset of the ideal of freedom.

First, there is an assumption underlying the purely democratic position presented here. Mr. Kurtz is presenting a democratic system of decision-making based on majority rule that will stand for freedom from any group's attempt at control, that will defend and protect human rights all for the ultimate strengthening of the human race. The assumption here seems all too clear; namely, the majority will choose the 'right' thing for the human race. But from whence does the idea of the 'right' thing come? Isn't the 'right' thing for the human race being decided by the human race one vote at a time? If there is no absolute moral law (which is what theists posit as part of the nature of God) what does 'right' even mean, except what the majority decides? This brings up a frightening question, what constitutes a majority decision? 51 of 100? What if 51 out of 100 people feel that people over the age of 70 represent the vast majority of health care costs, and since economically the culture cannot maintain itself at the current rate of expenditure for health care, and so for the betterment of society as a whole anyone over the age of 70 should be euthanized? Wouldn't this have to be implemented? Wouldn't this actually be the 'right' thing to do since the majority had considered the ultimate betterment of society and legitimately voted of the policy? These questions are not far-fetched or extreme, history shows that man is capable of exactly this line of reasoning outside any religious system. Without an unchangeable set of values that says all life is precious and filled with intrinsic value, what would keep any group in the majority from simply deciding which other groups were a 'drag' of the society as a whole and having them eliminated? It is only through an altruistic and simple view of all men as autonomous agents who always choose actions that are 'right' or 'good'. Those who espouse a Biblical-Christian worldview (and the founders of this nation) present a view of humanity that is actually consistent with reality, namely, man knows what is right, he doesn't do it. We know the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, because we are created in the image of God and therefore have common leanings toward the good. Evil is simply a perversion of good, and that is true for every human regardless of race, color, creed, location, age, or any other material or physical attribute.

That brings us to the whole discussion on freedom. What is the freedom we are talking about here? Mr. Kurtz actually borrows from the Declaration of Independence and says humanists are for the defense of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". He says these are rights are all human rights. With due respect, from whence do these rights that all humans have come? If humans are nothing more than cosmic accidents that exist because of a combination of random chance and time then did these rights come from the cosmos? Chance? Time? Do we give these rights to ourselves? Why do we have these rights and not trees or tadpoles or groundhogs? Again, looking to the founders, who were directly influenced by the likes of Coke, Blackstone and Locke who wrote based on the ideas of the Reformation, these rights are called "inalienable" and are said to be given to man by his "Creator". They understood man was created in the image of God and therefore has intrinsic value with rights to life, liberty and property that were not given by man and could not be infringed upon or taken away by man.

Arthur James Balfour dealt with the ideas of humanism in the early 1900's and addressed these very issues in a series of lectures later published under the title "Theism and Humanism". On the topics of freedom, values and democracy, he says the following:

"How came they to be what they are? To what causal process are they due?...what survival value have aesthetic judgments and feelings at any stage in culture?...It must, in other words, be shown that communities rich in the genius which creates beauty and in the sensibility which enjoys it, will therefore breed more freely and struggle more successfully than their less gifted neighbors...if so, our aesthetic sensibilities must be regarded (from the naturalistic standpoint) as the work of chance. They form no part of the quasi design which we attribute to selection; they are unexplained accidents of the evolutionary process. This conclusion harmonizes ill with the importance which civilized man assigns them in his scheme of values...Can we be content with a world-outlook which assigns to these chance products of matter and motion so vast a value measured on the scale of culture, and no value worth counting measured on the scale of race survival?...Where then, it will be asked, do we reach the point in the aesthetic scale at which values begin to require metaphysical or theological postulates? Is it the point at which beauty begins? If so, who determines where this lies; and by what authority do they speak?"

I believe what the secular humanists are advocating is autonomy for man, that humankind should be able to do whatever humankind decides to do. This, however, is not freedom but slavery. We all live in the present with a record of the recent past. Humankind cannot see into the distant past nor the future, and therefore can have no concept of how things began or how current decisions will turn out in the end. Worse, if it is a given that we are nothing more than happy cosmic accidents it doesn't even matter what decisions we make or if we survive as a race another day. So, under the secular humanist worldview, all decisions by a majority will turn out to be choices made in response to whim or fancy, even if they are arrived at after serious contemplation and discussion and with all possible sincerity. In this attempt to throw off all restraint by God, government and anyone else who would attempt to 'control' them, mankind ends up being shackled by his own appetites, enslaved by his own wants, and subject to his own selfish desires.

In contrast, Jesus who was and is and is to come offers the following with respect to freedom:
"If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free...I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed." John 8:31,32 and 34-36

What are the commandments Jesus proposed we hold to for the truth and subsequently freedom?

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself."

Critique Two - Part Three - Stating the Obvious

Separation of Church and State appears as the second principle of "loose consensus" proposed in the Secular Humanist Declaration. It is no surprise that this principle would be included as the humanist would have religion removed from all thought if possible, much less from matters of governance. I hesitate to even comment on this topic as it seems so very uncomplicated, but there has been such a focus on this issue in contemporary American culture that I fear something more duplicitous is taking place.

First, the separation of church and state, if taken at face value, is a quite reasonable and common sense statement. What is the purpose of the Church? In Paul's letter to the Ephesian church chapter 4 and verse 12 he states that the people are given gifts"...to prepare God's people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God, and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Chirst." In short the purpose of the Church is to equip the Saints to be more like Christ and to serve. What is the purpose of the State? Simply put, to govern the people, which for the United States means to provide protection so the people can realize their inalienable (or God given) rights to life, liberty and property. So, the Church and the State are naturally separated functionally in that they look to serve different purposes. Making much of the separation of church and state would be akin to jumping up and down and demanding the separation of the judicial branch of government from the executive branch. No one brings this up because everyone understands that those two branches of government are naturally separate in that they serve two different functions. To exclaim the separation is to state the obvious.

This is why I believe the continued pressing of this point is more duplicitous than a mere stating of fact. Cries of outrage on this issue do not come forth because of the desire to clearly state the difference in function of the two entities, nor do they come to make sure a priest is never elected to public office; rather, separation is invoked because people want to be out from under their accountability to God and feel that if they can secularize governance politicians will be accountable only to the people. It is interesting that the founders of this country understood all too well that although there was a natural separation in function between church and state, that all men were accountable to God individually, and therefore held themselves to a higher standard of governance. Our Declaration of Independence speaks of our Creator who bestowed upon us certain inalienable rights. These rights were being infringed upon by the English rulers of the day, which led the founders to fight a War for Independence.

How should this separation work out practically? I give two examples. One comes from a time when a King was in power over a united kingdom. During a time of war this king stayed home instead of going to battle, which was his rightful place. While at home looking over all he had command over, he saw the wife of a soldier who was fighting at her bath. He desired to meet with her, made the arrangements and engaged in an adulterous relationship. Intent then on covering up the activity the king sent the woman's husband to the front lines of battle where he summarily died. This activity was wrong, and where no one in his court would dare present himself to the king to question this activity a lowly prophet came and told the king a story and in so doing brought the king into account before God for his activity. King David's prayer of contrition is found in Psalm 51:4: "Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge." The king and the prophet went about their tasks independently serving their separate purposes, until the king violated God's absolute moral law. Then the prophet rebuked the king, not to replace him on the throne, but to bring him back in line with a law that was above them both.

At one time a Supreme Court ruled that it was OK for separate facilities, so long as they were equal, to exist to keep one group of citizens from coming into contact with another on the basis of color. One man, a minister, began a peaceable demonstration, with a strong backing of support and encouragement from his church affiliates to deny this activity. This man spoke in many arenas and gave his very life for the position that all men where created, and therefore had intrinsic worth that was not given by any man and could not be taken away or subverted by any man. In a speech that changed the outlook of an entire nation, including the state, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, in part, "...And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true...And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: "Free at last. Free at last. That God Almighty, we are free at last."

The separation of church and state is a re-statement of fact; namely that the two entities serve and different purpose. However, both entities exist under the authority of, and are accountable to, God. This fact is immutable and does not change no matter how many times we cry out and remind each other of the separation of the two bodies. Mr. Kurtz would have a separation of church and state so that government officials would not feel obligated to abide by an absolute moral law. In the next few posts we will discuss why this position results not in absolute freedom, but in absolute depravity and bondage.

Critique Two - Part Two - Imprisoned by "Freedom"

'Free Inquiry' is the first proposition elucidated in the loose consensus Decalogue of secular humanists. Mr. Kurtz begins with the following: "We oppose any tyranny over the mind of man, any efforts by ecclesiastical, political, ideological, or social institutions to shackle free thought. In the past, such tyrannies have been directed by churches and states attempting to enforce the edicts of religious bigots..." and he continues with "...The guiding premise of those who believe in free inquiry is that truth is more likely to be discovered if the opportunity exists for the free exchange of opposing opinions; the process of interchange is frequently as important as the result."

There are several things i'd like to say about the statements of Mr. Kurtz with regard to free inquiry. Firstly, is that the secular humanist position claims to be the champion of a freedom of thought while at the same time denouncing any ideas that include any form of supernatural explanatory phenomena. Mr. Kurtz began his declaration by emphatically positing a secular humanist position that "...is opposed to all varieties of belief that seek supernatural sanction for their values ..." Clearly this is a position in contradiction. In point of fact, the secular humanist position is exclusivistic in that it particularly and specifically excludes any position that includes the supernatural. In other words, everyone is free to inquire of any thought form and look to any position for explanation, except a religious one. In this way, secular humanism "shackles free thought."

Secondly, we must recognize that truth by definition is exclusive. The law of non-contradiction holds. In other words, something cannot be both 'A' and 'non-A'. Mr. Kurtz has stated that for secular humanists, "...the process of interchange is frequently as important as the result." This means that the search is as important as finding the truth. This position is also unsustainable. Once the truth is found, the search is over; in fact the very point of the search is to find the truth. Furthermore, once the truth is found everything opposite to the truth is untrue and must be discarded. For the secular humanist the perfect society and system of thought is ever seeking but never finding, to find is to fail. If a secular humanist were to ever find the truth and stand firm saying something like "killing innocent people is wrong at all times, in all places, in all circumstances, no matter what anyone else thinks", then he or she would commit the cardinal sin and be excommunicated for failing to permit free inquiry; they would be excluded for being exclusive. It is a self-destructive position that cannot be lived out.

This same point can be stated in a different way. One gets the feeling in the exposition of free inquiry and the system put forth that elevates the egalitarianism of ideas, or free inquiry, or looking at every idea as they are equally valid, that Mr. Kurtz believes everyone should think this way. As a committed Christian that espouses the Biblical-Christian world and life view and presents Christs statement that "I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me", I would fall into the category of a religious bigot that proposes a tyranny over the mind of man. A secular humanist would no doubt denounce my position and attempt to persuade me to drop my 'religious bigotry' and adopt the secular humanist position of tolerance and freedom. But how is that attempt to separate me from my beliefs tolerant? Aren't secular humanists in fact claiming themselves to have 'the only way', albeit that everyone should be tolerant of all ideas and not purport to have the answer? Again, this is a contradictory position. As soon as the secular humanist states that belief in the supernatural should be opposed, they cease to be inclusive of all ideas.

Finally, i'd like to reiterate my concern regarding systems of thought from the last posting, because it shows up front and center in the forum of 'Free Inquiry'. Secular humanists propose a system of an egalitarianism of ideas and an elitism of people. They have clearly stated in this first proposition that all ideas should be equally considered, free from any opposition. However, in societal relations some group will have to decide which idea to incorporate and ultimately press on its citizens. We will speak on this again in a later post, but in the end what will happen is that some group of people will decide which set of ideas all people will follow. The logical conclusion of the secular humanist position is totalitarianism (an elite group dictating for all the rest).

What does Christ offer as an alternative to this position. A system that holds up an elitism of ideas and an egalitarianism of people. An objective moral law exists that every human person ought to follow. All men are equal in that they are created by God to bring Him glory through worship, which includes full submission of every individual to God's elite ideal. The logical conclusion of this position is that no one has the right to dictate to any other. God established how all should live, and while following those ideals, individuals are free to interact in any way they wish within that framework. So, quite simply the position is as written in Matthew's Gospel chapter 22 and verse 37

"Jesus replied: 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hand on these two commandments."

Critique Two - Part One - A Common Thread

After having dealt with Atheism, as presented by Mr. Bertrand Russell, hopefully in a way that respectfully pointed out some shortcomings in that worldview, I am now going to attempt a critical response to another view on things that is probably more pervasive in contemporary culture, Secular Humanism. The reading on which i'll be commenting is by Mr. Paul Kurtz and is entitled "A Secular Humanist Declaration". Mr. Kurtz provides ten points in defense of his ideals, which I will attempt to address individually in upcoming posts. In this post, i'll use Mr. Kurtz's definition of secular humanism, address some of the introductory comments in the work at hand, and then mention a common thread that seems likely to be woven through the secular humanist position.

Secular humanism is defined by Mr. Kurtz on the Council for Secular Humanism (of which Mr. Kurtz in the founder and chair emeritas) website as, "...a comprehensive, nonreligious lifestance incorporating a naturalistic philosophy, a cosmic outlook rooted in science and a consequentialist ethical system." We will look at each of these in more detail in the course of study, but what we can look for as we go is a presentation and defense of a naturalistic, scientific and consequentialist position that will attempt to consistantly address the same issues for which religion purports to have answers. I will be giving some reasons I feel the secular humanist position is deficient and where the Biblical-Christian worldview does a better job in providing cogent, comprehensive and consistant answers.

In his introduction, Mr. Kurtz goes to some effort to present secular humanism as a strong force in contemporary culture and thought forms. His main emphasis is to establish secular humanism as a lifestance that has led to the "...improvement of the human condition..." has "...had a positive effect on reducing poverty, suffering, and disease in various parts of the world..." and in "...making the good life possible for more and more people..." Mr. Kurtz also states that secular humanism has no dogma or creed, no "statement of faith" no solid, immovable position on which all members stand, but rather is based on a "...loose consensus with respect to several positions". Finally, Mr. Kurtz is clear in stating that the form of secular humanism that he intends to defend is one that is "...explicitly comitted to democracy." Although not defined, it is assumed that by democracy Mr. Kurtz agrees with Webster's definition:

government in which the people hold the ruling power either directly or through elected representatives; rule by the ruled; majority rule

I would like to make clear before beginning that I do not intend to defend the Christian religion and how the church has addressed issues throughout history. Instead I hope to present Jesus Christ and His teachings, in the context of the whole of Scripture. I will do my best to present the Secular Humanist position correctly and simply respond to the points set forth in the article at hand, as this is how I would hope anyone reading these posts would do for me. It is quite important that it be remembered that we never judge a philosophy or worldview by its abuses, so characterizing an entire religion and all people who claim allegience to a system of belief as having the same views as those who would abuse and pervert that view would be unprofitable. I will attempt therefore to look at the ideas presented on their truthfullness and merit and nothing else.

With that preface, I would like to end this post with a common thread I believe will be woven throughout the presentation. This common thread has to do with two fundamental systems espoused and their difference to Biblical Christianity. These two fundamental systems are egalitarianism and elitism. Egalitarianism being a view of equality and elitism being a view of hierarchy or class or position. From the introductory statements of the Secular Humanist Declaration it is apparent that it is believed that ideas are all equal, that no one's idea of how things should be is any better than anyone else's. This is highlighted by the statements about how secular humanism is no dogma or creed and has only loose consensus on some points. It is also apparent that there is an elitism of people. A purely and staunch democratic position as well as the elevation of intellect, science and a determined ethical system puts people in the position of power (namely to decide right and wrong, good and bad, etc.). So, Secular Humanism then espouses an egalitarianism of ideas and an elitism of people. We will see this sustained as we go.

Biblical Christianity, on the other hand, presents an egalitarianism of people and an elitism of ideas. All men are created in the image of God and are therefore on equal ground, whereas the idea of right and wrong, good and bad, is transcendent and immovable by human will, decision or fancy. These differences will be addressed in future posts and I look forward to exploring some of the outworkings and practical applicaitons of the Secular Humanist position. Until next time...

Critique One - Part Eight - Bad Coffee

I've been trying to imagine a way to describe in brief my summary thoughts on Mr. Russell's presentation on 'Why I am not a Christian' in particular, and on Atheism in general. Bad Coffee kept coming to mind: it is weak and doesn't do what it's supposed to. Bad coffee looks more like tea, and warm milk is about as effective a pick-me-up. What has become clear in the past few weeks is that when one chooses to jettison God, some real mental gymnastics has to take place to make sense of the world. Mr. Russell's arguments were like the bad coffee, weak and ineffective.

In the end, as C.S. Lewis so plainly put it, Atheism turns out to be too simple, a "boy's philosophy". Atheism has no ability to explain why we are here, who we are, how we should behave, or what will happen to us. What it offers in return is a stubborn individualism, the human intellect (which to be consistent turns out to be just a happy accident of time and chance), and science. Per my last post, i'd like to say a few last words about science. These excerpts are taken from C.S. Lewis and his paper, De Futilitate.

"The physical sciences, then, depend on the validity of logic just as much as metaphysics or mathematics. If popular thought feels 'science' to be different from all other kinds of knowledge because science is experimentally verifiable, popular thought is mistaken. Experimental verification is not a new kind of assurance coming in to supply the deficiencies of mere logic. We should therefore abandon the distinction between scientific and non-scientific thought. The proper distinction is between logical and non-logical thought...

we can make no distinction between science and other logical exercises of thought, for if logic is discredited science must go down whith it...

logic is a real insight into the way in which real things have to exist...Unless we take to be knowledge is an illusion, we must hold in thinking we are not reading rationality into an irrational universe but responding to a rationality with which the universe has always been saturated...

I am well aware that many whose philosophy involves this subjective view of values do in fact sometimes make great efforts for the cause of justice or freedom. But that is because they forget their philosophy. When they really get to work they think taht justice is really good-objectively obligatory whether any one likes it or not: they remember their opposite philosophical belief only when they go back to the lecture room...In a word, unless we allow ultimate reality to be moral, we cannot morally condemn it...

The defiance of the good atheist hurled at an apparently ruthless and idiotic cosmos is really an unconscious homage to something in or behind that cosmos which he recognizes as infinitely valuable and authoritative: for if mercy and justice were really only private whims of his own with no objective and impersonal roots, and if her realized this, he could not go on being indignant. The fact that he arraigns heaven itself for disregarding them means that at some level of his mind he knows they are enthroned in a higher heaven still...

we then of course have to ask how this ultimate morality in the universe can be reconciled with the actual course of events. It is really the same sort of problem that meets us in science. The pell-mell of phenomena, as we first observe them, seems to be full of anomalies and irregularitities; but being assured that reality is logical we go on framing and trying out hypotheses to show that the appaent irregularities are not really irregular at all. The history of science is the history of that process. The corresponding process whereby, having admitted that reality in the last resort must be moral, we attempt to explain evil, is the history of theology."

I want to make clear first and foremost that it is not my intention to demean or fail to recognize the advances and benefits brought about by science. I am a structural engineer by trade, and therefore am very thankful that there are some absolute constants in this world. If things didn't behave predictably I could not do my job, nor design structural elements with any assurance that they will behave in a manner consistent with what has already been observed. What I am saying is that we cannot take science, which is experimentation and observation, and use it as an explanatory tool for the most important and far reaching questions for humankind: namely origins, meaning, morality and destiny. It is not just that science has not been formulated or applied properly to answer these questions, it is that science cannot answer these questions.

What answer do I then give to these questions of origin, meaning, morality and destiny? Not a person, not an organization or a denomination, not a program or thought form - I present Jesus - God, second person of the Trinity, the Word, the way, the truth, the life. If we take the Word and really examine what it has to say we find it is the most cogent, consistent and complete explanation available to those most important questions in life.

It has been said that in Christianity and the Bible joy is central and sorrow is peripheral, whereas in the world sorrow is central and joy is peripheral. It has also been said that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, but has been found difficult and left untried. A hard look at Jesus and the Christian-Biblical worldview will provoke serious thought about difficult issues, but will provide a non-contradictory answer. The alternative, i'm afraid, amounts to little more than a cup of bad coffee.

Critique One - Part Seven - The Man in the River

Mr. Russell is at the close of his presentation and so I have thoughts on his last points herein. I will summarize and give some final thoughts on the whole at the next posting. As for the matter at hand, after reading the final two sections 'Fear the Foundation of Religion' and 'What We Must Do' I could not escape feelings of pity and sorrow for Mr. Russell. I'm sure he would have demanded me not to feel that way toward him, and most likely would have thought me weak and foolish for the concern. Nevertheless, the picture of a man in a raging river carrying him downstream faster and faster toward certain destruction would not leave me. What really broke my heart and brought me to tears was the calm defiance I saw in his face. It was as if he was in this mess, racing toward his own demise, and all the while was ignorant of his surroundings and perfectly at peace with the situation. Mr. Russell passed many years ago, long since having gone over the falls, but even now I so desperately want to throw him and line and pull him in, even against his will.

In his 'Fear' section, Mr. Russell says the following: "Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear...Fear is the basis of the whole thing-fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death." I really don't feel this baseless assertion is worth a response. It is completely ludicrous to assert that all organized religion has is based in fear. For one, there is absolutely no way to prove that is the case. Secondly, it is a profoundly far-reaching and unilateral grouping of the majority of the known world (as the term Religion was used, which I presume includes Christians, Muhammadins and even the Pantheists). As easily as he can assert that Religion is based on fear (presumably of Hell or at least some sort of judgement), I could just as easily assert (without any basis in fact) that all Atheists chose their worldview out of fear that they would have to answer to someone other than themselves.

As a more intelligent option for the abject fear that was assigned to all religions without any supporting evidence, Mr. Russell offers up Science as savior. "Conquer the world by intelligence...A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage...It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future...the future that our intelligence can create." I have dealt with the issue of science in a previous post and will touch on it again in the final summary. I would however, turn to what the Bible has to say about courage. When I read Mr. Russell's thoughts the world needing courage my mind went immediately to Hebrews 11:35b-38 "Others were tortured and refused to be released, so that they might gain a better resurrection. Some faced jeers and flogging, while still others were chained and put in prison. They were stoned, they were sawed in two, they were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins," these courageous believers endured all this for a belief in a way of seeing everything (worldview) that had consistent, cogent, non-contradictory answers to the most important questions in life - those of origin, meaning, morality and destiny. In other words, they knew how they got here, how they were, how to behave and what their future held. That knowledge gave them genuine and limitless courage in the face of trials and persecution that neither I nor Mr. Russell ever encountered. What more could be said except to echo Verse 38 of Hebrews 11, "The world was not worthy of them."

I mentioned Francis Schaeffer in the last post and I'd like to finish up these comments with some excerpts from his Escape from Reason.

"If you do not have the view of the Scriptures that the reformers had, you really have no content to the word Christ - and this is the modern drift in theology...Thus on the basis of the Scriptures, while we do not have exhaustive knowledge, we have true and unified knowledge...We need to learn that when we begin to tamper with teh scriptural concept of true moral guilt, whether it be psychological tampering, genetic tampering, theological tampering or any other kind of tampering, our view of what Jesus did will no longer be scriptural. Christ died for man who had true moral guilt because man had made a real and true choice...This personal-infinite God of the Bible is the Creator of all else. God created all things, and He created them out of nothing. Therefore everything else is finite, everything else is the creature. He alone is the infinite Creator...In science the significant change came about therefore as a result of a shift...to the worldview of materialism or naturalism...What is wrong? When nature is made autonomous, it soon ends up by devouring God, grace, freedom and eventually man. You can hang on to freedom for a while, desperately using the word freedom like Rousseau and his followers, but freedom becomes non-freedom...The basic position of man in rebellion against God is that man is at the center of the universe, that he is autonomous-here lies his rebellion. Man will keep his rationalism and his rebellion, his insistence on total autonomy or partially autonomous areas, even if it means he must give up his rationality."

This is why I weep for the man in the river.

Critique One - Part Six - Take Me to Your Leader

Christians have made many mistakes. Churches have made many mistakes. These are points on which Mr. Russell hammers away, and to which we as believers must stand up and face. Churches and Christians have fought the wrong battles, been on the wrong side of important issues and have missed the mark on many doctrinal points in which we should never waiver. It's interesting as I write this that an article in the local paper just this morning announced an astronomy exhibit opening at the Vatican. The article stated, "The ruling (of the Catholic Church against Galileo) helped fuel accusations that the church was hostile to science - a reputation teh Vatican has been trying to shed ever since." I am not a Catholic and am not here promoting or denouncing Catholicism, just reinforcing the point that some mistakes are not quickly forgotten.

These facts are black marks on Churches and Christians alike, and many, like Mr. Russell, have capitalized on it to build a case against Christ. Many times believers lash out in the face of such criticism fearing that their faith is somehow being compromised. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I for one thank Mr. Russell for being true to his worldview and bringing these shortcoming to light. Why would any Christian say something like that? What is the central message of the Christian faith, if not that man is fallen, broken and sinful; incapable of curing the disease of sin in his/her own life; and lives with a desire for forgiveness and a need for salvation. Jesus offers this forgiveness and salvation through faith in His condescention to become human, suffer and die on the cross, and to raise Himself to defeat sin, death and Hell. What has Mr. Russell done here but prove our point? Pointing out the mistakes of the Church only highlights the fact that man is fallen and actually stipulates the sinful nature of all humankind. Mr. Russell has not reached the end of the Christian faith, he has just found the beginning. Paul reminds the church in Rome of Psalm 14 which states, in part,

"The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.' They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on the sons of men to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. All have turned aside, they have together become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one." (emphasis mine).

Churches will continue to make mistakes so long as it consists of humans. Christians will continue to make mistakes because Christians are first people. Thankfully we are not presenting the Church or ourselves as the answer. As believers, we should be constantly pointing to Jesus as the solution to the sin problem, not people we know, actions we can take, or groups we can join that will 'save us from ourselves'.

Finally, I must point out what should already be obvious, that Christians have not cornered the market on bad behavior. Churches do not have a monopoly on atrocities. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Bin-Laden - surely these names cannot be ignored. Further, if each and every person looks into their own heart, what explanation do they have for the evil they find lurking there. We can never judge a worldview by its abuses. I discount Atheism because of what I see as untenable core priniciples, not because Stalin was an Atheist and he oversaw the killing of millions of his own people. When discussing the efficacy of Christianity, we must always be cognizant of this principle and look not to what people who call themselves Christians do, or what churches do, rather we need to investiagate the claims of Jesus and decide if they correspond to reality and are coherent and consistant. I believe that they are, I believe in Jesus, and that is why I am a Christian and why I try to persuade people to walk with me in following Christ.

Critique One - Part Five - A Truth Ignored

"I now want to say a few words upon a topic which I often think is not quite sufficiently dealt with by Rationalists, and that is the question whether Christ was the best and the wisest of men...Then you come to moral questions. There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in Hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment...I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people know to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects." Having believed to have dealt a serious enough blow to the existence of God and to immortality, Mr. Russell moves on to Christ in his paragraphs entitled The Character of Christ, Defects in Christ's Teaching and The Moral Problem. As a Christian I must admit I was pretty upset at my first reading. A number of assertions were made and scriptures cherry-picked and taken out of context or with complete misunderstanding to press his point. I did read the section a few more times, however, as I myself only desire a hearing for the Gospel of Christ and felt the least I could do was not dismiss these ideas out of hand. I spent a day and a half thinking of his assertions and how to address them. It finally occurred to me that in all three of these sections there was common glaring void, a proverbial elephant in the room being ignored, Truth.

I capitalize Truth intentionally with respect to Francis Schaeffer who spoke extensively about true-truth and its necessity. Mr. Russell bases his entire criticism of Christ on whether in his mind Christ was "...the best and wisest of men." He then looks at bits and pieces of scripture and summarily decides he doesn't like Christ's viewpoint on several issues. Mr. Russell's fatal mistake here is never considering the question, "Is what Christ said true?" In simplest terms, truth is correspondence. If I say the grass in my yard is green, then the truth or falsehood of that statement is found by witnessing if the grass in my yard is in fact green. This is the question at hand with regard to Christ. Mr. Russell is not alone in his dislike of the idea of Hell, and he sees Christ's discussion of it as cruel. What if Hell is a reality, what if Hell is an actual place of eternal torment? If that is true, then cruelty would be not to tell people of its existence and provide a way of escape.

A full and exhaustive defense of Jesus as the Messiah is not possible here due to space and has been dealt with in much finer form in other works. I would offer two things for consideration. First, Jesus said he was the way, the truth and the life. He did not say He knew of the truth, He said He was the truth. If truth is correspondence, then Jesus was saying that He corresponded completely with every prophecy of what the Messiah would be when he came as foretold in the Old Testament. I will leave it to each reader to find out what those prophecies were and if Jesus in fact fleshed out each one. I believe that He did.

Second, Jesus forgave sins. I only recently gave serious thought to what that actually means. If someone were to yell at me for no reason and later realize their error and then ask to be forgiven for the offense, then I could acknowledge my forgiveness. It is an entirely different matter for me to approach someone on the street and tell them that I forgive them their sins. I have no idea against whom they have sinned! Furthermore, I am not the one offended! For Jesus to speak with people and during the discourse pronounce their sins forgiven, He was saying that they had sinned against Him, that He was the party offended, and further that He had the authority to forgive them.

Who is the man who could be so audacious as to make these pronouncements. Philip Schaff puts it this way: "Jesus of Nazareth, without money and arms, conquered more millions than Alexander, Caesar, Mahomet, and Nepoleon; without science and learning, He shed more light on things human and divine than all philosophers and schools combined; without the eloquence of schools, he spoke words of life such as never were spoken before or since, and produced effects which lie beyond the reach of any orator or poet; without writing a single line, He has set more pens to motion, and furnished more themes for more sermons, orations, discussions, learned volumes, works of art and sweet songs of praise, than the whole army of great men if ancient and modern times. Born in a manger, and crucified as a malefactor, He now controls the destinies of the civilized world, and rules a spiritual empire which embraces one-third of the inhabitants of the globe. There never was in this world a life so unpretending, modest and lowly in its outward form and condition, and yet producing such extraordinary effects upon all ages, nations and classes of men. The annals of history produce no other example of such complete and astonishing success in spite of the absence of those material, social, literary, and artistic powers and influences which are indispensable to success for a mere man."

Jesus was the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament. He was the fulfillment of the promise long before made to the world, and the one identified by the man from the wilderness who said He was the One to be followed. He was fully God and fully man. Malcolm Muggeridge in his "Jesus: The Man Who Lives" says, "Jesus had previously told the disciples that whatever was prayed for sincerely in his name would be granted, to that point that mountains could be made to move themselves by prayer. If, therefore, he had truly asked God to deliver him from betrayal by Judas and all its consequences, his prayer would surely have been answered, and he have been spared the agony and bloody sweat that lay ahead. But, of course, there was the proviso; it must be, not as he willed, but as God willed. And it was God's will that he should be nailed to a cross, and thereby, as the victim of this, perhaps the cruellest form of execution ever devised, provide mankind for ever after with a fount of joy and hope, an inspiration to high endeavor, and a certainty of salvation."

This is the Jesus in whom Mr. Russell chose to disbelieve. Not merely a man like you or I who didn't measure up to his personal subjective preferences for stature or wisdom, but the way, the truth and the life. We must all set about looking at this Jesus and either accepting who He claimed to be and the evidences of what He said and did or denying Him.

Once again, i'd like to close by considering the outworking of Mr. Russell's worldview with regard to Jesus. We must always take a worldview and its assertions to their logical conclusion. Again, Mr. Muggeridge is much more eloquent in making these outworkings plain, "If, as often seems to be the case, we have driven Jesus away, or at any rate back to the catacombs, then we are totally at the mercy of our rulers, whoever they may be and whatever their ideology on behalf of which they purport to govern. The only antidote to the poison from Caesar's laurel crown comes from Jesus's crown of thorns. He alone can deliver us from the monstrosities and buffooneries of power, as has been discovered by the most perceptive spirits of our time, such as Sozhenitsyn. Faced with power at its most unbridled and most brutal, they turn for help and comfort, not to Universal Declarations of Human Rights and other pronouncements, solemn undertakings, Covenants and Charters in a similar vein, but to the man wearing a crown of thorns, decked out in a red robe of absurdity and with a court of jeering soldiers. There alone the sting of power is drawn and its pretensions are exploded, and the princes of this world have no recourse but, like Judas, to flee into the night."

Critique One - Part Four - Intellectual Ascent

"Now we reach one stage further in what I shall call the intellectual descent that the Theists have made in their argumentations, and we come to what are called the moral arguments for the existence of God." One could spend a lifetime with all the entailments of the ideas Mr. Russell presents in the two short paragraphs on morality and justice. Again I will be brief and present only three points for consideration.

(1) Unfounded Beginnings. Once again it seems Mr. Russell is content with his own, and other individuals interpretations of God instead of actually investigating what the Christian position on God actually is. He singles out goodness and justice to present his case, but the Bible actually presents many names for God. The significant point here is what the Bible is and what it does not say. The Bible is the revealed Word of God (or God describing Himself to us) where we see who God is and how He operates. The Bible does not say that God exhibits certain qualities, but rather that He is Almighty, Most High, Everlasting, Provider, Banner, Peace, Lord of Hosts, Sanctifier, Shepherd, Righteous, Ever-Present, Master, Transcendent, Savior, Father. This is significant because to prove God doesn't exist you would have to prove that He is not those things (not just that He appears to not be those things in some situations). This is, I believe, the fatal flaw with Atheism; namely, the affirmation of a negative in the absolute. More on this later.

(2) As regards goodness in particular, I would only do injustice to the topic if I were to do anything but reiterate C.S. Lewis from his 'Mere Christianity': "In other words badness cannot succeed in being bad in the same way that goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled...Put it more simply still. To be bad, he must exist and have intelligence and will. But existence, intelligence and will are in themselves good. Therefore he must be getting them from the Good Power: even to be bad he must borrow of steal from his opponent. And do you new begin to see why Christianity has always said that the devil is a fallen angel? That is not a mere story for children. It is a real recognition of the fact that evil is a parasite, not an original thing."

(3) As regards justice, again I defer to Mr. Lewis: "But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line...A man feels wet when he falls into water, because a man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet...Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God does not exist-in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless-I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality-namely my idea of justice-was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning."

As I mentioned before, this topic is deep and requires much thought. Ultimately, the Christian knows that God is good and He is just. He created and it was good. He created man and woman for man and it was very good. Mankind chose sin and with the entrance of sin it went bad. Only an unjust, unloving, bad God would leave us to our own devices and not do everything He could to set things right (like sending His only Son to suffer and die to defeat death and the grave so all humankind would have the opportunity of salvation). This is precisely what He has done, why we should fall on our face before Him as those unworthy of such mercy, and why He has every right to command our exclusive faith, love and worship.

Critique One - Part Three - An Eternal Choice

Mr. Russell spoke briefly concerning the Natural Law Argument and the Argument from Design as continued support for why he chose not to follow Jesus. He indicated that advances in science had convinced him that chance was a better explanation for why things are exactly the way they are than is the Biblical creation account. Mr. Russell admittedlly spent a short amount of time on this point because of the vast amount of detail involved. Likewise, my comments in response will be brief. There are only two points i'd like to present for consideration.

First, science is an explanatory agent. Science is observation. We believe something to be true, we devise a way to test that explanation and observe the results of the test then make a judgement to the validity of the first premise. Therefore, if science were perfected then we would have an explanation for how everything in the universe works. We quickly see the limitation here. Science can never explain why things are the way they are because we cannot observe origins. True scientists would admit as much. This means that science can have nothing to say about origins, only untestable, unobservable premises. This is why I believe advances in science only make clearer the case for creation. The more we discover, the more difficult it is to explain the intricate details by time and chance. If one looks at just two recent proposals for intellegent design, namely irreducible complexity and specified complexity (look briefly at the make-up and operation of blood clotting and DNA, for example) one would easily see that the passage of time makes ideas of chance as moving beyond the limits of plausibility.

"I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves...although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out...it is not such as to render life miserable." I am glad Mr. Russell at least recognizes that people have real problems with the outworkings of his views, although he quickly dismisses those individuals concerns. We cannot waive our hand at the reality that people are miserable. If one holds that everything came to be via time and chance then there is nothing to hope for. Death is the end. We'd have to consider whether considering anything important (origin, meaning, morality, destiny) was worth consideration. The Bible is clear that man is immortal, and will spend an eternity in one place or the other. This gives the Christian an unswerving hope no matter the situation, and the skeptic despondency and hopelessness even in the best of times.

Mr. Russell has missed the logical conclusion of his arguments against natural law and design. If we are all here as a result of time and chance, then man is just an accident, an unexplainable phenomena in the universe. If this is the case, then why should I as an accident care one whit what another accident thinks about anything? In other words, Mr. Russell's worldview discourages anyone from even considering his worldview. What Mr. Russell rejects, and disciples of Christ offer, is the peace, contentment, joy and hope that comes with belief that we are created in the very image of God, for the glory of God who makes available salvation, justification, sanctification and an eternal home in His presence through faith in Jesus Christ. It is a choice each of us must make.

Critique One - Part Two - Bad Assumptions

"'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, 'Who made God?' That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause."

This treatment of the First Cause Principle by Mr. Russell appears at first blush to be pretty logical, but there seem to be some bad assumptions behind his position. Namely the following:

(1) Mistaken Equality. In mathematics we understand the simple formula, If A=1 and B=1 then A=B. In this case, A and B are equivalents because the have the same value, and are therefore interchangeable. Saying A equals unity is the same as saying B is equal to unity. Unfortunately Mr. Russell makes this assumption about God and man, namely that they are equal with regard to causation. It could be stated thus, "If man has a cause and man is equal to God with regard to causation, then God must have a cause." Once we make the assumption that man is somehow on the same footing with God we are no longer discussing Christianity.

(2) Necessity. Man is not a necessary being. Human existence is not a pre-requisite for the function of the universe. We are dependent, this is why we must have a cause. The Bible is not confused here. God is a necessary being, independent and eternal. There has never been a time when God was not. This exposes a small part of the beauty of the Trinitarian view of God, the three-in-one (and we bring in Christ here). God didn't have to create anything because there was community in the Trinity from eternity past. Hence, "In the beginning God created..." He was necessarily there eternally before the "beginning" and created because He chose to do so.

I am not here trying to make a defense of the First Cause Principle in all its detail. I am concerned only with the usage of it in Mr. Russell's line of argument against the existence of God. I believe the assumptions inherent in the First Cause Principle as described by Mr. Russell are not valid and therefore cast no doubt or shadow on the existence of God.