Is there a battle to win and a cost if we don’t fight? Let’s talk about it on Deeper Waters.
Readers of this blog probably know by now that I quite like the church that Allie and I have found. I get a sermon that is intellectually satisfying while touching the heart as well. I wish I could say that this was the norm when it came to churches, but alas, I cannot. Too many churches have the congregations just getting some pablum so they can go home and at the end of the day feel good about themselves.
Christians. Take a look at the culture around you. Does it look like we’re really making an impact? Does it look like the church is being salt and light in this world?
If not, then why should we go to church and feel good about ourselves? If we are not obeying the Great Commmission, then we should be looking at ourselves with shame.
I have in fact reached the point where I want to go up to pastors and say to them “Please tell me why I should believe that Jesus rose from the dead.” There are two answers that are unacceptable for this one. Now there could be variants on how these answers are said but the answers are still the same.
“The Holy Spirit tells me that Jesus rose from the dead.”
“The Inerrant Word of God says Jesus rose from the dead.”
What’s the problem with both of these? In the long run, they both beg the question. You say the Holy Spirit tells you this? Fine. The Holy Spirit also apparently tells Mormons that the Book of Mormon is from God and that Joseph Smith is a true prophet. Do you believe that? Why should I think what you’re experiencing is the Holy Spirit and not something else? You could say “Well if you experience it, you know who it is.” Don’t you think the Mormons would say the exact same thing?
What about the latter? Now I do hold to inerrancy, but I hold to inerrancy as a conclusion and not a presupposition. You want to claim your holy book is the final authority. Fine. Muslims do the exact same thing. Why is it that I should believe what you say about your holy book but I should not believe what the Muslims say about theirs?
If all you have is your own subjective viewpoint for defending the resurrection, you will not last when opposition comes your way. When I meet pastors like this now I have a simple wish to make of them. “Get out of the pulpit. We’re in a war and we don’t need people like you dragging us down. Give your office to someone who deserves it.”
You see, too many pastors are acting like there isn’t a battle going on. They still have this idea that all Christianity is supposed to teach us is how to be good people. Christ did not need to come just to teach us ethics. The people of the day could have got that from the philosophers of their time. Christ came to bring about the Kingdom of God. Note that. Kingdom. How many people out there think that you could belong in a Kingdom and not care about what you were to do for the King but only think about what the King was to do for you?
There is a culture war that is going on here in America. If you want to deny this, then you are quite simply a fool. There is an active homosexual agenda that’s wanting to silence your voice on the public square. Abortion has been around for 40+ years and we have seen the lives of millions of innocent babies claimed. The new atheist agenda is spreading like wildfire through the colleges and your students are going to encounter it. Muslims would be delighted to bring Sharia Law here to America.
There is not a question any more of if we and our children will face opposition. We will. There is only the question of how we would face it.
Picture if you had a son or daughter who had to take a job somewhere where you had concerns about them walking to their car in the parking lot. What are you going to do? You might ask the police to keep a watch on the area, but the police can’t be there 24/7. What else could you do? You might want to say “I’ll give my children mace” or “I’ll enroll them in a class so they can carry a concealed weapon” or “I’ll have them learn karate.” Why? You want your children to have a fighting chance if they come against enemy opposition.
Picture your having a son who goes into the military. You receive word from his officers that they are about to fly overseas and go and fight the enemy. You ask if your son has taken any courses in combat to prepare for this mission and you hear “Nah. We don’t think that’s really necessary. We figure if we just give them a gun that they’ll know enough to be able to protect themselves.” I suspect you’ll be calling your Congressman or Senator before too long if that’s the case.
Yet we want to send our children into the lions’ den regularly and do so without giving them basic protection in apologetics?
There’s a word for that.
That word is “Stupid.”
Some of you might say “Well my children aren’t going to college.” Okay. College isn’t for every person, but this is happening in high school! Opposition will be there and not just intellectual opposition, but moral opposition. You want your children to practice a Biblical sexual ethic. What reason will you give them? If you just have them say “The Bible says so”, their friends in high school who are not Christians and are sexually active will be more than happy to clear them of their delusions on the Bible. If that takes place, do you really think your assurances will be enough to overpower hormones? How many of you would have had that work with your parents?
Some of you might say you will home school your children. Fine. Do that. Keep in mind this reality however. Sooner or later your children are going to leave home and go off into the world. Are they going to be prepared or not? If not, you are one who will be held accountable, especially the fathers. The fathers are the main ones in Ephesians 5 who are to raise up their family and the only ones said to give an account for how the whole family turns out. I’m not at all saying mothers are unimportant in this. Mothers are vastly important. Fathers in the Biblical teaching however are called to be leaders of their family and to raise up their children well. If you’re reading this and a father, imagine how you will stand before God and give an account of how you raised your children. If they’re not equipped and they fall away, what account will you give?
The reality is that we can win this battle. I think of a certain person in apologetics who recently said about my position to reclaim academia “How do you plan on doing that in a nation under the judgment of God?” How? Simple. One battle at a time. How dare we abandon our intellectual heritage and give it right over to the enemy! This is especially the case with NT scholarship where Christians should be at their strongest. We have too often let the enemy dictate how the battle will be fought. No more.
In other battles, when Christians do something, results happen. When Chick-Fil-A Day came, Christians went in droves to their Chick-Fil-A stores and set records in fast food sales for that day. When Duck Dynasty was pulled from A&E, Christians started on their own a boycott page and called their cable companies and canceled. Cracker Barrel had decided to not carry Duck Commander material. They changed their mind on that quickly when Christians spoke up! When Suntrust decided to pull away from some men who were in support of traditional marriage, Christians immediately began going to their Facebook page and letting them know their discontent and began pulling their accounts. Before a day had passed, Suntrust changed their mind.
Christians WON all of these battles.
The problem is not that the church cannot win battles. The problem is that the church rarely shows up.
I have too often seen churches deny the need for apologetics training. I will go to churches regularly and offer them to come and work with them. It will be of no charge to them whatsoever! I would be delighted just to teach. 99% of the time the answer is that they don’t really need something like that. I always leave a church like that realizing the pastor is just deluding himself. As one of my mentors once told me “The pastor will call you back when his son comes home from college and announces he’s abandoned his faith.”
When we encounter those who abandon their faith, it is normally for foolish reasons. Also, it can be because too much emphasis was placed on a secondary doctrine instead of a primary, the resurrection of Jesus. The two biggest offenders in this category are young-earth creationism and inerrancy. In both cases, when someone finds a reason why these are called into question and they no longer believe them, everything else crumbles like a house of cards. If inerrancy or young-earth creationism are made the foundation for the Christian faith, we are setting ourselves up to fail.
Make no mistake. We are at war. We cannot be just playing games and getting pablum at church and expect to be able to fulfill the Great Commission in this day and age. Here in America, we have the best means to equip our people. There is no excuse for our being unprepared for the battle that awaits us. IF we who have been given so much ability to learn and spread the truth fail with it, we will all give an account before God of how we did.
I can only end with saying what Joshua said for how he would decide. Choose this day who you will serve but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
Tags: abortion, apologetics, Chick-Fil-A, Christianity, Christians, culture war, Duck Dynasty, Holy Spirit, homosexuality, Jesus rose from the dead, morality, Sexual ethics
Deeper Waters 
July 8, 2014 at 10:12 -04:00Jul |
What you call basic protection in apologetics imposed on children when they have no means to compare and contrast what it is they are being taught (for reasons you think are justified) I call religious indoctrination of the innocent. That’s a clue about its ethical value.
This ‘war’ you claim exists could be easily ‘won’ if you could demonstrate your religious beliefs were true! Mission accomplished.
But that’s not the case, is it?
Why isn’t this task – demonstrating that your beliefs reflect and describe reality – a simple one?
Well, I think the answer is pretty obvious: it’s not simple because your religious beliefs do not reflect and describe the reality we share. Reality in this case is the proper enemy. Good luck defeating it.
When young people come to this realization, substituting religious indoctrination as a defense mechanism rather than a critical re-examination of the beliefs in light of better information, it seems to me to be an admission by the religious of utter defeat on the battleground of reason in reality and replaced with a battleground of rote learning in theology that doesn’t overcome the original problem; it only substitutes a diversion.
And the real casualty in this kind of ‘warfare’ is caring enough about what’s true to stick to the problem and not be diverted by shiny objects. That’s the sacrifice religious people impose on their children: to teach them children that it is more important to maintain the unjustified beliefs of the parents for poor reasons than to think for themselves and come to their own conclusions.
Religious indoctrination as a practice is an admission of intellectual failure to justify religious beliefs and a demonstration of distrust that children will support the beliefs on merit. That, too, is a rather important clue parents would prefer to avoid thinking too hard about…
July 8, 2014 at 10:12 -04:00Jul |
You are right to criticize the failure of many Christians to fail to properly connect Christianity to reality. A nice analogy is Schrödinger’s equation: what the hell does
(1) iħ ∂/∂t Ψ = HΨ
even mean? Unless someone shows you how to connect the various bits of that to reality such that you can plug stuff in that you observe from reality, turn the crank on the mathematics, and then compare the result to what you observe in reality, you won’t understand it. It is really important to understand the difference between ‘fact’ and ‘truth’. Only reality makes logical mathematical constructions true or false—or if you prefer, ‘useful’ or ‘useless’. And then you might get some heat from pure maths people—who says math has to be useful?!
Fortunately, there actually are ways to connect bits of Christianity to reality. For example, I can do something like I say needs to be done with Schrödinger’s equation, with the following triads:
• Mt 5:43-48, Jn 13:34-35, Jn 17:20-23
• Mt 5:23-24, Mt 18:15-20, Eph 4:25-27
• Mt 7:1-5, Mt 23:1-4, Gal 6:1-5
• Mt 7:15-23, Mt 13:24-30, Mt 25:31-46
If you’d like me to give that a shot, just tell me, tildeb. I warn you though: nobody says we have to build the kind of society and world (i.e. “kingdom of heaven”) described in the Bible. Similarly, nobody had to create negative index metamaterials. Heat death could have happened before such cool science was done. Similarly, no naturalistic law demands that we construct the “kingdom of heaven”. Furthermore, there is no evidence for it until it is actually constructed well enough to point to. If I brought directions on how to create negative index metamaterials back to the 18th century, people would probably call BS. They could ask “where’s the evidence?”, and I wouldn’t have any, because it hasn’t yet been built.
Furthermore, different people would believe that negative index metamaterials are possible at different stages of explanation and manufacture. Some would only believe upon seeing light refracted in the opposite way to what is usual. Some might just call it ‘magic’ and never believe, making the paraphrase of Max Planck come true once again: “Science advances one funeral at a time.”
So tildeb, do you accept that the kind of society and world the NT claims to make possible could be pretty awesome? (There are definitely multiple interpretations of what this “kingdom of heaven” would look like, so we can talk about that, too.) Just look at the first triad I posted. Do you believe that incredible diversity could exist without war and without oppression? Do you think people can learn to agápē those who are very unlike them? Or are you more of the French persuasion, that people wearing full headcoverings are a threat to social harmony? Here’s a claim in the Bible:
Do you think that is possible? Do you think that ‘negative index metamaterial’ can actually be constructed? Do you think it would be good to construct it?
July 8, 2014 at 10:12 -04:00Jul |
Oh Tilde. You’re so hysterical. You really think that the only reason people believe or disbelieve something is because of evidence? I can’t think of a single proposition everyone in this world agrees on, even if there is such a thing as truth itself.
And as for indoctrination. Yeah. I have this strange view that parents can raise up their children and teach them what they believe and why. By all means give them the equipment to study other belief systems. Interestingly, Christian schools have classes in logic. The public school system doesn’t.
July 8, 2014 at 10:12 -04:00Jul
Hysterical? I’m not the one calling this issue a war!
It’s a rather selfish and self-centered notion I think that the ‘equipment’ we give to our children should be what to think (and how to defend that) according to our preferences and beliefs and biases rather than how to think in various ways. Teaching religious beliefs to children as if true independent of the parent’ belief when its not is, to use Dan Barker’s words, ‘studying a subject without an object’, meaning the object – God – is assumed (and it’s a HUGE assumption) to be in reality but absent from it with cause (hence the need for apologetics). What children far too often take away from all of this ‘teaching’ is fear of life. What a marvelous gift to arm the next generation to become the defenders of the faith.
July 8, 2014 at 10:12 -04:00Jul
Yes Tilde. You’re hysterical. Every time you comment you remind me of the damage done by atheism to thinking today.
Sorry Tilde, but my regular recommendation to people has been to learn to read both sides of an issue and to evaluate it that way. That’s the same way children should be raised, but feel free to come in and assume otherwise because you live with the paranoia of someone like Richard Dawkins.
Also, I see you’re using Dan Barker (Now there’s a great source! That explains so much! Here you talk about thinking and you post the words of a Christ-myther!) as a claim to teach children what isn’t true, which means you’re engaging in atheistic presuppositionalism. My children are not going to be told to assume God. When we have them, they will learn I believe in God, but they will also learn why I believe in God and I will welcome them bringing the best arguments they can against my view. This is quite different from the atheist view that wants to shut down all opposition and discussion.
No. Let’s teach them the new atheist way. “We don’t need to read scholarship that disagrees with us! Richard Dawkins said it! It must be true!”
July 8, 2014 at 10:12 -04:00Jul
Ahh, I see I’m on your ignore. I was wondering.
July 8, 2014 at 10:12 -04:00Jul
Tilde put you on ignore?
July 8, 2014 at 10:12 -04:00Jul
Well, he’s conveniently ignoring my responses to him which seem on-topic and seem to provide challenges to his audacious claims. I can only infer of course, since I don’t have access to whom he is ignoring.
July 8, 2014 at 10:12 -04:00Jul
Well if he is, it’s amusing that hear he’s wanting everyone else to be open and it looks like he isn’t.
Atheistic presuppositionalism.
July 8, 2014 at 10:12 -04:00Jul
Well if he is, it’s amusing that hear he’s wanting everyone else to be open and it looks like he isn’t.
Atheistic presuppositionalism.
July 9, 2014 at 10:12 -04:00Jul
Atheistic presuppositionalism?
No. That’s a cooked up excuse for your failure to create a religious explanatory model that works to accuratley and reliably reflect and describe the reality you claim includes your god. Don’t blame me (and call me names) for your failure; simply demonstrate your model!
Labreuer,
Thanks for the invitation to go down the rabbit hole with you to supposedly connect your faith-based claims with the reality we share. But if this little journey of the mind requires pit stops into quantum physics, borrowing an analogy with negative index metamaterials and then refitted by scriptural interpretive triads in order to make the connection (square pegs, round holes anyone?) that some ‘kingdom of god’ is possible, then that’s a pretty good indication to me that it is a rabbit hole well worth avoiding. Obviously, what’s down there isn’t up here where your journey’s beginning are based on maps of your own making… with the map key clearly built by your assertions and assumptions extracted from your faith and not the reality we share. That’s why the journey you wish to ‘share’ with me is so convoluted. That’s a clue…
Look, go ahead and build your kingdom of heaven to demonstrate its value but don’t assume that justifies this bizarre requirement that I (or your children) or anyone else must go along with it. Form your commune with like-minded individuals (and not indoctrinated children) and demonstrate its superior moral value. That’s fine. Mind you, if history is any kind of guide worth considering, I suspect you’ll end up with some rendition of the Handmaiden’s Tale as most religious sects do but hey, whatever turns your crank. I decline your kind offer to drink the Cool-Aid with you.
My criticism of the OP is that turning this quest to bring god to the heathens (and cry crocodile tears when the effort is blunted by equality laws) and defend the indoctrinated from reality’s rather brutal arbitration of this failed model into a kind of ‘war’ you wish your children to fight on your behalf against those who choose to dare to think for themselves, respect reality, and insist you not have the means to control their lives is not good advice. That criticism has nothing whatsoever to do with quantum mechanics, negative index metamaterials, and everything to do with good reasons. These reasons stand on their own merit and do not require me to understand a very disturbing interpretation of scripture used to excuse and justify this so-called war… whether in singlets, dyads, triads, or whatever mix and match assortments you think makes the navel gazing rabbit hole you have created worth exploring. Other apologists may think the journey well worth taking. I don’t.
July 9, 2014 at 10:12 -04:00Jul
No. Atheistic presuppositionalism is a reality. It’s when atheists assume that they alone are rational and their belief alone is rational and don’t think they have to argue for it.
But if you want an argument for Christianity, here’s one for the resurrection. Feel free to give a better explanation for the data.
Christianity had a shameful Messiah in an honor-shame culture. You wanted to avoid shame, but crucifixion was the most shameful death of all.
Christianity taught resurrection. For the ancients, the body was a prison to escape. You didn’t want to have a return to the body.
Christianity was a new belief. In the ancient world, antiquity and tradition was honored and novelty was looked at with suspicion.
Christianity taught exclusivism. In the ancient world, tolerance and inclusivism were the norms.
Christianity had a Messiah that had shameful origins such as being from a town of no reputation and a people of no reputation, even perhaps an illegitimate Messiah. (The Virgin Birth would have been seen as a way of avoiding that.)
Christianity taught you to not worship other gods or the emperor. This was a no-no in a culture where deviancy and individualistic actions would be viewed with suspicion.
Christianity had a Messiah who had a shameful behavior.
And this is just the start.
And yet, Christianity survived. The only reason I can think of that such a negative belief would survive is that people saw that it was true, and it in fact grew fast among the middle and upper class who had the resources to test the claims.
July 9, 2014 at 10:12 -04:00Jul
Do you want more basic illustrations? No illustrations? I’ll tell you what statistically happens when I don’t give as complete an answer as I gave to you: the discussion hares off into many directions and never goes anywhere. I have taken my considerable knowledge of how discussions of criticisms like the ones you offered go [online], and attempted to plug all the various ‘holes’ that get exploited in order to avoid discussing the main thrust.
So, I have no problem with this. What I do have a problem with is if and when you attempt to thwart my building of the kingdom of heaven. For example, see Colleges and Evangelicals Collide on Bias Policy, which is the beginning of the end for certain kinds of religious practice being funded as a club, just like all the other clubs. One must be tolerant of everyone but the intolerant—oh wait, that’s Russell’s Paradox.
No, your reasons depend on you not responding to criticism, criticism of the very claim that some activity you call ‘indoctrination’ is truly indoctrination. Or rather, criticism of the claim that whatever it is you are teaching children, it ain’t ‘indoctrination’, while whatever it is that them religious bigots are doing, it is ‘indoctrination’.
And so, I attempted to explain that one can connect the Bible to reality, just as we connect e.g. F = ma to reality. Surely this is a way to keep it from being ‘indoctrination’? But I suspect that you don’t actually want to talk in these terms, so you found excuses to avoid my criticism.
July 8, 2014 at 10:12 -04:00Jul |
Hear, hear! Jacques Ellul’s The Subversion of Christianity is a great book to go with this post.
This is peanuts in comparison to the fulfillment of CS Lewis’ predictions in his The Abolition of Man. The very conception of personhood is under attack, and with that goes responsibility, and with that goes humanity. (As to the relationship between responsibility and Imago Dei—which I take to be the true humanity—see Emil Brunner’s Man in Revolt.) From Subversion:
Right now, Western culture is probably comparable to the Exodus-era Israelites who wanted to return to Israel and its pots of meat—and slavery. Revelation doesn’t use the term “one who conquers” 7+1 times arbitrarily. In Rev 21:8, there is a reason that the first damning characteristic mentioned is cowardice.
July 8, 2014 at 10:12 -04:00Jul |
My wife and I haven’t read anything this inspiring and powerful on the internet in quite a while. Thank you so much for your powerful address to pastors, parents and Christians around the globe – a message that is much in need of being disseminated.
July 8, 2014 at 10:12 -04:00Jul |
All your points are very well taken, and I think I understand where you are coming from. I am an Orthodox Christian (read, Ancient Church) and I have been working and writing and testifying publicly as best I can that the Church Age as we’ve known it is over, that Christianity as a religion has served its purpose and now, because it is unwilling to take the next step in our human evolution, is slipping into irrelevance and rightly so, and that there will be a single, visible Church by the end of this century, which will be the Orthodox, because it’s the only one outfitted to survive any culture or political war, proven by its existence from Greco-Roman times to today.
However, I am not being a denominational Orthodox, even tho I ‘belong’ to the Greek Church, and attend services at an Arab church (little ‘c’ church = congregation; big ‘C’ Church = the Body of Christ). I am just as unhappy with the rigidity and refusal to recognize the ‘Orthodox’ outside the historic Church by the ‘canonical’ Orthodoxy as I am with those who want to perpetuate denominational divisions based on historical and doctrinal dysfunctions.
In other words, the contemporary (Eastern) Orthodox Church is, due to human failings, applying criteria from our ancient struggles to defend itself from other Christians who find themselves outside it, when they should be building bridges of understanding to all kinds of Protestants and Independents whose faith is actually Orthodox, tho their practice is different (I won’t say heterodox, because that must be decided by the Church in council).
And, on the other side of the divide, contemporary non-Orthodox but christologically orthodox Christians (sorry for using technical terms) can’t be blamed if they find the Orthodox Church mysterious, forbidding, crypto-Catholic, and possibly legalistic. That’s part of the ‘unwelcome mat’ put out by a Church that spent its first thousand years defending itself from real heresies, ideas that you as well as we would find erroneous and even lethal.
What I tell my co-religionists (sorry to use this term, because Christian Orthodoxy is NOT a religion, per se) is, stop playing so hard-to-get, stop making the road difficult for sensitive, sincere Christians who really want to be joined to the Apostolic Church (another name for Orthodoxy ‘at its best’), and come up with a formulary agreeable to all of you (I mean ‘us’ since I’m one of them) that will admit other Christians, not just singly but as congregations, into the Church. What’s the good of watch-dogging the borders of the Church, if you don’t obey your Master when He calls you off, so the new arrivals can enter without fear and trembling?
What I tell those who, like me twenty-five years ago, encounter Orthodoxy and realise that it IS the Ancient Church, despite the accretions, and not dangerous (no hidden terms and conditions) is, if you go to an Orthodox church and get the cold shoulder (no one sits down with you after services and introduces themselves, etc) then pass on that church, no matter how beautiful the worship is, and try another. I just happened to luck out, and joined the Greek Orthodox Church in a time and place where a revival was in progress. But the Church has fruitful branches, and unfruitful, even dying branches. Be persistent, force your way in, if you have to, because Orthodoxy is the inheritance of EVERYONE who believes in Jesus and wants to follow Him.
I have no solution, of course to the dysfunction of Church Disunity except to rant, rave, soothe, and heal. The first two for the stubborn, the last two for the meek. My main thrust, other than one-on-one personal ministry and evangelism, has been my blogs, Cost of Discipleship, and some of the shorter ones, such as Orthodox Anarchist, The.
I am not out to sucker followers, and I don’t acknowledge any, but I hope that my writing (I will begin publishing in book form after I retire next March) will help Christians, and even non- or post-Christians, to understand what is at stake here, how important is living in the Resurrection of Christ, and in the Word (the Bible), and how inevitable unity among the disciples of Jesus is. Ecumenism has little impact and will never bring Christians anything but a superficial level of inter-church cooperation. That is absolutely not what Jesus wants, nor what He prays for to His Father. “I pray that they will be one, as You and I are One.’
If you read this to the end, thanks, brother, and God bless.
In Christ,
Romanos
July 8, 2014 at 10:12 -04:00Jul |
I read it all. I think it’s really best to focus on Mere Christianity. I don’t count on any one church to have it all right. What I do see is the resurrection is central, and that’s something Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox all agree on.
July 9, 2014 at 10:12 -04:00Jul |
Great essay Nick Peters!
July 10, 2014 at 10:12 -04:00Jul |
[…] post by Nick Peters is a very passionate argument that the church needs to re-order […]
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