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July 23, 2000
Skeptics about the Christian faith have played a useful role in the development of Christian claims to have the truth. Skeptics forced the early church to sharpen and develop its doctrine. In more recent centuries skeptics have kept the Church honest by engaging Christian thinking with developments in the natural and social sciences. Serious skeptics have sometimes been judged to be heretics by the Church; persecuted to the point of their martyrdom; and then later, when the Church came to its senses, rehabilitated as saints. Not all skeptics regarding the Christian faith are helpful: some are simply silly in their criticisms, others are mischievous or even pernicious using a false skepticism to try to destroy the faith of others. But I can't have these in mind when I appeal for open-mindedness both in our critics and with ourselves. I have in mind those who like Doubting Thomas in the Fourth Gospel are open to believing but who are not convinced and who lack the will, unless otherwise persuaded, to make a faith commitment. These skeptics tend to be sincere and humble and they help us who are within the Christian fold to also stay sincere and humble. At the beginning these two thoughts: the greatest gift in all creation is the human mind. We are because we think and we think because God made us to think. Therefore, it follows that the Christian faith can only be strengthened as Christians engage their minds in all the channels through which the intellect leads us. Reason is not the enemy of faith. Mind and heart are companions on the way to the Truth. And then this balancing observation: God is greater than the sum of all our thoughts; God remains the infinite mystery behind our creation and the One who transcends our mental capabilities. Yes, we humans can know God, but as the hymn by William Cowper titled "God Moves in a Mysterious Way" puts our situation:
"Our unbelief is sure to err And scan God's work in vain; God is God's own interpreter, whose truth shall be made plain."
And now let's lay out some other ground rules for our discussion on how both believers and skeptics can deal with the human need expressed in "Lord, I believe. Help Thou my unbelief.": First, all parties need have an open mind. It's striking how often people who claim to be open-minded are anything but open to new truth. Don't write off extraordinary events such as the Resurrection of Jesus on the presupposition that it's too strange to be considered. Don't let your skepticism or prejudice close the door on possibilities which initially seem incredible to your infinite mind. In others words, don't make the limits of your experience the limits of reality. Secondly, ask the big questions. Life is a mysterious business and we cannot casually let it pass us by without saying, "What's it all about?" We cannot brush off the majestic universe with an agnostic's shrug. We cannot look at human beings who think, love, worship, feel guilty and appreciate beauty without pausing to ask, "What kind of world can produce that kind of creature?" Nor can we turn our backs on the most extraordinary person in history who made the most extravagant claims, and simply consign Jesus to a list of eccentrics to be ignored. Third, correlate data. Just like scientists correlate all data to come up with the best theory, so spiritual inquirers need to correlate the data they observe and embrace that position which best fits the facts. Finally, be prepared to be committed. Christian faith involves not just the head, but the heart. If you are intellectually persuaded, have the courage to commit to moral and spiritual obedience. A Christian saint said: "By doubting we are led to inquire, and by inquiry we perceive the truth." Doubt and understanding sooner or later embrace. So, doubters, take heart. All seekers after truth deal with a couple of universal issues. One is: Can we prove the Christian faith? Or for that matter, can we prove anything! A schoolboy once defined faith as believing in something you know isn't true! Nothing could be further from the case. Wishful thinking just like wishful unthinking is not what the Christian faith is about. The Christian faith is embraced by millions primarily because it is held to be true. The verification of the claims of faith need, however, to undergo the same ways of scrutiny as any other kind of proving. …the scientists must consider all the possible evidence before them, and seekers likewise must consider all the relevant evidence for Christian belief. This will include evidence about the origin of the universe and of the human race, plus data from the whole range of our experience. And as the scientist must explore all theories, so the Christian seeker must explore all theories to account for what we observe about the universe, human nature, our inner selves. The Christian faith can confidently dialogue with philosophy or with other great faiths. …the historians ask questions about events and the endless historical studies have examined and often challenged claims about the life and death of Jesus. The Jesus of history is, understandably, far removed from modern comprehension but we know with assurance the main outlines of his teachings, travels, healings, who were his friends and enemies, his unjust trial and persecution, and his painful death. In fact, we know a great deal more about the biography of Jesus of Nazareth than, for example, William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon. Shakespeare is arguably the more important cultural figure of Europe of the last 500 years and yet we know little about him. We know Shakespeare through his works. We, finally, know Jesus through his works. …the philosopher inquires if ideas and suppositions make sense? Are there contradictions to what I know and experience. Believers as all the time ask "Does the Christian faith make sense?" And we are stirred to do so often just because of our dialogue with skeptics. …the artist, poet, writer, dancer investigates insightful and inspired truth in the great human adventure to claim a sense of the Truth in our aesthetic experience. The Christian faith embraces these arts and their insights and in fact has been the primary motivation for them in the West. …in personal relationships, we ask "Can I trust so and so?" Is that person genuine? Is he or she the kind of person he or she professes to be?" So we can ask the same questions of Christ. …and finally we know that we cannot truly get to know other people in depth without real commitment to them, neither can we have final verification about Jesus till we commit ourselves to him in an act of faith, albeit a rational act based on good evidence. Another and related great issue is: Chance or Design? Two facts constantly face each of us: the fact of the universe and the fact of our own existence. The Christian faith, like every alternative and sometimes complementary school of thinking, addresses these two universal and fundamental facts. Our faith argues that the universe is the creation of an infinite, personal God? Others assert that the universe is the product of impersonal energy, plus time, plus chance. Both theories need to be subjected to the tests of evidence, logic and personal experience. The Christian faith pays high regard to the fact that in the midst of what might seem like an impersonal and mechanistic universe, we have mind, personality and self-consciousness. Also there is a mysterious thing called beauty and we apprehend it. Like our hymns today the Christian traces mind, personality, self-awareness, beauty and morality to a personal Creator. We do not hold that matter explains matter; we see the forces and influences of the non-material, the spiritual and the mysterious at work in the universe and in our lives. The Christian experience finds that we creatures are inexorably linked to something mysterious and ultimate: We human beings reflect, think, feel. We have guilt feelings, make amends, and try to do better. We grow indignant over cruelty, angry over injustice, praise good, and abhor evil. We look for meaning and desire to trace meaning to the ultimate. The leading literary and intellectual voice of my college years was Albert Camus, the French existentialist novelist whose works like "The Plague" and "The Stranger" were in every student's reading and which asserted there was no meaning to life. Yet Camus, like his older colleague, the philosopher Jean Paul-Sartre, was a passionate opponent of French colonialism in his native Algeria. Both men, while any ultimate truth and meaning, were willing to stake their very lives on opposing what they discerned as imperialistic injustice. Where did their passion, their sense of justice, their courage come from? Sartre died an atheist but the younger man, Camus, at the time of his untimely death in an automobile accident was undergoing preparation for baptism from the pastor of the American Church in Paris! We humans experience a powerful sense of oughtness and we look for meaning behind the evil we experience and the pain and suffering which scrambles the search for human happiness. We trace these powerful moral urges to a morally perfect God, who has made us to be restless until we rest in Him; and who in giving Himself to us in Christ on the cross gives us not prepositions to answer the problem of evil and suffering but who identifies himself with us and bears the worse that any human might bear and in experiencing it assures us of the ultimate defeat of all that is life denying. Faith in that God is the Christian response to evil because faith in Christ gives us a victory which overcomes the problem of evil by confining its rage within our trust and hope in a good God and by recognising the limits of our finite minds. Saint Paul counseled us: NOW WE SEE IN A MIRROR DIMLY, BUT THEN FACE TO FACE. NOW I KNOW IN PART, THEN I SHALL UNDERSTAND FULLY. (1 Cor l3:l2). The Christian story maintains that the evidence about our oughtness is grounded in historical fact and not in wishful thinking; we state that God has entered history, often and in diverse ways and persons, but supremely and uniquely through his perfect creature, Jesus of Nazareth. Could a perfect person ever exist? Skepticism refutes the claims of and about Jesus on the argument that a uniquely perfect, or moral, or insightful person could not exist. But I find the uniqueness of Jesus no more problematical than the uniqueness of our entire human race, or for that matter the uniqueness of each one of us. As best we know there is no precedent in the universe for human life; likewise, there is no precedent for the perfect human, Jesus the Christ. Jesus is just as miraculous, no less and no more so, than is human life. Does it not follow that a personal God would want to identify with our unique humanity and would choose to do so through a unique person who could reaffirm and confirm who we were created to be and who we are yet becoming, the perfect sons and daughters of God. The historicity of God and what God did in Jesus hinges above all on the claim that God raised Jesus from the dead. The assertion that the tomb was empty seems uncontested; what is contested is how, or what happened to the body. The skeptics' explanations boil down to a claim of fraud: either the disciples stole the body or the enemies of Jesus stole it. And also there is the swoon theory that Jesus went into a swoon or coma and actually did not die and then fled to an island or mountain somewhere to live happily ever after. Or there is the unique Gospel claim that God acted to raise Jesus from the dead, as a confirmation of all he had done in Jesus up to his death and as a sign to all humanity that the grave was not the future of each of us. The post Resurrection experiences of Jesus are not like some ethereal sightings of Elvis but encounters with a living Jesus who though pure Spirit was equally personal, recognizable and inspirational to all whom he approached. The historical claim that Jesus has been raised to be the ever living Christ gets no where unless reinforced with a personal experience. As the song says: YOU ASK ME HOW I KNOW HE LIVES. HE LIVES WITHIN MY HEART. At that point subjective personal experience and objective historical reality coincide and one is gloriously convinced, or one is left entirely cold and in the dark. The first disciples were gloriously convinced and even Doubting Thomas had a personal encounter with the Living Christ and believed. While personal death is a threat which most defer as long as one can, all humans experience the need for a way out of the limits of their present living long before the confines of the grave press upon us. Every person seeks meaning and a way to reconcile the disappointments of human performance with our higher yearnings. The human condition is incomplete; we Christians call it being in a state of sin or separation from God our Creator and Father. What God has done through Jesus the Christ is give us the way out of our predicaments and the way back to God. Through Jesus, God wills to restore us to our original and perfect condition; the promise delivered in Jesus is that we can start living anew and now, we can taste heaven now, we can build an earthly Kingdom in anticipation of the Heavenly Kingdom. The Christian faith is no pie in the sky by and by, but a present, existential, and dynamic invitation to live life fully beginning now in a relationship with Christ and God. The Christian faith invites trust in Jesus as the fullest manifestation of deity with us. Trusting Jesus is not foolish or irrational. For faith in Jesus is based on solid evidence from history, the scriptures, human aspiration, and experience. And while his teachings are compelling and his character entrancing, the more compelling and winsome power of Jesus is his continuing ability to authenticate himself as truly real in the life of the believer. And Jesus validates our trust in him by becoming our new friend to help us live not according to the ways of passion, worldliness, and egotism, but according to the will of God. It's the commitment of faith and discipleship which protects the Christian from morally destructive forces without and within us and which enables us to go on from strength to strength along the way of Christ. The call of discipleship is to live more and more with God at our controls so that we overcome reservations, defeat regret with joy, and experience the glorious blessing of our lives moving meaningfully with God. Sooner or later we all can have the experience and the blessing of knowing that our reason is on course with the mind of God and that our hearts are in tune with the divine heartbeat.
Pastor Gene Preston
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The Rev. Gene R.Preston14th Floor, Blk 36, Lower Baguio Villa Tel : 25516161 Fax: 25512114E-mail : gpreston@netvigator.com |
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