I Like to Think of God As...

“I like to think of God as….” I cringe whenever I hear those words. Who cares how you like to think about God? The real question is whether your understanding of Him is true.

Unless your conception of God is determined by what God says about Himself, you have about as much chance of being right as frog would of understanding a man. In Scripture, God mocks fools who imagine that their religious observances will hide their wickedness: “You thought that I was just like you” He says (Psalm 50:21).

God’s forgiveness also goes beyond human comprehension. He urges us to turn from our sins, promises His pardon, and then adds, “‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,’ declares the Lord” (Isaiah 55:8).

When God called Moses to lead His people out of Egypt, He first identified Himself as “the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6). Next Moses asked His name, and “God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am’; and He said, ‘Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, “I am has sent me to you”’” (Exodus 3:14).

“I AM” signifies that God is eternal and unchangeable. He is who He is, not what we imagine Him to be. And what He is, is more strange and complex than our distorted ideas of Him.

The gods that people have made up for themselves are generally simple. There are gods of love and gods of war; gods of fertility and gods who protect travelers. Each god knows his job, and he sticks to it. There is a god who is defined by absolute unity and sovereignty; another god includes in his being all that is; a third loves America and approves of its crusade for democracy.

The God who has revealed Himself in the Bible is none of these. His complexity is overwhelming. He is high above us, yet all of Him is present in every place. He is as ferocious as a lion and as gentle as a lamb. He sends rebels into eternal torment, but sacrifices Himself to save sinners. He is both one and three (though His oneness and His three-ness refer to different aspects of who He is). Though He is complex, yet He is also simple because He cannot be divided into parts. He is beyond our comprehension, but since He has made us in His image, we can know Him. He is beyond the power of language to describe, but His descriptions of Himself are true, and they may be understood by ordinary people.

I began this essay with the way you think about God. Far more important is the way God thinks about Himself and how He has revealed Himself to us. Almost equally important is what God thinks about you and me.

Again the answer is rather complex. On the one hand, we are hated and abhorred because of our sins (Psalm 5:5-6). On the other, “The Lord takes pleasure in His people; He will beautify the afflicted ones with salvation” (Psalm 149:4).

Though we are ugly in ourselves, we become beautiful when God saves us. Though we are hateful in our sin, God takes pleasure in us when He makes us beautiful. Our beauty, however, is not truly ours, for it is the beauty of Christ who covers our ugliness with the glorious robes of His righteousness. This comes about only through personal faith in Christ (Philippians 3:9).

Do you know this God? Does He know you? “The firm foundation of God stands, having this seal, ‘The Lord knows those who are His’” (2 Timothy 2:19).

(Published in the Allentown Morning Call, November 12, 2011)

The Place of Creeds

These paragraphs are part of my contribution to a FaceBook conversation on the importance of the great Trinitarian creeds of the early church.

How we think about the ancient creeds and other doctrinal formulations makes a great difference in how we value them. The creeds are not human improvements on Scripture as though God didn't know what He was doing when He inspired the Bible. God gave us Scripture as a progressive and historical revelation precisely because our salvation is rooted in history, not in abstract ideas. Neither should we think of the creeds as additional revelations from God supplementing the Bible.

I think the best way to view them is to say that the Holy Spirit has been at work in the Church as a whole to enable the Church to understand Scripture and to defend the truths of Scripture from error. This is one way in which the church is "the pillar and support of the truth" (1 Timothy 3:15). Spirit-guided meditation on Scripture by a host of godly teachers throughout the centuries has gradually increased our understanding of this precious treasure, the word of God. After all, the Spirit gives some the gift of teaching (Ephesians 4:11), and we learn not just from current teachers, but from those in the past as well.

I regard the Trinitarian formulations of Nicaea and Chalcedon as Spirit-guided gifts to the Church enabling the Church to stay true to the most important teachings in Scripture--the teachings about Christ and the gospel. The creeds are not infallible, as Scripture is, but neither can we safely make light of them. History shows us that whenever churches neglect or muddle the doctrine of the Trinity, they soon lose Christ.

I see a tendency among modern evangelicals to become impatient with clear thinking on these issues. Doctrine is no substitute for a warm, vital relationship with Christ, but a warm, vital relationship with Christ usually only lasts a generation or so after the loss of clear doctrinal teaching.

Nicene Creed (AD 381)

Creed of Chalcedon (451)

How to Become a Christian

From a FaceBook correspondent: “If someone walked up to you and asked, ‘What must I do to become a Christian?’ how would you answer that?”

The shortest biblical answer to a similar question came in response to the Philippian jailer who asked, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” Paul and Silas replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:30-31). Notice, however, that the question and response imply a large amount of shared information. The jailer knew that he needed salvation, that salvation was possible and that he was not yet saved. He already knew who Jesus was and that Christians claimed He was the Lord over all creation. He also understood what Paul meant by believing in the Lord Jesus. This information was available to him because Paul and Silas had been preaching in the city for many days.

In 21^st century America, we can no longer assume that the people we meet understand any of this. Therefore, I would begin by trying to find out where the inquirer was in his spiritual journey. If he were a Hindu, he might have no concept of creation or final judgment or the uniqueness of Christ’s incarnation. I might need to start with Genesis 1 and move on to the Ten Commandments and the Old Testament sacrificial system before he had the mental furniture on which to place the deity of Christ, His sacrificial death for our sins and the uniqueness of His resurrection. This kind of preparation may be more or less extensive lasting from several visits to as little as a few minutes.

If an inquirer has a rudimentary grasp of the big ideas, I would probably draw the familiar bridge diagram on any scrap of paper available, using verses from one book (Romans) to avoid constant and confusing flipping throughout the whole Bible.

I often then follow up with a diagram illustrating the exchange that takes place—Christ takes our sin and gives us His righteousness. I would probably use Philippians 3:7-9 with this diagram. I describe faith by saying that as sinners, we have our backs turned to God and we are going our own way in life. Faith is turning to Christ from our sin and trusting in His death and resurrection for our salvation.

I might suggest a sample prayer: “Lord, I know that I have sinned, and that I deserve to be punished for my sins. Thank you for sending Jesus to die for sinners. Thank you for raising Him from the dead as proof of His victory over sin and the devil. I now receive Him as my Savior and I want to follow Him as my Lord and Master. Thank you for the precious gift of your Son. In Jesus name, Amen.”

However, I don’t think it is always necessary or even advisable to have the inquirer pray the sinner’s prayer a line at a time. I remember one lady who thought she was a Christian before she came to our church. In the course of a membership class, she came to me privately and asked how to be sure she was a Christian. I went through the gospel as outlined above, and then I left her in my office to do her own business with God. After 15 or 20 minutes, she came out glowing with fresh assurance in Christ.

I know that God uses the simple formulas for evangelism that have been developed in the past one hundred years. I also know that many people “pray the prayer” and are not saved. Furthermore, God is not confined to our methods of evangelism.

Two young ladies in recent years have come to Christ by listening to sermons in church. One of them said, “I prayed for several months for Christ to come in. It took a long time, but finally He did.” The change in her life is amazing. The other young lady left a difficult home situation to live relatives. They required the her to attend church. At first, her countenance was the perfect picture of resentment and despair. After several months—she is not sure how or when—Christ came into her, gave her faith and transformed her whole outlook on life. She is now a joy to look at.

My father suffered for years with doubts about his salvation. I remember him saying, “I’ve received Christ many times, but I don’t know if he has received me.” At his request and based on a rather humble and shaky confession of faith, I baptized him. Many years later, I learned that his baptism had settled his doubts. Baptism was God’s seal on his faith, the reassurance he needed that God had accepted him.

The bottom line is that we may try to mass-produce converts, but God deals with people one by one. To the humble inquirer after salvation my basic counsel is, “Cast yourself on the mercy of God in Christ. Call out to Him to save you. Cling to Christ and don’t let go because He will never disappoint you.”

For the Scripture says, “Whoever believes in Him will not be disappointed.” For “Whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:11, 13).

Jesus said, “All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out” (John 6:37).

Psychology and Faith

I spoke last week to a woman who was greatly distressed because her church was making a slight change in a common liturgical formula. When the celebrant says, “The Lord be with you,” the people respond, “And also with you.” Her church is planning to change the response to, “And with your spirit.”

“What gives them the right to do that?” she demanded. In her eyes, the pastor was arbitrarily altering what God had ordained. I tried to explain that the exchange was not in the Bible and that both versions were acceptable to God, but I’m not sure she understood. She was stuck in an early, immature stage of faith, like children who will not allow their parents to skip a page or alter a line in their favorite Dr. Seuss book.

Or consider the teen who is afraid to go to a certain college because the teaching there might be unsettling to her faith. In such a case, one might appropriately ask, “Which is more important, the doctrines you believe or the truth?” However, that may be the wrong question. Perhaps what seems most important in her crazy, unsettled world is the security of anchoring her heart in an unchanging, unchallenged system of belief.

These sorts of encounters lead to a broader question: What does psychological development have to do with faith? Various attempts have been made to link the two. A friend has asked me to comment on the theological soundness of James Fowler’s work on stages of faith development and Scott Peck’s stages of spiritual development. Hence, this blog post. For a chart summarizing their views click on the link—Fowler/Peck chart.

I am not an expert in developmental psychology, but I find it relatively easy to think of people whose spiritual development bears a resemblance to the stages described by Fowler and Peck. For example, I have seen people questioning their faith in their early twenties (as they suggest) and either abandoning it, or coming to a deeper, more personal experience of Christ.

At the level of observation and description, the work of psychologists like Fowler and Peck can be very helpful. We do see people progressing through or sometimes stuck in various stages of spiritual development. However, I see several major limitations to the whole project.

The first is that the end-point of spiritual development is defined without respect to ultimate truth. A person may be a spiritually mature Buddhist, Muslim, Mormon or Baptist. This is unacceptable for those who hold to a biblical worldview. For us the pattern for maturity (both individually and corporately) is conformity to the character of Christ (Ephesians 4:13-16).

A second limitation of psychological descriptions of faith or conversion is that they inevitably end up in what the late British Christian neurophysicist Donald M. MacKay liked to call the “nothing buttery” syndrome. Love, morality, appreciation of beauty and all our joys and sorrows are “nothing but” a physiological response within our brains to certain external stimuli. Conversion is “nothing but” a radical change of attitude and viewpoint resulting from certain psychological stresses.[1]

In a similar vein, a fascinating sermon by C. S. Lewis discusses how the higher, richer aspects of human life are transposed into the lower, poorer realms of physiology and descriptive psychology.[2]

If the richer system is to be represented in the poorer at all, this can only be by giving each element in the poorer system more than one meaning. . . . If you are to translate from a language which has a large vocabulary into a language that has a small vocabulary, then you must be allowed to use several words in more than one sense. . . . If you are making a piano version of a piece originally scored for an orchestra, then the same piano notes which represent flutes in one passage must also represent violins in another.[3]

So a psychologist might describe the conversion of Malcom X to Islam using the same terms as he would use to describe conversion from political apathy to fervent activism in the Tea Party. Again, the same language might describe conversion from atheism to Christ. Psychological tools and language are not rich enough to describe the work of the Holy Spirit in spiritual terms. That is a limitation, not a fault, in the psychological method. It only becomes a fault if the psychologist assumes that his description is complete delineation of what is happening in the lives of his subjects.

Let us now return to our original question, about Spirit and Nature, God and Man. Our problem was that in what claims to be our spiritual life all the elements of our natural life recur: and, what is worse, it looks at first glance as if no other elements were present. We now see that if the spiritual is richer than the natural (as no one who believes in its existence would deny) then this is exactly what we should expect. And the sceptic’s conclusion that the so-called spiritual is really derived from the natural, that it is a mirage or projection or imaginary extension of the natural, is also exactly what we should expect; for, as we have seen, this is the mistake which an observer who knew only the lower medium would be bound to make in every case of Transposition. The brutal man never can by analysis find anything but lust in love; the Flatlander never can find anything but flat shapes in a picture; physiology can never find anything in thought except twichings of grey matter. It is no good browbeating the critic who approaches a Transposition from below. On the evidence available to him his conclusion is the only one possible.

        Everything is different when you approach the Transposition from above, as we all do in the case of emotion and sensation or of the three-dimensional world and pictures, and as the spiritual man does in the case we are considering.[4]

A third limitation relates to ways in which Christians might use psychological descriptions of how faith matures. I see positive contributions and a need for caution.

Contributions. Observing the normal progression of faith can help pastors and parents in several ways. First, it may keep us from expecting more maturity than is realistic for most children and for most early teens. Immature faith can still be genuine faith. Second, when we observe someone who is stuck at an immature level of faith, we may be better equipped gently to guide that person toward greater maturity. Third, we need to realize that some people do not have the mental or emotional capacity to progress as far or as fast as others. They may truly love and trust the Lord, but never move on to the kind of confidence that will enable them to respond calmly and kindly to people who challenge their faith. They may always resort a flight or fight reaction that is born out of fear and insecurity.

Cautions. The greatest danger for parents and pastors is probably the temptation to think we can protect our children from apostasy by using psychological insights and methods. Psychological techniques cannot transform group conformity that is common among our teens to confident, independent faith in their twenties. No one grows from the family of Adam into the family of God. Each one must be born into it. Neither can psychological methods of altering behavior produce the fruit of the Spirit. Fowler and Peck may help us see what is going on in the lives of those under our care, but as always the true “weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses” (2 Corinthinas 10:4).

---

[1] For a helpful response to this kind of reductionism, see Donald M. MacKay, “Man As a Mechanism,” in Christianity in a Mechanistic Universe, edited by Donald M. MacKay (Chicago: Inter-Varsity Press, 1965).

[2] C. S. Lewis, “Transposition,” in Srewtape Proposes a Toast and Other Pieces (Collins: London, 1965).

[3] Ibid., 80-81.

[4] Ibid., 85.

Hell Is a Hot Topic--Again

[This essay of mine was published in the Allentown Morning Call on Friday, August 12, 2011.] 

         Hell is a hot topic again. The recent book, Love Wins, by Rob Bell suggests that eventually all people will be saved. This would not be surprising if it came from a liberal theologian who opines that the Bible is a collection of myths. Bell, however, believes in the divinity, virgin birth, miracles and resurrection of Christ. What shall we make of his proposal?

         (1) Bell has apparently been troubled by a sense that eternal torment is incompatible with God’s love. We ought to be disturbed by the biblical images of hell, but that does not mean we should cast them aside. As I point out in The Beauty of God for a Broken World, God Himself weeps over the doom of the lost. If Bell were right—that all will eventually be saved—I suspect God would not grieve so much at the necessity of judgment.

         (2) Bell is standing in a lonely spot. Apart from a few individuals throughout church history, he doesn’t have much company. The major branches of the Christian church—Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant—have historically taught that some people will suffer torment in hell forever. Most defections from this consensus have been among people who think that the Bible is bunk, not among those who take it seriously. The smaller number, who believe the Bible yet deny the classic doctrine of hell, usually opt for annihilationism, the doctrine that the unsaved will simply cease to exist, either after death or after an appropriate period of punishment.

         Bell’s proposal implies that the vast majority of the great theologians of the church have completely misunderstood one of the major doctrines of the Bible for the past 2,000 years. That in itself ought to give us pause.

         (3) The Biblical evidence for eternal punishment in hell is clear. Those who worship the beast “will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever; they have no rest day and night” (Revelation 14:10-11). When Jesus divides the “sheep” from the “goats” at the judgment, “These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matthew 25:46).

         It does no good to note that the Greek word translated “eternal” may mean “age-long.” In the first place, that is a rare usage. In the second place, the meaning of a word depends on its context. Everyone agrees that “eternal life” means life that goes on forever. Therefore, “eternal punishment” must mean punishment that goes on forever.

         (4) While it is true that God takes “no pleasure in the death of the wicked” (Ezekiel 33:11) and that “he is not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9), we must not conclude that the doom of the lost represents a defeat for God’s love and power.

         God’s plan for the world encompasses all that takes place throughout history, including His decision to permit certain sinful actions that grieve Him, and His decision to punish such behavior. God’s plan is a victory for His love because by allowing human beings to rebel, He opens a way for Himself to express His infinite, saving love toward unworthy, but believing sinners.

         “God being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:4-5). God’s love does not fail of its purpose. His love does indeed win.

Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus

In Misquoting Jesus, Bart Ehrman claims that there are thousands of errors in the New Testament and that this completely undermines the orthodox Christian faith. Here is a link to an Excellent Review. If that is too detailed, here are my brief responses to the issue.

1. We do not have the original manuscripts of the New Testament. We do have more abundant attestation for the text of the New Testament than we do for any other ancient book. No one complains that we don't know what Julius Caesar wrote or what Tacitus wrote even though we have far less certainty about the text of their writings than we do about the New Testament.

2.  God gave us an inerrant message, not an inerrant piece of paper. Suppose you were offered two choices: First, a perfectly accurate copy of someone's vague speculations about God; second, a perfectly adequate copy of an inerrant message. Which would you choose? I would take the second, and that is what we have. God did not choose to preserve perfectly accurate copies of the original manuscripts, nor did He preserve the originals. I suppose if we had them, we would worship them. People would go on pilgrimages to see them. Whoever had them would get rich. He gave us what is best for us.

3.  When we look at the various readings of the manuscripts, it becomes perfectly clear that none of the credible variants teaches any new doctrine. In other words, take any of the alternate readings and you will still be reading truth.

4. No doctrine of Scripture depends on one particular variant, so no doctrine is lost if one concludes that it is not taught in a certain verse.

5. I say these things, not because I have been told them, but because I read through the Greek New Testament every year. (Well, this year I am reading every other day in Greek and on alternate days in Latin.) I read an edition of the New Testament that lists various readings where there is any serious question of the correct reading. I often go through those alternate readings, so I can affirm what I have written from personal examination.

The Occult

In response to a friend whose friend is interested in the occult, I recently wrote:

There is a little bit on neo-paganism in chapter 5 of my book The Beauty of God for a Broken World. Regarding the occult more generally:

(1) The English word comes from a Latin root meaning "to cover up, hide, conceal." People are attracted to the occult because it promises to give hidden knowledge and to open up mysteries not available to the common run of humanity. Its appeal is similar to the appeal that conspiracy theories have for a certain kind of person.

(2) The Bible also speaks of mysteries, but they are a different kind of thing. The Bible's mysteries are things not previously known or discoverable by human reason, but now revealed for all to see.

(3) I compare them thus. The occult arts profess to reveal dark mysteries to the initiated. The Bible reveals bright mysteries in a public fashion. The difference between a bright mystery and a dark mystery is this. A dark mystery is like a cave. An apparently friendly enemy lures you into the cave with the promise of finding hidden treasure, but once you are inside and can't see anything, he pushes you down into a hundred-foot-deep hole. A bright mystery is like the sun. You can't look at it for very long, but by its light you can see and make sense of the world around you. Such are the mysteries of the Trinity, the incarnation and the atoning death of Christ.