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Stories of Life –
The Many Resurrections in the New Testament
Good Is Stronger Than Evil
Truth
Is Stronger Than Falsehood
Love
Is Stronger Than Hate
Life
is Stronger Than Death
The
Ultimate Story of Life
World Religions
Hinduism
and the Bread of Life
Buddhism
and the Way The Truth and the Life
Islam
and the Good Shepherd
Judaism
and the Light of the World
New
Age and the Gate to Abundant Life
A
Mother’s Day Story – Amber Sees the Big Picture
Mormonism
Objections to the Christian Faith
How
Can There Be Only One True Religion?
How
Could A Good God Allow Suffering?
Doesn’t
A Biblical Faith Collide With Science?
How
Accurate Could The Bible Really Be?
The
Church Is Full of Hypocrites!
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"Stories
of Life -- Good Is Stronger Than Evil" - Dr. Brant D. Baker
Do not fret because of the wicked; do not be envious of
wrongdoers, for they will soon fade like the grass, and wither like the green
herb. Trust in the LORD, and do good; so you will live
in the land, and enjoy security. Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you
the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the LORD; trust in him, and he will
act. He will make your vindication shine like the light, and the justice of
your cause like the noonday. Be still before the LORD, and wait patiently for
him; do not fret over those who prosper in their way, over those who carry out
evil devices.
Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath. Do not fret—it
leads only to evil. For the wicked shall be cut off, but
those who wait for the LORD shall inherit the land. Yet a little while,
and the wicked will be no more; though you look diligently for their place,
they will not be there. But the meek shall inherit the land, and delight
themselves in abundant prosperity. The wicked plot against the righteous, and
gnash their teeth at them; but the LORD laughs at the wicked, for he sees that
their day is coming.
The wicked draw the sword and bend their bows to bring
down the poor and needy, to kill those who walk uprightly; their sword shall
enter their own heart, and their bows shall be broken. Better is a little that
the righteous person has than the abundance of many wicked. For
the arms of the wicked shall be broken, but the LORD upholds the righteous.
Psalm 37:1-17
Some time ago I was teaching a Bible study in which we
happened to come upon a story in the book of Acts about Peter bringing back someone
from the dead. One of the participants commented on her surprise to find such a
story in the Bible. It gave me an idea to look at the stories of life found in
the Bible as preparation for Easter, stories that have something to say about
resurrection. There are surprisingly more of these stories then most of us
realize. We know that Jesus was resurrected, and perhaps we've heard the story
of Lazarus, but in fact there are half a dozen additional stories of people who
came back to life. We need to be careful to observe that these people were
re-vivified, not resurrected because, as far as we know, all of these people
died again at a later time. (Although I have seen claims in the National
Enquirer that someone has located Lazarus still living on a remote island in
the Mediterranean…) Still, each of these stories of life shows some part of the
larger truth of what full resurrection is like, and the story we consider today
illustrates the resurrection truth that good is stronger than evil.
Good is stronger than evil. It’s a rather audacious claim
to make. Whatever your politics, whatever your view of this war, thoughtful
people know that we don't have to look very far to see that evil too often
triumphs over good. And even without the brutality of war, the news is full of
stories about evil on the march. For many of us this experience is personal: we
have been good, and we have been victims. "Why be good?" we might ask
in despair, "look what it's gotten me." Cynicism and pessimism are to
be forgiven, perhaps, when we look around and see evil people getting ahead,
and getting away with it. While many of us in the church will continue to do
good because we think it’s the right thing to do, we have an uncomfortable
suspicion that evil is stronger than good, and that if we were really smart, or
really gutsy, or really free from all our middle class values, we could be a
lot happier if we lived like those around us: living for today, living for
ourselves, and to hell with everyone else.
Harder to make and defend is the claim that, in fact, good
is stronger than evil. And yet that is the claim of our faith. As the psalmist
says,
"Do
not fret because of the wicked, do not be envious of wrongdoers,
for
they will soon fade like the grass…
Do
not fret over those who prosper in their way, over those who carry out evil
devices
For
the wicked shall be cut off.
The
wicked draw the sword…to bring down the poor and needy,
But
their sword shall enter their own heart
The
wicked plot against the righteous
But
the Lord laughs at them
For
he sees that their day is coming.
The words of Psalm 37 recognize the reality of what we see
around us. The wicked are getting ahead, there is no justice. But that's not the last word. The Lord
laughs, because the day is coming when the wicked will fade like grass, when
they will be cut off, when the sword in the hand of the wicked will be plunged
into their own hearts. The day is coming when there will be vindication, when
there will be justice, when the meek will inherit the land, and will delight
themselves in abundant prosperity.
What we’re really talking about is a resurrection claim.
Because it turns out that belief in resurrection is more than belief in an
afterlife, as important as that may be. The resurrection is a claim on the future
that covers all of creation. The resurrection is about God's insistence that
the original beauty and goodness of creation not be thwarted, that the fullness
of life intended at creation and lost through sin and death will be reclaimed
(Note in Oxford RSV on Matt 22:31-32). To this end the later chapters of the
book of Revelation describe God's ultimate recreation of the new heavens and a
new earth, the absolute perfection that God intends for God's people, a
situation where death and crying and pain will be no more (Rev 21:4). This is
not pie in the sky by and by, this is the solid theology of our belief in a
future resurrection, and it can greatly impact how we live in the here and now,
because it affirms that evil and injustice are not the last word, that God will
have the last laugh, as the psalmist says, and it will be a hearty one!
Our story today comes from the Old Testament. Resurrection
hope and truth, while only fully realized in Jesus Christ, are not the domain
of Christians only, and in the Old Testament we have a wonderful story from the
life of the prophet Elijah. Perhaps you recall the showdown between Elijah and
the prophets of Baal, when each were given a chance to ask their respective
gods to make it rain, and only Yahweh, the God of Elijah, was able to do so.
That story from 1 Kings 18 really begins in 1 Kings 17,
when Elijah announces to the evil king Ahab that Yahweh is going to cause a
three year drought, which is exactly what happens. During this time Elijah is
lead by the Spirit to go to Zarephath, a city outside of Israel, because there
God has arranged for a widow to feed Elijah. Here's how the story goes:
Elijah set out and went to Zarephath. When he came to the
gate of the town, a widow was there gathering sticks; he called to her and
said, “Bring me a little water in a vessel, so that I may drink.” As she was
going to bring it, he called to her and said, “Bring me a morsel of bread in
your hand.” But she said, “As the LORD your God lives, I have nothing baked,
only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering
a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son,
that we may eat it, and die.” Elijah said to her, “Do not be afraid; go and do
as you have said; but first make me a little cake of it and bring it to me, and
afterwards make something for yourself and your son. For thus says the LORD the
God of Israel: The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not
fail until the day that the LORD sends rain on the earth.”
Elijah is essentially saying to her, "Do you trust
Yahweh? If so, fix something for me first, and then you will have plenty for
yourself…" She went and did as Elijah said, so that she as well as he and
her household ate for many days. The jar of meal was not emptied, neither did
the jug of oil fail, according to the word of the LORD that he spoke by Elijah.
After this the son of the woman …became ill; his illness
was so severe that there was no breath left in him. She then said to Elijah,
“What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to
remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!” But he said to her, “Give me
your son.” He took him from her bosom, carried him up into the upper chamber
where he was lodging, and laid him on his own bed. He cried out to the LORD, “O
LORD my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am
staying, by killing her son?” Then he stretched himself upon the child three
times, and cried out to the LORD, “O LORD my God, let this child’s life come
into him again.” The LORD listened to the voice of Elijah; the life of the
child came into him again, and he revived. Elijah took the child, brought him
down from the upper chamber into the house, and gave him to his mother; then Elijah
said, “See, your son is alive.” So the woman said to Elijah, “Now I know that
you are a man of God, and that the word of the LORD in your mouth is truth.”
Our faith as Christians means that, in the last day, and
perhaps even before then, truth will triumph over evil, because the Lord is
risen indeed. This is a resurrection faith, a faith that good is stronger than
evil.
Amen.
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"Stories of Life -- Truth Is
Stronger Than Falsehood" - Dr. Brant D. Baker
Top
Soon afterwards he went to a town called
Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. As he approached the
gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s
only son, and she was a widow; and with her was a large crowd from the town.
When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, “Do not
weep.” Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still.
And he said, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” The dead man sat up and began to
speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized all of them; and they
glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has risen among us!” and “God has
looked favorably on his people!” This word about him spread throughout Judea and all the surrounding country.
The disciples of John reported all these
things to him. So John summoned two of his disciples and sent them to the Lord
to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” When
the men had come to him, they said, “John the Baptist has sent us to you to
ask, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’” Jesus
had just then cured many people of diseases, plagues, and evil spirits, and had
given sight to many who were blind. And he answered them, “Go and tell John
what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the
lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good
news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”
Luke 7:11-23
"What is truth?" According to a recent poll, Americans
are likely to answer the question based on how they feel at any given moment.
By more than a 3-to-1 margin American say that truth is relative to a person's
situation, and that they are likely to make moral and ethical decisions on the
basis of whatever feels right or comfortable in a situation. Truth in America
is relative.
Truth in first century Palestine may have been equally difficult
to ascertain. John the Baptist sent his disciples to ask Jesus "are you
the truth?" Now, just to remind you, John the Baptist was Jesus' cousin.
They had grown up together, but despite this long history, John still isn’t
sure it Jesus is the truth.
The disciples of John are invited to observe the evidence: at the
hand of Jesus the blind receive sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the
deaf hear, the poor hear good news. Oh, and one other thing: the dead are
raised (vs. 21-22).
The dead are raised? Jesus almost makes it sound like an everyday
occurrence. How often it happened we can’t know for sure there are three
stories in the gospels that involve Jesus raising people from the dead, and one
of these comes just prior to the arrival of John's disciples.
In our story from Luke 7 Jesus has left Capernaum, where he
carried out quite a bit of his ministry when not in Jerusalem, and goes to a
town called Nain. At the gate of the city Jesus and his disciples encounter the
funeral procession of a man who has died, his mother's only son, and she is
also a widow. Jesus had compassion for her and said to her, "Do not weep,
and then breaks all religious and social custom by touching the coffin, which
brings everyone to a stop. Jesus then says, "Young man, I say to you,
rise!" He does and Jesus, Luke tells us, gives the man back to his mother.
Now the first detail for us to notice is the obvious parallels
between this story and the one we looked at last week about Elijah. Both
involve a widow, both involve the death an only son, which is to say, the death
of the widow’s only means of support, and in fact, each story concludes with
the almost identical phrase, that is, that both Elijah and Jesus, upon raising
the son, "gave him back to his mother." It is very clear that Luke
tells his story in such a way as to show the parallels between Elijah and
Jesus. Elijah is generally recognized as the greatest prophet of the Old
Testament, Luke is telling us that someone greater than Elijah is here, someone
who did all that Elijah could do, and then some. Jesus doesn’t go through all
the stuff Elijah did, stretching himself out over the boy three times, and
crying out to God to act. Jesus acts himself and does so by giving the command,
“Young man, I say to you arise.”
The second thing to note, if only briefly, is that in verse 15
Luke gives us the detail that the son, upon being raised, “began to talk."
As you have heard me say before, there are no wasted words in the Bible. This
is not simply stray background material to move Luke’s story along. These words
function very much in the same way as another little tidbit we have in John’s
gospel: that following his own resurrection Jesus ate some fish. The message in
both cases is clear: ghosts neither talk nor eat because ghosts have no body
and thus no means of vocalizing nor of processing food. The fact that this son
began to talk is proof that it was not a ghost, but a physical being. He was
brought back to life.
Finally, as if we needed to know, Luke tells us in verse 16 that
fear seized the people and they glorified God. Some scholars have tried to
soften the claim of a bodily resurrection by suggesting that the people in
Jesus day were superstitious, backward, and gullible, inclined to want to
believe in miraculous occurrences. These scholars would suggest that the people
in Nain only think they saw a person come back to life, as an extension of
their pre-scientific worldview, and due to their psychologically fragile state
of mind, both of which predisposed them to make their spiritual claims in
physical terms.
The view of these scholars is that the physical resurrection is
too great a truth claim to make. Instead they believe that resurrection
language is expressing theological truth in mythological garb. According to
them, when more enlightened people say, “The Lord is risen,” they are not
making a claim about the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ, but instead are
saying something like this, “I don’t really know what happened to Jesus’ body,
but the truth is that Jesus continues to live on in our hearts. As enlightened
people we do not need to make physical claims in order to believe the spiritual
truth that Jesus lives, because he has influence on us through his memory and
our adherence to his teachings.”
But verse 16 suggests another truth. The reaction of the people
was one of shock, amazement and fear. Bear in mind that these people were much
more in touch with death than are we. They were around dead people all the
time, and even without a coroner they knew when someone had died--like the
parrot in the old Monty Python sketch: “He's dead I tell you, dead, deceased,
gone to the great beyond." In other words, the people of the first-century
were no more superstitious, foolish, or gullible than we are. The reactions of
the people at the funeral in Nain suggest that this was not part of their
ordinary experience or expectation. What happened there was that a man who was
dead came back to life, and that was very strange indeed!
The story of the man at Nain is a story of life, but not a story
of resurrection. Still, it holds a resurrection claim for us, namely, that
truth is stronger than falsehood. In terms of our beliefs about Christ it is
the truth about the physical resurrection that we're debating, the fact that
Jesus returned from the grave and spoke and ate and talked and that his body
was of a different sort even than that of this man in Nain, that his body was a
resurrected body, unique in ways we will deal with another time. For now it is
enough to know that the people around Jesus did not merely claim the spiritual
reality of Jesus in their hearts. They claimed to see Jesus as a physical
presence that spoke and ate and had substance. And it was to this physical
presence that they went on to give their own lives.
Christian scholar Craig Blomburg makes the observation that
Christ's resurrection as bona fide historical event actually sets Christianity
apart from all its major rivals. In the case of Buddhism and Islam there is no
claim made for the deity or the resurrection of their originators. Both Buddha
and Mohammed are merely prophets whose teachings “live on” in the hearts of
their followers. And of course in some religions such as Hinduism, there is no
attempt to prove the actual historical existence of their founders and gods.
But Christianity lives or dies with the claim of Christ's physical resurrection
from the dead. Put another way, if we were to discover the bones of Jesus, it
would have a seriously negative impact on Christianity as traditionally understood
and practiced (Blomburg, 308).
What is truth? Perhaps it isn't relative, but perhaps we do need
to decide what truth to believe…. At the end of the story of Jesus raising the
widow’s son the people say, “A great prophet has arisen among us.” …he has
risen indeed!!
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"Stories of Life -- Love Is Stronger
Than Hate" - Dr. Brant D. Baker
Top
Now there was a woman who had been
suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many
physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather
grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and
touched his cloak, for she said, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made
well.” Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she
was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from
him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” And
his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you
say, ‘Who touched me?’ ” He looked all around to see who had done it. But the
woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before
him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has
made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
Mark 5: 25-34
Why do bad things happen to good people? How could an all loving,
all powerful God allow the kinds of things that happen to the people God
supposedly loves? It's a question that plagues us all, and it is usually
answered in one of three ways.
The first answer is that perhaps God isn't as good as we think
God is. Perhaps evil and good are cut of the same cloth, that there is really
just one cosmic reality out their, and this cosmic being is a little
capricious. This is the answer of many eastern religions, that there is a kind
of ying and yang to human experience that reflects a deity who is good some of
the time, but not all of the time.
The second answer holds intact God's goodness, but suggests that
maybe God isn't really all powerful, that perhaps God isn't able to control as
many things as we thought. This is essentially the answer that Rabbi Kushner
came up with in his book on this subject several years ago. Basically Kushner
argues that while God's heart is in the right place, God just doesn't have as
much power as we'd like God to have, and so is unable to shield us from some of
the things that happen to us.
Finally, some people believe that human suffering is God's way of
teaching us important life lessons. These people have a strong need to believe
that there is a reason for everything that happens, and so they must find
meaning in the suffering that comes our way. "God must really be trying to
teach you something," they will say, and not quite sympathetically. This
is a view expressed by well-intentioned Christians who end up doing more harm
than good.
I have to tell you that I believe all three of these views are
wrong. I believe, in contrast to some eastern teaching, that God is always and
completely good. I disagree with Rabbi Kushner because I believe that God is
fully powerful to do all that God intends to do. And finally, I believe that
looking for a reason in everything that happens is also misguided. As Philip
Simmons says in his book, Learning To Fall, The Blessings of an Imperfect
Life, "Wanting human suffering to fit some divine plan is like wanting
to fly an airplane above tornado wreckage and see that it spells out song
lyrics or a cure for acne." ("Christian Century," June-19-26,
2002, p 34).
But there is an answer as to why bad things happen to good
people, and it is one we've touched on before, namely, that we have an ancient
enemy who hates our guts. The Devil, Satan, our ancient enemy, hates our guts
and seeks to work us woe. This enemy attacks without reason, explanation, or
provocation, often with disastrous results. And before you disregard such talk
as superstitious nonsense, you should know that the famous theologian Karl
Barth suggests that modern Christians pass over this reality too lightly.
"There exists," says Barth "a superior, relentless enemy whom we
cannot resist unless God comes to our aid." He continues by saying that he
doesn't care to dwell on such matters, but that it is necessary for us to know
that the Devil exists (Barth, Prayer, 73).
The Devil exists, and hates our guts, but thanks be to God for
the resurrection claim that love is stronger than hate, and specifically, that
the love of God in Jesus Christ is stronger than the hate of our ancient enemy.
That was certainly the case for the unnamed woman in the story we
heard this morning. For 12 years the ancient enemy had worked woe in her life.
For twelve years she not only suffered physically, but also emotionally and
spiritually, treated as an outcast and banned from participation in the temple
because she was ritually unclean. For twelve years she no doubt asked,
"Why me? What have I done to deserve this?" -- a question that could
only be answered by making reference to a dark, evil, malicious enemy, who
doesn't need a reason to hate.
But love is stronger than hate. Of course it was a risk--to be
out in public, to be identified and sent away, but she had to get to the man
who was said to love, a man who would perhaps be able to help her. Besides she
only intended to touch his garment--who would know? She would slip in and slip
out and no one would be the wiser.
According to plan she touched the fringe of Jesus' clothes, and
perhaps beyond her hopes the bleeding stopped immediately. But then something
unplanned happened as well. Jesus knew. He stopped. He turned and demanded to
know who had touched him. Could it be that this man would be angry at her? Could
it be that she was once more to be confronted by hate? No, but by a love she
could scarce imagine. Not only is she healed, but in fact, she is saved.
But now…the rest of the story. You see the story we've just heard
is actually in interlude, an interruption, in an even larger story of life. The
woman to touched the fringe of Jesus' robe did so as Jesus was on his way to
the home of Jairus, a leader of the synagogue, whose daughter was sick.
Curiously, this daughter had been born twelve years before, about the same time
as the woman Jesus encountered on the way began to have her trouble, but beyond
that there is no other connection that we know of. Except perhaps this, at the
moment the woman is healed, the ancient enemy thrashes out and takes the life of
the little girl. It's as if one prisoner is set free and thus Satan demands
another. There is even a sense in the story that by pausing to deal with the
woman, Jesus missed the chance to heal the girl before the illness could take
her. No doubt this is the opinion of Jairus, the loving father. “Oh Jesus, if
only you had hurried, perhaps my daughter would not have died!”
But Jesus is undeterred by the news. He tells Jairus not to fear,
only to believe, and his daughter will be saved. There's that word again. Not
just healed, not just restored to life, but saved. In Greek the word is sozo
and it means a complete and total healing and restoration--physical, mental,
emotional, spiritual. It is the word of life.
Jesus and Jairus continue to the house, where already the
mourners have gathered and weep and wail. Jesus asks them not to weep, for the
girl, he says, is only sleeping. They all laugh at him. They laugh! Jesus might
be a great man, a wonderful teacher, a loving healer, but these people know
death when they see it, and the little girl is dead.
But Jesus took her by the hand and says, "Talitha,
cum," "Little girl, get up," and immediately she got up and
began to walk around. Not only this, but Jesus further instructs that she be
given something to eat, so that everyone knows and understands that this is a
physical presence.
And once more, the hate of an ancient enemy is overcome by the
love of an even more ancient God. And once more love turns the very devices of
hate back on themselves, thwarting Satan's plans and bringing healing,
salvation, and life. Friends, believe the Good News, the resurrection claim,
love is stronger than hate, even an ancient and smoldering hate, because the
Lord is risen indeed!
________________________________________________________
"Stories of Life -- Life is Stronger
Than Death" - Dr. Brant D. Baker
Top
What then are we to say? Should we
continue in sin in order that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who
died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been
baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been
buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from
the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.
For if we have been united with him in a
death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like
his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin
might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has
died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we
will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will
never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he
died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also
must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Romans 6:1-11
Will Willoman, Dean at Duke University, tells the story of a man
at the school we'll call Chris. One day Chris came to visit Willoman and told
him a story. Basically Chris had been a bad boy, and an even worse teenager, so
bad, in fact, that he had had been sent to a camp for delinquent teens. So bad,
in fact, that he broke out of the camp and escaped to the city. There he became
a male prostitute and one night he rolled a business man and stole his American
Express card.
Chris was caught and sentenced to hard time at the Joilet Prison.
We could say that he was as good as dead. But life is stronger than death, and
something happened at the prison that was unexpected. Chris was taken under the
protection of an older prisoner. Every night before lock down this older man
would read to the younger man a chapter of Luke's gospel. It took a long time,
because the old man didn't read well, but one night they finally came to the
story of the Prodigal Son. Chris told Willoman that that Jesus "body
slammed" him with that story. In fact, Chris claims that he heard Jesus
speak directly to him, and what Jesus said was this: "You owe me, I've got
plans for you." and with that Chris was saved. He served his time, got off
for good behavior, earned his G.E.D., and now was a student at Duke University.
As Chris finished his story he looked Willoman in the eye and said, "I'm
the only proof of the resurrection you've got."
Life is stronger than death. The Apostle Paul puts it this way,
"For since we have been united with Christ in a death like his, we will certainly
be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was
crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no
longer be enslaved to sin."
In his book Through the Valley of the Kwai, Ernest Gordon
recounts the life of prisoners of war during the second world war, a life of
death. "Death called to us from every direction. It was in the air we
breathed--it was the chief topic of our conversation. The rhythm of death
obsessed us with its beat… On one occasion" he writes, "a whole
string of barges came floating downriver to our camp. Their cargo consisted of
corpses--the bodies of prisoners from upcountry. They were no more than
skeletons covered with skin" (63).
This constant press of death meant that such life as was lived
was lived according to the law of the jungle: stealing from one another;
cursing one another, their captors, and God; waiting for one another to die in
order to rob the corpse of its few meager belongings. Nor was faith of any help
or consolation. It may be hard to imagine for those who have never experienced
it, but the total debasement of the human such that there is no shred of
dignity or decency can reduce people to something even less than animals.
"We were," writes Gordon, "forsaken men--forsaken by our
families, by our friends, by our government. Now even God had left us"
(67).
Then one day a new story of death made its way through the camp.
A man named Angus had died, nothing exceptional, except in the manner of his
dying. It seems that Angus had a friend who was ill, and had made up his mind
that his friend wouldn't die. When someone stole his friend's blanket, Angus
gave the man his own. At mealtime Angus would show up to get his food, but
instead of eating it himself, he would take it back to his friend. At night he
took to slipping out of the camp, denying himself sleep, in order to trade on
the local black market for medicine and extra food. His friend got better, but
Angus collapsed, dead from starvation and exhaustion. And someone remembered,
"Greater life has no one than this, that a man lay down his life for his
friends."
Life is stronger than death, and so this death was a turning
point in the life of the men. As the story was told and retold, the men began
living differently. "Death was still with us," writes Gordon,
"no doubt about that. But we were being slowly freed from its destructive
grip. We were seeing for ourselves the sharp contrasts between the forces that
make for life and those that make for death. Selfishness, hatred, jealousy, and
greed were all anti-life. Love, self-sacrifice, mercy, and creative faith, on
the other hand, were the essence of life, turning mere existence into living in
its truest sense. These were the gifts of God to men" (94).
Life is stronger than death. The Apostle Paul puts it this way,
"…if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.
We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no
longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all;
but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves
dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus."
One of the most well known stories of life in the entire Bible
concerns Jesus' good friend Lazarus. He became ill, and his sisters, Mary and
Martha, sent word to Jesus. But when Jesus heard it he stayed where he was for
two more days, saying that the illness of Lazarus would not lead to death, but
rather to the glory of God.
When Jesus finally announced to his disciples that they were
going to Judea, to Bethany, within an hour's walk of Jerusalem, his disciples
reminded him that the Jews there had just recently tried to stone him to death.
Of course Jesus knew this, as he also knew that the jubilant crowds who would
welcome him with waving palms would quickly turn into the lynching mobs of Good
Friday.
When Jesus and his disciples arrived in Bethany they found that
Lazarus had died four days earlier. Martha and Mary were each grieving in their
own way. Martha, the practical one, was polite toward Jesus but we get the
sense that quietly she was smoldering. Mary, the emotive one, simply cried.
Both conveyed to Jesus their belief that, had been there, Lazarus would not
have died. The shortest verse in the entire Bible sums up our Lord's response
to the whole scene, "Jesus wept." Several people present noticed
this, but others were critical and wondered if a man who could open the eyes of
the blind couldn't have done more to keep a friend from dying.
According to middle eastern custom, the body had been buried on
the same day Lazarus had died. According to Jewish belief, the soul of an
individual lingered for three days against the possibility of some
revivication. According to ever sensible Martha, if they opened the tomb there
would be a stench. Lazarus was dead in every possible sense of the word, but
Jesus insisted. In an act that would foreshadow events just weeks away, Jesus
asked that the stone be rolled away. Then he looked upward, prayed a prayer of
thanksgiving, and then called in a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out."
He did, still bound and wrapped in his burial cloth.
Life is stronger than death. Jesus puts it this way, "I am
the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die,
will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die." Then
he asks, "Do you believe this?"
Amen.
________________________________________________________
“The Ultimate Story of Life” - Dr. Brant D.
Baker
Top
35But someone will ask, “How are the dead
raised? With what kind of body do they come?” 36Fool! What you sow does not
come to life unless it dies. 37And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body
that is to be, but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. 38But
God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body…
42So it is with the resurrection of the
dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. 43It is sown in
dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.
44It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a
physical body, there is also a spiritual body…
50What I am saying, brothers and sisters,
is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the
perishable inherit the imperishable. 51Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We
will not all die, but we will all be changed, 52in a moment, in the twinkling
of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will
be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. 53For this perishable body must
put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality. 54When
this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on
immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled:
“Death has
been swallowed up in victory.”
55“Where, O
death, is your victory?
Where, O
death, is your sting?”
56The sting
of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. 57But thanks be to God, who
gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-44, 50-57
Someone teaching a Sunday School class asked the children this
question, “If I sold my house and my car, had a big garage sale and gave all my
money to the church, would that get me into Heaven?" "NO!" the
children all answered.
"If I cleaned the church every day, mowed the yard, and kept
everything neat and tidy, would that get me into Heaven?" Again, the
answer was, "NO!"
"Well, then, if I was kind to animals and gave candy to all
the children, and loved my wife, would that get me into Heaven?" the
teacher asked again. Again, they all answered, "NO!"
"Well, I continued, "then how can I get into
Heaven?"
To which a five-year-old boy shouted, "YOU GOTTA BE
DEAD!"
For the last several weeks we’ve been looking at some of the
fascinating stories in the Bible about people who were dead and then came back
to life. In total we’ve looked at only four of the ten stories in scripture
that involve people coming back to life, and in each of these we’ve taken pains
to suggest that in order to come back to life, “you gotta be dead.” In the
process we have challenged the charge that the people in Jesus day were
superstitious, backward, gullible, and therefore unable to accurately determine
if someone was really dead or not. Against this we argued that when those
people said someone was “dead, deceased, gone to the great beyond,” they knew
it.
On this Easter Sunday, as we turn our attention to the ultimate
story of life, it is again important that we substantiate that Jesus was, in
fact, really dead, and there is some rather gruesome evidence to support that
fact. According to medical examiner Dr. Alexander Metherell, Jesus was already
in hypovolemic shock after his flogging at the hands of the Roman guards.
Hypovolemic shock means a person is suffering from loosing a large volume of
blood. The whips used by the Romans had bits of bone and metal imbedded in the
braiding, with the express purpose of opening the flesh as much as possible,
thus bringing about this large loss of blood.
From there Jesus was taken to the cross. No one is exactly sure
what causes death on the cross, but one theory is that death comes by slow
asphyxiation. It is impossible to take in breathe when hanging by your arms, so
in order to breath the individual must push up on the spike through his ankles,
tearing open his already lacerated back. Eventually exhaustion would set in and
death would come due to lack of oxygen.
At the same time, as a person’s breathing slows, he goes into
what is called respiratory acidosis—the carbon dioxide in the blood is
dissolved and causes the acidity of the blood to increase, which eventually
leads to an irregular heartbeat. This together with the loss of blood would
bring cardiac arrest.
Finally, if neither asphyxiation nor heart failure get you, the
Roman guards are there to either break your legs, or, in Jesus case, to
puncture your heart with a spear. Again, these Roman guards knew death, and also
knew that their own death would be required if they took someone off the cross
prematurely. There can be no doubt that Jesus was dead.
Jesus’ body was placed in the tomb late Friday afternoon, just
before the Jewish sabboth, which started at sundown and continued until sundown
on Saturday. Among other things that meant that no one could come and tend to
the body until first thing Sunday morning, and so it was, even before first
light, that some of the women went, hoping against hope that the Roman guards
posted there might move the heavy stone and allow them entry. While the four
gospels differ slightly in who exactly was in this group of women, the
important detail is that the four gospels agree that it was women who first
found the empty tomb.
Why is this important? Because if the early church were going to
fabricate this story they wouldn’t have done so with female witnesses. In
Jesus’ day a woman was not considered a worthy witness, and any self-respecting
group trying to establish its credibility would have put someone with
credentials at the tomb if given the chance. The fact that all four gospels
agree that it was women who were the first witnesses is perhaps the strongest
evidence possible that this story was not a fiction written by the early church,
but in fact what actually happened as God arranged events.
My favorite version of the Easter story is in John’s gospel. In
his telling it is Mary Magdalene, perhaps the most suspect of all the women,
who finds the empty tomb. She runs and gets Peter and John, who race back to
the tomb, perhaps because they don’t believe her either. They find the linen
wrappings, and while they leave convinced that the tomb is empty, they don’t
really know what to make of it. John comments that “they did not understand the
scripture, that [Jesus] must rise from the dead” (John 20:9). Then, probably
because they are guys and can’t think of anything else to do, they go home.
But Mary…Mary stays put. She stands weeping outside the tomb
because she also still believes that Jesus is dead and that someone has taken
his body. Something must have caught her attention because in the midst of her
crying she bends down to look inside and sees two angels sitting where Jesus’
body had been. They chat a moment and then she turns around and sees Jesus, but
she thinks maybe he’s a gardener, and asks him if he knows where Jesus’ body
is. As it happens, Jesus knows exactly where his body is, and furthermore he
knows that this resurrected body is different than it was before. It is still a
physical body, and as the story unfolds Jesus is prodded and poked by various
disciples satisfying themselves on this point. But it is also a spiritual body,
something quite different from the body it was before.
The best description of what the resurrected body of Jesus was
like, and indeed what our own resurrected bodies will be like, can be found in
1 Corinthians 15. The Apostle Paul offers a vivid analogy on the differences
between earthly and heavenly bodies. Consider a seed, says Paul. You look at a
seed and it’s dry and lifeless and gives little indication that anything could
possible grow from it. Then you bury it in the ground and it further
decomposes. But then a mystery of life from death occurs, and that seed gives
way to something vibrant and alive and really quite amazing. Yes, there is
molecular and biological continuity between the seed and the plant, but the
plant is about as different for the seed as it can be. So, too, says Paul will
our resurrected bodies be in continuity with our current bodies, but different
in ways mysterious and amazing.
Over the past few weeks we have made some amazing and audacious
claims about the resurrection: that good is stronger than evil, that truth is
stronger than falsehood, that love is stronger than hate, and that life is
stronger than death.
Today we make one final audacious claim: namely that Christianity
insists that life after death is not mere immortality of the soul, but that it
is also physical. Over-against any philosophy or belief that tries to suggest
that created matter is inherently evil, the Bible declares that God’s created
world is good, that matter is good, that physicality is good, and that this
goodness extends to include human bodies as well. Human beings were created to
live in a bodily form, in a material world, and this reality will not end at
the resurrection. The resurrection victory of Jesus Christ against an ancient
enemy who sought to end his physical life is a foreshadowing of God's ultimate
resurrection victory for all creation, a victory that, according to the book of
Revelation, includes not only a new heaven, but also a new earth. Put another
way, God started something back in Genesis when God created the heavens and the
earth, and God intends to see that original creative purpose fulfilled. If our
resurrection is simply a spiritual reality it would essentially say that God’s
original intention of a physical and material world was somehow a mistake. The
fact that Jesus was resurrected in a physical body is God’s way of giving us a
hint of what’s to come.
To get to heaven you gotta be dead, but to get to the new heaven
and the new earth you gotta be resurrected. Thanks be
to God that Jesus Christ is risen indeed…!
________________________________________________________
“Hinduism and the Bread of Life” - Dr. Brant
D. Baker
Top
Jesus said to them, “Very
truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is
my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is
that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” They said to
him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”
Jesus said to them, “I am
the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever
believes in me will never be thirsty. But I said to you that you have seen me
and yet do not believe. Everything that the Father gives me will come to me,
and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; for I have come down from
heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. And this is the
will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of
all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. This is indeed the
will of my Father, that all who see the Son and
believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last
day.”
Then the Jews began to
complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from
heaven.” They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father
and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Jesus
answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. No
one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise
that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall
all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes
to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he
has seen the Father. Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life.
I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and
they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat
of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever
eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the
life of the world is my flesh.” John 6:32-51
This
is really, really bad. This is so bad
it’s good. Are you ready?
Ok,
as you may know, Mahatma Gandhi walked around barefoot most of the time, which
produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him
rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him......a super callused fragile
mystic hexed by halitosis.
Today we begin a five-week series on the
major world religions. We will look at
Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Isalm, and New Age,
trying to be respectful of each tradition while we get some clarity about what
it is that each believes and how those beliefs might differ from
Christianity. Of course it is almost a
fool’s errand to try and present an overview of any of these belief systems in
a fifteen to twenty minute sermon, which I guess makes me a fool. But if so, hopefully a fool
for Christ, one who hopes to challenge the wide-spread assumption of our day
that all of these religions are basically the same. They are not, and to pretend they are is an
oversimplification that disrespects each of them. Certainly there are some similarities, and we
will try to note these, but if we are to truly respect the adherents of these
other religions as well as our own, we need to understand some key differences.
We begin today with Hinduism, the oldest
of the major world religions still practiced today, and in some ways the most
remarkable because of the great variety of practices among its adherents.
Over its 4000 year history Hinduism has
gone through many changes in direction and emphasis. In its earliest form Hinduism was a blend of
religions from the native Indian population infused with the beliefs of an
invading Aryan culture. The Aryans
brought with them a religion with gods that represented various natural forces
like the sun, the moon, and the fertility of the soil, and so early Hinduism
had many gods and godesses, and was primarily a form
of nature worship (Hopfe,
76).
Hinduism in is most classical form came
into being around 1000 BC. This form of
Hinduism was very dependent on a priestly caste and on an elaborate system of
sacrifice. The main religious text of
the classical period, the Bhagavad Gita, is a dramatic poem mostly having to do with the
god Krishna, who became incarnate to
protect good, destroy evil, and re-establish true piety (Hopfe,
30).
Krishna, it turns out, is actually one of ten
incarnations, or earthly appearances, of the god Vishnu. Vishnu is himself one of the three primary
gods that form the focus of Hinduism today.
Vishnu, is known as a god of love, benevolence, and forgiveness, as a
being who loves to play, and who enjoys tricks and pranks. It is because Vishnu is so concerned for
humanity that he has appeared on earth so many times in so many forms. In every case he has come to aid humankind
because he is the preserver and the restorer.
The two other gods in the Hindu trinity include Brahma the creator, who
receives the least attention; and Shiva, who receives quite a bit of attention
as the god of death, disease, destruction, dance, fertility and sexuality (Hopfe, 92).
So, while Hinduism allows for literally millions
of gods and goddesses, and even though in modern times the focus is on the
three we’ve just named, there is ultimately only one god in Hinduism, the god
Brahman. Like the Christian God,
Brahman is eternal, infinite, and without gender. But unlike the Christian God, Brahman is
totally impersonal. In fact, there is no
distinction between Brahman and the living beings that inhabit our world. Each living thing is really only an
expression of the Brahman, each soul only a part of the great ocean of souls
that make up the Brahman.
And here is one place where Hinduism is a
very different religion then many others: Hinduism believes that all existence
is actually an illusion arising from ignorance of the true nature of
reality. A person’s individuality apart
from the Brahman—the world in which we live, that which we see, hear, touch,
and feel—all of this an illusion, a dream according to Hinduism (Hopfe,
82). The plight of human beings,
according to Hinduism, is that we are bound up in this world of illusion and
ignorance, thinking that it is real, and unaware of our true identification
with the Brahman.
A story of Hinduism serves to illustrate
what we’re trying to say: there once was a tiger who
was orphaned as a cub and raised by goats.
All of his life, he believed that he was a goat; he ate grass like a
goat, he talked like a goat, he lived like a goat. But one day me met
another tiger who took him to a pond where the first tiger saw his true
image. The second tiger then forced him
to eat meat for the first time and he slowly came to realize his tiger
nature. In a similar manner, says
Hinduism, human beings are deceived about their true nature and need to be set
free from their illusions (Hopfe, 82). Each of us is really a god in embryo, and the
purpose of life is to discover that divinity within us and be set free.
This all leads to one last thing to know
about Hinduism. This quest to discover
our true identity and be set free is accomplished through a spiritual journey
we in the west have come to call reincarnation.
Hinduism believes that the life force of an individual does not die with
the death of the body, but instead moves on to another time and body, where it
continues to live. Far from being a
desirable thing, reincarnation is actually a curse, showing that the individual
continues to be bound to the ignorance and pain of this illusory life. The goal of most forms of Hinduism to break
this cycle and free from the burden of life (Hopfe,
83). This view of salvation is realized
by simple cause and effect: if you do good things you reap good reward in your
reincarnation, if you do bad things, you reap punishment in your next
life. That’s karma. Among other things
this means that someone who has a good life right now is realizing the benefit
of positive actions in the past, while someone who has a bad life right now is
obviously reaping the consequences of choices made in the past.
What can we make of all this? Two quick conclusions from this very quick
overview: First, religious beliefs have consequences in everyday life. You may know that a feature of life today in
India, where Hinduism is primarily practiced, is the caste system. The caste system divides people into
different groups from lowest to highest.
A person’s caste is determined by the caste of their parents, and a
person’s caste determines what they do for a living, where they live, who they
marry, and even what they eat. Overall,
the lower one’s place in the hierarchy of caste the more that person will do
menial and unpleasant labor (Hopfe, 103). People in the lowest caste, the untouchables,
handle the dirtiest and most undesirable jobs.
To the outside observer it’s hard not to
notice that this whole system of social stratification is completely justified
by the religious beliefs of Hinduism.
Untouchables must be in this situation because their karma from a
previous life dictates it. If the
outcasts will simply accept their duty (or dharama) of this life and not
rebel against it, they can hope for a better caste in the next life (Hopfe, 104). This
self-justifying social inequality of Hindu religion and society is obviously
very different from Christianity’s concern for the poor and outcast. Christianity doesn’t believe in a
pre-assigned reality based on a person’s previous life: instead Christians are
called to take special care of cause of the poor and the oppressed. This may be one of the clearest examples we
will encounter of the way in which the beliefs of one religion lead to
consequences, in this case social and perhaps moral, that are quite different
from the consequences reached by another religion.
A second conclusion, perhaps even more
troubling, however, has to do with Hinduism’s ultimate goal of salvation. As we said earlier, the goal of this entire religious
system is for the individual to achieve intimate union with the deity
Brahman. But as we noted, one of the
primary characteristics of Brahman is that this god is totally and completely
impersonal. Brahman is almost less a god
than simply an amalgamation of souls.
You might say that Brahman wouldn’t know us from Adam, or perhaps more
precisely put, from any atom, since all matter is part of what Brahman is. So it is that Ravi Zacharias, who is himself
an Indian Christian, has noted that however much we may respect the intent of
such teaching, seeking intimate union with an entity that is impersonal simply
doesn’t make sense.
Another way we might say this is that,
from a Christian perspective, personal union with an impersonal deity does not
satisfy our yearning for relationship, our longing for communion. As Christians we propose and purpose to
know a God who has been revealed as Father, we believe we can have a personal
relationship with Jesus Christ, a relationship in which we remain distinct as
individuals, and yet which promises a communion that is almost beyond what we
can imagine.
Jesus makes it clear in John 6 that in
offering himself as our spiritual food we are given access to the very heart of
God, and to a life that is eternal and abundant. Jesus said, “I am the bread of life…the
living bread that came down from heaven.
Whoever eats of this bread will live forever…” (John 6)
Religions of the World (8th edition), Lewis M. Hopfe and Mark R. Woodward, Prentice Hall: New Jersey, 2001)
Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among Other
Gods, W Publishing Group, Nashville,
TN: 2000.
________________________________________________________
“Buddhism and the Way The Truth and the Life” - Dr. Brant D. Baker
Top
“Do not let your hearts be troubled.
Believe in God, believe also in me In my Father’s house there are many
dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare
a place for you? And if I go and prepare
a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I
am, there you may be also. 4And you know the way to the place where
I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord,
we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the
truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. John 14:1-6
Did you hear about the Buddhist who went
up to the hot dog stand and said, “Make me one with everything”? Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused
Novocain during a root canal? He wanted
to transcend dental medication.
Today
we consider the third of five world religions, looking for points of comparison
and contrast with Christianity, in an effort to evaluate whether all religions
are the same. Hopefully it is becoming
clear that they are not the same, and that in Jesus Christ we have a truth that
is wonderfully unique.
The
practices of Buddhism were begun sometime around 525 B.C. The man who history would come to call the
Buddha was born the son of a raja. His
given name was Siddhartha Gautama.
Gautama was raised by his father in a rather peculiar way. Growing up the young prince was not allowed
to see a dead body, an old person, a diseased person, or a monk, for fear that exposure
to these extremes would fulfil a prophecy that the
young man grow up and become a religious teacher. Thus Gautama grew up surrounded by youth,
beauty and health. He received a normal
education, and when he was nineteen years old married his cousin and founded a
happy home (Hopfe, 127).
By
the time he neared middle age, however, Gautama was becoming aware of the
ugliness of the real world. He became
more and more troubled about the problems of suffering and pain, the issue that
we suggested last week all religions must sooner or later deal with. Gautama attempted to find solutions first in
the study of philosophy, and then in a full immersion into the world of
asceticism. It is said that he became a
sort of champion ascetic, seeking out anything that was unpleasant, painful, or
disagreeable as a means by which he might find release from the miseries of
this life. You know all of those
supposed statues of Buddha as a plump, jolly person? Those aren’t Gautama,
those are actually Chinese kitchen gods.
The real Gautama supposedly reached the point of living on a single
grain of rice each day, and so became quite thin. He wore irritating garments and sometimes sat
for hours on thorns. For a time he slept
in a graveyard, and in the tradition of many ascetics in his time, allowed
filth and vermin to accumulate on his body (Hopfe,
128).
As the story goes, the turning point in
Gautama’s quest came one day when he was walking by a stream. Weakened by his rigorous practices, he
fainted and fell in. As the cold water
revived him he suddenly realized that for all of his heroic efforts he still
had not found enlightenment. He went and
ate a full meal, and then sat under a tree, deciding he would meditate there
until he had at last solved the problems of pain and suffering in human
life. As he sat it came to him that
humans are bound to the endless cycle of birth and death because of desire.
It is desire that causes karma,
the Hindu concept that if you do good things you reap good reward in your next
reincarnation; if you do bad things, you reap punishment. Desire thus traps people in this endless
cycle. As proof of this Guatama realized that he had desired enlightenment and had
sought it through asceticism and knowledge, but when it eluded him and he ceased
to desire it, he found it. We see some
truth in this concept in our own lives: when we stop trying so hard to remember
what we forgot, we remember it; many couples have found that when they stop
trying so hard to have children, they have them; creative people understand
that you can’t desire your way to creativity, it comes unbidden when you least
expect it.
And so, with the insight that
desire is the thing that traps us, and enlightenment is only reached through
the cessation of desire, Gautama became the Buddha, which literally means “the
enlightened one.” In many respects the
practices and beliefs that Gautama came to espouse were protests against
certain features of Hinduism, including the idea of a fixed caste system,
dependence for salvation upon paid priests or bribable deities, and having
sacred scriptures written in an unintelligible ancient language. It is important to realize that in its
rejection of gods, scriptures, and priests the original practice of Buddhism is
not actually a religion at all.
Gautama’s main emphasis was on saving oneself from a world infected with
misery, not with the help of a personal deity, or forms of worship or prayer,
but instead through self-discipline and ethical behavior.
Buddhism today has basically two branches. Hinayana Buddhism,
which means “the exclusive way,” is both smaller and more orthodox. Like the practices of Guatama
himself, those following Hinayana Buddhism rely on
themselves for enlightenment, and in this regard the monk is seen as the ideal
figure. The Buddhist monk shaves his
head, puts on the yellow robe, takes up a begging bowl, and seeks release from
life by attempting to escape desire through meditation and self-denial. If he achieves this goal he becomes a saint,
and when he dies, he attains Nirvana
and thus release from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.
The larger and in a sense
more liberal form of this religion is called Mahayana (Ma-ha-ya-na) Buddhism, which means “the expansive way.” (Review Hinayana Buddism,
“the exclusive way,” and Mahayana Buddism, “the
expansive way.”) One of the key
features of Mahayana Buddhism is the belief that Gautama was really more than a
man, that he was in fact a compassionate, eternal being who came to earth in
the form of man because he loved humankind and wished to be of assistance (Hopfe, 136). And in
this regard, it is one of the great ironies of religion and history that a man
whose main message was a call to a self-reliant, ethical life without need for
a divine being should himself be subsequently worshipped.
Buddhism in both
its exclusive and expansive ways is sometimes called a simple religion of
compassion and ethics. The truth is that
there is probably no religion more complex than Buddhism. Buddhism starts off with four noble truths,
first that all existence involves suffering; second, that all suffering is
caused by indulging in inherently insatiable desires; third, that all suffering
will cease upon the suppressing of these desires; and forth, that the way
leading to the cessation of suffering is the Eight-fold Path. The eight-fold path includes having right
views, right aims, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort,
right mindfulness, and right contemplation (Zacharias, 65).
But as one enters the eight-fold path,
there emerge hundreds upon hundreds of other rules to deal with various
contingencies. There are 75 rules for
those entering the order, and upon entering, 227 rules
of discipline for men and 331 for women.
There are 30 rules on how to avoid the loss of one’s discipleship
status, with an additional 92 rules that apply to just one of these cases.
The most common prayer for forgiveness in
Buddhism reflects this numerical maze:
I beg leave! I beg leave! …May I be freed at all times from
the four states of Woe, the Three Scourges, the Eight Wrong Circumstances, the
Five Enemies, the Four Deficiences, the Five
Misfortunes, and quickly attain the Path, the Fruition, and the Nobel Law of
Nirvana…
Contrast then, all of the rules of the
exclusive way and the expansive way of Buddhism, with the message of grace
found in Christianity, which has only one way, Jesus Christ, who is not only the way, but also the truth, and the
life. As we have said throughout this
study, the claims of the various world religions are not all the same, and in
fact logically exclude one another. Both
Buddhism and Christianity cannot be simultaneously true on this point. Either there are two ways, or one way, but
you can’t have it both ways.
Many people outside of Christianity take
issue with this exclusivist viewpoint, that Jesus is the way. (It is interesting
that you don’t hear those same people attacking the exclusive Hinayana way of Buddhism…)
Many Christians are themselves uncomfortable with such an idea, not
wishing to offend, such is the cultural sensitivity of
our time. The result is that we are left
unsure about whether or not to say anything about the wonderful good news that
we have: that Jesus Christ is the
way, the truth, and the life, that he has come to show us the way to the
Father.
We might be helped to remember that it is
not our claim, but the claim of Jesus Christ himself. In other words, we’re not trying to force a
cultural or religious worldview on someone else, we’re
trying to accurately say what Jesus said.
Of course to do this well we need to first decide whether or not we
believe that Jesus is truly God. If he
is, then we need to listen closely to what he has to say, because whether we
understand him or not, agree with him or not, like it or not, this is what he
said. If Jesus said it, and if Jesus is
God, then we need to try and understand why he would make such an
exclusivist statement.
And if we think about it, there might be
two good reasons for Jesus to say, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” First, Jesus said it because it is true, and
he wants us to know the truth. Second,
Jesus said it because he loves us. He
loves us! The point of being exclusive
about the way to the Father is not that Jesus is trying to send some people to
hell. We’re all going to hell without
this truth! Jesus came to tell us how to
avoid this fate. You can argue with the
fact that there is only one way if you want, but that doesn’t change the
motivation of God’s love, or the fact that Jesus Christ is God’s way for us to
avoid what is otherwise our sure and certain fate.
Think about it this way: if you go to the
doctor and he says that you have a disease and you will die unless you get
treatment, what do you do? Do you say,
“How dare the doctor tell me I’m going to die”?
Do you say, “Well, I don’t want that treatment because there are a lot
of other people who have my problem and never hear about this treatment, and
what’s going to happen to them”? Do you
say, “Well, I’ve read that some doctors say all treatments are equally valid
and effective, so I choose to eat chocolate and watch TV for my
treatment”? No! You do what the doctor says so you can live,
and then you start telling others about how to live as well.
Friends, Jesus Christ is the doctor for our soul, the Great
Physician. He has come to tell us the
treatment not because he wants us to die, but for the very opposite reason, he
desires us to live. All treatments, like
all truth, are not equal nor effective. There is only one cure for the deadly disease
of sin: Jesus Christ, the way, the truth, and the life. Thanks be to God!
________________________________________________________
“Islam and the Good Shepherd” - Dr. Brant D.
Baker
Top
Kevin Costner’s 1991 movie Robin Hood:
Prince of Thieves opens with Robin of Locksley escaping from a Turkish jail
along with another man, Azeem, whose life Robin saves. As they make their way back to England Azeem,
who is Muslim, seems scarcely able to believe that people as unsophisticated
and backward as the English have somehow managed to conquer his people. In one particularly amusing scene, Azeem
offers Robin the use of his telescope, a device Robin has never seen
before. He puts the scope to his eye and
as their enemies appear to come suddenly closer, Robin struggles to pulls his
sword to fight them. Azeem simply shakes
his head.
There is a tendency to vilify Muslims in
our time. To do so is not only to miss
the contributions of a great culture, but is also to lump a large majority of
peaceful and rational people into the same camp as a few extremists. Osama ben Ladin no more represents Islam than
the Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan represents Christianity.
Just as Buddhism grew out of Hinduism, so
Islam, a relatively late-comer to the world religious scene, grew out of
conscious opposition to Christianity.
The founder of Islam, Muhammed, was born about 570 A.D. in Mecca. After the deaths of his father, mother, and
grandfather, Muhammed was raised by a merchant uncle during a time of great
economic disparity between the very rich and the very poor. Muhammed developed a reputation as a
trustworthy and honorably man, and was well-respected in business affairs.
In a trajectory that might remind us
somewhat of Gautama, Muhammed seems to have gone through a mid-life spiritual
quest. He began spending more and more
time in meditation and in conversation with both Christians and Jews he met
along the trade routes. He often
retreated to a cave on Mount Hira, a few miles from Mecca. On one occasion, during the month of Ramadan,
Muhammed began to receive ideas that he believed came from the angel
Gabriel. These thoughts became the basis
for the Quran and another work called the Hadith.
“Muhammed proclaimed the Quran as the
final and superior revelation from the One Supreme God (Allah). He banned the worship of idols and taught
that a Muslim’s life must be wholly committed to Allah.” (30 Days, 5). Nor were his reforms only of a religious
nature. Among other things, Mohammad forbade burying unwanted daughters alive,
which was the practice of his day.
The term Islam means “submission to God,” and the word Muslim translates to “those who submit.” There are five duties laid on a Muslim, five
ways that this submission is carried out, called the five pillars. The first pillar is the recitation of the
Creed, the shahada, “There is no god
but Allah and Muhammed is his prophet;” the second pillar is to pray five times
each day; the third is a belief in almsgiving; forth, the practice of fasting,
especially during the month of Ramadan; and finally, making a pilgrimage to
Mecca at least once during one’s lifetime.
It is important to note that while a
Muslin may faithfully observe each of these pillars, there is still no
guarantee of salvation. Some Muslims
believe that two angels accompany each of us, one who writes down our good
deeds, one who writes down our evil deeds.
On the fearful Day of Judgement, Allah will open the books and weigh
each person’s deeds to determine their eternal reward or punishment. “Each person hopes that his good deeds will
outweigh his bad deeds. However, Allah reserves
the absolute right to send individuals to whichever he pleases, hell or
paradise. Some Muslims teach that the
only sure way to paradise is to die as a martyr in a jihad, technically translated as “striving in God’s cause.” (30 Days, 6).
And so, while Islam believes in one
supreme deity who is merciful and compassionate, this deity is also somewhat
arbitrary in making decisions. Islam
presents a deity who is to be “submitted to,” and who does not hesitate to rely
on methods of force, fear, and reward.
This submission is without the benefit of a personal relationship with this
being (Hume). Whereas Christians want to
know God and be conformed to God’s character in Christ, Muslims want to
understand Allah’s will and become more obedient to his commands. In this regard sin is considered a mistake
rather than moral corruption, and as a result Muslims do not easily understand
the reason for the cross of Christ. Why
would Jesus die such an unseemly death and for such a reason? This message is difficult for a Muslim to
grasp. In the view of Islam, Jesus was a
great prophet. As such, death on a cross
would be unthinkable. Instead, Muslims
believe that Jesus was taken up to heaven without dying and that Judas Iscariot
was crucified in his place. Muslims
believe Jesus will return to earth sometime before the end of the world to
punish Jews and Christians alike for their corruption of religious faith and
practice, and that Jesus will then eventually die a natural death and later be
resurrected and judged with all men during the last days by Allah (30 Days,
11-12).
In contrast to a religion based on
servitude and obedience we have the picture of the Good Shepherd presented by
Jesus. The good shepherd lays down his
life for the sheep. This is the core message
of Christianity and the central way in which Christianity is different, not
only from Islam, but from any other religion in the world.
First, we believe God has revealed
Godself as neither capricious nor arbitrary.
While Allah is absolutely free and not bound by any moral principals, we
believe God always acts in accordance with universal moral principals
established by God. In further contrast
to Allah, we believe that God is not austere and aloof but eagerly desires to
be in relationship with creation. As
Jesus said, “I know my own, and my own know me” (John 10:14).
Second, we would put forward a God who
realizes that without some intervention, humanity will be lost for all
eternity. Our salvation, thankfully, is not
contingent on a positive balance between our good deeds over our bad
deeds. We understand that we are
corrupted by sin through and through, and that even our attempts at
righteousness are as filthy rags before God.
And here is the unique message of Christianity: we cannot save
ourselves, only God can save us. God is
not some mean old dude in heaven sitting with his arms crossed waiting for us
to impress him. No, God saw our plight
and tenderly set aside everything that would keep Him from us, coming to us,
wrapping his arms around us in love, and then dying on a cross so that all our
sin might be crucified and put to death.
As Jesus said, “I lay down my life for the sheep” (John 10:15).
I must tell you that I am deeply humbled
to offer this sermon on Islam while Bob Blincoe sits here today. As many of you know, Bob is a Presbyterian minister
who is also a veritable expert on Islam, serving as the Executive Director of
Frontiers, a mission agency located just a few miles from here. The men and women who serve with Bob at
Frontiers have a passion to serve Jesus Christ by engaging Muslims around the
world in dialogue, to address them as the sheep of another fold that Jesus
speaks of, sheep who also need to hear His voice.
Bob reviewed this sermon for me and
mentioned that one of his friends in ministry, Pat Cate, once surveyed fifty Iranian
Christians from a Muslim background, asking them what attracted them to Jesus
Christ. The answer given more than any other was the words of Christ in Matthew
11: "Come to me all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you
rest." This view of God in Christ
is quite different from the Muslim view of Allah. It seems that there are 99 names for Allah in
Islam: names like king, and ruler, and judge, all names that even Christians
can appreciate. But among these 99 names
there is no mention of Allah as Father and no mention of Allah as a
shepherd.
Every religion is not the same. Islam was founded as a conscious alternative
to Christianity, and presents a god who is austere and arbitrary, distant and
demanding, and whose relationship with humanity is that of master to
slave. Rather than vilify Muslims,
may it be our prayer, in times like these, that this great people might come to
know the God revealed in Jesus Christ, a loving Lord who cares deeply for this
part of his flock, who knows the name of every Muslim, and who desires to be
their Good Shepherd.
Bibliography
Religions
of the World, Lewis Hopfe and Mark R. Woodward
“30
Days Muslim Prayer Focus,” WorldChristian News and Books, 2003.
The
World’s Living Religions, Robert E. Hume
________________________________________________________
“Judaism and the Light of the World” - Dr.
Brant D. Baker
Top
“Aunt Ada’s Rules for Jewish Living:
1)
Israel is the land of milk and honey, Florida the land of milk of magnesia
2)
According to Jewish dietary law, pork and shellfish are forbidden. But shrimp
may be eaten in Chinese restaurants, and a pig in a blanket makes a nice hors
d’oeuvre.
3)
There comes a time in every man’s life when he must stand up and tell his
mother that he is an adult. This usually happens around age 45
4)
Always be sure to whisper the names of diseases, and if you can’t say something
nice, say it in Yiddish.
We continue today our series overviewing
five of the world’s major religions in an effort to determine the truth or
falsity of the popular claim that all religions are basically the same. It is our contention that they are not, and
further, that as Christians we need to know in what ways they are not, so as to
respect better those religions and our own, and so as to know better how we can
lovingly communicate the gospel.
We turn today to a study of our sister
religion, Judaism. And perhaps you’ve
heard me say it before, to be a good Christian you need first to be a good
Jew. Christianity is not a western
religion, but is in fact firmly planted in a Semitic culture, language, and
world view. To be a good Christian may
not mean following Aunt Ada’s Rules for Jewish Living, but it does mean
understanding the Jewish roots of our Christian faith.
A quick overview of Judaism would begin
with the patriarch Abraham and his wife Sarah.
It was with them that God made the old covenant, the promise that they
would become a great nation and the promise of a land. God kept these promises even though Sarah was
barren at the time, and eventually a great great grandson named Joseph would
arrange for the growing family to be kept safe in Egypt during a famine in the
promised land. The people prospered
there and became more numerous, but also lost their protector and ended up as
slaves to the Pharaoh. The story
in Judaism tells of the night over 3000 years ago when God sent the angel of
death throughout the land, killing the first born of their Egyptian masters,
but passing over the Jewish homes where the blood of a lamb was painted on the
doorposts. This bedrock story of Judaism
is still celebrated today in one of the key Jewish holidays called
Passover.
The golden age of Jewish history spans
about two hundred years, from 1100 to 900 BC, and includes the reign of three
kings—Saul, David, and Solomon. Not only
was it a golden age for Judaism as a religion, but also, under the reign of
King David, Israel was a major political and military power as well. King Solomon, renowned for his wisdom, built
the temple, and times were good. After
Solomon’s death, however, political upheaval meant the beginning of the end,
and the next few hundred years were not pleasant and culminated with the capture
of first the northern kingdom by the Assyrians and then the southern kingdom by
the Babylonians. The people were carried
off into exile, and while the time there was well-spent in recording the great
stories of the Jewish faith, weaving together a narrative history of God’s
covenant, overall the defeat was interpreted by the prophets as a penalty for
the sins of the people in not keeping their part of the covenant with God.
This question of why conquest and exile
come into our lives, of how it is that we can be in the promised land one minute
and by the waters of Babylon the next, this issue of evil and suffering is one
of the basic concerns of life that all religions must at some point
address. We learned last week that the
answer provided by Hinduism to the question of evil is that it is karma, man,
that suffering is simply the payback for deeds done in a previous life. Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm notes that there is no
single answer in Judaism to the ancient question of zaddik ve-ra to, literally "the righteous whom evil
befalls." From Jeremiah to Job,
from the Talmud to Maimonides (mai-man-i-dez), from Habbakuk to the Holocaust
there is one constant question, why
are the righteous afflicted with evil, but no single official authoritative
answer that speaks for all of Judaism.
That being said, however, there is one
answer in Judaism that probably gets used most of the time, an answer that, at
least at its starting point, is very similar to the answer of
Christianity. Suffering and pain are a
part of the world, according to this answer, because human beings use their
free will to choose against God and against one another. We tend to be selfish in our actions, seeking
that which gains us individual advantage rather than seeking the advantage of
the larger community. This use of free
will to disturb, degrade, and damage extends not only the people around us, but
into our environment as well. God
watches all this with sadness, but in order to allow human freedom to be truly
free and human morality to be truly meaningful, God refrains from getting
involved. Evil in mainstream Judaism is
simple cause and effect: you reap what you sow.
And so, out of their Jewish understanding
the disciples ask Jesus about a blind man they encounter, phrasing their
question to reflect this particular answer to the question of evil: Who sinned,
this man or his parents, that he should be born blind? But Jesus, as he often did, rejects simple
human dichotomies, and says three things that give us a different perspective
altogether.
First, Jesus says that neither this man
nor his parents sinned. In saying this
Jesus is not alone in rejecting the simple tidy answer of traditional
Judaism. In fact some streams of thought
in Judaism had been rejecting such tidy answers for many centuries. The book of Job raises point blank the fact
that it is not always the case that if you do good you are rewarded and if you
do evil you are punished. And although
one can argue that it was all good in the end for Job, it certainly wasn’t all
good in the middle, and this despite the fact that Job was a righteous man from
beginning, to middle, to end. In
rejecting a black and white view of suffering Jesus challenges his followers to
understand a very profound truth: that while you can be sure that sin will lead
to suffering, you cannot always argue backwards from suffering and find sin
(Gerald Sloyan, Interpretation-John,
p115).
Second, Jesus says that he is the light
of the world. This is a deep spiritual
claim, yes, but also a huge philosophical claim, namely, that the only way we
have to recognize evil is by comparison to the good. This claim works against those who argue that
the existence of evil disproves God’s existence. If God really existed, they say, there would
be no evil in the world. Since there is
evil in the world God must not exist.
It sounds reasonable enough except for one tiny detail: how else would
we recognize evil unless there were good?
The only way to know that there is an alternative to darkness is to see
the light.
Famed scientist Richard Dawkins, author
of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, is one of those
who believes the existence of evil disproves the existence of God. This has led Dawkins, a renowned atheist, to
develop another explanation for the problem of evil. Here’s what he says, “in a universe of blind
physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt,
other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in
it, nor any justice. The universe we
observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at the
bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no other good…. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is.
And we dance to its music” (as
quoted in Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among
Other Gods, 113-114).
But if this is true then we need to ask
Dawkins why people get so upset when Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot merely dance
to their DNA. If this is true then we
need to wonder why people object so strenuously when Jeffrey Dahmer or Osama
bin Laden or any of the dozens of people picked up in this past week by Valley
police merely dance to their DNA? The
reason their actions bother us is that we have seen the light, and so have an
expectation that life in that light is more than simply dancing to our
DNA. As C.S. Lewis once argued: we get
upset when we see injustice because something in us tells us that there is an
alternative, an alternative that is clear to us in the light of Jesus Christ (Mere Christianity).
Finally, Jesus says that the man was born
blind “so that God’s works might be revealed in him” (v 3). The real question, says Jesus, is not about
the cause of evil but its cure. Jesus
points us to a deep mystery that will only be unfolded in the cross, namely,
that which evil intends for human harm is transformed, redeemed, and redefined
for good by an all-powerful and all-loving God.
Evil never challenges these attributes in God, rather, evil unwittingly
allows for the full manifestation of God’s perfect power and love as the acts
of evil and darkness are turned in on evil itself. A man is born blind and evil seems to have
won, but with the coming of Jesus Christ an even greater triumph occurs: not
only is he healed, but he is saved.
The religious leaders around Jesus were
pretty shocked that he could heal someone like this, but rather than admit that
they got after Jesus for breaking the sabboth laws. You see, making mud counted as work, and they
were determined to bring Jesus up on charges.
It was a thin plan, but it was the best they could come up with. They haul in the formerly blind man and
demand that he give them some dirt, so to speak, that they can use. This happens twice, and each time the man
simply tells the truth, finally saying to them that while he doesn’t know
whether or not Jesus is a sinner, there is one thing he does know, and he tells
them, “I once was blind, but now I see.”
Amen.
Bibliography
Religions
of the World, Lewis Hopfe and Mark R. Woodward
Jesus
Among Other Gods, Ravi Zacharias
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/ideas_belief/sufferingevil/Suffering_Solutions_TO/Suffering_Modern_Responses/Suffering_BerkCohen_Encyc.htm
________________________________________________________
“New Age and the Gate to Abundant Life” - Dr.
Brant D. Baker
Top
If you’re at least 40 years old you
probably remember the rock musical Hair and the song that was later made famous
by The Fifth Dimension, The Age of
Aquarius. At the time it just seemed
like a catchy song about love and peace and brotherhood. Looking back one could argue that it was the
theme song for an emerging religions jumble called the New Age. In fact, the term "New Age" is
informally derived from astrology, and indicates that creation is on the verge
of an evolutionary transition from the Picean Age of rationality to the
Aquarian Age of spirituality, bliss, and the harmony of all things.
But even though the Fifth Dimension, the
Beatles, and Shirley MacClaine would have us believe they’ve discovered
something new, the "New Age" is actually very, very old. Generally
New Age borrows its beliefs from eastern
pantheism, especially Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism; and its practices from Western occultism,
especially Wicca, astrology, divination, and the like. According to cult-watcher Craig Branch, New
Age is a belief system that encompasses thousands of independent and sometime
contradictory systems and organizations, all of which generally seem to exhibit
one or more of the following beliefs:
1. All is one. Another way of saying this is that everything
is God and God is everything. According
to this belief the divine is a life-force, a cosmic mind or soul of the
universe, a great unity or wholeness.
Although this sounds innocent and perhaps even attractive, it leads New
Age adherents to some places that are difficult for Christians to follow. For one thing, even though many New Age
adherents describe "God" in personal terms, in the final analysis an
impersonal life force or energy is
incapable of personal relationship. This
is the same kind of “god” that we met in Hinduism and is one of the places
where New Age shows its eastern theological origins.
2. Since each human being is also a part
of this universal God-consciousness there is no absolute truth external to any
of us, only relativism and subjective experience. Another way of saying this is, “What’s true
for you is true for you, and what is true for me is true for me.” There can be no questioning of the
individual, because each individual is a deity, and therefore a law unto
themselves. The logical incoherence of
this view, however, is witnessed by us every time we turn on the news: when my
truth clashes with your truth we have lawlessness and crime, but who can
challenge? As we said a few weeks ago,
we’re all just dancing to our DNA. At an
even more subtle level, each person being a law unto themselves can lead to
power without representation, economic inequities, and the failure of justice
for those who have neither power nor money.
3. Third, if God is in everything and
everything is in God then it follows for the New Ager that the means to
enlightenment, or salvation, or abundant life is simply to discover the god
that lives within each of us. Among
other things this means that human kind is not really sinful since our true
essence is divine and perfect. The only discontinuity between ourselves and
"God" is our ignorance of our unlimited potential. Our problem isn’t sin, it’s our ignorance of
our divine nature. Salvation and a
satisfying life in New Age is therefore found through expanding our spiritual
knowledge. New Age teachers such as
James Redfield in his Celestine Prophecy offer
various occultic techniques to enable people to acquire this knowledge,
including channeling, past life therapy, transcendental meditation, yoga,
crystals, and so on.
4. Finally, a key part of most New Age
belief systems is that life continues through some kind of reincarnation. In this view reincarnation allows individuals
repeated opportunity to improve their spiritual consciousness until they are
one with the cosmic consciousness that is God. According to books like A Course in Miracles, each person's goal
is to come to this same self-realization of their own divinity. (Vol. 3, pp. 83-4) It is worth noting in this regard that some
New Agers, like Kenneth Ring in his book Heading
Toward Omega, even misrepresent Christian history and twist Scripture to
support the idea that original Christianity taught reincarnation (p.158). In this view Jesus was a man who
evolved spiritually to the state of
being the Christ, just as Siddhartha evolved to become the Buddha, the
enlightened one, both reaching the point of ultimate essence with the divine
cosmic reality.. To the New Ager, Jesus the Christ, is one of many ascended
masters - whose function is to awaken humanity and illumine the path. Shirley MacLaine has even claimed that Jesus
traveled to India and learned New Age doctrines before beginning his public
ministry (Shirley MacLaine, Out on a
Limb, pp. 233-34). (The preceding
overview was taken from www.watchman.org
Profile on New Age).
I mentioned that people over forty are
old enough to remember the beginnings of New Age influence. Conversely, people under forty are young
enough to have grown up in an America where Christianity was an option, not a
cultural requirement. In fact, a recent
new member of to our church has given me permission to tell you the story of
her own journey. She grew up very much a
child of the New Age, describing herself as someone brought up to be a good
agnostic. For her this meant a strong
commitment to relativism, intellectualism, and a belief that all existence is
ultimately meaningless. She looked into
Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Native American animism, and occultism, but failed
to find anything that could reconcile her deep down desire to make a difference
in people’s lives with her deep down belief that those lives were meaningless.
When she turned 30 a trusted friend
overheard her say, as she often did, that “it’s all relative.” “You know,” he
said, “it can’t all be relative…If
something is relative, it must be relative to
something.” Her friend’s comment suddenly shattered the cool logic of
relativism, and this coupled with her suspicion that it really wasn’t all
meaningless, sent her on a new spiritual quest. Since she was intolerant of
much of what she saw in Christianity, she began to look for spiritual meaning
in every New Age trend to hit the streets of Sedona. Yoga, vortexes, an angel reader, astrology,
and an especially powerful experience with numerology all led her to believe
that her consciousness was expanding in some way. These experiences, many of them almost beyond
belief, were real and powerful, if not somewhat alarming. Here’s what she has to say,
“Part of me wishes right now that I could
say these events were all in my imagination, but they weren’t. They were as
real as the chair you are sitting on. Initially all these amazing occurrences
gave me a hope that there was a purpose to my life. It seemed clear that
something or someone was communicating with me and I bought into the idea that
everything happens for a good
reason—It finally felt like this was all going ‘somewhere.’ Who or what was behind the reason was still
an abstract principle—Light, Love, Oneness…who knows. But I was determined to
figure out why I was here. New age promotes the idea that we actively and
passively create our own individual reality.
If our consciousness is advanced enough, they say, we can literally pull
that which we want in our lives to us—including physical things. As well, before we were born we chose lessons
for this life and set up tests and challenges for ourselves ahead of time to
teach us these lessons. If there’s something negative around, new age believes
we are pulling it to us or we chose it beforehand so that we could learn a
lesson and thus raise our consciousness closer to God’s.
Unfortunately, without a personal
relationship with God, or a single standard to live by, my quest to determine
what my lessons were quickly spun out of control. I spent hours in bookstores and on-line
“researching,” reading and writing in forums on everything from mediumship to
past-lives, charkas to planetary alignments. All these books and discourses
were focused on raising awareness of ultimate truths, expanding consciousness,
letting go of ego and other illusory boundaries, and all were cloaked in a
constantly professed veil of Love and Light. Before long, though, I had to
admit to myself that I and all the other new-agers around me were simply
dashing from one revelation-like idea of the moment to the next. It was a
competition of signs and miracles, a meandering marathon of metaphysical
musing, a continuous vision-quest with no practical purpose. I also noticed
that very few participants, if any, actually went out and acted on the Love and
Light they so vociferously proclaimed to live for. It appeared to be nothing
short of addictive behavior and I wanted out. But, again, I didn’t know what
else to do or believe.”
Woven through many of these experiences
was a kind of latent Christianity. As
we’ve already suggested, many New Agers borrow from biblical stories, a fact
that makes it difficult sometimes for Christians to keep things straight. Our friend believes that the Holy Spirit was
calling to her through some of these things, and while her hostility to
Christianity was reducing, she couldn’t quite understand why she needed a
savior in the first place. The New Age
aversion to anything called sin caused her to wonder from whom or what she
could possibly need saving.
It should come as no surprise that the
New Age rejection of sin also means a rejection of the existence of Satan,
although it does grant that there are negative energies and entities to
avoid. As it happened in this case, an
occasional boyfriend appears to have been more than just casually interested in
things dark and demonic, and although our friend desperately wanted to
disbelieve that anything satanic could be happening, when she allowed for this
possibility some of the incongruous things in her life with him suddenly fell
into place. This led her to our
church, still with no intention of becoming a Christian, where she heard the
gospel of Jesus Christ presented in a way she never had before, and to a
ministry session where she began receiving deep level spiritual cleansing and
healing.
She went home from this powerful time of
prayer and started reading the Bible.
She writes, “…lo and behold -- IT ALL MADE SENSE! Over the next 48
hours, my eyes, ears and heart finally opened to the reason and purpose of
Jesus Christ and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I needed his help. I
needed salvation because I was losing my life to the devil’s tricks and to my
own sins which were helping him and his assistants along. Within two nights I
was on my knees confessing my sins, accepting Christ as my savior, and
surrendering my will to God. It was the
most humbling experience of my life. I was reborn. I have remained reborn. I am
reborn daily, sometimes hourly, and I am in continuous awe that all the
answers, all the comfort, and all the meaning has been there…all along.”
Jesus said “Very truly I tell you, I am
the gate for the sheep. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly”
(John 10:7, 9-10). The promise of
Christ is that whoever uses him for a gate will “be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.”
In other words, the abundant life that Jesus promises includes
salvation, spontaneity, and sustenance.
Salvation in the forgiveness of our sins
and an escape from death. It’s not
something we must earn, or attain, or discover through secret knowledge or
practice. It’s right there, out in the
open, and a gift of grace.
Spontaneity is something of a surprise to
some people, but it is true nonetheless.
Jesus tells us that his gate is a gate for both coming in and going out.
Our Lord’s interest is not in controlling us and limiting us, but in giving us
liberty and freedom, within the abundant life-giving boundaries God knows are
best for us.
And finally sustenance. The abundant life that reach through the gate
of Jesus Christ also means spiritual sustenance—seen as good pasture in the
metaphor of Christ the gate for the sheep, and seen by us in terms of the
spiritual food that we need to live (Oxford NRSV note on John 10:9).
________________________________
“Amber Sees The Big Picture” - Dr. Brant
D. Baker
Top
Bless the LORD, O my soul. O LORD my God,
you are very great. You are clothed with honor and majesty, You cause the grass
to grow for the cattle, and plants for people to use,?to bring forth food from
the earth, and wine to gladden the human heart, oil to make the face shine, and
bread to strengthen the human heart.
The trees of the LORD are watered
abundantly, the cedars of Lebanon that he planted. In them the birds build
their nests; the stork has its home in the fir trees. The high mountains are
for the wild goats; the rocks are a refuge for the coneys.
You have made the moon to mark the
seasons; the sun knows its time for setting. You make darkness, and it is
night, when all the animals of the forest come creeping out. The young lions
roar for their prey, seeking their food from God. When the sun rises, they
withdraw and lie down in their dens. People go out to their work and to their
labor until the evening.
O LORD, how manifold are your works! In
wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. Yonder is
the sea, great and wide, creeping things innumerable are there, living things
both small and great. There go the ships, and Leviathan that you formed to
sport in it.
These all look to you to give them their
food in due season; when you give to them, they gather it up; when you open
your hand, they are filled with good things. When you hide your face, they are
dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.
When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of
the ground.
May the glory of the LORD endure forever;
may the LORD rejoice in his works!
Psalm 104:1, 14-31
Amber was at the age where she liked to draw: it was a kind of
power to watch the lines appear on the page, flowing from her head, through her
hand, down to a clean sheet of paper. While she couldn't have named it as such,
there was a mystery and a beauty in this act of creation that surprised Amber
every time it happened.
Amber was also at the age of wondering. If she drew animals, she
wondered where they came from. If she drew a tree, she wondered why they grew.
Lately she had been drawing pictures of her house and her family, and she
wondered where she came from and why she was here. There was a lot to wonder
about when you were only seven.
On this particular morning Amber was finishing a picture for her
mother. It was a special picture because it was a gift for Mother's Day. Amber
loved her mother, and thinking about her mother as she drew filled her with
happiness. Her heart conceived her picture, and so the sun, carefully placed in
the upper right hand corner of the page, had a smile too.
The rest of the picture was of Amber and her mother planting
flowers, as they had a few weeks before. Amber had liked working together, had
liked the fact that they had gotten dirty but had laughed because it was
alright to get dirty when you were planting flowers. Although Amber couldn't
have said so at the time, it was this goodness of creating something together,
something that would bloom in time, that had been so special. And so in the
picture her seven year old artistic sense showed the flowers being planted
already in full bloom, just as the ones that they had put out were now in full
bloom outside the downstairs window.
At breakfast the family talked of the their plans for the day.
Lunch at grandma's and a walk in the park were planned for later, but first was
church. Amber liked church, and she especially like the children's sermon. It
came right after they read out of the Bible, which Amber listened to, even though
she was usually drawing while she did.
Today the Bible reading was from the Psalms. It was about God,
and some animals, then the pastor called the children forward. He gave them
each some playdough, and with it asked them to make a lion, and then a bird and
then a fish. Then he asked,
"Can you make a real lion, or a real
bird, or a real fish? "NO!"
The children all said. "Who
can?" he asked, and after a long pause one of the children said, because
they all knew it was always the right answer, "God." "That's right, God even made you and me.
Let's thank God. "THANKS GOD!"
they all called out loudly. "But
what about your mom and dad, didn't they help God make you too?" The
children all nodded their supposed agreement as the pastor continued, "And since
today is Mother's Day, let's thank mom too" "THANKS MOM!" they all yelled. Then
they giggled and then they prayed and then they went back to their seats.
When she sat down beside her mother Amber she started to draw a
new picture. She drew a lion, and then a bird, and then a fish. Then she tried
to draw God, but she couldn't, and so she drew her mother instead. She started
to wonder about what the pastor had said, and a jumble of questions came to her
head. She needed to know more about this special power shared by God and
mommies.
In the car on the way to grandma's house Amber finally sorted out
her wondering and questions.
"Mommy and Daddy," she asked, "who made me, you or
God?" Her parents looked at one another, but fortunately they had been
listening to the children's sermon, and one of them said,
"God made you, and we helped."
"What for?" asked Amber. Her father, assuming her
question was about the relationship between God and parents, answered by saying
that it was God's gift that people get to help God in making special things. He
had assumed wrong. "No," said
Amber, "what did you and God make me for." "We made you so there
would be more love in the world." Amber's mother said. Amber fell silent
while she thought about this for a minute, and her mother continued, "Before
you were made we didn't have you to love. Helping God make you meant that there
was more love in the world because Daddy, and me, and grandma, and God all love
you. Because you were made there is more love in the world than there was
before.
Amber was quiet the rest of the way to grandma's house. When they
got there Amber took out the picture she was soon to give her mother and after
some thought she wrote across the top:
God made the whole world to love,
mommy and daddy made me to love,
I made this picture to love you.
________________________________________________________
“Mormonism” - Dr. Brant D. Baker
A Presbyterian
Perspective
Top
Historical Background
The United States of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries was a place of intense religious fervor. Traveling preachers
emphasized personal spiritual experiences and feelings. Church authority,
baptism, predestination, and the origin of the American Indian were questioned
and discussed. Many new churches were being started. Skepticism of religion
abounded among the educated.
Into such a time as this Joseph Smith was born to Joseph and Lucy
Mack Smith, in Sharon, Vermont, on December 23, 1805. The young Joseph received
little formal education, but would prove to be a man with an acquiring
intellect, a natural curiosity, a fertile imagination, and a keen sense of the
religious needs of those around him.
According to the official history of the LDS church, young Smith
had his first religious vision in 1820 when he was almost fifteen years old. In
his report of this incident, he says that he was confused by the competing
claims of the Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists during a religious
revival in Palmyra, the town in upstate New York where he and his family lived
at the time. So he went into the nearby woods to pray and to ask God which
church to join. There he allegedly saw a pillar of light descend upon him. When
it rested on him he saw two bright and glorious figures standing above him in
the air. According to Smith, one of the figures spoke to him, and said while
pointing to the other one, “This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!” Smith says he
asked which of the various churches was right. He was told that he must join
none of them, and that those who believe in them were “all corrupt” (Joseph
Smith, The Pearl of Great Price, History 1:5-20)
Smith reports that three years later he was visited by an angel
named Moroni. Moroni identified himself as a prophet of an ancient American
race of people who were now extinct. He allegedly told Smith of buried gold
plates upon which the history of Moroni’s people was engraved. The ancient
record was said to have been written by Moroni’s father Mormon, as well as
others of the race. Smith was given a vision as to where these plates were
buried in the nearby woods, but he was not allowed to take possession of them
until four years later when he was 21 years old.
On January 18, 1827, Smith secretly married Emma Hale of Harmony,
Pennsylvania, without her father’s permission. Later that year, he reported
receiving another visit by the angel Moroni, this time directing him to remove
the gold plates along with some special stones, which he was told were the Urim
and Thummim mentioned in the Old Testament. Smith says he used these stones in
translating the gold plates from a language he called Reformed Egyptian (Joseph
Smith, The Pearl of Great Price, History 1:35). His wife assisted him in
this translation, writing down the words Smith called out from behind a
curtain. No one other than Joseph saw the stones, but eight witnesses claimed
to have seen the plates and the writing on them. Emma never saw the plates, but
believed they existed. Her father, on the other hand, in whose house the
alleged translation work took place, always questioned their existence. The
plates were said to be swept away by the angel Moroni after Smith finished his
work.
The Book of Mormon purports to be a history of people who
lived in the ancient Americas. Its major story begins in Jerusalem in about 600
B.C., just before the final Babylonian conquest. Warned by the Lord, a prophet
named Lehi and a small band of Hebrews left Jerusalem, traveled east over the
Arabian peninsula, and set sail in boats to the west coast of America. In the
course of time, they divided into two competing groups, the Lamanites and the
Nephites. Because of their evil ways, the Lamanites were cursed with a dark
skin (and thus the origin of the American Indian is explained, if in somewhat
racist terms).
According to LDS teaching Jesus Christ visited the Americas to
teach the people and organize his church after his resurrection. Two hundred
years of peace followed his visit, then conflict broke out, culminating in a
great battle in A.D. 421 that ended with the evil Lamanites completely
destroying the Nephites. The last prophet of the Nephites, Moroni, supposedly
completed engraving the record of these events on gold plates and buried them
before he died. This same prophet became the angel who would later be said to
guide Smith.
Thus for Mormons, the Bible is the first revelation from God, but
only one of many. In itself the Bible does not contain sufficient information
for salvation. It is to be understood only as correctly interpreted by proper
Latter-day Saints authority, as the Bible is believed to have been corrupted
through the centuries. The King James Version is the only acceptable and
complete English version of the Bible. To understand the King James Version
from a Mormon perspective, Joseph Smith revealed the Inspired Version of
the Bible (his own translation). Other books were later revealed to Smith, key
among them Doctrine and Covenants and The Pearl of Great Price,
and these are also called “scripture” by Mormons. These later books and
revelations, more than the Book of Mormon, contain the essence of Mormon
beliefs (see below).
Reflection Questions
Why are certain
written words called “scripture?”
What makes such
words authoritative?
Observations
Despite extensive
archeological activity, in America and elsewhere, by both Mormon and non-Mormon
scholars, no historical or otherwise independent record of the peoples spoken
of in Book of Mormon has ever been found:
-no Book of Mormon cities have ever been located
-no Book of Mormon names have been found in New World
inscriptions
-no genuine inscriptions of Hebrew have been found in America
-no genuine inscriptions of Egyptian or anything similar to
Egyptian (which could correspond to Joseph Smith’s “Reformed Egyptian” have
been found in America
-no ancient copies of Book of Mormon scriptures have been
found
-no ancient inscriptions of any kind in America which indicate
that earlier peoples had Hebrew or Christian beliefs have been found
-no mention of Book of Mormon persons, nations, or places
has been found
-no artifact of any kind which demonstrates the Book of Mormon
is true has been found
-rather than finding supportive evidence, Mormon scholars have
been forced to retreat from traditional interpretations of Book of Mormon
statements
Dr. Walter Martin states the matter succinctly
With one “Special Revelation” the Mormon Church expects its
intended converts to accept the totally unsupported testimony of a
fifteen-year-old boy that nobody ever preached Jesus Christ’s gospel from the
close of the apostolic age until the “Restoration” through Joseph Smith, Jr.,
beginning in 1820. We are asked to believe that the church fathers for the
first five centuries did not proclaim the true gospel—that Origen, Justin,
Iraneaus, Jerome, Eusebius, Athanasius, Chrysostom, and then later Thomas
Aquinas, Juss, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Tyndale, Wycliff, Knox, Wesley,
Whitefield, and a vast army of faithful servants of Jesus Christ all failed
where Joseph Smith, Jr., was to succeed.
With one dogmatic assertion, Joseph pronounced everybody wrong,
all Christian theology an abomination, and all professing Christians
corrupt—all in the name of God! How strange for this to be presented as
restored Christianity, when Jesus Christ specifically promised that “the gates
of Hell” would not prevail against the Church (Matthew 16:18). In Mormonism we
find God contradicting this statement in a vision to Joseph Smith, Jr., some
eighteen centuires later
(The Maze of Mormonism, Santa Ana, CA: Vision House Publishers, Inc. 1977, p
25, 31).
Mormon Beliefs
God
Mormon theology teaches that God was once a male human being. He
is said to have lived on a planet similar to Earth, and to have experienced
basically what we are now experiencing as he moved through life. He wasn’t yet
a god at that point, but he was on the way.
“Heavenly Father,” as Mormons call God, obeyed the god of the
world on which he lived as he progressed through life. He followed the
principles of the gospel set forth by that god, and moved steadily toward the
status of godhood in life beyond mortal existence on that planet. He married on
that earth, and he and his wife had children and lived a full life. After
Heavenly Father and his wife died and passed into post-mortal existence, he
achieved the status of godhood. Where the god of that world as well as that
world itself came from, Mormon theology does not claim to know, nor does it
address the origins of matter and intelligence, which it considers to be
eternal.
According to LDS teaching, having become a god, Heavenly Father,
or Elohim (the Hebrew word for “god”), planned for some the eternal matter to
come together to form the earth we now inhabit. Heavenly Father and his wife
then began begetting spirit children. All of the people who have lived or ever
will live on this earth are spirit children of Heavenly Father and his wife (or
possibly wives); therefore, all humans are literally sisters and brothers to
one another.
The process of allowing these spirit children the opportunity to
progress and become like their Heavenly Father and Mother unfolded as this god
shaped bodies of flesh and bones for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, which
Mormon belief locates near present day Independence, Missouri. Their pre-mortal
spirits were joined with these mortal bodies. Mormonism teaches that, as the
human race grows through reproduction from these original parents, eventually
enough bodies will be made available for all of the spirit children in
pre-mortal existence to come to earth and pass through mortal existence.
In contrast to the Mormon view of God as having once been a human
being, Christians believe that God is Spirit (John 4:24), infinite, eternal,
and unchangeable in being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth
(The Shorter Catechism, 7.004). There is one God and only one God (Isaiah
45:15, 18, 21) whose authority and power is over all persons and all worlds.
And although the male pronoun is used by biblical writers in speaking of God,
God is not considered male or female, but, in the parent imagery of the
scriptures, carries aspects of both. In the Christian tradition, humans are
made in the image of God, not the other way around.
Reflection Questions
What kind of
God is it you want to believe in—one who was once human and “climbed the
ranks,” or one who is eternal and infinite, one who all people can eventually
come to be like, or one who is substantially different from all humanity?
Why is the
difference significant?
Observations
Mormon theology appears to want to claim for God what Christian
theology claims for Jesus Christ, that is, that the divine took on human flesh
and dwelt among us. Beyond the problematic assertion that God “worked his way
up through the ranks,” there is the important distinction that, in Christian
understanding, Christ’s work on earth was part of God’s saving work. The Mormon
god had no apparent salvific intention in mind, only his own reward.
Jesus Christ/Salvation
In Mormon belief Jesus is the firstborn of the many spirit
children of Heavenly Father. In his pre-existent state Jesus is known as
Jehovah (a non-biblical word commonly used as a name for God). In a heavenly
council before creation, Jesus/Jehovah volunteered to accomplish Heavenly
Father’s plan for the redemption of the world. Jesus’ brother, Satan/Lucifer,
offered an opposing plan that would have eliminated free will and forced total
obedience with Satan/Lucifer receiving the credit for not losing anyone. Jesus’
plan was accepted and Satan’s rejected.
Although Jesus was the first born spirit child, he did not come
to earth to begin his mortal existence until later. In the fullness of time,
Heavenly Father had union with Mary, who was a virgin, and Jesus Christ was
born to be the Savior of humankind. He was Savior in that he revealed and
modeled Heavenly Father’s intentions for human character, attitudes, and
actions. Although the New Testament is silent on the matter, Mormons have
speculated that Jesus was married, perhaps at the wedding at Cana in Galilee,
to Mary, Martha, and/or Mary Magdalene. The LDS church also holds that,
following his ascension, Jesus appeared on the North American continent to the
Nephites and Lamanites, and in this appearance established the church and the
Melchizedek priesthood along the lines presently found in the LDS church. They
also hold that when Christ returns to establish his kingdom on earth (at the
beginning of the millennium?), a New Jerusalem temple will be built on a site
in Jackson County, Missouri, with a companion temple to be built in present-day
Jerusalem (Ether 13:5, Book of Mormon).
In Mormon belief the goal of mortal existence is to learn to
distinguish between good and evil. Memory of pre-mortal existence is blocked
out, and in their mortal existence on this earth people make the choices that
will affect their destiny. The Mormon belief that Mormon families are the best
settings for that growth is the major reason behind the large families that are
encouraged by the LDS church (although some Mormons deny that there is any
explicit teaching on the issue of family size). After death, those persons who
have chosen to respond positively to the gospel, be baptized by a man holding
the priesthood, and obediently live according the principles and ordinances of
the gospel, will achieve the status of godhood and pass into post-mortal
existence. There they will beget their own spirit children, and the whole
process repeats itself. Joseph Smith himself suggested that very few will
achieve the status of godhood.
Mormons believe that Jesus went to the cross to die and thus
broke the hold of physical death over the human race. Jesus’ resurrection makes
bodily resurrection a reality for all of humanity. Thus he made it possible for
human beings to overcome spiritual death and to attain exaltation by their
faith in the gospel. But while salvation is understood as the gift of God for
all persons, it is exaltation that is necessary to achieve the highest heaven
and godhood.
Exaltation requires acts of obedience as specified in the
“gospel” (or Restored Gospel). These acts include tithing, temple work,
celestial marriage and other temple rites, obedience to the Word of Wisdom
(refrain from use of tobacco, coffee, tea, and alcoholic beverages), and the
pursuit of moral purity. By obedience to the “gospel” a male
achieves godhood with a female. It is LDS belief that this “restored gospel”
contains the necessary ordinances for exaltation.
In contrast to the Mormon view of Jesus as the first spirit child
of the Heavenly Father, Christians believe that Jesus is “the only Son from the
Father” (John 1:14) who exists from the beginning with God. In the mystery of
the incarnation Christian teaching affirms that Jesus is both fully human and
fully divine, and thus able to accomplish God’s saving work. That saving work
is complete in Jesus Christ: there is no “higher” state (exaltation) that we
attain by our own works. In Christian belief the emphasis is not on works of
obedience but on the gift of God’s grace. Christians accept on faith (which is
also part of the gift of grace) that Jesus’ death on the cross breaks not only
the power of physical death, but more importantly, the power of sin. In
this sense, the atoning death of Jesus Christ is a completed act that opens the
way of eternal life to those who accept this unconditional act of grace: no
further act is necessary from human beings in the way of works of obedience.
Salvation is not a reward for works, but God’s gracious gift to all persons
through Jesus Christ.
Reflection Questions
What might be
some results of believing that Jesus and Satan are brothers (and thus
presumably equal in power)?
What is the
connection between salvation given as a gift and the holy (obedient) life
demanded by the Bible?
Do you believe
that there are different levels of heaven for different groups of people? What
does the Bible teach in this regard?
Observations
Having applied incarnational theology to “Heavenly Father,”
Mormon theology seems at something of a loss to know what to do with the person
and work of Jesus Christ. It seems clear that Joseph Smith, Jr., was trying to
link obedience and salvation, perhaps in well-meaning ways. His error, from a
Christian perspective (and one that had been made by many before him), was to
condition salvation on works, rather than seeing works as a response to
God’s gift of salvation.
Beyond this significant theological error, of course, is the
stratification of heaven into multiple levels: the Celestial Kingdom for
Mormons (which is itself divided into three parts, the highest of
which—godhood—is reserved for those Mormons married in the Temple); the
Terrestrial Kingdom for honorable men (and women?) who didn’t accept Mormonism;
and the Telestial Kingdom for the wicked of the world. In addition there is a
Spirit Prison/Hell/Second Death condition that is reserved for Satan and his
followers. To arrive at this multi-heaven understanding requires Mormons to go
far afield from anything even remotely suggested in the Bible.
Holy
Spirit
In Mormon theology the Holy Ghost is referred to as the Comforter
or Sanctifier through whose influence wicked desires are purged, and worthy
saints move toward peace and perfection. He is the personage of spirit with a
body of “refined matter” who is also the source of miracles, gifts, and godly
powers by which enemies are defeated and the people of God blessed. The Holy
Ghost dwells permanently only with those who desire him and are worthy of him,
having received him through the laying on of hands by one holding the
Melchizedek priesthood.
Some Mormons differentiate between the Holy Ghost (above) and the
Holy Spirit who is the “Spirit of God” or the “Spirit of Truth” and operates in
the lives of those other than Latter-day Saints “striving to bring men to the
knowledge of the truth” (Smith, Gospel Doctrine, 66-68).
In contrast Christians believe that the Holy Spirit is not
something other than God, but the very presence of God with us. When Jesus left
this earth he sent the promised Holy Spirit to be his continued presence with
us. While Christians would agree with Mormon theology in viewing the Spirit as
the giver of gifts, the reception of such gifts is not a matter of “worthiness”
or of having had hands laid on us by the right person.
Christians do not differentiate between the Holy Spirit and the
Holy Ghost. It may be that Smith, having access primarily to the King James
Version of the Bible, followed the style of the KJV which used two terms,
“Spirit” and “Ghost,” to translate the Greek word pneuma (spirit).
Reflection Questions
The Holy Spirit
remains a mystery for many Christians. What do you know and believe to be true
about the Holy Spirit?
Can you support your views biblically?
Church and Priesthood
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does not see
itself as a part of the continuous witness of Christ from the time of the
apostles to the present. The Mormon church views itself as a restored
church, not a reformed church. Their belief is that, following the time
of the apostles, the authority of the priesthood was lost and along with it
certain important practices and doctrines. Mormons are now willing to state
that the Lord continued to work through various Christian traditions,
preserving the essentials of the gospel, particularly the atoning work of Jesus
Christ. But this is clearly not enough in Mormon opinion, and so Mormons see
their mission as converting others to what they believe is Christ’s restored
gospel.
Because Mormons understand that their beliefs grow out of Joseph
Smith’s original vision, in which all Christian churches were condemned as “an
abomination,” Mormon theology does not encourage ecumenical cooperation.
Although some Mormons do cooperate in limited ecumenical enterprises, for the
most part Mormon theology views Christian churches as teaching a corrupt
gospel. In Mormon belief, complete sanctification and exaltation are not
possible outside of the restored priesthood and ordinances of the Mormon
church.
Central to advancing through earthly existence to godhood is the
priesthood, which can only be held by males. There are two levels of priesthood
in Mormon practice: the Aaronic (or lesser) priesthood and the Melchizedek (or
greater) priesthood. These priesthoods have their own divisions, and a man must
move through the hierarchy, ordinarily starting at age twelve. Mormon practices
uses the word “elder” as a common title given to all who hold any level in the
office of Melchizedek priest (“elder” is the first level in this priesthood).
Only those holding the Melchizedek priesthood can officiate at marriages in
temples and administer other gospel ordinances. This priesthood is also the key
to leadership in the church at the highest levels.
In contrast to these Mormon beliefs, Christian theology affirms
the priesthood of all believers (male and female). This view of priesthood
suggests that all Christians are to be about the work of ministry, without
distinction of “levels.” Christian theology does practice the concept of
“ordination,” which is a “setting apart” for special kinds of ministry, where
those gifts have been confirmed through a process of discernment. But in making
this distinction Reformed Christian theology is careful not to set up a hierarchy
within the church. Calvin, in particular, was suspicious of investing too much
power in one or in many, and thus created the kind of shared power structure
observable now in Presbyterian churches.
In further contrast, most Christians recognize that the “church”
is the body of Christ around the world, present wherever the gospel is preached
and heard, the sacraments administered, and Jesus Christ served. The Head of
the church is the Lord Jesus Christ, and no other person can claim that place.
Christians believe that a continuity exists between the church of the apostles
and the present Christian church, and the Reformed branch of the church
believes that the church is reformed and always reforming, as the Holy Spirit
works in our midst.
Reflection Questions
Does Mormon
belief in a male-only priesthood ring true to the Bible? Why or why not?
How far should we
go in accepting beliefs of other Christian or semi-Christian communities? What
is the standard?
Many Christians
have been led to believe that Mormonism is simply a variant of Christianity,
yet it is clear from Mormon theology and practice that Mormonism doesn’t hold
the larger part of Christianity in the same kind of mutuality. Does this or does
this not suggest that Mormonism is really not a variant form of Christianity
but something quite different?
Conclusion
It should be clear from the preceding that there are more
differences than similarities between traditional, mainstream Christianity and
the religion practiced by Mormons. Although the LDS Church expresses its
beliefs in traditional Christian terms, those beliefs cannot be regarded as an
expression of historic, traditional Christianity.
Those persons who live in areas heavily populated by Mormons are
perhaps the most challenged. The fact that Mormonism uses Christian
terminology, but in decidedly different ways, makes basic dialogue a challenge.
The aggressive proselytizing undertaken by Mormons can make for difficult
relations as parents seek to shelter their children. And finally, the social
consequences of being a kind of persecuted minority for so long have had the
predictable effect of creating a close-knit, almost clannish Mormon community,
with the expected fallout when Mormons find themselves in the majority.
Like people everywhere, some Mormons are easier to get along with
than others. In general, individual Mormons tend to be quite friendly
(although this friendship has been known to dissipate when evangelistic
prospects seem dim). The issues seem to fall out between the perceived image of
Mormonism, on the one hand, and the actions of so-called “jack” Mormons, on the
other hand. In this regard, Mormonism struggles from the same kinds of
hypocrisy as Christianity, with the possible exception that Mormonism has a
less-sufficient doctrine of grace.
It is also clear that, whatever differences may distinguish them,
Mormons may have some things to teach the Christian church. Their unabashed
insistence of virtuous living, despite the failures and hypocrisies of some, is
refreshing in a cultural climate that has largely abandoned personal
responsibility. Their strong emphasis on family appears to be one of the major
drawing cards for many who come through their doors. Their incredible evangelical
fervor should give Christians everywhere pause.
But the conclusion is inescapable that Mormonism is not simply
another kind of Christian denomination. Mormonism is it’s own religion.
While it share words in common with Christianity, it uses these words in
decidedly different ways. Mormonism has a different understanding of the person
and work of God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit; Mormonism has its own
unique understanding of the nature and means of salvation; and Mormonism has
its own unique set of writings it considers to be scripture.
The fact that Mormonism is so different, that in fact it began as
a reaction and criticism of Christianity, makes the attempts by contemporary
Mormonism to appear as simply another branch of Christianity all the more
troubling and ironic. It is not enough, in Mormon belief, to be a Christian:
more is needed, and that “more” is an addition to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
History is filled with religions (cults) that represent themselves as “Christ
plus…” In every case the true and historic church of Jesus Christ has rejected
any attempt to add to or water down the gospel.
Postscript
There is an obscure passage in 1 Corinthians 15 that refers in
passage to an apparent practice of baptism on behalf of the dead. The argument
in question has to do with whether or not there is to be a resurrection.
Without advocating its use, Paul uses this practice against them, asking why
they do this if they don't believe in the resurrection.
One of the challenges of reading Paul's letters, of course, is
that we only have half the conversation. Most scholarship agrees that, if this
was practiced at all, it was a practice limited to the Corinthian church (which
had several other somewhat questionable practices as well!). The New Testament
is otherwise completely silent about this practice; and there is no known
practice like it in any of the other churches nor in any orthodox Christian
community in the centuries that immediately follow. "How can such a
practice be so completely unknown if in fact it had had any authorization with
the churches of the first century? This complete silence in all other sources
is the sure historical evidence that, if such a practice existed in fact, it
did so as something purely eccentric among some in the Corinthian
community." (Gordon Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, The
New International Commentary on the New Testament, Eerdmans, 1987, p 764).
Comparisons of Mormon and Christian Beliefs
(Taken from Mormonism 101)
The God of Mormonism:
- was not always God (once a man)
- was not the first God
- organized already-created
matter in the creation of the world
- cannot be in more than one
place at once
The God of Christianity:
- is eternally God
- is the First Cause of all
things
- created the world ex nihilo
(out of nothing)
- is fully present everywhere (p
39) (see Isaiah 43:10, 44:6-8, 45:5-6, 21-22, and 46:9 on the issue that
"before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after
me…beside me there is not God.")
The God of Christianity: The Jesus of Mormonism:
- born of a sexual relationship
between God the Father and Mar
- elder brother of the human race
- Lucifer is his brother
- Reached perfection at some
particular point in time
The Jesus of Christianity:
- born of the Virgin Mar by being
overshadowed by the Holy Spirit
- is God in the flesh
- Lucifer, together with all the
angels, was created by Jesus and is therefore not Jesus' brother
- Has been eternally perfect (p
49-50)
The Trinity, according to Mormonism:
- was an invention of the
apostate church
- cannot be true because it
cannot be understood
- cannot be true because the
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are merely one in purpose
The Trinity, according to Christianity:
- is a doctrine that came from
biblical origins
- is one of the things about God
that is not able to be understood by a finite, created mind
- is true because there is one
God by nature who is evident in three persons (p 57)
The Bible, according to Mormonism:
- it is true only as far as it
does not disagree with Mormon doctrine
- it is the only book of the four
LDS scriptures that is accepted with limitations
- it is filled with alleged
contradictions
- it cannot be trusted by itself
The Bible, according to Christianity:
- it is the Word of God that is reliable
for the modern Christian
- it is the only Scripture
inspired by God
- the context of a passage and
the rest of the Bible must be considered when
- interpreting supposed
contradictions
- it can be fully trusted (p 103)
The atonement, according to Mormonism:
- provides everyone with a
general resurrection and cancellation of the consequences of Adam's
transgression
- took place primarily in the
Garden of Gethsemane
- was possible before Christ had
died and was raised
- is not complete unless the
individual demonstrates total obedience
The atonement, according to Christianity:
- provides for the salvation of
only those who have faith in Christ
- took place on the cross alone
- was possible only after
Christ's death
- is complete for the believer by
the grace of God ( p 148-149)
Grace and works, according to Mormonism:
- the grace of God provides for
resurrection from the dead
- works are necessary for a
person to achieve exaltation, or godhood
- salvation by grace alone is a
pernicious doctrine
- perfection is an achievable
goal
Grace and works according to Christianity:
- grace is provided free to those
who believe
- works are the result of saving
faith
- salvation by grace alone is a
biblical concept
- nobody is able to live up to
the whole law, which is why grace is needed ( p 169)
Sources
“A Present Day
Look at the Latter-day Saints.” Prepared by a special task force of the
Presbytery of Utah, PCUSA, for the 202nd General Assembly (1990).
Mormonism
101: Examining the Religion of the Latter-day Saints, Bill McKeever & Eric Johnson (Baker
Books, 2000).
“Presbyterians
and Mormons: A Study in Contrasts.” Office of Theology and Worship of the
PCUSA, 1990.
“Relations With
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Its People” Position Paper of
the Presbytery of Utah, 1995.
A Ready
Defense. By Josh
McDowell, compiled by Bill Wilson. Thomas Nelson Publishers (Nashville, 1993).
________________________________________________________
How
Can There Be Only One True Religion? - Dr. Brant D. Baker
Isaiah 40:12-17, 21-25,
28
Top
This is the first in a series on
five of the main objections that people raise against Christianity. Responding to these objections becomes
important as we realize the need to respond to some of the tough questions that
others are likely to raise in conversation with us.
Take Blair, for instance. She is twenty-five years old, lives in a
major urban center, has a good education and an
up-and-coming career. “It’s arrogant,”
she protests, “to say that your religion is superior and try to convert
everyone else to it. Surely all the
religions are equally good and valid for meeting the needs of their particular
followers.”
A similar objection is raised by
Geoff, also in his twenties, a transplant to America from England. “Religious exclusivity is not just narrow,”
he suggests, “but also dangerous.
Religion has led to untold strife, division, and conflict. It may in fact be the greatest enemy of peace
in the world. If Christians continue to
insist that they have ‘the truth’—and if other religions do this as well—the
world will never know peace” (The Reason for God, Timothy Keller, p 3).
These vignettes come from Timothy
Keller’s book The Reason for God,
which will be the basis for this series, and which I highly recommend for your
personal library. Keller goes on to tell
about being a panelist at a local college, along with a Jewish rabbi and a
Muslim imam. The three were asked to
discuss the differences among religions, and they did so in a tone that was
courteous, intelligent, and respectful.
Nonetheless, each speaker affirmed that there were significant,
irreconcilable differences between the major faiths.
Several of the students
were quite disturbed by this. They
didn’t want to believe that all religions couldn’t somehow be harmonized and
brought together. Typical statements
were to the effect that what mattered was only to believe in God and to be a
loving person. To insist that one faith
has a better grasp of the truth than others, they contended, was
intolerant. Said one
student, “We will never come to know
peace on earth if religious leaders keep on making such exclusive claims!”
(Keller, 4)
This frustration grows out of the
very real fact that religion can, in its worst form, tend toward exclusivism
and even intolerance. One purpose of any
religion is to give its followers the “truth,” and being human beings we easily
tend toward a feeling of superiority when we believe we are right. From there it is not hard to see how various
religious groups come to stereotype and caricature one another, and from there
to marginalize, oppress, and possibly even commit violence against one another
(Keller, 4).
Clearly this is a real
problem, but is the solution to simply water down the unique beliefs of each
religion to create some kind of harmonious mélange that ends up not meaning
very much to anyone? This kind of “one
world religion” seems to be the approach preferred by at least some in our
culture. Many people believe that the
doctrinal differences between Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and
Hinduism are superficial and insignificant, and that all of these religions
essentially believe in the same God.
Such a view clearly belies a lack of serious study of the real teachings
of these widely divergent faiths. All of
which brings us to the first Counter-Objection that we might raise against the
idea of a “one world religion,” namely, that an attempt to harmonize all of the
historic world religions ignores the very real differences between those
faiths, and in fact even tends to disrespect each of those faiths and their
adherents.
But there is an even more
challenging difficulty for proponents of what we might call the
“one-world-religion” idea. Let me
illustrate with a somewhat famously told story about several blind men who were
encountering an elephant for the first time.
Each man is in touch with a different part of the animal, and so each
arrives at his own conclusion about the “true” nature of an elephant.
“An elephant seems to be a lot like
a snake,” says one man, as he holds the trunk.
“No, no,” responds the second man
who is touching the leg, “it is thick and round like a tree…”
“You are both crazy,” says the
third, who has his hands on the elephant’s side, “this
beast is large and flat.”
And so it went, each man convinced
that he had the full, true, and accurate description, but of course none of
them could envision the entire elephant.
In the same way, it is argued, that the great world religions each have
a grasp on a part of the truth about God and the spiritual realm, but none of
them have the whole truth because they are only in touch with one aspect of the
immensity of the divine.
It seems like a compelling argument
in favor of the view that there can’t be just one true religion, that in fact
all of the religions are describing one reality beyond the own narrow
viewpoint, until you realize that the
story is told from the point of view of someone who is not blind and who can
therefore see what a whole elephant truly is.
In other words, how could you know that each blind man only sees a part
of the truth unless you claim to be
able to see the whole elephant? (Keller,
8-9)
And here we come to the logical
inconsistency of the “one-world-religion” idea.
The assertion that there is simply one All-Loving Spirit who is
variously recognized and described by the several blind men of Christianity,
Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism is itself a claim to some insider
information, some higher truth. In other
words, the “one-world-religion” idea becomes itself a religion, with an
assertion of an absolute truth, namely the truth that there is only one God who
is simply seen from these various points of view. Put another way, how could you possibly know
that no religion can see the whole truth unless you yourself have the superior,
comprehensive knowledge of spiritual reality you just claimed none of the other
religions have? And so the second
objection people of faith can legitimately raise to
those who seek to harmonize all of the historic world religions is to point out
that the claim of “one-world-religion” is itself a religious claim.
So, can there be only one true religion? It would certainly seems that if there is a
God, the attributes of godliness would not be ill-defined, a vague kind of
loving force in the universe. In fact
one requirement we would have for any being to be worthy of the name God is
that such a being be very much definable, having distinct and unique
characteristics. It would further make
sense to say that such a being would certainly seem to define truth as part of the divine nature. If we can agree to these things then let’s
move on to make three assumptions:
1) God defines Truth
There is a unique God,
and God defines Truth as an aspect of what it means to be God. In other words, to be qualified for the job
of God, a being must not only be all-powerful, all-knowing, and everywhere
present, but must also contain within itself all that is really true.
As a side note we would probably want to say that this is not a
Truth we can know because it is really above and beyond us. This seems to be part of what God is saying
in Isaiah 40. Through the prophet Isaiah
God asks a series of rhetorical questions, all of which suggest that God knows
a whole lot more truth than we do. “Who
has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens
with a span,” asks God, “[who has] enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure,
and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance? Who has directed the spirit of the LORD, or as his counselor has instructed him? Whom did he consult for his enlightenment,
and who taught him the path of justice?
Who taught him knowledge, and showed him the way of understanding?
In other words, as
found in the Brant Baker translation of this text: “Hey buddy, there is stuff
going on all around you that is really a lot bigger than you are. Shut up and pay attention!” Put more demurely, “Truth with a capital ‘T’
is God’s Truth alone to know.”
2) God created and
is in relationship with creation and has expectations for us
But, we could
know another kind of truth. That truth
would stem from the further assumption that God created and is in relationship
with creation, and has particular expectations, hopes, and even
requirements, for that creation, and of created beings such as ourselves. These expectations, hopes, and requirements
are a kind of lower case “t” “truth” that God want us to know, as again
is made clear in Isaiah 40 when God says, Have you not
known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations
of the earth?”
Finally, if these two
assumptions are correct then a third assumption could follow, namely that
3) God’s truth is
largely knowable through natural revelation
Christianity readily agrees and
proclaims that there are many things that humanity can know about God simply by
looking at creation. The technical term
for this is “natural revelation” and it is an idea found not only in Isaiah 40
but also in the opening chapter of Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, where
we read,
Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and
divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through
the things he has made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew God,
they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in
their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise,
they became fools…, And since they did not see fit to
acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should
not be done. They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil,
covetousness, [and] malice. Romans 1:20-22, 28-29a
In other words,
Christianity, in its best and most balanced form, recognizes that there is
truth to be found in the world outside of the church, and that includes truth
that can be found in other world religions.
Here again, some people cite the overlap between religions as proof that
they all same the same thing. The
Christian, on the other hand, understands this overlap as a result of the fact
that God is not trying to be hidden, that God has in fact been revealed through
natural revelation, and that other religions and philosophical systems would
have equal access to this part of the truth about God.
But natural revelation
will only take you so far, especially as it gets viewed through the lens of
human selfishness, arrogance, and perversion.
Eventually the “true” message of God got lost along the way, which is the
larger argument Paul is making in Romans 1.
Of course thoughtful people don’t need the Apostle Paul to tell them
that even the loftiest ideals get misplaced given enough time in human hands. Because of this some additional revelation is
always necessary, and the witness of Christianity is that this additional
revelation, and indeed the final and ultimate revelation, came in the person
and work of Jesus Christ. But please
note, this special message of God’s grace and
redemption comes to all people, not just to a chosen few who happen to be in
the right tribe or know the right code words.
Paul makes this clear in Romans 3:21 and following,
But now…the
righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the
prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who
believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of
the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the
redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of
atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his
righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins
previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is
righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus. Romans 3:21-26
So, does this prove unequivocally that Christianity is the
only true religion.
Certainly not, but it at least begins to open the door to consider what
the marks of a true religion might be, one of which, as I’ve tried to show, is
its universal accessibility. In other
words, any God worth the name would not limit access to the truth humanity
needed to any tongue or tribe, and race or culture. But, as I’ve also tried to show, that truth
cannot logically exist equally in all religions, and so we need to look for
which religion proclaims a truth that seems to most fit with the idea of the
kind of God that most people seem to believe in to some extent, an all-loving
Being who seeks some kind of relationship with creation.
Timothy Keller believes that Christianity has shown the
most promise of being that religion, going all the way back to the
beginning. He notes that the Greco-Roman
world’s religious views were quite open and seemingly tolerant, a situation not
unlike our world today if you think about it.
Everyone had his or her own god.
But where the Greco-Roman world tended to despise the poor, Christians
tended to give generously not only to their own poor, but also to the poor of
other faiths. And, where in the broader
society women had very low status, being subjected to high levels of female
infanticide, forced marriages, and lack of economic equality, Christianity
afforded women much greater security and equality than had previously existed
in the ancient world. Finally, during
the terrible urban plagues of the first and second centuries it was the
Christians who cared for all the sick and dying in the city, often at the cost
of their own lives.
All of this while Christianity was at the same time very
exclusive, saying that there was salvation in no other name than that of Jesus
Christ. How is it
that such an exclusive belief system would be so open to others? Such an exclusive belief system can be open
to others because Christianity has within it the strongest possible resource
for practicing sacrificial service, generosity, and peace-making. In other words, at the very heart of the
Christian view is the reality of a man who died for his enemies, praying for
their forgiveness. Reflection on this
can only lead Christians to a radically different way of dealing with
those around them (Keller, 20). Our
contention would be that this radically different way of dealing with others
points to a religion that is True with a capital “T,”
one that calls its adherents out of themselves and into the world.
A second statement in favor of Christianity being the one
true religion comes out of something that I’ve shared with you a time or two
before, but which I think bears repeating.
At the start of the new millennium respected news anchor Peter Jennings
did a one-hour television special attempting to explain the incredible impact
of Jesus Christ on the previous 2000 years of human history. Two things struck me as I watched that show. One was that, despite hedging of scholars
interviewed, Jennings and company were at a loss to explain that incredible
impact.
But a second and more compelling truth was not commented
on, but seen. In image after image of
the Holy Land what one noticed was the amazing variety of people there. People from all over world,
every country, every race, every color.
It turns out that Christianity is amazingly transportable. Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism—these
remain, by-and-large, tribal religions, with only limited appeal to those
outside cultures that gave rise to them.
If I ask you where most Jews live, you would tell me Israel. If I asked you where most Muslims live, you
would say in the middle east. Hindus? India.
Buddhists, China.
But Christianity has transcended all tribal and cultural
boundaries. If I ask you where you think most Christians live, what
would you say? It turns out that the
smallest number, about 260 million, are in North America, and the largest
number, about 550 million are in Europe.
But that is still less than half of all Christians worldwide. The remainder are spread around the globe in
remarkably similar numbers, about 360 million in Africa, about 312 million in
Asia, and about 481 million in Latin America, with still another 140 million
tucked away in various other places around the rest of the globe. (Sources:
www.bible.ca/global-religion-statistics-world-christian-encyclopedia.htm; www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html)
What might this
mean? To me it says that the deep down truth
of Christianity is recognized by people around world, regardless of where they
live, or what the predominant religion around them might be.
Friends, this is not a call for a new tribalism that
asserts we have the lock on truth and everyone else better get on board. That is the worst of religions fanaticism by
whatever stripe. Rather, we should
humbly, thankfully, and thoughtfully engage with others, seeking to bring them
to see the Truth that we find so compelling, the truth of God’s great love in
Jesus Christ.
Amen.
________________________________________________________
How Could A Good God
Allow Suffering? – Dr. Brant D. Baker
Genesis 50:15-21
Top
For the past several months my small
group has been working its way through a very interesting book entitled,
“Letters From a Skeptic.” In it Greg Boyd is writing his father Edward
about some of the very difficult questions his father is raising about the
Christian faith. As it happens, Greg
himself wasn’t raised a Christian but is now a professor of theology at Bethel
College, with a doctorate from Princeton Theological Seminary.
Our small group’s
interest in the book is along the same lines as my purpose in this sermon
series, to try and help all of us who have a Christian faith to be thoughtfully
prepared for the tough questions that non-Christians are bound to raise as we
talk with them. And of all of those questions
perhaps none is more difficult than the question of suffering, as voiced by
Edward Boyd in the following letter:
Dear Greg:
Nice to hear from you so soon. I’m surprised you can keep up this fast a
pace of letter-writing amidst your busy schedule. But I’ve got a good bit of time on my hands,
so you set the pace. Like you, I’m
enjoying the chance to air our thoughts.
…[The]
bigger problem I have with the idea of an all-loving God…[is] evil in the
world. If God created this world and
cares about it, why is there so damn much suffering in it? In your letter your answer was that God can’t
be held responsible because He have man the freedom to choose to do right or
wrong. But, Greg, I don’t feel that the
question can be swept away so easily.
When the freedom to decide to do harm results in pain and suffering to
innocent people, God is simply not the “loving” God you make Him out to be.
I thought
about this when I read about this lunatic down here in Florida who was released
from jail after some seven or eight years for raping a teenage girl and then
chopping off both her arms, leaving her for dead. It was his free choice to commit the crime,
but what choice did the innocent girl have?
It would appear that the “loving,” protecting God forgot all about her!
Why does God value the freedom of the criminal, but not the freedom of the
victim?
…[T]his
world doesn’t look at all like the kind of world we’d have if there were an
all-powerful, all-loving God behind it.
And I don’t see that your explanation of freedom improves the situation
much.
Well,
enough for now. Look forward to your
letter. Lots of love, Dad (Letters From A Skeptic, 21-22)
Oh, and have a nice day!
There is a very real protest and a
very real anger that comes out with a vengeance when people talk about
suffering, especially if they are a victim, as most of us sooner or later are,
to the senseless random violence in our world.
It can take quite a bit of time simply to work through the emotion that attends discussion about
this topic before one can ever get down to talking through the underlying
theological issues.
In replying to his
father, Greg begins by acknowledging this dilemma.
“This is
a very tough question,” he begins, “to the point where it is almost insensitive
to even give an answer. And, indeed,
under the emotional impact of this nightmare it would be perfectly
understandable to be angry at God and everything else in the world.” He continues,
For those touched by this tragedy, rage is the
only understandable immediate response.
The Bible itself records the honest questions, and even angry prayers,
of many ‘heroes of the faith’ (such as Job, David, and Jeremiah). God isn’t threatened by our anger or doubts.
But when the dust eventually settles, there
comes a time to begin to think through who is really responsible for this
evil. And when we do this, my contention
is that responsibility can’t be attached to God.
It seems to me, Dad, that if God is going to
give free wills to His creatures, He has to allow for the
possibility of them misusing that freedom, even if it means hurting
others. To be significantly free is to
be morally responsible, and to be morally responsible means being morally
responsible to each other. What is the
freedom to love or not love unless it is freedom to enrich or harm another? God
structured things this way because the alternative would be to have a race of
robots who can’t genuinely love—but that’s hardly worth creating, is it?
So why doesn’t God intervene every time someone
is going to misuse his or her freedom and hurt another person? The answer, I believe, is found in the nature
of freedom itself. A freedom which was
prevented from being exercised whenever it was going to be misused simply
wouldn’t be freedom.
…[If] God really gives us freedom, it must be, at
least to a large extent, irrevocable. [God]
must have, within limits, a “hands off” attitude toward it. God creates free people who can do as they please, not determined instruments who always end up doing
what [God] pleases…. If I’m correct, the
horrendous evil we see people inflicting on each other in this world is a
necessary possibility if this is to be the kind of world where love is
possible.
I look forward to your response. As always, Greg. (Letters, 23-24)
I have to say that I
think Greg’s answer hits the nail on the head exactly. A world with free will is a better than a
world where that freedom doesn’t exist, even if it means that people misuse
that freedom to hurt themselves and other people. As we will see in a few minutes, even that
ends up proving the goodness and rightness of God’s decision to give creation
freedom.
Before we get to that,
however, let me offer you several counterpoints that need to be made in any
discussion about the question of suffering in the world, which can be found on
your sermon outline. These are drawn
from the book by Timothy Keller entitled “The Reason for God,” which I have
recommended to you and which, as I said last week, is the basis for most of the
material in this series of sermons on what is technically called “apologetics,”
from the Greek word meaning to make a defense or to give a vindication.
Counterpoint #1 –
Pointless Suffering from Whose Perspective?
In his book Keller observes that,
“Tucked away within the assertion that the world is filled with pointless evil
is a hidden premise, namely, that if evil appears pointless to me, then it must
be pointless” (Keller, 23). But this reasoning is flawed for the simple
reason that, just because you or I can’t see or imagine a good reason why God
might allow some kind of suffering to take place doesn’t necessarily mean there
isn’t a good reason. The assumption
being made, namely, that if we can’t discern the reason for suffering then it
must be pointless, places immense confidence in the reasoning and perception of
the skeptic. In fact, one might say that
in this instance the skeptic has tremendous faith in his or her own
powers of perception! More power to
them, but I would rather have faith in God!!!
This is exactly the point of the
story of Joseph. Do you remember
Joseph? He was the youngest of twelve
sons, and his father’s favorite, a fact evidenced by the robe of many colors
given to him as a gift. Joseph is also
gifted in the interpretation of dreams, including his own, and so in a moment
of youthful indiscretion he tells his older brothers about dreams in which he
sees them bowing down to him and he reigning over them. All of this drives the older boys to
distraction and they finally fake his death at the hand of a wild animal and
sell him into slavery. Joseph’s
wonderful life comes crashing to an end as he becomes a slave to Potiphar, an
officer of Pharaoh. Still he does well
for himself, up until the point that Potiphar’s wife, unhappy that the handsome
young Joseph won’t service her desires, accuses him of taking advantage of
her. Joseph is thrown into jail and left
to rot. Finally, after two years he is
sent for and is at last restored to a position even better than before, but
still very much a servant.
During all of this time
Joseph could have easily said, “All this suffering is pointless—I’m wasting
away in prison for crimes I didn’t commit—where’s the justice in that?” But in fact, if
God had
not allowed Joseph’s years of suffering, he never would have later been in the
position to become a powerful agent for the nation of Egypt, and more
importantly, for the nation of Israel.
A lot of people will tell you, as
they look back on a season of suffering in their lives, that
much of what they needed for future success in life came to them through those
difficult years. The bottom line, as stated by Keller, is that “If you have a
God great enough to be mad at because he hasn’t stopped evil and
suffering in the world, then you have (at the same moment) a God great enough
to have good reasons for allowing it to continue that you can’t know. Indeed, you can’t have it both ways” (Keller,
25).
Counterpoint #2 – Our
Objections to Evil and Suffering May Be Evidence For God
There is no doubt that evil and
suffering is a difficult problem for the believer in God, but it may be an even
greater problem for the non-believer.
This was exactly the situation for one of the most famous skeptics of
the last century, C.S. Lewis. Lewis
describes how he originally rejected the idea of God because he found life to
be so cruel and unjust. But then one day
he came to realize that simply having ideas about what was “just” and “unjust”
suggested that there might be some larger intelligent purpose at work in the
universe. In other words, where do we
come to have notions of what is fair and just?
How do we get the idea that people ought not to suffer, or be oppressed,
or endure hardship, if not for some higher power at work in the world that
draws our thoughts to such ideals? In
point of fact, a purely godless and scientific view of the evolutionary
mechanism of natural selection would tell us that the world is supposed to work
by the strong defeating the weak, that death and destruction of the less able
is simply the way of life, and so why be concerned about it? If a baby is born imperfect or infirm, throw
it out into the snow. When people get
old and can’t care for themselves, oh well, time for them to go. The fact that we recoil against such
brutality and cold rationalism says that we have an objection to evil
and suffering that has come to us from somewhere beyond what the theory of
evolution can provide.
Philosopher Alvin Plantiga has
noted, “A [secular] way of looking at the world has no place for genuine moral
obligation of any sort…and thus no way to say there is such a thing as genuine
and appalling wickedness. Accordingly,
if you think there really is such a
thing as horrifying wickedness (…and not just an illusion of some sort), then
you have a powerful… argument [for the reality of God]. (Keller, 27).
Counterpoint #3 – We’re
Not In This Alone
Timothy Keller tells of a woman in
his church who once confronted him about sermon illustrations in which evil
turns out for good. This woman’s life
hadn’t quite turned out that way so far—she had lost her husband in an act of
violence during a robbery, she had several children with severe mental and
emotional problems—and so she insisted that for every one story in which evil
turns out for good there were a hundred more in which there was no conceivable
silver lining. We can no doubt resonate
with this woman’s feelings that despite all of the cool logic of the previous
two counterpoints, there is something that just still leaves us feeling
outraged at the suffering we see. “So
what if suffering and evil don’t logically disprove God,” we might say, “I’m
still angry and all this philosophizing doesn’t get the Christian God off the
hook for the world’s suffering.”
In response we offer the third, and
perhaps most powerful counterpoint of all, namely, that God isn’t trying to get
off the hook for suffering, but instead very deliberately entered into it all
and put himself on
the hook. In Jesus Christ, God
experienced the greatest depths of pain, and so, while Christianity doesn’t
provide a reason for each experience of pain, it does provide deep and powerful
resources for facing suffering with hope and courage rather than bitterness and
despair (Keller, 27-28).
In fact Christianity is
alone among the world religions in claiming that God became uniquely and fully
human in Jesus Christ, and therefore knows first hand our feelings of despair,
rejection, loneliness, poverty, bereavement, torture, and imprisonment. On the cross he went beyond even the worst
human suffering and experienced something much more difficult—a cosmic
rejection and pain that exceeds ours as infinitely as his knowledge and power
exceeds ours (Keller, 30). When Jesus
cries out on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” it is not a
renunciation of God but rather the mourning of one infinity
calling to another, but calling nonetheless.
So, if we ask why God
doesn’t stop evil and suffering and then look at the cross of Jesus Christ, we
still don’t know what the answer is, but we know what the answer isn’t. The
answer isn’t that God doesn’t love us, or that God somehow isn’t with us in it
all and through it all. In fact,
it seems that God takes our misery and suffering so seriously that he entered into it, to be Immanuel—God with us—even in our worst sufferings (Keller, 30-31).
Counter-Counterpoint
#1—God Is About Redemption
Which brings us to
a counter- counterpoint, which is to say, a point of our own that we can offer
in discussions about suffering in the world. Here’s the question: which God would be more
powerful, a God that reached in and intervened, stopping suffering before it
ever happened (but then contradicting human free will), or a God who allowed
human free will to run its evil course and then was able to unravel the
mess? To my mind it is the latter God,
which is to say, the God who resurrects and redeems all our suffering who is
clearly the more amazing and awesome God.
In another great book I highly
recommend called The Shack, by
William P. Young, God puts it this way in a conversation with the book’s main character:
“…there are millions of reasons to allow pain and hurt and suffering rather
than to eradicate them, but most of those reasons can only be understood within
each person’s story... But your choices are also not stronger than
my purposes, and I will use every choice you make for the ultimate good and the
most loving outcome” (The Shack, 125).
The biblical view, and the Christian
claim, is not in a future that is merely a consolation for the life we never
had—“there, there, now, that was too bad but it’s going to be okay”—but a
future that is a restoration of the
life you always wanted. This means that
every horrible thing that ever happened will not only be undone and repaired
but will in some way make the eventual glory and joy even greater.
“Just after the climax of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Sam
Gamgee discovers that his friend Gandalf was not dead (as he thought) but
alive. He cries, “I thought you were
dead! But then I thought I was dead
myself! Is everything sad going to come untrue?” The answer of Christianity to that question
is—yes. Everything sad is going to come
untrue and it will somehow be greater for
having once been broken and lost” (Keller, 33).
________________________________________________________
Doesn’t A Biblical
Faith Collide With Science? – Dr. Brant D. Baker
Mark 8:1-21
Top
In this third of a five part series
on objections to Christianity we are visiting the notion that a biblical faith
collides with scientific fact. A common assertion by many in our day and time
is that the advances of science have made obsolete the artifacts of
religion. We live, after all, in an
enlightened era, where it is assumed that objective proofs are superior to
subjective beliefs. No, no: give us the
data and empirical evidence of science, and spare us the soft hopes and dreams
of religion. There is a
certitude, a confidence, a reassurance that can only come from dealing
straight-forwardly with hard, cold facts.
But, as you may have
perceived by now, there tends to be a logical flaw in many of the claims
brought against faith, and the flaw is that sweeping statements of certitude
about the way things are tend to be based on faith that things are in fact another way. So in this series we have seen that when
people say, “All religions are basically the same,” they are essentially making
a faith statement. What they are really
saying is that they have faith that
all religions are basically the same because clearly such a statement cannot be
proven to be any more true than any one of the unique
claims of individual religions.
Similarly when people say there is no purpose in human suffering they
are again making a faith claim, essentially saying, “There is no purpose that I can see, or that makes sense to me,
therefore I take it on faith that human suffering has no purpose.”
The same turns out to be true for
those who make sweeping assertions about the superiority of science over
religion. Not that we should be terribly
surprised—science is known for making confident sweeping assertions. For example,
In 1943, Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, said, "I
think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
In 1949, Popular Mechanics, in an issue forecasting the
relentless march of science, predicted that "Computers in the future may
weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
In 1968, commenting on the recent invention of the
microchip, an engineer with IBM said, "But what ... is it good
for?"
In 1977, Ken Olson, the chairman and founder of Digital
Equipment Corporation, said "There is no reason anyone would want a
computer in their home."
And my favorite, from 1981, is the confident assurance of
none other than Bill Gates, who said, "640K ought
to be enough for anybody."
All of these men
thought they had the hard empirical evidence of science on their side when they
made these statements, but what they really had was faith in the science of
their day, a faith which turned out to be somewhat misplaced.
And so it is that when someone says
that science has proven there is no such thing as miracles, they are not making
a statement of fact, but are instead taking a leap of faith. As Timothy Keller says in his book, The Reason for God, “To be sure that
miracles cannot occur a person would have to be sure
beyond a doubt that God didn’t exist, and that is an article of faith. The existence of God can be neither demonstrably proven or disproven” (Keller, 86).
Another way to put this is to say
that science is good for what science is good for. Science has brought us many wonderful
improvements of life in just about every sphere. But when science makes an assertion about the
supernatural it has strayed outside of its arena. It is looking for things it isn’t set up to
see, a little like a man looking for his lost car keys under the streetlight,
because the light is better there.
Science is looking for God under the lights in its empirical arena, when
in fact God may not be best seen there at all (Keller, 86).
To investigate at this matter more
closely let’s consider the work of Ian Barbour, a scholar who was awarded the
1999 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in recognition of efforts to
create a dialogue between the worlds of science and religion. As an aside, Barbour, a physicist and a
theologian, was the second of three sons of an American Episcopalian mother and
a Scottish Presbyterian father, both of whom taught at Yenching University in
China.
In his 1965 book, Issues in Science and Religion Barbour
proposed four different ways that science and religion might relate to each
other, and these four classifications are still used by scholars today. The first way is to say that science and
religion relate to each other primarily in conflict, and that tends to be what
we hear about the most because it makes for good headlines and sound
bites. Ironically enough, this end of
the spectrum includes not only people like renowned scientist and atheist
Richard Dawkins, but also proponents of the new earth theory, extreme
creationists who argue for a rigid interpretation of Genesis and believe that
the world may only be a few thousand years old.
At the other end of Barbour’s
spectrum is the view that science and religion are completely independent from
one another. In this view faith is a
private, subjective matter and doesn’t speak to the empirical realm at
all. In this view science and religion
have nothing to say to one another.
As is often the case in such
debates, the truth probably lies in a more complicated and nuanced view
somewhere between the extremes. Barbour
suggests that “dialogue” and “integration” are the two middle positions, and
more and more people, scientists included, seem to be not only willing to move
into dialogue, but even to search together for a truly integrated view, one that
balances and respects both science and religion. Let’s take a quick look at what that might
mean in terms of the two most difficult conflicts between faith and science,
one of which is evolution.
An Integrationist View
of Evolutionary Theory
We all know that as
evolutionary theory has made its way more and more into the mainstream in the
past century clashes between scientific proponents and religious opponents have
became more and more pronounced. And, as
you are no doubt aware, those wars continue today, although largely in obscure
school districts fighting over which science will be taught.
But in the view of many
who seek integration between science and religion on this point, including
myself, the Bible was never intended to be taken as scientific textbook to
begin with. Trying to present the Bible
as the basis for a scientific theory is like trying to turn the Constitution
into the basis for a religion. You could do it, but since that was never
the intention of the document to begin with, you would eventually run into some
pretty stout challenges. Similarly,
using the Bible as the basis for science runs into its own stout challenges,
not least of which is that the Bible never makes such a claim for itself. The Bible seeks to tell us about God, and the
most important scientific claim that is made in the Genesis story of creation
is in the first four words, “In the beginning God…” In the beginning God…, and
whatever happens after that—evolution, creationism, intelligent design, or
something yet to be named—no matter, it all comes from God.
The most thoughtful
approach seems to be an integrationist view that says basically, yes, there is
some pretty strong evidence for evolution, but there is also some really strong
evidence that evolution alone doesn’t tell the whole story. Consider the cell, which is the smallest living unit
of an organism. Cells are often called
the building blocks of life and they are pretty amazing little things. Lewis
Thomas, in his book Medusa and the Snail stands in awe at the amount of
information contained in a human cell, and says that the mere existence of a
cell should be viewed as one of the greatest astonishments of the earth. In fact, he says, people ought to be walking
around all day, all through their waking hours, calling to each other in
endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell.
Why is Thomas so amazed, you ask?
Because there is simply no way that a cell, even one, could have come
into existence merely by chance. You
see, a cell is itself made up of lots and lots of smaller parts, the
predominant one being something called enzymes. A professor of
applied mathematics has calculated that the statistical probability of nature
randomly forming even one enzyme is 1 in 1040,000. Here’s how big that number is: if you took
all of the stars of all of the galaxies in the entire known universe, and then
collected all of the atoms of all of those stars, you would have one chance
that one of those atoms was the one you were looking for. Yes, responds the evolutionist, but nature
has had a long time to work on this.
Perhaps, you should say, but this is only one enzyme, and you need at
least several dozen more for even the more basic human cell, and then you need
some variety to create skin cells, and lung cells, and brain cells, all
specialized to their particular part of the body, and then you need to assemble
all of them in proper sequence for the 30,000 or more human genes, and finally
you have to glue all 100 trillion human cells together to make a person. By-the-way, the professor who did the
statistical calculation showing the improbability of even one enzyme being
formed randomly in nature was an atheist, and once he had seen his own work he
had to concede that this was clear evidence of some supernatural hand at
work. Evolution may or may not be a
process that God uses, but the bottom line is that, in the beginning, God
was at work.
Miracles --Three Points
for Integrationist Pondering
The issue of miracles is a bit more
difficult of a challenge to the thoughtful Christian. Miracles raise not only scientific questions
about the violation of the natural order but also theological questions about
why God intervenes sometimes but not others.
There are at least two
things the thoughtful integrationist Christian can say about miracles in the
Bible. The first might be to remember
that a miracle is in the eye of the beholder.
In other words, what appears to be a miracle to one person may have a
perfectly good explanation to another. Think about all of those Star Trek episodes
where the crew of the Enterprise lands on some primitive planet and finds
themselves worshipped as gods because they can heal a deadly disease. What is thought to be a miracle is simply a
better knowledge of science. In fact we
don’t even have to go into science fiction to understand how this works: if you
and I were to travel back in time even 100 years and tell people that we had a
treatment for cancer they might think us miracles workers. But if we were to travel back another fifteen
hundred years and make the same claim some people would surely bow.
So the fact that
science now understands more than ever about the nature of God’s creation
shouldn’t be so much a cause for boasting among that community, let alone a
cause to claim that God is no longer relevant, but instead should be a cause
for the kind of wonderment suggested by Lewis Thomas, especially when we come
to the humble realization that there is likely quite a bit more yet to be
learned! Please be very suspicious when
anyone claims to know everything about anything, because the very real
likelihood is that there is embedded a deeper mystery still to be discovered.
And so, when Jesus
performed miracles it makes sense to imagine that, as a human he was drawing on
insights revealed to him by the Divine Scientist, and that the God who invented
the universe has some deeper insights into how it functions than we do. Seen in this way, miracles do not so much
violate the laws of science but instead utilize even deeper laws of science we
have yet to learn about. Put another
way, if reality is like an onion, where we can keep peeling away layers and
learning more, then let’s posit that the reality of a primitive people has
three or four layers. Let’s further
posit that our reality has twenty five or thirty layers. So how many layers do you think God’s reality
probably has? A
hundred? A
thousand? Who knows??? Bottom
line: God knows a heck of a lot more science than even Richard Dawkins!
The second thing that the thought
Christian might say about miracles is that God always leaves room for human doubt,
which is to say, for our freedom to reject that a divine cause is at work. Free will seems very important to God, and it
would be a violation of that free will if miracles forced us into a place that
we had to believe God was acting because there was simply no other
explanation.
The text from Mark 8 is a great
example of this. The main action, what
we usually focus on, is the miraculous feeding of the four thousand (which is
different than the feeding of the five thousand). But what is so interesting is what happens
next. Jesus has an encounter with the
Pharisees and they ask him for …a sign!
Are you kidding me??? Jesus has
just fed four thousand people and they want a sign? But wait, it gets worse! Jesus gets in the boat with the disciples,
the guys who have been with him 24/7, and he tries to
warn them about the Pharisees by talking about leaven or yeast. The guys miss this point completely and start
to stress out because someone forgot
to pack the bread. “Oh my gosh,” they say to one another, “Jesus is mad because we
don’t have any bread…!” No, Jesus wasn’t
mad about bread, but he’s mad now that you guys don’t get it! And here it’s possible that Jesus may have
raised his voice at least a little. “Do
you still not understand? Do you not yet
get the fact that I am Lord of all Creation, and a little thing like bread is
the least of our worries?”
Well, apparently they didn’t get
that, and it is hard to simply chalk that up to the boys being a little
dense. You’d think that out of the
twelve at least one or two would be tuned in at any given moment. How could they not see the miracles going on
right in front of them? Because God always leaves room for our doubt. Need more proof? Check out the amazing statement from Matthew 28:17. Jesus has been resurrected and called the
eleven together, and Matthew says, “When they saw him, they worshipped him; but
some doubted.” Now there’s a
statement! The resurrected Christ is
standing in front of you, but there is still room for doubt!
A final point to ponder
in thinking about miracles is to wonder about their intended purpose. Miracles in the Bible, says Timothy Keller,
don’t lead simply to belief, but to worship. “Jesus’s miracles in particular,” he says
“were never magic tricks, designed only to impress and coerce. You never see him say something like: ‘See
that tree over there? Watch me make it
burst into flames!’ Instead, he used
miraculous power to heal the sick, feed the hungry, and raise the dead. Why?
We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural
order, but Jesus meant them to be a restoration of the natural
order. The Bible tells us that God did
not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong
and heal the world where it is broken.
His miracles are not just proofs that he has power but also wonderful
foretastes of what he is going to do with that power. Jesus’s miracles are not
just a challenge to our minds, but a promise to our hearts, that the
world we all want is coming” (Keller, 96).
Amen.
________________________________________________________
How Accurate Could The
Bible Really Be? – Dr. Brant D. Baker
2 Timothy 3:10-17
Top
Last fall I called for a meeting
with my son’s high school history teacher to challenge, among other things, her
statement in the classroom that there are so many versions of the Bible that we
can’t really know what it said for sure.
It was clear to me that she was a secular person, and so I gently asked
her where she came by this opinion. She
waved her hand in a vague way and told me that “lots of credible scholars” have
this opinion. I asked for names and
sources—she is a history teacher after all!—and was given a meager reference
that I was later unable to track down. I
don’t really blame her for not knowing the source of her idea—we live in a
culture bombarded with information and ideas flow like water across our brains:
some sink in but most just leave a faint damp spot we can’t quite
identify.
Whatever its source there is a
prevailing opinion in secular culture that questions the origins, legitimacy,
and truthfulness of the Bible. Some
think that the Bible stories were written so late and cobbled together so
poorly that their historical accuracy is in question. Others believe that even if we do think the
Bible we have is accurate to an original source we still can’t trust what we
read there because it was all made up to support a particular point of
view. Still others share the view of my
son’s history teacher, and claim that there are just too many differences and
variations for anyone to know with certainty what the Bible may once have said.
As Christians we have
some good answers to these questions and suspicions, which we will get to in
just a moment, but we also have to be honest and say that in the final analysis
we are accepting on faith that the Bible is the holy word of God. It is not a faith that is naïve or blind or
without some fairly good supporting evidence, but in the end it is still a
faith decision. This shouldn’t alarm us
too much: even the atheist is exercising faith, faith that there is no
God. It is no stretch to say that
everyone ends up making a certain number of assumptions about how the world
works, some of which are based on reasonable facts, but a number of which are
based simply on what that individual believes to be true.
Have said that, let’s
deal with some of the more common objections raised against placing one’s faith
in the Bible, as opposed to placing one’s faith in one’s own opinion.
1) The “Accuracy” Objection
Let’s begin with what
I’ll call the “Accuracy” Objection. The
Accuracy Objection puts forward the idea that the Bible was written too long
after the events it supposedly reports to be trusted to accurately represent
what went on. This is the most
straightforward and bold attack of the secular humanist, saying essentially
that the Bible is at best a collection of faded memories. At worst, and probably more likely to the
mind of those with this view, the Bible it is an outright fabrication.
For the sake of this
conversation we’ll focus mostly on those stories of the life and teaching of
Jesus, the four accounts that Christians call the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John. It is important to note that
the Accuracy Objection can most often be found in the mind of someone who has
never actually taken the time to read one of the gospel accounts, let alone all
four. The starting point for getting
past the question of accuracy is to actually look at what the gospels say, and
when we do that we find lots and lots of little details that are of the sort
only found in first hand, eye-witness accounts.
As noted by Timothy Keller in his book, The Reason for God, “[i]n Mark 4, we are told that Jesus was asleep
on a cushion in the stern of a boat. In
John 21 we are told that Peter was a hundred yards out in the water when he saw
Jesus on the beach, that he then jumped out of the boat and together they
caught 153 fish. In John 8, as Jesus
listened to the men who caught a woman in adultery, we are told he doodled with
his finger in the dust… None of these details are relevant to the plot or
character development at all” (Keller, 107)
These kinds of details only come from someone who was an eyewitness and,
for reasons having to do with the psychology of recollective memory, has held
on to a stray detail about the number of fish or doodling on the ground.
On the other hand, if
you or I were making up a story about Jesus we would include some details, but
they would be details that would drive the story forward in an exciting
way. Above all we would clean up the
messy parts that would likely be an embarrassment to later followers. So, for example, Jesus wouldn’t cry out on
the cross that he had been abandoned by God—no, no, no! That just won’t do if we want to create a
heroic spiritual being. And we certainly
wouldn’t have women be the first ones
to discover his resurrection—no, no, no!
Let’s have Herod, or Pilate, or some respected Jewish High priest be the first one there.
And can we please get some apostles who aren’t petty and jealous and
almost impossibly slow-witted, and who in the end come out as cowards who in a
variety of ways fail their master (Keller, 105)?
The fact is that when
you take the time to read what is actually in the gospels it quickly becomes
apparent there is a real story
here, not some foggy memory or fictionalized account. And all of that before we deal with the fact
that manuscript evidence discovered over the past one hundred years has forced
even the most critical scholars to conclude that the gospels were all
originally written quite early. That’s
right, there are fragments of original manuscripts that date back far enough to
prove that the gospel of Mark was written in the seventies (that’s the original
seventies, not the 1970s…), Matthew and Luke in the eighties, and John in the
nineties (Keller, 264). Why is this so
important? Because it means that many of
the original eyewitnesses were still alive when these documents were written
and would have contradicted what they say if the gospel writers were lying. In fact, the gospel of Mark even invites this
kind of fact checking, when Mark says that the man who helped Jesus carry his
cross to Calvary was the father of Alexander and Rufus (Mark 15:21). “There is no reason for the author to include
such names unless the readers know or could have access to them. Mark is essentially saying, ‘Alexander and
Rufus can vouch for the truth of what I am telling you, if you want to ask
them’” (Keller 101).
Some of you may know
the name of Anne Rice. She was raised
Catholic, but then became a completely secular person and grew to fame for her
books about a vampire rock start named Lestat.
It shocked the literary and media world when Rice announced that she had
returned to Christianity, but even more shocking was the reason she gave. In researching a novel called Christ the Lord: Out
of Egypt Rice did extensive research about the historical Jesus, reading
the most respected scholars she could find.
The main thesis of these respected authors was that the biblical
documents we have aren’t historically reliable, but Rice was amazed how weak
their arguments were. She writes,
Some books were no more than assumptions piled
on assumptions….Conclusions were
reached on the basis of little or no data at all…The whole case for the
nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified…that
whole picture which had floated around the liberal circles I frequented as an
atheist for thirty years—that case was not made. Not only was it not made, I discovered in
this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I’d ever read (Keller, 99).
2) The “Limited Voices”
Objection (aka the Da Vinci Code Objection)
A second objection to
biblical authority comes via “The Da Vinci Code.” Both the book and the movie helped forward
the supposition that the Bible was put together by a small group of powerful
people, and done in such a way as to secure their political and ecclesiastical
positions at the expense of other voices.
The “Limited Voices”
Objection doesn’t challenge the truths of scripture outright, but by casting
doubt and suspicion on the selection process there is an indirect effect of
degrading the Bible as a whole. You have
probably read Time Magazine or watched on some PBS documentary and learned of
the Gospel of Thomas, or the Gospel of Mary, or some other obscure ancient book
that used the word “gospel” in the title and yet was left out of the
Bible. The subtext to these arguments is
clearly along the lines, “The Bible can’t be trusted if it chooses to ignore
such worthwhile material.”
The truth is that a)
these other so-called gospels are much later writings, and b) they are
not on the same caliber as the biblical gospels. The Gospel of Thomas, the best known of these
pseudo-gospels, can’t be dated any earlier than 175 A.D, or about 100 years
after the canonical, or biblical, gospels were already in widespread use. Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, has said that these gospels were so late that they
no more challenge the Church’s faith than the discovery of a letter written in
1950 in defense of King George would challenge the basis of American democracy
(Keller, 102-103).
The idea put forward in
The Da Vinci Code that Emperor
Constantine supposedly determined the New Testament canon and arbitrarily cast
aside other supposedly more authentic gospels flies in the face of the actually
historical record, which suggests that by the time Emperor Constantine got
around to asking for a firm list of books to be included in the New Testament
there was almost universal agreement based on more than 200 years of
practice. Rather than imposing his own
preferred beliefs on Christianity in order to use it as a tool for his
political agenda, it seems much more honest to say that Constantine simply went
with what had already been sorted out by an up-until-then persecuted church.
3) The “Hodge Podge”
Objection
The “Hodge Podge” Objection says
that there are simply too many versions of the Bible, in too many languages,
spread over too many years for us to have anything even remotely resembling the
original. Like the “Limited Voices”
Objection this view is too shrewd to come out and directly say that the Bible
is untrue: it wants to allow that, perhaps once the Bible was a divinely
inspired book, but over time that divine message has been lost in mis-translation
and mis-handling of the original text.
This was exactly the question Lee
Strobel had on his mind when he went to visit Dr. Bruce Metzger, one of my
former professors at Princeton Theological Seminary, and the man who, until his
death two years ago, was the leading expert on the New Testament. Strobel records their conversation in his
book The Case for Christ as follows,
“I’ll be honest with you,” [Strobel]
said to Metzger. “When I first found out
that there are no surviving originals of the New Testament, I was really
skeptical. I thought, ‘If all we have
are copies of copies of copies, how can I have any confidence that the New
Testament we have today bears any resemblance whatsoever to what was originally
written?’ How do you respond to that?”
“This isn’t an issue that’s unique
to the Bible,” said Metzger. “[I]t’s a
question we can ask of other documents that have come down to us from antiquity
as well. But what the New Testament has
in its favor, especially when compared with other ancient writings, is the
unprecedented multiplicity of copies that have survived.”
“Why is that important,” asked
Strobel.
“Well, the more often you have
copies that agree with each other, especially if they emerge from different
geographical areas, the more you can cross-check them to figure out what the
original document was like. The only way
they’d agree would be where they went back genealogically in a family tree that
represents the descent of the manuscripts.”
“OK,” said Strobel. “I can see that having a lot of copies from
various places can help. But what about the age of the documents? Certainly that’s important as well, isn’t it.”
“Quite so,” said Metzger. “And this is something else that favors the
New Testament. We have copies commencing
within a couple of generations from the writings of the originals, whereas in
the case of other ancient texts, maybe five, eight, or ten centuries elapsed
between the original and the earliest surviving copy….”
Strobel then asked Metzger for some
hard data—what kind of numbers and dates are we talking about here? Metzger replied by saying that there are more
than five thousand cataloged New Testament Greek manuscripts in existence
today. That number may or may not impress
you, but listen to what Metzger went on to say,
“The quantity of New Testament
material is almost embarrassing in comparison with other works of
antiquity. Next to the New Testament,
the greatest amount of manuscript testimony is of Homer’s Iliad, which was the bible of the ancient Greeks. But there are fewer than 650 Greek
manuscripts of it today. Some are quite
fragmentary and come down to us from the second and third century A.D. and
following. When you consider that Homer
composed his epic in about 800 B.C, you can see there’s a very lengthy
gap.”
So, let’s review. There are 5,000 biblical manuscripts
dating to within 100 years of the
originals, and only 650 manuscripts of the Iliad, dating to within 1000
years of the original. And yet you don’t
hear anyone debating the accuracy of the Iliad. No, the scope of their doubt is limited to
the Bible, which they would have us believe is somehow untrustworthy.
Do you see what’s going
on? Not to put too fine a point on it,
but essentially a small but influential group of scholars hostile to
Christianity have gotten enough press in Time Magazine and on PBS to re-write
history and lead an increasingly secular culture to embrace a position it wants
to believe. Not heard in this
conversation are voices like Metzger’s, or that of Sir Frederic Kenyon, former
director of the British Museum, who once said that “in no other case is the
interval of time between the composition of the book and the date of the
earliest manuscripts so short as in that of the New Testament.” The bottom line is that there is undeniable
proof to refute any assertion that suggests the New Testament documents are
unreliable to the originals. It is simply
not an argument that holds any water.
The little chart below
is one I use in teaching our New Member Class, designed in brief to make the
same point we’ve been making in this sermon, namely, that the supposed
differences between the biblical versions cast doubt on the reliability of
scripture. As you can see from the chart
there are three basic types of translations that tend to fall along a kind of
continuum, on the one end attempting to render the translation word-for-word,
in the middle attempting to render the translation into current equivalent
language, and on the other end, interpreting the text in a contemporary way and
even adding some additional words to help clarify further. But even with all that the differences
between these three basic types of translation tend to be quite minor. The Ten Commandments still say we aren’t to
murder, commit adultery, steal, and so on, and John 3:16 still says that the
word of God’s love to us in Jesus Christ is still a word to which we can and
must cling if we are to have hope.
We have already granted that as Christians we choose to take it
as a matter of faith that the Bible is God’s word, just as those who reject
that word are doing so in faith as well.
But our faith is not simply in human logic and wisdom, but is in the God
of All Creation, who has not only gone to all the trouble to give us the Word
of Life, but has preserved it as well.
Amen.
Bible Translation
Comparison Chart
There are three basic types of translations that tend to
fall along a continuum:
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Literal
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Dynamic Equivalence
|
Paraphrase
|
|
Attempts a
word-for-word translation
|
Translates text into
current equivalent language
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Interprets text into
contem-porary idom and supplies help to understand meaning
|
|
Example: King James
|
Example: New Revised Standard
|
Example: The Message
|
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Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou
shalt not steal. Exodus 20:13-15
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You shall not murder.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal. Exodus
20:13-15
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No murder. No adultery. No stealing. Exodus 20:13-15
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|
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________________________________________________________
The Church Is Full of
Hypocrites! – Dr. Brant D. Baker
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18
Top
A man was shipwrecked
on a remote island for twenty years.
After nearly giving up hope, he finally spotted a ship on the
horizon. He set off flares, attracted
the attention of the sailors, and they rescued him from the island. As they were leaving the captain noticed
three structures on the island. Impressed,
the captain inquired about the buildings.
“The one on the left is my house,” the man said, “and the one on the
right is my church.”
“Then what is the building in the middle?” the captain
asked.
“That one?” the man sniffed, “that’s the church I used to
go to, but it was full of hypocrites!”
The issues of hypocrisy and false pride are the scourge
of religion in general and Christianity in particular. There just seems to be something about the
church that brings out the worst in people, or perhaps more rightly said, since
people tend to be worse than even they want to admit, church people tend to
pretend they are better than they are.
It is no secret that Jesus saved some of his most pointed remarks not for the prostitutes and thieves, but
for the scribes and Pharisees. His
comments about hypocrisy in the Sermon on the Mount are most obviously aimed at
these religious professionals and lay leaders, warning against an outward show
of piety aimed only at impressing other people.
As his ministry developed Jesus became even more pointed in his critique
of the religious establishment.
Consider, for example, these choice words from Matthew’s gospel:
25“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the
outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and
self-indulgence.
15Woe to you, scribes and
Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and
you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.
27“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like
whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are
full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth. (Matthew 23)
Sadly, not much has
changed. Now instead of scribes and
Pharisees we have preachers and elders, and not too few lay people, all of whom
seem prone to project a larger-than-life view of their moral purity and
religious devotion. To be sure some of
this exaggeration is in the eye of the beholder—it’s easy to judge someone else
as thinking themselves superior when we ourselves are feeling inferior. But it is also the case that a good bit of
this critique is well-deserved. How did
we get into such a mess?
Two Root Causes
1) Because of what
church people tend to believe is true about themselves
I believe there are two root causes to the critique that
the church is full of hypocrites. The
first has to do with what church people want to believe is true about themselves. Most folks have a
pretty high opinion of themselves, and go to pretty incredible lengths to try and convince
other people that this high opinion is the truth. The way we dress, the way we talk, the way we
spend our money and our time, are in many cases all carefully planned to convey
an image that we wish others to see
and believe. We would like everyone
around us to believe that we have it all together, regardless of what is really
true.
In his book When
Bad Christians Happen to Good People, author Dave Burchett imagines how it
might be different. In his vision a
church service that would run a lot like an AA meeting. If
you showed up late, rather than staring you down, people would stand and
embrace you (like the do in AA) realizing that you may not have made it at
all. And when newcomers arrived they
would come to the front of the sanctuary and say, “Hi, my name is ___ and I’m a
sinner.”
“Hi, ---“ the congregation would
respond, “We love you and we are here to help.”
More likely, however,
if this were to happen, an usher would gently take us by the arm and try to
lead us quietly away while a deacon called the straitjacket express… (p 28).
All this being said, I actually think that most of us
here at FPC have a pretty good handle on who we really are. We
largely understand that “good
character” has more to do with a loving and stable family, something that is out
of our control and is given to us as a gift.
Ministering here in this community as we do we have a pretty good
understanding of the fact that folks coming out of an unstable family
background, who have had poor role models, and an ensuing history of poor
decisions are, as a result, burdened with all kinds of insecurities, issues,
and idiosyncrasies. Such folks may
struggle with uncontrolled anger, shyness, and addictions, all of which they
bring to the church in hopes of finding help and healing. For someone outside of the church to look in
and say, “Wow, for a place that’s supposed to be all about high morals there
are sure a lot of hypocrites there,” is unfair in the same sense that it would
be unfair to criticize a hospital saying, “Wow, for a place that’s supposed to
be all about health there sure are a lot of sick people there” (Keller,
54). The truth is that there are a lot
of us in here who are unhealthy, and if we forget that it not only
proves the truth of our lack of health, but also of course leaves us open to
the charge of hypocrisy.
2) What people outside
the church tend to believe is true about Christianity
A second reason that the church ends up vulnerable to the
charge of hypocrisy has to do with what people outside the church believe is
true about Christianity. The
fact of the matter is that both Christians and non-Christians really shouldn’t
be that surprised when people of other faiths, and perhaps even people of no
faith, live morally superior lives to our own.
That may have caught you off guard, so let me say it again: both
Christians and non-Christians really shouldn’t be that surprised when people of
other faiths, and perhaps even people of no faith, live morally superior lives
to our own.
Why? Because most
other major world religions are works-based, that is, they believe that
humanity relates to God mostly through living a good life. Christianity, on the other hand, teaches
exactly the opposite. In the Christian
view Jesus does not tell us how to live so we can merit salvation. Rather, Jesus comes to give grace and
forgiveness and salvation, none of which have anything to do with our
goodness. Christians believe that God’s
grace does not come to people who morally outperform others, but to those who admit
their failure to perform and acknowledge their need for a Savior (Keller,
19).
Another way of saying
this is that by-and-large people inside the church and people outside of the
church still haven’t fully processed the core message of Jesus Christ, namely,
that we are in relationship with God only by sheer grace. We hear it over and over, we sing about it
time and again, we speak about it among ourselves and with anyone who will
listen, but the truth of the matter is that many many Christians continue to
live and act as though their salvation was their own responsibility. And so, once more with feeling, please repeat
after me:
There is nothing I can do
Or nothing I can fail to do
That will make God love me
Any more than God already loves
Through Jesus Christ my Lord and Savior.
Ok preacher, wait a
minute, are you saying that we don’t have to be good? One might come to such a conclusion, but
let’s be clear that Jesus’ critique of the religions establishment in that part
of the Sermon on the Mount we have before us today is a critique aimed at
people who would be judgmental and condemning of others, but unwilling to look
at their own lives. They have all the
externals right, but it springs from a wrong motivation. Christians are to aim for goodness, but as a response to all we have received
from God in Christ. We aren’t trying to
earn God’s favor, rather, we are trying to say thanks
for God’s grace.
Two Specific Cases
The charge of hypocrisy in the
church can be made everyday in personal observation, but a much bigger charge
is often made against the whole of the church over issues like slavery. There is no denying the deep stain on
Christian history that has been made by the fact that the Christian religion
was dominant in the nations that bought and sold slaves, and so the church must
share in responsibility, along with the larger society, for what happened over
many centuries. But it is also true, and
somehow conveniently lost from history until recently, is that it was
Christians who first challenged the institution of slavery, and who in many
instances led life-long crusades against it.
Many of us probably saw and enjoyed the moving story of William
Wilberforce told in last year’s moving “Amazing Grace.”
Social historian “Rodney Stark notes
how historians have been desperately trying to figure out why the abolitionists
were willing to sacrifice so much to end slavery. He quotes the historian Howard Temperley, who
says that the history of abolition is puzzling because most historians believe
all political behavior is self-interested.
Yet despite the fact that hundreds of scholars over the last fifty years
have looked for was to explain it, Temperley says, ‘no one has succeeded in
showing that those who campaigned for the end of the slave trade…stood to gain
in any tangible way…or that these measures were other than economically costly
to the country.’ Slavery was abolished
because it was wrong, and Christians were the leaders in saying so. Christianity’s self-correcting apparatus, its
critique of religiously supported acts of injustice, had asserted itself”
(Keller, 63-64).
Another cause in which the
institution of the church has been accused of hypocrisy, but which belies a
deeper and more nuanced story of faithfulness, is associated with Hitler’s Germany. One of the men who made a difference in that
conflict was the famous Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was serving
two German-speaking churches in London
when Hitler came to power. Bonhoeffer
refused to stay where it was relatively safe for a man of his convictions,
instead returning to Germany
to head an illegal seminary for the Christian congregations that refused to
sign an oath of allegiance to the Nazis.
An outspoken prophet, he opening critiqued both the government and that
part of the church which was so spiritually dead as to cooperate with Hitler
and turn a blind eye to the horrors of his regime.
Marx argued that if you believe in a life
after this one you won’t be concerned about making this world a better place,
but the opposite argument is also true: if this world is all there is then why
sacrifice them for others? Bonhoeffer
correctly saw that anyone who follows Christ must live like he lived. Living out that conviction eventually got him
arrested and, shortly before the Allied liberation, he was hanged. Before his death, in one of his last letters
from prison, Bonhoeffer wrote,
It
is not a religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the
sufferings of God in the secular
life. [This is the meaning of repentance]:
not in the first place thinking about one’s own needs, problems, sins, and
fears, but allowing oneself to be caught up into the way of Jesus Christ (Keller, 66).
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