Crisis of Faith 1

I was introduced to a young woman recently who is having some doubts about her Christian faith, raising some legitimate questions for which the prepackaged answers are not satisfying. I have decided to publish my answers here since the questions she has are not at all unusual these days. The global marketplace of ideas has made "shopping" for religion much more prevalent than in the days of monolithic belief systems passed on from one generation to the next. Even in the past, however, it was always necessary for each generation to choose to believe or not, because God doesn't have any grandchildren.

The issue which currently troubles this young woman is whether good people who don't believe in Jesus damned to hell? For those of you who read me regularly, you know I dealt with that at length in my series “Answering Rob Bell,” parts 1-6. Before I even get to the point of sharing that argument however, there are more basic issues to settle. The question of God’s judgment cannot be answered without first tackling another more basic one: is the Bible the revealed truth of God or not? Until one settles that question, there can be no ground for debate. Granted, there are different "interpretations" of many Bible passages, but unless two people agree that the Bible is authoritative, they will have no ground on which to base their arguments.

I believe that there is sufficient evidence to prove that the Bible is unlike any other book known to man; I believe it has the kind of supernatural characteristics that one would expect in a document that claims to be the revelation of a supreme being. Its unaltered longevity, fulfilled prophecies, historical and archaeological accuracy and amazing internal integrity (for a book comprised of 66 volumes written by 44 authors over thousands of years) argue clearly for its divine nature.

Philosophically, I believe that a supposed supreme being who created sentient creatures would logically want to communicate with them in some way. It is also logical to imagine that said being would likely have rules of engagement and standards of acceptable behavior. It would be illogical, if not sadistic to create sentient beings with innate moral sensibilities and then leave them clueless as to the basis for their existence.

Some have proposed that the God of their imagination is just such a sadist, as a poem by Steven Crane suggests that God built the ship of humanity and then sent it rudderless into the sea of fate. This is the position traditionally known as deism and describes the view of many who call themselves agnostics. This point of view is intellectually unsatisfying to me, and has proven depressing to virtually all those who hold to it, many becoming hopeless nihilists or bitter cynics as a result.

I concluded the first response to my friend by saying that if we can agree that the Bible is an authoritative source of truth for determining who we are and how we must live, then we can have a discussion. I will enlarge my response to the original questions in the next installment. If you are interested in following this line, stay tuned.