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.

Rolling Thunder

As I write, thunder is rumbling somewhere over Lake Michigan. I don't like the inconvenience of a sudden rain or the damage lightning can cause, but I love a thunderstorm. When our kids were little we told the usual fairy tales about angels bowling in heaven or dropping pumpkins off their wagons to calm the kids' natural fear of loud noises. Once they grew older, we began to explain thunder as a hint, a metaphor of the awesome power of God.

This opens up all kinds of teaching opportunities. Thunder is loud and scary; God is big and not someone to be trifled with. Lightning can destroy things; God owns the earth and if he wants to break something, it's his right. Thunderstorms seem to pop up out of nowhere (forget our new radar weather forecasts;) God is everywhere and you never know when he will act. If this sounds like a terrible way to introduce kids to God, bear in mind that the Bible constantly instructs us to fear him. I love the line C.S. Lewis puts in the Chronicles of Narnia regarding Aslan, the figure of Christ in the series: "Safe?" said Mr. Beaver."Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good."

I think too much of our teaching about God in the church today tries to make him safe. I have previously commented on Rob Bell's outrageous statement that the biblical "story" about hell is not attractive and we need to concoct a better "story." It is common to hear believers trying to downplay the harsh nature of the God of the Old Testament: the Levitical penalty for adultery was stoning both parties; the Canaanites were to be subjected to mass genocide; a crowd who rebelled against Moses was swallowed by an earth quake -- twenty-three thousand of them.

Do I think that we should preach Jonathon Edwards' sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" every Sunday? No, but I think the required balance is missing. I assigned the Edwards' sermon in a Literature class and got the expected reaction from a couple self-avowed atheists: who would want to believe in a God like that? Mea culpa. I should have had them read another of his works on the grace of God or the fellowship of the saints or anything for balance. The wrath and the love of God must be taken as a whole. Either alone distorts who he is.

People love to talk about the wonder of creation in a starry night sky or how the beauty of a sunset speaks of God's tenderness towards us. These are good analogies, but so is thunder. I believe that much of what is wrong in society today can be traced to a loss of fear of God. We used to speak of parents putting "the fear of God in 'em" to motivate good behavior. Now I hear the (sickening) parental cry, "Stop doing that, Johnny, Okay?" as little Johnny continues to wreak havoc and the parents shrug.

What Johnny needs to hear is a clap of thunder -- and maybe he should experience a little bolt of lightning in the form of a swat on his behind. I think we could all do with a flash of "inspiration" like that occasionally. Without a sense of how big God is and what his rights are over his creation, we all tend to get a little too big for our britches. I say, "Roll thunder, roll."