“Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts…It is no longer sufficient to hold beliefs just because you inherited them.” -Tim Keller
Tim Keller is one of my favorite preachers. He is the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian in New York City and was formerly a pastor of a local church in Hopewell, VA where I grew up and lived for the majority of my life. I honestly had never heard of him until probably a year and a half ago. His teaching has been instrumental in the last several months in helping me not only share my faith but also showing me how to defend it. My mother first told me about him when she came across a video of him on facebook and recognized him as a preacher who had talked with my dad after he became a Christian. After my dad’s conversion, naturally he had questions so the man who led him to the Lord brought him to talk with Tim Keller to help instruct him in the faith. When I found this out I became intrigued with learning more about this man who had helped my father. The first book I picked up of his, “The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism”, is probably his most well known since it is a New York Times Bestseller. With chapter titles in the book like “How Could a Good God Allow Suffering”, “Christianity is a Straightjacket”, and “How Can a Loving God Send People to Hell”, I knew this would be a helpful book in defending and strengthening my faith with those who do not claim to be a Christian. Little did I know how many people in the church would need solid answers on most of the same questions.
He couldn’t be any more right could he? “Belief in an age of skepticism” that is. We are no longer modern but postmodern in our thought and everything that once was thought to be claimed without a shadow of a doubt to be true is now up for grabs. In Christian circles some have heard of the Emergent church (see at the end of the post) while for those outside of the church there is skepticism. Such common objections are often heard like how can we know there is a God and how do we know the Bible is accurate? My entry for today isn’t so much directed for those who do not adhere to Christianity. It takes a supernatural awakening of the Spirit of God to open the eyes and the hearts of unbelievers. Until then the message of the gospel and all its truth remains utterly foolish to them. My concern, rather, is for those who claim to follow Christ but choose to believe that truth is relative and can’t be fully known.
The quote I posted from Keller at the top is amazing when you truly think about it. How many of us have beliefs because of the church we have grown up in or because of what are parents have told us to believe about the Bible. It is fine to question what we have been taught but it is not good to remain in an uncertain questioning state. Every Christian has wrestled with doubts and it is wise to not just believe something because someone told us to. In Acts 17:11 we are told of the Bereans who are praised in the Bible for not just receiving the message but daily went to the Scriptures to see if what was being taught by Paul was truth. We see very clearly when there is doubt there is one place to turn and it is the Word of God.
The danger of our postmodern thought is that Scripture is no longer highly esteemed. In some cases it is deemed culturally irrelevant and for those who do value its truth are labeled as arrogant, bigoted, lacking humility, narrow minded, and unloving. How can this be? Look only to the example of Jesus Christ. The most loving humble person to ever walk on the face of the earth made the same claims about the truth that Scripture does. In fact in John 14:6 Jesus says, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” This does show the exclusiveness of his claim in being the “truth” and to know God requires knowing Jesus. Still, they push back, how can we know your version or opinion of the truth is really truth? In fairness to the emergent church Jesus is believed to be the only way to heaven from what I understand to be the view from most of its leaders. The problem in their view is not all truth is believed to be contained within the words of Scripture. Truth it is said can possibly be found in other religions. I say how can this be? If Jesus is the “truth” then necessarily it means there is something that is also false. If something is not of God or against the God of the Bible it is anti-God meaning it can’t possibly be truth. This is where I usually get in trouble with my conversations. To have a claim on truth or any doctrine for that matter means not being tolerant of other views as well as lacking humility. Basically by questioning doctrine and truth it is seen as more loving and coming from a humble spirit. You can imagine how much I disagree since the words of Scripture are filled with doctrine and precious truth.
Imagine you are college student and are required to take your final exam for one of the courses you are currently enrolled in. The professor gives you the test along with the instructions and tells you there is one hour to complete. The minutes creep by until finally it is time to turn in your work. There is only one problem though. You have decided not to fill in any of the answers for fear of answering incorrectly. The professor glares at the exam while noticing you haven’t answered any of the questions. He asks you why it is blank and your response is that you were afraid of getting something wrong. Instead you tell him that by actually not getting any of the answers wrong you are somehow smarter. The professor firmly responds that it doesn’t make you smarter by leaving it blank but only makes you unwise because now you have failed the exam and possibly the class. I am aware this isn’t a perfect example but you can see the similarity in the way a person claims to be a follower of Jesus and denies believing in and doing anything that is required. It doesn’t make a person humble to question the truths of Jesus and the Bible rather it makes a person very unwise to deny what has been so freely given to us. True humility is understanding who we are apart from Jesus and submitting to his commands and truth because of the precious price he paid for us on the cross.
I expect someone who is a new believer like my father was at the time he talked with Tim Keller to have doubts and questions. The beautiful thing about faith is that it is a gift from God and we continue to live out our lives with Christ in this same faith. We are called to mature and grow in the faith. Maturity doesn’t come from denial and questioning the truth but from yielding and submitting to the truth. We are expected to conform our lives to God’s Word not the other way around. Can it truly be honoring and glorifying to question the God we claim to know? Without believing we can know truth leaves us open to the trap of the enemy Satan. How will we know what is false without knowing what is true? How can we pursue holiness if we don’t know what truths along with the Holy Spirit lead us to holiness? To be indifferent about the truth is to be indifferent about God. God is truth and truth is central to the gospel.
**For more information about the emergent church check out Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck’s book “Why We’re Not Emergent”. This book has been a great resource in helping me understand the teaching coming from several of the leaders in that camp. **
I have been at this truth thing my whole life. I have always believed in an absolute truth, and I still do. When I was a kid I had no problem with Christianity, I just believed. It was true, my Baptist faith was right. I got older and started to work in a Christian bookstore. While working there I discovered all these different ‘Christianities’. Each one claiming to be the True Version. This led to years of confusion for me. I didn’t know who was right. They all claimed they were holding the Bible up as Truth, yet obviously someone was getting something wrong. They all read the same Bible. They all claimed the Spirit was leading them in Truth. Now, either God was schizophrenic or somebody was wrong. Then I looked into Catholicism, which holds (for me at least) the most compelling reason for why it is the True Church. I don’t want to get into that whole thing right here, but suffice to say that it was built on the Rock of Peter. This Church was to be the vehicle that would authoritatively interpret the Scrpitures ( I mean, the Catholic Church put the Bible together) so we would not fall into error. Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to lead the Church in Truth.
I was like “Finally! Someone I can trust to lead me in Truth.” So I converted and was content for a time. But eventually I started to question. I began to feel confined and restricted. I was fine if I agreed with a certain doctrine, but if I disagreed it was not fun. Because I had a choice: either accept it as Truth or rebel against it in an exercise in futiliy. I tried so hard to believe all I was taught, but I just couldn’t. I beat my head against so many walls and grew increasingly frustrated. And when I would raise my doubts and questions, I just got dogma quoted at me. So I left the Church to put myself into the wider world of Christianity. And now that I’m in that world, I find most Protestant churches do the same. They just spit dogma at me. Like with Platt, once he started quoting typical party lines about his version of Christianity, I just tuned out.
But, this is good in a way because it’s forcing me to confront myself. To learn a new kind of truth: the TRUTH about myself. Just who and what I am, and what I’m not. It’s been brutal, but it’s been honest too. I think God can work with my honesty. And this is where I finally get to my point. Some of us, no matter how hard we try, just cannot fit ourselves into these boxes. For us, it kills our faith. It would be like asking you to turn from your Reformed view towards an Emergent view. You cannot do that. So it seems to me that it comes down to each individual person. To our personalities. To what speaks to us in the deepest parts of our being. For whatever reason, the Reformed view speaks to you. For others of us, the Emergent view speaks to us. What you find freeing we find confining and vice versa. For us Emergents, this is just how we are, the way we were made. To force ourselves to accept something we can’t accept would be to kill our faith. Most emergent people I know and most emergent authors I have read actually became emergent in an effort to save their faith. If I had to go back to Catholicism, I would die. If I had to force myself to be Reformed, I would die.
It took me years to figure this out. My whole life, really. Now my concept of Truth is changing. It’s becoming more three dimensional. It’s like quantum physics. More levels than we know. I used to think Truth came wrapped up and prepackaged. Like a recipe. Add this, stir that, now bake, add icing and voila: Chritian believer. Now I know it’s incredibly more complex than we realize. I have found that any time we try to contain God in our boxes He overflows them. He busts out. Because He won’t be contained by our theology. Our feeble attempts to understand something we can’t even comprehend. This is not to say we cannot know God. I believe we can. I just believe the danger comes when we think we got Him all figured out.
Comment by Joel — September 4, 2010 @ 9:52 PM |
Joel,
First of all – your comment about the Roman Catholic Church are wrong. Jesus told Simon that he was cephas – the word for pebble when he made his confession in Matt. 16. Then Jesus went on to use the word for boulder when He said “on this rock I will build my church”. That boulder was the confession, not the person of Simon also called “Peter” (Cephas). Secondly, by the time that the cannon of Scripture was formally decided upon and closed – it had already been accepted for 100s of years, being recognized by the early church fathers, and in the case of OT, by Jews for 1,000s of years. It simply had not been formally codified. And if the Roman church is the true church, then please explain why Rome was the cause of the first great church split – you know, the great schism – when the bishop of Rome (in his pride and lust for greater power) declared that he should rule all of Christianity and the Eastern churches would not give in. It ended in separation.
Now I don’t know you personally, Joel, but you seem to making the same mistake that so many others do today – you want Christianity and truth, but only if it matches up with what you want to believe. For those who name the Name of Christ – that is not an option. The Bible, the very Word of God, is, and must be our “supreme court” if you will. God has the final say, not us sinful, finite, men. There are certain doctrines that are essential to one being a Christian – to deny those is to deny the God of the Bible. For example, the Trinity – to deny this doctrine, as folks like TD Jakes do, is to deny the God of the Bible, and thus they worship a different God. Then there are secondary doctrines, like the method of baptism, where we can disagree and it does not affect one being a believer. However, our guide cannot be ourselves – what we believe or want to believe. We are finite creatures, marred by sin. When what we believe differs from Scripture, for Christians, Scripture must take precedence. It doesn’t matter whether one is Reformed, Charismatic, Emergent, Eastern Orthodox, etc. This must be. For anyone who treats sound biblical doctrine like it’s something that can be simply thrown aside, like the emergent church does – I have to question whether they’re really Christians to begin with.
As for your idea about truth, Joel – truth is by definition exclusive – as the logical law of non-contradiction states – something cannot be both “a” and “non-a” at the same time. Couple that with what Jesus said John 14 (that Phil quoted” – and Jesus can be only 1 of 3 things – a liar who purposely deceived people, a lunatic who deceived folks unintentionally, or He is Who He said He is (paraphrased from C.S. Lewis). If He is Who He said – if He is God, and God cannot lie (Num. 23:19, 1 Sam. 15:29, Titus 1:2), then we can trust what He said. The authenticity of the Bible is not a question. We more manuscript evidence for it than for any work or antiquity. And we have the empty tomb. No one else has ever risen from the grave. Therefore, we have to believe Him when He says that He is the ONLY way to God.
One personal issue I have with Rome is it’s doctrine. Specifically, it teaches, like all “religions”, a works- based salvation. That’s what sets true Christianity apart – God did all the work for us. The good works we do are as a result of our change in nature and our desire to please Him, Whom we love. Rome’s gospel is no different than that of the Mormons, or so many Americans today, who believe that they’ll get into heaven because “I’m a nice guy”, “I’ve never done anything REALLY wrong”, “the good stuff that I do outweighs the bad”, etc. Yet none of that will get anyone into heaven. I love doing good things, and helping others, etc. However, that cannot take the place of sound doctrine- or it simply devolves into works-righteousness. Doctrine does matter, despite what the “emergent” movement wants to believe.
Comment by shawn — September 7, 2010 @ 10:19 AM |
Oh, and as far those verses about it being impossible for God to lie – I neglected to mention Hebrews 6:18.
Comment by shawn — September 7, 2010 @ 2:57 PM |