"...For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world--to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth listens to my voice." Pilate said to him, "What is truth?" John 18:37,38 (ESV)
This exchange between Jesus and Pontius Pilate is evocative of the modern tortured soul searching for meaning and authenticity in a life awash in moral ambiguity and relativism. As I read this I am almost tempted to visualize Pilate as a beat poet, clothed in a black turtle-neck and beret, with a cigarette between his fingers as he wistfully asks his profound question, "what is truth, man?"
Perhaps the reason for my mental picture is the way Pilate's question seems so different in subject from Jesus' preceding statements that he had come to bear witness to the truth, and every one who was of the truth would listen to his voice--implying that truth was a qualifying characteristic of his message--whereas Pilate's question seems directed not at the nature of Jesus' message, but at the nature of the concept of truth itself.
This is why Pilate's question is so timely to our age; it goes to the very heart of a crucial dilema of Christianity and the Gospel message in the present. We are inheritors of a culture that has fragmented our concept of truth to, on one hand a solid compartment of "fact", in which we house science, and on the other hand an amorphous cloud, in which we relegate "values". Facts are reliable; they are Newtonian physics. Values are capricious matters of personal taste, arbitrary and changeable. In modern Western culture it has become bad manners to state one's morality with any degree of certainty.
Yet central to Christianity is a complete, undivided concept of truth. As Francis Schaeffer put it in his book The God Who is There:
Before a man is ready to become a Christian, he must have a proper understanding of truth, whether he has fully analyzed his concept of the truth or not... Some who consider themselves real Christians have been infiltrated by the twentieth-century thought-forms. In reference to conversion, in a Christian sense, truth must be first. The phrase 'accepting Christ as Saviour' can mean anything. We are not saying what we are trying to say, unless we make completely clear that we are talking about objective truth, when we say Christianity is true and therefore that 'accepting Christ as Saviour' is not just some form of 'upper-story leap'. (emphasis mine)
In other words, when we as Christians say God exists, we are not talking about god as an idea, but God as a person, for whom one can properly use the pronoun He. When we say Jesus died for our sins, we aren't talking about a myth that illustrates the comforting idea of forgiveness, redemption and second chances; we are declaring that the real and personal God who exists, took on the incarnate human form of a man, lived for 33 years, and was actually crucified in the real Roman province of Judea some 2,000 years ago; that His death was a substitute for our real moral guilt before God as a way to reconcile us back to a proper relationship with Him.
One of the most exceptional aspects of Christianity--by which I mean distinct from other religions--is how it is solidly rooted in space-time. The Gospels challenge every reader with references to real historical people, places and events in ways that can--and have--been examined and verified.
To Pilate's question Christianity says truth is: scientific fact, Newtonian physics and objective moral absolutes as defined by God's righteous nature, revealed to man through His word.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Skepticism or Scandal?
Now they had forgotten to bring bread, and they had only one loaf with them in the boat. And he cautioned them, saying, “Watch out; beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.” And they began discussing with one another the fact that they had no bread. And Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why are you discussing the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? (Mark 8:15-18 ESV)
The default attitude of science is skepticism; a necessary posture, at least in the testing phase of the scientific method. However, with Western culture's deification of science, skepticism has become more than an essential ingredient to scientific inquiry; it has been elevated to a virtue. In the above text, we get a slightly different notion of God's attitude towards skepticism--at least with regard to our relationship to Him.
At this point in the narrative of Mark's gospel the disciples had witnessed numerous examples of Jesus' divine power, and yet they still failed to understand who he really was; indeed prior to this they had seen Jesus calm a vicious storm on the sea that had threatened to kill them all just by speaking to the wind and water and ...said to one another, "Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?" (Mark 4:41 ESV) A little later, after Jesus had fed five thousand people with five loaves of bread and two fish, they had seen Jesus walking on water, while they struggled in their boat against a fierce head wind. When Jesus got into the boat with them and the wind instantly died down, ...they were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened. (Mark 6:51,2 ESV)
The disciple's inability to perceive Jesus' true identity, which from our vantage point millennia later as readers of the gospel, makes them seem almost comically dense, was not a result of honest skepticism--but then again neither is modern man's rejection of God. It was--and is--rather a result of man's fallen nature which hardens his heart and makes him resistant to submission to God. The same impulse behind Eve's seduction to sin, to "be like God" and determine her own rules of right and wrong rather than follow God's rules, still impels us today in what we so often misinterpret as skepticism, but what is in reality our intractable defiance of God. It is the same impulse that Milton wrote of as the words of Satan in Paradise Lost, "...better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven." And it is the same impulse which governs the scandal of the cross that Francis Schaeffer described in his book, The God Who Is There. "The true scandal is that however faithfully and clearly one preaches the Gospel, at a certain point, the world, because it is in rebellion, will turn from it. Men turn away not because what is said makes no sense, but because they do not want to bow before the God who is there. This is the 'scandal of the cross'."
This hard-heartedness is what Jesus was speaking of as the "leaven of the Pharisees"; it was what blinded the disciples to Jesus' identity for so long, and why, when Jesus finally confronted them with the question, and Peter answered, ...you are the Christ, the son of the living God,, Jesus said, ...flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. (Matt.16:17 ESV) It is why Jesus said, ...no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. (John 6:44 ESV) This is why any evangelical or missionary endeavor, or even the sharing of one's personal testimony, must by necessity be a collaborative effort with the Holy Spirit. For this reason prayer is indispensable (and the failure to pray is perhaps one reason why the Church is not growing in this country as it has in the past). But if we do collaborate with the Holy Spirit in prayer and in declaring the gospel, we have God's promise: And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. (Ezekiel 36:26-28 ESV)
The default attitude of science is skepticism; a necessary posture, at least in the testing phase of the scientific method. However, with Western culture's deification of science, skepticism has become more than an essential ingredient to scientific inquiry; it has been elevated to a virtue. In the above text, we get a slightly different notion of God's attitude towards skepticism--at least with regard to our relationship to Him.
At this point in the narrative of Mark's gospel the disciples had witnessed numerous examples of Jesus' divine power, and yet they still failed to understand who he really was; indeed prior to this they had seen Jesus calm a vicious storm on the sea that had threatened to kill them all just by speaking to the wind and water and ...said to one another, "Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?" (Mark 4:41 ESV) A little later, after Jesus had fed five thousand people with five loaves of bread and two fish, they had seen Jesus walking on water, while they struggled in their boat against a fierce head wind. When Jesus got into the boat with them and the wind instantly died down, ...they were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened. (Mark 6:51,2 ESV)
The disciple's inability to perceive Jesus' true identity, which from our vantage point millennia later as readers of the gospel, makes them seem almost comically dense, was not a result of honest skepticism--but then again neither is modern man's rejection of God. It was--and is--rather a result of man's fallen nature which hardens his heart and makes him resistant to submission to God. The same impulse behind Eve's seduction to sin, to "be like God" and determine her own rules of right and wrong rather than follow God's rules, still impels us today in what we so often misinterpret as skepticism, but what is in reality our intractable defiance of God. It is the same impulse that Milton wrote of as the words of Satan in Paradise Lost, "...better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven." And it is the same impulse which governs the scandal of the cross that Francis Schaeffer described in his book, The God Who Is There. "The true scandal is that however faithfully and clearly one preaches the Gospel, at a certain point, the world, because it is in rebellion, will turn from it. Men turn away not because what is said makes no sense, but because they do not want to bow before the God who is there. This is the 'scandal of the cross'."
This hard-heartedness is what Jesus was speaking of as the "leaven of the Pharisees"; it was what blinded the disciples to Jesus' identity for so long, and why, when Jesus finally confronted them with the question, and Peter answered, ...you are the Christ, the son of the living God,, Jesus said, ...flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. (Matt.16:17 ESV) It is why Jesus said, ...no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. (John 6:44 ESV) This is why any evangelical or missionary endeavor, or even the sharing of one's personal testimony, must by necessity be a collaborative effort with the Holy Spirit. For this reason prayer is indispensable (and the failure to pray is perhaps one reason why the Church is not growing in this country as it has in the past). But if we do collaborate with the Holy Spirit in prayer and in declaring the gospel, we have God's promise: And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. (Ezekiel 36:26-28 ESV)
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