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Faith is a complex experience, so it is hard to address the whole of it in a blog post. I’m not even attempting that.

The early Christian believers had knowledge as well as faith. Peter, John and Mary saw the empty tomb. Thomas was offered the opportunity to touch the nail scars. Paul met Jesus face-to-face in the road. They KNEW that Jesus was risen again because they’d seen and talked with Him. It was such a powerful experience that Jesus’ brothers, James and Jude, who were greatly opposed to His ministry during His lifetime, became believers who were willing to die for their faith. The knowledge that He was risen so convinced that them Jesus was God incarnate that it gave the early believers the courage to speak the gospel even under persecution and most of them would die for their faith. Even when everyone around them said they were wrong, they held fast to the KNOWLEDGE of what they had actually experienced and that gave them faith that God would keep His promises for the future.

Modern Christians do not KNOW God in the same way that early Christians did. We must exercise faith more than they did. Yet that does not mean we do not have some knowledge to support our faith.

C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity:

I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of evidence is against it. That is not the point at which faith comes in. But supposing a man’s reason once decides that the weight of the evidence is for it. I can tell that man what is going to happen to him in the next few weeks. There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other people who do not believe it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief. Or else there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair; some moment, in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true. And once again his wishes and desires will carry out a blitz. I am not talking of moments at which any real new reasons against Christianity turn up. Those have to be faced and that is a different matter. I am talking about moments where a mere mood rises up against it.

Now faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding onto things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian, I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable; but when I was an atheist, I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why faith is such a necessary virtue; unless you teach your moods “where they get off” you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of faith.

For Lewis faith is the determination of the mind to cling to what is known in the face of what is felt. Though it involves trust it’s all about knowledge: trusting that what one knows to be true remains true even when it does not feel true.

The early Christians had every reason to desire to recant their story. Their culture made it uncomfortable and eventually fatal to believe that Jesus Christ was God in the flesh. Their faith in Him didn’t bring them power or prestige. It brought them death, and yet they held to it even as the sword hung over their necks. Clearly, they had no doubts about what they believed.

They KNEW Jesus.

I may not know Him in the same tangible way they did, but that does not mean I don’t KNOW Him.

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http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-supreme-court-contraceptives-20140613-story.html

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/06/30/supreme-court-hobby-lobby/

For the record, I’m a woman. I’ve been married nearly 30 years, I have two children spaced six years apart and my husband and I have sex regularly.

At no time in our 30 years together has our medical insurance covered contraception. For most of those years, our combined incomes have made us middle-middle class and during some of those years, we’ve been solidly lower-middle-class.

Yet, we somehow only have two children. The first one was born seven years after our marriage. The second one was born six years later. Both were planned. Yes, we use contraception to prevent pregnancy and yes, we pay for it ourselves. For the record, the contraception methods we’ve used do not permit conception and then chemically or mechanically abort a zygot (the beginnings of a human baby). We take responsibility for our own sexuality and for the children we produce through sharing that awesome experience with one another.

The world will not end of Hobby Lobby’s Christian owners are not required to pay for the abortificients of their sexually-careless employees. It won’t end if couples have to go on buying their own contraception. The birth rate won’t increase. Women will not be forced into domestic servitude. People will still be free to use contraception for the prevention of pregnancy.

All that’s happened is that the Supreme Court has recognized the right of people of faith to not participate in the murder of children. Now, if we can stop forcing me to pay for abortions through my federal income taxes ….

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Recently, I’ve had atheists (at least, they claim to be atheists) complain that I pretend to know something I don’t — that God exists. I’ve been accused of arrogance and condescension for sharing my faith and told that Christianity is a crutch — with the unspoken implication that only weak or incompetent people could be Christians.

I seriously doubt I’ll ever convince these people to change their minds, but such charges deserve an answer.

Whether or not atheists or skeptics (and I believe they are not necessarily synonymous) agree, Christian faith is belief that is built on knowledge. There is no “leap of faith” in Christianity. Some atheists would like to redefine faith for the rest of the world, insist that it is belief without evidence or even against evidence, but that’s an obviously self-serving stance built on a false dichotomy.

Just think about what that definition of faith would mean for all the great Christian thinkers, artists and social activists throughout the centuries. Aquinas’ Summas were stupidity from start to finish. Dostoyevsky’s novels were built on superstitious nonsense. Bach’s music was motivated by moronic thinking. Wilbur Wilberforce fought against the slave trade for unintelligent reasons.

If faith is the absence of intelligence or knowledge, then Jesus Christ is actually the enemy of faith. If faith is belief divorced from evidence, He apparently was misinformed because He kept providing reasons for people to believe.

Why would the New Testament exhort Christians to study, gain knowledge and teach on the average of twice every chapter if learning undermines faith?

What are the implications for higher education? All the first universities were founded by Christian organizations. Why would Christians go to such expensive lengths to take away all the ignorance that faith requires?

Why would Christians waste our time with apologetics if providing evidence for belief takes away people’s faith?

The word faith has a meaning based in history, scripture, theology and experiential context. I’m fluent in American Sign Language and the ASL sign “faith” combines “think leading to trust”.  In other words, knowledge that leads to confidence. Many nonbelievers would like to divorce the word “faith” from its traditional moorings and insist it means something it has never meant before. Maybe it’s because they are ignorant of the rich history of Christian thinkers, artists, and educators, though they act as if they know all about these things. Rather than accuse them of ignorance, I’m going to suggest that they do know that a lot of very smart people have been faithful Christians throughout the centuries and that their reason for redefining faith is a propaganda tool.

Why? Because after more than a century of controlling our American school system, they haven’t been able to stop faith. About 80% of Americans say they believe in God and around half of American scientists say they believe in a metaphysical realm. Worse, from an atheist point of view, these “heretics” have the audacity to question the authority of materialism as a sole acceptable view of the way universe.

If you can’t convince people with rhetoric and you don’t have the demographic numbers for coersion, then use proganda to MA finalize those who offer an alternate point of view.

By suggesting faith is anti-knowledge and possibly lunacy, the hope is they can automatically inoculate people who care to be viewed as intelligent and sane from very even listening to us.

Of course, when you know the truth, you shouldn’t really worry much overmuch about the opinions of the misinformed, except to be concerned for their well-being, because being misinformed has consequences.

 

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A great discussion!

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Before you get into a lather about how I “don’t understand” you, let me explain something.

I used to be you! I was raised in a non-Christian household in the very secular state of Alaska. I think my family went to church three times while I was growing up — once for a funeral, once for a wedding, and once because Easter fell on my dad’s mom’s birthday and he wanted to honor her memory … or something like that. My parents were not atheists. More like agnostic-edging-toward-deist-not-interested-in-god-ruining-their-fun American “Christians”. They didn’t give God much thought and neither did I until fog grounded a bush plane in the Alaska wilderness and the only choices for reading materials were the Bible (in German), Zane Grey novels and Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who Is There. I really hated westerns and I can’t read German, so ….

I read the book in two days and I was challenged to question the presuppositions I’d been raised with. I wasn’t hostile toward God; I just never really thought much about metaphysics. I was a cultural “christian” in that I (sort of) knew the Christmas and Easter stories, but I largely accepted without examination that Jesus was at best a great man who lived a long time ago and at worst was a myth. Because I lived in a very secular state, I didn’t know any faithful Christians personally and the few that I had met turned me off because they seemed really fake to me. I grew up with an old joke about Christians as my basic impression:

“I’m perfect. I don’t drink, smoke or swear. God loves me! Dammit, I left my cigarettes on the bar next to my empty beer.”

Funny, but it turned out not to be true!

Francis Schaeffer’s book gave me pause because he explained why belief is a more reasonable response to the world than nonbelief. But it only gave me pause. I was still skeptical and for the next 16 months, I investigated the evidence for Christianity’s claims. By maintaining an open mind and by treating those faithful Christians who came into my life with respect rather than derision, I eventually came to a place where enough of my objections were answered satisfactorily to where I had to admit that the only thing standing between me and knowing if Christianity’s claims were true was my own unbelief.

I could choose to go on not believing or I could lay aside my objections for a moment and let God show me why belief was the most reasonable response to the world. It took 16 months to get to that point, so it was not a “leap of faith”. I had thoroughly investigated the subject before I accepted salvation.

During those 16 months I learned some things.

• Christians are human beings who are not perfect. And most of them don’t claim to be.
• Faithful Christians are generally consistent in what they believe from the Bible, but they struggle to reconcile their faith with their culture, which sometimes leads to perceived inconsistencies.
• The Bible is surprisingly consistent with itself, but misconceptions abound among both believers and nonbelievers, with the nonbelievers holding the greater share of them.
• American “cultural christianity” is mostly unfamiliar with the actual teachings of the Bible.
• The Bible and science do not (contrary to popular belief) disagree about the world. Science properly cannot make any claims to understanding the metaphysical claims of the Bible and the Bible is a book of faith and history, not science. Those claiming that science has proven there is no God (or gods) are mistaken in their claims because they try to make science authoritative outside of the observation of the physical universe, which is its proper field of research.
• Archaeology has so far been supportive of the Bible’s claims

Because I am not a true believer in science — and never was — I can see theories for what they are — someone’s opinion about the collected evidence. Materialistic scientism arrives at one theory about the origins of the universe and life on the planet by viewing the evidence through the lens of certain presuppositions. Intelligent design (it wasn’t called that in the 1970s, but it was around) has another theory also based on their examination of the evidence colored by their own presuppositions. There are extremes of both groups of theorists who try to take the evidence where it cannot go. Not being a true believer in materialism, I could have faith in God and still respect science for what it does well – collect evidence.

Archaeology hasn’t proven the Bible, but it has not found substantial evidence against the Biblical claims. The same summer I read Schaeffer’s book, I read an article in a magazine about how the Bible was crap because, among other things, Nineveh had never existed. Archaeologists had been looking for it for a century without success, so the writer insisted the Bible was lying about Jonah and, therefore the whole Bible was in question. I believed that claim without examination all during my investigative period. Within days of deciding to let God show me that my objections were misapplied, archaeologists announced that Nineveh had been found.  They’d been looking in the wrong places for a really long time and someone more or less stumbled upon it where they weren’t actually looking. Coincidence? Maybe, but it added evidence to the mountain that I was now scaling. Contrary to popular belief at the time, archaeology was actually confirming many of the claims of the Bible.

I came to the Bible and the claims of Christianity as a skeptic, but I had been challenged to approach the subject with an open mind. An open mind demands proof, but not absolute proof. Absolute proof is the province of a closed mind, a mind that is made up and will not be changed even by overwhelming evidence. I did not require overwhelming evidence. I only needed my reasonable questions answered. Essentially, when my collected evidence spoke more for God’s existence and, particularly for the claims of Jesus Christ, than it did against, I set aside my skepticism and let God answer the rest of my objections.

And, He did!

So, yes, I do understand skepticism, but no, I don’t think skeptics are right.

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“Heaven is a place, just as much a place as is New York or Chicago.” Charles Ferguson Ball

Everyone wants to know about heaven and everyone wants to go there. Nearly 80% of Americans believe there is a place called heaven and most people expect to go there when they die. That 80% includes a lot of people who do not attend church or align with the New Testament definition of a Christian.

Don’t you wonder why so many non-believers in the Biblical God want to go to His heaven?

Something deep inside the human heart cries out for something more than the pain and suffering of this life. They hope for something more than 70 or 80 years on Earth, of being born, living, dying and being buried. C.S. Lewis talked about a “God shaped hole” in the human heart, but even in an era when many Americans claim not to believe in God, there is apparently still a heaven-shaped vacuum inside the human heart. We somehow know we were made for something more than this life.

What I find interesting about all of those folks who think they’re going to heaven — especially the ones who do not seek a day-to-day relationship with God while they’re on this planet — is most of them have no concept of what heaven will be like and even if they do, if you push them, they wouldn’t really like heaven.

I suspect most Christians wouldn’t like the mythical representation of heaven either. What’s to like about floating around on clouds playing the harp? I l’ve hiked into many a cloud and they tend to rain on you and I don’t play the harp now, so why would I enjoy playing it for eternity in wet robes?

Fortunately, that’s not the Biblical concept of heaven. The Bible describes it as a real place, where believers will be free of sin, illness and death to pursue the work of God and worship Him without end. I don’t know any non-believers who would like to live that way for even a day, let alone an eternity.

Nonbelievers, I have a few questions for you. Please consider …

If you desire to go somewhere, shouldn’t you have some idea of where you’re going and what it will be like when you get there? Wouldn’t that be important if you were going somewhere forever? If you don’t like it, you’re going to have a long, long time to regret your decision. If you don’t want to worship God now, why would you want to worship Him forever?

How do you feel about serving Him forever? Luke 19:11-27 provides us a picture of what heaven will be like. We will use our gifts to administer the new heaven and the new earth. Bakers will bake, teachers will teach, singers will sing, and preachers will preach. For all I know, soldiers may march off to battle and quarterbacks will throw passes. Think of the flowers the botanists will study. Gifted astronomers will go from galaxy to galaxy studying the wonders of God’s creation.

No one will be sitting around on a cloud eating grapes and polishing his halo. We’ll all be too busy for that. And all of it will be in the service of God.

Non-believers –

You do realize — Christians will be in heaven? You know, those people you’ve ridiculed for believing in God — whom some of you have called stupid or mentally ill or weak willed. Are you sure you want to spend eternity with us? And we’re not just talking about one or two Christians. We’re talking about millions of Christians.

You can be as angry as you want about God expecting you to meet His standards to enter His home, but be honest with yourselves. If you hate God and are annoyed by Christians, would heaven feel like hell to you rather than a paradise?

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To a certain extent modern Christians own the non-believers jabs on several topics, including heaven and hell. The prosperity gospel favored by many churches today paints a rosy picture of heaven as a place of temporal rewards where even a greedy person might overdose on the opulence.

Most Americans have a cliched notion of heaven as a blissful realm of harp-strumming angels. The vast majority of Americans also believe that after death their souls will ascend to some kind of celestial resting place where they will be “happy”.

There’s really no Biblical basis for that belief. First century Christian believers expected the world to be transformed into God’s Kingdom – a restored Eden where redeemed human beings would be liberated from death, illness, sin and other corruptions. They also believed that Jesus had established the Kingdom of God with His death and resurrection. In other words, they (and we) were (and are) living in the the start-up era of the Kingdom of God. This inauguration of God’s Kingdom was (and is) far from complete and required (still does) the cooperation of God’s people in spreading the gospel and being good examples of Christ-in-the-flesh, because God works through people and He is not willing for anyone to perish … if He can help it.

Which makes me sometimes wonder … is the delay in His return due to the rising tide of atheism? Is He allowing Christians the opportunity to find effective arguments to reach these misguided humans?

The idea of heaven veered off course in the Middle Ages. Writers and artists like Dante and Michelangelo and some theologians began to depict a heaven and hell (and a purgatory in Catholicism) that looked nothing like the New Testament version. Why? Depicting hell as the absence of God didn’t make such an exciting painting as the fiery hell painting? Maybe, but images like hell-fire and angels were actually pagan images from surrounding cultures, made more attractive because people couldn’t read the New Testament for themselves.

Twenty-first century Christians don’t have the same excuse. We have the New Testament literally at our fingertips. We can carry it around on our smart phones. We should read it, because our misconceptions, Christians, are crippling our faith. We have a temporal perspective rather than an eternal one. Many of us live only for the here and now and we don’t study that much about the world to come.

The Bible actually commands us to think about Heaven.

“Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.” Colossians 3:1-2

When we understand what heaven really is, it changes how we live life now.

My cousin Rick (the research doctor) works with patients who have debilitating diseases and very little chance of long-term survival. I’ve met people from third-world countries where they faced difficult and dangerous situations, where sharing the faith can get them imprisoned or killed. Those who face adverse circumstances think about heaven a lot! Their perspective is not on their temporary lives, but on their hope for the future.

On Jesus’ last night on Earth, He told his remaining 11 disciples “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in Me. My Father’s house as many rooms, if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with Me that you also may be where I am.” (John 14:1-4)

Heaven is about a restored relationship, which is what Christians have signed onto. The relationship we have now is intermittent because we are bent and twisted by sin. The relationship we will have with God in heaven will be in sharp focus. We will have renewed relationships also with our fellow believers and with ourselves. Heaven will be a place where sin, death and sorrow are absent, adventure, work and discovery await us and God will be present in a way that even we who seek Him have never experienced.

Now doesn’t the sound better than floating around a cloud playing the harp?

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Many nonbelievers are affronted that God would “send them to hell”. The argument goes something like this —

God is evil for sending anyone to hell. How dare he expect me to love him back when I don’t even believe he exists and how dare he send anyone to hell for not believing in him.

That’s a lot of anger toward a being who the nonbeliever claims does not exist, but let’s just concentrate on the topic of hell for a moment.

Hell is a place where God is not present. On the day Jesus comes back, all people — believers and nonbelievers all — will know that God is real and know with certainty that God is good. God will judge the believers and the nonbelievers. Nonbelievers are those who have spent their lives avoiding getting to know and spend time with God. They have a host of excuses for that, but all of their excuses boil down to the simple fact that they chose not to have a relationship with God.

Adam and Eve were created for the purpose of having a relationship with God. They decided that relationship was expendable if they could be like gods themselves. They broke the relationship and God kicked them out of the Garden to allow them to live their lives as they chose, following their own faulty thinking rather than His perfect guidance. We who live today and all intervening generations have not been able to restore that relationship, because frankly, we continue to put ourselves in the seat of God. We deem a relationship with Him to be too confining on our ability to do as we please. God did something dramatic to help us understand the importance of that relationship — He stepped down into our messy world in human form and died a horrible death so we would understand just how much He loves us and wants to restore that relationship.

Christians are those people who have recognized that sacrifice and chosen the relationship that God offers. It doesn’t make us any less human or any better than those who have not. It just means we’re connected to God through relationship and He honors our choice.

But He won’t force any of us to fellowship with Him. He suffered and sacrificed to reconcile with us, but it’s still our choice to accept that relationship or not. And if we die without having accepted that restoration, He will give us the dignity of our choices and allow us to spend eternity without Him.

That absence will be so painfully keen that it will cause continual weeping and gnashing of teeth. Hell is the absence of God.

You can hate God for that, but you’re the one who chooses it.

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They get it right sometime

Supreme Court rules against Obama on recess appointments

Of course, it’s six years past and he’ll get to keep his unapproved appointments, so it really wasn’t a victory until the next president has to operate on the separation of powers.

 

New York Court Blocks Proposed Large Sugary Drink Ban

Nanny state takes a hit — probably not big enough to knock it out, but it looks good from here. If you don’t want to drink large sugary drinks, you don’t have to, but for those who do … ah, liberty!

 

High court strikes Massachusetts abortion “buffer zone”

Free speech means speech that is free. And shouting from across the street is less effective than a quiet voice near to the door. Seems kind of strange that we have to have the Supreme Court explain what free speech is. Liberty, you know? The right to speak what’s on your mind even if others disagree so long as your speech does not result or advocate for the physical injury of someone.

Not a hard concept!

 

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Far too often,we human beings try to redesign God in our image. One way we do that is by misinterpreting His communication with us — the Bible.

Take the concept of Hell.

The Bible describes “hell” as a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth. Where did the idea of hell as a place of fire and brimstone come from? Revelation 21:8 talks about a burning lake of fire where the antiChrist will be thrown in the end times and Genesis 19 describes fire and brimstone destroying the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Preachers for centuries have riffed off that imagery for its effect, but neither image is really a description of hell.

The word the Bible uses to describe hell “Gehenna” comes from a valley adjacent to Jerusalem where the Jews (under kings Ahaz and Manasseh) sacrificed their children to the god Molech. In Jesus’ day it was a nasty place of constant fires used to burn refuse and the bodies of criminals. When Jesus used the word Gehenna, He was speaking of the city dump of all eternity. Fire was a part of it, but the emphasis was really on separation and loss.

The New Testament provides varied descriptions of hell — fire, a bottomless pit, a burning lake, darkness, death, destruction, everlasting torment, a place of wailing and gnashing of teeth, a gradation of punishment. The variety of descriptions argues against applying a literal interpretation of any particular one. For example, in a place of absolute darkness, does fire emit light? Fire consumes, but the people who would provide the fuel are never consumed. The concept of graduation of punishment is also something to consider. Does Hitler’s part of the fire burn more painfully than the part inhabited by an honest pagan? Does he fall more rapidly into the abyss than the pagan? Is utter darkness darker for Hitler? Does he wail and gnash more loudly than others?

Although you have to be careful of assigning a symbolic status to God’s word, the images of torment in hell appear to be a metaphor and not a literal burning fire in eternal darkness. The symbolic nature does not lessen hell’s potency. On the contrary, their combined effect describes a hell that is worse than death, darker than darkness, and deeper than any abyss. Hell is a place with more wailing and gnashing of teeth than any single description can portray. It is a place that exceeds our capacity to imagine and describe in human language.