|
|
|
Are the Vessels Worthy?
Preface
It
is easier than ever to be an atheist. Atheistic philosophies based on a rigorous materialism are far more sophisticated today
than they could have been only a century ago. They gain a great deal of their power from principles and findings of science
and the scientific method. Several prominent scientists, indeed, vocally and eloquently promote such materialistic views.
I have little doubt that I would have joined them had it not been for powerful religious experience. The intellectual
appeal, the appeal of a clean worldview uncontaminated by spirits, has always been great. But the power of God has been greater.
Although I spent decades as a professional scientist (a geophysicist), this book represents my life’s work more fully
than do my efforts in science. As a young man, beginning at age 19, I had an extraordinary personal revelation of the God
of Christianity. That and my continuing close relationship with God through subsequent decades has impelled a lifelong effort
to find a rationale for religion in what often appears to be a relentlessly materialistic world. This book thus presents
a spiritual worldview intended to stand up to atheistic materialism.
If there is a single set of facts that gives
atheists the courage of their convictions, it is the rich diversity of fossil plants and animals, the implied flow of early
life forms into later kinds, and the great lengths of time, evident from geology and radiometric dating, over which this evolution
took place. The more deeply one delves into the fossil record the less likely it seems that any master plan was involved
and the more likely that changes in life forms resulted mostly from random genetic mutations. If an intelligent and all-powerful
personal God of the sort traditionally invoked by Christians really existed, one could argue, it is inconceivable that creation
would have proceeded in the seemingly haphazard manner evident from the fossil record.
Or is it so inconceivable?
All it takes is a small change of emphasis in the way Christians have looked at God to bring him into compatibility with scientific
discoveries. This shift in emphasis leaves God as powerful and at the same time as personal as any traditional Christian
theologian might want him to be. Furthermore, this shift has firm support in teachings of the Bible. This book presents
and explores such a change of emphasis.
The book’s unifying thread is a sense of awe that creatures grown up out
of mud could come to know and interact with God. This sense of awe, along with an idea from the apostle Paul, inspired the
book title. The world, far from being a place that begins and ends with things, has a spiritual dimension. And we humans,
though made of matter, can live in that dimension.
Quotes from the New Testament are my own translations from
the Greek influenced by the New International version (NIV) and the Revised Standard version (RSV) of the Bible. My goal
most of the time in translating was not to produce good, readable English but to render the Greek as literally as possible
in tolerable English in order to present what the words actually said. Old Testament quotes are from NIV or RSV.
Are
the Vessels Worthy?
We hold this treasure in vessels of clay... (2 Corinthians 4:7).
People who love
God need a creed. Feelings about God for those close to him can change from day to day and even from hour to hour. A creed
encapsulates important ideas about God and provides a concrete, stable point of reference. Partly because creeds are confessed
by multitudes, they can anchor religious feelings as a hand holding the string anchors a kite.
The standard Christian
creeds such as the Nicene emerged many centuries ago, before the great revolutions in human thought brought on by scientific
discoveries. Despite their great age, and partly because of it, the old creeds have served well and still serve many well.
But for others they are incomplete. In view of what scientists have learned about the origins of the world and its mind-boggling
size, simply to say “God created” is not enough.
If God is all-powerful and yet an intelligent being we can know
as a person, why should he have chosen the slow agony of evolution as the mechanism for bringing us and other life forms into
existence? And now that we have an inkling of how vast the universe is, can we believe it will all vanish one day just because
the time will have arrived for a particular species on a planet of an inconsequential sun in some undistinguished part of
an insignificant galaxy? In other words, can we believe, as many Christians do, that God would destroy our universe and create
a new one just for humans?
Some of those Christians, of course, are oblivious to the discoveries of science, others
feel such discoveries are irrelevant, and still others have consciously rejected those discoveries. They can accept the gospel
of Jesus as it stands, and for them the old creeds work just fine. What I am writing is not for them.
My purpose
instead is to present ideas that can serve as end-points of creeds for those who love God, or think they might want to, but
who cannot ignore scientific discoveries and their implications. By “end-points” I mean ideas about the beginnings of the
world and the end of the world, and why God may be doing things in the way he is doing them. What we need, in other words,
is a new myth for informed Christians, where “myth” does not mean “fairy tale” but a story about origins and religious beliefs
that tells us who we are.
Anyone can invent a myth, but not everyone can convince us that his myth is compatible
with God. This book will attempt to make the case that the ideas presented are compatible not only with God and fundamentals
of Christianity but also with the findings of science. The thrust is on several fronts. Logic is prominent but insufficient.
Personal witness comes in when I recount some of my spiritual experiences. I appeal also to ancient Judeo-Christian traditions
and scriptures.
The theme is simple: God is involved in a process of expressing himself in matter. God, a spirit
from beyond time, is becoming incarnate, taking on a physical body. He is giving himself fully to his world, so fully that
in the end he will in some respects have become his world, and his world will have become God. He is risking all to become
flesh and blood, and in this process he takes on all the problems and frailties of human existence. In order to succeed he
must overcome them.
The implements through which God becomes incarnate are creatures of the world but especially
humans. Humans collectively and individually are the form of matter that can achieve intimacy with a spirit, intimacy with
God. They are the vessels into which God is pouring himself. Can the vessels hold God? Can he fulfill himself in them?
Are these vessels, brought into being over hundreds of millions of years, good enough? Are the vessels worthy?
The
answer to the questions for Christians is obviously yes. Christians believe that God came into the world, expressed himself
in a physical form as a man, Jesus of Nazareth. But this incarnation of God is not the ultimate incarnation. It lacks something.
It is incomplete. Jesus came, but he left. The world is better because of his coming, but it is hardly perfect. His followers
believe that one day God will pour himself into them perfectly and that they will thus share in the incarnation. But that
day has not arrived.
Meanwhile, although they share a superior hope, Christians participate in the same kinds of
struggle and turmoil that have engaged life forms from the beginning. So through Jesus the vessels have shown themselves
to be worthy, but for some reason God has not been able to pour himself fully into them. Jesus remains an isolated case,
one of a kind. Other humans are merely potential christs, christs in hope but not in fact.
Jesus
Who
is this Jesus of Nazareth, and why do we believe that, up to this time, he is the only full incarnation of God? Over the
years Christians have taken great liberties with Jesus. Everyone wants him to be someone they can be comfortable with, and
I am no exception. But some Christian teachers have made him into a person that almost anyone would find congenial.
The
New Testament gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—give a different impression. They portray him as one relentlessly obsessed
with his mission, one who was often abrupt and severe in manner. Ingratiating he never was. The gospels give no hint that
he ever relaxed and became one of the boys. There is no mention that he ever laughed or even smiled, although there is no
reason to think he did not. Nevertheless, the gospel portrayal is uniformly that of a very serious young man.
There
is not a single statement in the New Testament that unambiguously supports the idea that Jesus might have been a light-hearted,
jovial sort of person. There are many statements and stories that show him to have been focused on his mission practically
to the point of fanaticism.
Fanatics according to a common stereotype have one-dimensional, austere personalities.
They have a deep need for their beliefs to dominate, but instead they usually find themselves at the fringe of society and
powerless. Was Jesus like that? Politically he was at the fringe and powerless, but the gospels insist that he knew exactly
how to achieve his goals and was in control of his destiny.
Jesus had the kind of power that lasts. He knew it,
and the world has acknowledged it down through the ages. His personal power added depth and breadth to his personality of
a kind not normally associated with fanatics. His ability to attract admiring crowds confirms a measure of charisma. Nevertheless,
the gospel narratives offer nothing that would allow us to round out his personality.
What is abundantly clear is
Jesus’ belief in an afterlife, and not just eternal life but also eternal damnation. For Jesus hell was real, and many people,
he believed, would spend eternity in it. Judgment and a final reckoning were ever-present, vivid realities to him.
Neither
Jesus nor the Christianity his followers founded is nice. Nice people believe everyone belongs to one big family, and human
compassion and love can overcome evil. Jesus saw a great divide: Some people would be saved, some unavoidably lost. The
dividing line would slice through nuclear families as irrevocably as through larger communities.
Some claim to find
humor in the recorded words of Jesus. If it is there, I do not get it. When Jesus talked about taking the plank out of one’s
own eye to see clearly how to remove the wood chip from another’s eye, perhaps he intended to bring smiles by the grossness
of the exaggeration. But are we supposed to chuckle also when he advises earlier in the same discourse to cut off a hand
or put out an eye in order to avoid sinning? Jesus used plenty of exaggerations, but it takes work to find humor in them.
Exaggerations? A better word is extremes. Jesus commonly used extremes. The plank in the eye becomes understandable
only when we realize that Jesus was not talking about eyes at all. The plank symbolizes gross flaws obvious to everyone except
the one who owns them. Jesus truly believed, he knew, it would be better to enter life with one eye than to suffer God’s
rejection with two good eyes. It is just that the remedy of putting out one’s eye seems a rather extreme cure for lustful
looking.
Yet my own fasting, which I undertook in search of God and will describe later, was every bit as extreme
as cutting off a hand or putting out an eye, although the fasting caused no permanent damage. Jesus knew, as I did, that
it is worth going to extremes to reach some goals.
Emotionally Jesus was alone, an isolated man. He was always aware
that he was above other human beings and acted towards them on that basis. God, whom he called his father, was his only intimate
companion.
Even with his mother he was abrupt, even in his childhood. At age twelve he took the liberty of staying
behind in Jerusalem without telling his parents as they left for home. When they found him three days later, his response
was, “Why is it that you sought me? Didn’t you know that it is necessary for me to be in the things of my father?” “Father”
to Jesus at age twelve meant God, not Joseph.
Later, at a wedding in Cana near the start of his public ministry,
Jesus’ mother brought to his attention that the host had run out of wine. His response was identical in structure to the
cry of the demon-possessed (see Mark 5). Jesus said, “Woman, what to me and you?” The demon-possessed said, “What to me
and you, son of the highest God?” Translations are literal to indicate the abruptness apparent in the Greek idiom.
Still
later, Jesus’ family had become convinced that he had lost his mind, so they went to fetch him (Mark 3). When the crowd surrounding
him told him that his mother, brothers and sisters were outside the house looking for him, he downgraded the blood relationships
by saying, in effect, “It is not blood that makes someone my close relative, but a person’s eagerness to do God’s will. You
people here, who are doing God’s will by listening to me, are my real mother, brothers and sisters.”
Jesus was open
and receptive only to those who looked up to him. He was a sharp and incisive opponent of all who looked down on him, and
he allowed no one to approach him as an equal.
He was aware throughout his ministry that no one understood his message
in the way he intended it to be understood. It was partly for this reason that he often resorted to extremes, making statements
that he knew would severely challenge reasonable listeners. Many other times he spoke in parables that he knew his listeners
could not correctly interpret, and he even claimed that he did so deliberately to prevent their understanding. At times when
crowds eagerly and enthusiastically followed him, he knowingly said things that so outraged them that they left. The prime
example is in John 6, when Jesus told a previously admiring crowd that they had to eat his flesh and drink his blood in order
to be saved. Many left in disgust.
Jesus taught morality, but that was not his primary emphasis. His teaching focused
much more strongly on himself and his role in the world than on human virtue and brotherly love. His ministry dominantly
emphasized himself, God, and doing the will of God.
For one so focused on his own role, Jesus was nevertheless extraordinarily
people-oriented. At least part of his interest in and concern for people, however, came from the nature of his role. His
purpose as he understood it was to help people, to bring them to God. Hence it is not surprising that he gave himself so
completely to people of all kinds. This giving extended even to social settings, as he accepted dinner invitations from people
at both high and low social levels.
What might it have been like to have dinner with Jesus? For those on the lower
social rungs who respected and admired him, the affair probably was pleasant and illuminating. Wealthier, status-conscious
hosts had a rougher time of it. Jesus felt no obligation to make such hosts feel good about themselves. On the contrary,
he openly challenged their values and those of the other guests, and he ruthlessly exposed their hypocrisy (see Luke 12:37-53).
A model guest he was not. Hosts who got such treatment probably did not invite him a second time.
From criticisms
of the Pharisees it is apparent that Jesus ate more often with people at the low end of the social spectrum than at the high
end. Some called him “a glutton and a drunkard,” terms that seem out of character for one so focused on his mission. Nevertheless,
those at the low end no doubt readily acknowledged Jesus’ leadership, and in none of the gospel stories is there an indication
that he relaxed his focus.
Intent as he was on his mission, he was a man of deep and genuine compassion. He was
friendly to children, sympathetic towards all who suffered, whether physically, emotionally or spiritually. He devoted a
very large fraction of his ministry simply to alleviating human suffering as only he could.
Gospel writers occasionally
point out that the crowds were delighted with Jesus, and “everyone praised him”. Luke makes this comment in chapter 4, verse
15. But by verse 28 of the same chapter he tells us that Jesus’ comments had so infuriated the hometown crowd that they wanted
to kill him.
Jesus generated ambivalence intentionally: To people at a distance he appeared attractive, but once
they assumed they knew him and tried to get close to him on their own terms, whether to have a friendly debate or to make
him king, he often deliberately offended them. Once, when Jesus predicted that he would suffer and be killed, Peter, who
was one of his closest companions, tried to tell him that such evil would never happen to him. Whereupon Jesus told Peter
in all seriousness, “Get behind me, Satan.” For Jesus to be able so to distance himself from his closest companions once
more manifests his intensity of focus. In comparison to his mission, friendly social relationships with companions had low
priority.
At bottom Jesus was proving to people that they really did not know him. At bottom, except for his relationship
with God, he was as alone as any man ever has been.
There are other important facts to keep in mind about Jesus the
human being. Although at age twelve he showed a precocious ability to interact with adult teachers in the temple, he seems
to have given no other indication as a child or young adult that he was anything extraordinary until he fasted forty days
in the desert and began his public ministry. Spurious stories about childhood miracles sprang up after his death, but those
who were most familiar with him as a carpenter, with the possible exception of his mother, were the ones who were most surprised
at his abilities as teacher and miracle worker, and among the ones more likely to be offended at his claims about himself.
Finally, although Jesus is highly regarded by many as a religious teacher, to people of his time he was a religious
teacher who was also a layman. He was definitely not sanctioned by the religious authorities. In Jesus’ day as in ours there
were people whose status depended on their ability to convince others of their godliness. Jesus lay bare the selfishness
of their motives. They hated him for it, sought to kill him and in the end succeeded.
This is the man Jesus as the
gospels portray him, the one Christians believe to be the incarnation of God. Why should anyone believe such a one to be
the incarnation of God?
|
|
Why Believe in Jesus?
Many Christians believe in
Jesus primarily because they have little choice. Brought up in a Christian tradition but challenged by a very materialistic
world, they are not enthusiastic supporters of Jesus and they have their doubts, but they return always to Peter’s question:
When Jesus asked his disciples whether they would abandon him as others had done, Peter replied, “Lord, to whom shall we go?”
We need God, we need a hope of ultimate fulfillment, of eternal life, and Jesus offers such a hope. Yet faith that endures
primarily because there are no acceptable options is a small faith.
At an opposite pole are “born-again” Christians
who identify an emotional conversion as the starting point of their life with God. These Christians claim a faith in Jesus
that comes directly from God by way of a personal knowledge of him through his indwelling Spirit. For them in the initial,
emotional stages, the direct knowledge of God overwhelms any challenge to belief.
But doubts are there, even in the
initial stages. The born-again submerge the doubts by asserting aggressively the tenets of the Christian tradition into which
they were converted. Later, when emotions cool, as they will, they build more rational defenses. Nevertheless, even the
most fervent eventually wind up at times asking Peter’s question, “Lord, to whom shall we go?” It is for those times of questioning
and doubt that it is useful to outline reasons for believing in Jesus.
Which reasons are most important vary from
person to person. I’m not going to review the various reasons people have come up with, not least because I have no way of
discovering them all. In my life with God I have faced many intellectual challenges to faith and have met them successfully,
so I will present reasons that have emerged from these challenges. At the same time, as a scientist I acknowledge that none
of my reasons is airtight.
In the end, Christian faith lives not because there is airtight logic or irrefutable evidence
supporting it but because the Spirit of God supports it in living Christians. Intellectual reasons for believing are never
the substance at the center, but they can be useful aids at the periphery.
The first and most important reason I
believe in Jesus is one that only Christians can comprehend. So it has no value for persuading outsiders, except in that
it allows the Christian to convey a confidence that goes beyond logic.
The primary reason I believe in Jesus is that
the Spirit of God within tells me that the writings attributed to Jesus’ followers are trustworthy. How does this happen?
Do I hear a voice when I read that says, “Believe this!” or, “Believe that!”? Instead, it works like this: From previous
encounters I know what it is like to be close to God. When I read the witness to Jesus in the New Testament, the sense of
being close to God strengthens. Scientists might describe the phenomenon as a resonance: The motion of a system gets stronger
when the stimulating frequency is just right. So the feeling of closeness to God is strengthened when it is stimulated by
testimony to Jesus.
One problem is that this resonance is not narrow but broad. That is, lots of frequencies, not
just a few, can stimulate strong motion, and many different statements, not just one, can strengthen the feeling of closeness
to God. The breadth of the resonance most of the time is a virtue. It means that many different kinds of testimony to Jesus
can be helpful. But it is a problem when it comes to deciding exactly which parts of the testimony to Jesus are true in every
sense of the words used and which are true only in a limited sense. The feeling of closeness to God is strengthened not by
this or that particular statement but, most of the time, by the cumulative effect of many statements. The overall impression
is more important than any part.
It is this breadth of the resonance that makes parts of the Bible spiritually uplifting
for me even when I cannot accept those parts as factual. The creation story in the book of Genesis is the prime example.
My twenty-five years’ exposure to earth science as a geophysicist has eliminated any possibility that I could take the book’s
first several chapters as scientific fact; but when I read those chapters now, they still stimulate the resonance.
If
words that are false by scientific standards can enhance communion with God, how are we to know whether any part of the Bible,
including the gospels’ testimony to Jesus, is factual? How can we be sure that it is more than just a collection of spiritually
uplifting but largely fanciful stories? From a strictly scientific point of view, we cannot. Archaeology can establish that
some of the people and places mentioned in the Bible were real, but it cannot verify the events or the activities of these
people that we find spiritually uplifting as we read of them.
If none of the Bible is factual, then Christians’ hope
is vain and the salvation they look for will never come. More to the point, if I felt none of the Bible were factual, I would
not be wasting my time writing this stuff.
The reality is that a rational person can have a healthy level of confidence
in the factuality of much of the Bible. First of all, the parts of the Bible that conflict most irreconcilably with discoveries
of science are in those first chapters of Genesis. Events reported there were not recorded by eyewitnesses, and even those
who accept them as historical acknowledge that they were written down at some much later date. The testimony to Jesus reported
in the New Testament, in sharp contrast, was written by eyewitnesses or by people who could consult eyewitnesses.
Some
scholars argue that much of the New Testament was not written by people so close to Jesus. It is true that identities of
many New Testament authors are not known with certainty, because they wrote anonymously. It is also true that it is less
important who it was that wrote than that the writer was under God’s influence. Nevertheless, it would increase the Christian’s
confidence in the truthfulness of the New Testament to know that its authors were close to Jesus.
Such knowledge
is within reach for large parts of the New Testament. For example, no one doubts the apostle Paul’s access to eyewitnesses,
or that his letters of the New Testament were written within a few decades of Jesus’ crucifixion. In these letters appear
many teachings central to Christianity. For example, the man Jesus, a descendant of King David, was the Christ who died to
overcome the power of sin for all people. After dying on the cross he arose from the dead, lives today and ultimately will
appear again to raise the dead and gather all believers to himself.
Paul in his letters also considers miracle working
to be an expected part of the Christian ministry, so the idea of miracles cannot have been, as some would have us believe,
a much later fiction introduced just to support ideas of Jesus’ deity. These teachings of Paul’s letters carry the force
of that apostle’s considerable authority.
What about the New Testament gospels? Church tradition ascribes their
authorship to Jesus’ apostles and others who had access to eyewitnesses. Perhaps the clearest evidence of an early date for
a gospel is that for the gospel of Luke. The author of that gospel wrote also the Acts of the Apostles. In the Acts the
author from time to time switches his narration from third to first person. That is, he writes not that “they” did such and
such, but “we” did such and such. The use of the first person indicates that, unless the author was trying to mislead the
reader, he was on the scene. Hence the Acts establishes that the gospel of Luke was written by an associate of Paul at a
fairly early date. Because scholars generally agree that the gospel of Mark came before Luke, we can trust that Mark was
written at an even earlier date.
Skeptical biblical scholars such as Burton Mack have gone to extraordinary lengths
to cast doubt on the early dates of New Testament authorship. In his book, Who Wrote the New Testament?, Mack asserts that
the “’we’ passages in the Acts are limited to the journeys in which travel is by sea,” and that “the author was merely following
a normal convention for just such description….”
This would be an important point if true, but Mack’s statement is
not accurate. For example, the author of Acts uses the first person in chapter 21:15-18, which describes travel from Caesarea
to Jerusalem as well as activities within Jerusalem. It was of course not possible for Paul to sail to and within Jerusalem
from Caesarea, as Jerusalem is in a hilly region some distance from navigable bodies of water. Paul similarly could not have
sailed from Three Taverns in Italy to Rome (chapter 28). Furthermore, chapters 13, 14 and 18 describe sailing trips exclusively
in the third person, not the first person.
Most telling of all are descriptions in chapter 20 that indicate the missionary
party split up. Activities of some members of the party are described in the third person, while activities of others are
described in the first person. It is reasonable to conclude that the author was with those whose activities he describes
in the first person.
People who can believe that the New Testament represents an honest effort to present truth can
have confidence that at least most of its authors were eyewitnesses of Jesus or had access to them. People such as Mack who
seem to have a need to undermine the authority of Jesus and the Bible are left to pile speculation on speculation in their
effort to explain how it all could have happened in the absence of God’s intervention. The scholar’s edifice, built as it
is on a foundation of doubt and speculation, cannot come close to matching the power of God that flows out of an openhearted
reading of the New Testament itself.
Of major importance for people who want to evaluate religious myths objectively
is the level of the fanciful, the miraculous, the far-fetched. The human tendency to embellish events and religious teachers
of the past with far-fetched tales is certainly one reason for trying to establish an early time of writing for New Testament
literature. The closer the writers were to the actual events, one might argue, the less likely they would be to embellish
the stories with far-fetched tales. Christianity thus owes the apostle Paul a considerable debt just because his writings
are so unambiguously early. While his letters say little about details of Jesus’ life and words, they nevertheless contain
the core of Christian teaching.
Much that outsiders regard as fanciful appears in all religious myths. Near-East,
Greek, Roman and European religious myths have had much exposure in the West. Tales of the Buddha out of the Far East are
perhaps less familiar.
A biography of the Buddha did not appear until more than two centuries after his death. It
is unlikely that some of the more fanciful elements, such as those recorded in the Mahayana text Lalitavistara, would have
been incorporated had his biography been composed within the lifetimes of eyewitnesses by chroniclers who were striving to
be historically accurate. Among such elements: The Buddha planted himself in his mother’s womb as an elephant. At birth
he passed not through his mother’s birth canal but through her side, not as an elephant but as a human baby. Stone statues
of Hindu gods came to life and knelt in obeisance before the Buddha.
Christian scriptures have their own stories
that challenge credibility, but most of those are in the Old Testament. New Testament stories almost all occur in settings
where there were witnesses who could have objected to misrepresentation.
Even most of the Old Testament historical
writings provide internal evidence of a concern for factuality. For example, there are few untainted heroes. Almost all the
ancient leaders of Israel or Judah are described as having serious flaws. There was a strong sense of right and wrong, good
and bad, truth and falsehood.
This is not to say that every Old Testament story is accurate in every detail. Authors
from time to time may have taken unfounded legend as truth. A prime candidate would be Lot’s wife’s turning into a “pillar
of salt” in a part of the world where there were weathered salt formations. Standards for literary accuracy at those ancient
times of writing, after all, could not have been comparable to modern standards. Despite this, most of the Old Testament
writings speak with authority to me, and I trust that their authors strove for accuracy.
The apostle Paul was certainly
raised in that Old Testament tradition, as were Jesus’ intimate disciples. The letters to young churches of the New Testament
give obvious evidence of a concern for getting the doctrines right and express strong opposition to teachers who were introducing
distortions. While traditions of many religions seem to invite and encourage embellishments on history, Jewish and Christian
scriptures internally emphasize a concern for adherence to facts and right teaching.
The eyewitnesses who wrote the
New Testament were not objective in the scientific sense. Nevertheless, we can trust that those witnesses were as faithful
to the facts as they knew how to be. The primary reason is that they were speaking in the Spirit of God. All who are in
the Spirit know that the Spirit is the Spirit of truth. So whoever in the Spirit witnesses to Jesus will be as honest and
truthful as can be. Such persons nevertheless are still human, and human characteristics and failings still color their testimony.
Arguments that apostles stuck to the facts because influenced by the Spirit of God will not carry weight with people
who are not already committed Christians, partly because words and actions of many who claim to be committed Christians are
often unacceptable and offensive. But Christians work with a hierarchy of trust. Not all authorities have equal status.
For Protestants, the most trustworthy witnesses are those closest to Jesus. Then come the reformers, who permanently changed
Christianity several hundred years ago. Other witnesses are assigned lesser weights.
Catholics have also their saints
and popes. Many Protestants give no weight, or even a negative weight, to the testimony of certain Catholic saints or doctrines
of popes. Although my highest weights do not go to Catholic saints, I have benefited from the witness of several of them
and of the Catholic Church as a whole throughout its existence. The emphasis on Mary has certainly been offensive to me and
most Protestants, but no Christian denomination has been completely free of excesses and distortions. On balance the witness
of Christians has been pleasing to God, who is able to overlook evil in those who have committed their lives to him.
The
intellectual, spiritual and emotional chaos that characterized the first centuries of the Christian era led to a great many
efforts to reinterpret Christian teachings within the frameworks of other philosophies and religions. Such efforts included
the writing of much literature on themes that superficially sounded Christian but were spurious and were rejected by Christian
leaders. The Gnostic writings are notorious among them.
The intellectual ferment inevitably influenced some of those
who made copies of the New Testament writings, and there is evidence in a few cases that they modified words or inserted comments
to reflect their own points of view rather than those of the original author. One notorious example, although dating from
well after the first few centuries, is in a portion of the fourth chapter, verse 7, of John’s first letter, where a scribe
apparently inserted words to support the doctrine of the Trinity. In a few cases whole paragraphs were added to some manuscripts.
That said, the earliest available manuscripts agree remarkably on matters of substance. Scholars have compiled Greek
New Testaments that have variant readings from the major manuscripts of the second through the eleventh centuries. Apart
from major discrepancies mentioned above, very few of the alternate readings significantly affect meanings.
We conclude,
then, as Christians have for centuries, that the New Testament witness to Jesus is as honest and truthful about him as the
original authors were able to make it.
But suppose for the sake of argument the authors were deliberate liars. It
is possible for people to show outward signs of being in the Spirit of God while their true motive is personal gain. Many
then as now, in fact, did so, and they succeeded in deceiving many. We note, however, that deliberate deceivers rarely invent
or create patterns of godly living and speaking; they borrow. Once they become aware of practices that succeed, they mimic
them and twist them to their own advantage. Fraudulent faith healers or revivalists are examples in our day.
Jesus
with the help of the apostles and other followers founded Christianity. He was not twisting an already successful system
of beliefs and practices to his advantage. He had precedents but no real role model. And it is this Jesus as we see him
through the New Testament that the Spirit of God supports.
A more serious question is whether the authors of the
New Testament, while not deliberate liars, had been so moved by their experience of the power of God through Christ that they
exaggerated their witness to Jesus. Probably everyone who has spent a lot of time with Christians has heard at least one
enthusiastic person make outrageously exaggerated claims for Jesus. It seems unlikely that all authors of the New Testament
could resist every temptation to exaggerate.
Nevertheless there were strong forces working against flagrant exaggeration,
the principal one, again, being the Spirit of God. The New Testament writings were early enough that many Spirit-filled eyewitnesses
of Jesus were around to restrain the narratives. Furthermore, the tendency to exaggerate was probably far stronger, as it
seems to be also today, among those holding little responsibility than among those who were leaders and were aware of the
lasting impact their words could have. The human tendency to exaggerate is also much easier to suppress when writing than
when speaking.
•
The most compelling motives for believing in Jesus are all related to conscious, personal
knowledge of God. Yet many modern Christians openly acknowledge that they do not know God in that they cannot sense the presence
of God. Leaders in the early Christian church at least sometimes regarded such absence of conscious, personal knowledge as
a deficiency that they cured by praying and laying their hands on those who lacked the knowledge (see Acts 8:14-17; 19:1-7).
These days the Christians who claim to lack personal knowledge of God often come from Christian homes and have been raised
as Christians from infancy.
But if Christians cannot see God for themselves, and if their vision of God is not enhanced
when they read about Jesus in the New Testament, how can they be sure that the New Testament is truthful? They must rely
on others, such as parents, pastors or church leaders, whom they trust. For myself, that kind of dependence on other human
beings would have been intolerable. I went to extremes to know God adequately.
•
Thus far we have observed
that many people believe in Jesus because they feel they have no choice. They have grown up in Christian homes and have little
faith but cannot bring themselves to deny Jesus, because then they would have no hope. Others believe in Jesus because they
have had a personal encounter with God, an emotional experience of his presence that has made the message of Jesus come to
life for them.
The number of Christians who claim to have had a personal encounter with God is not small. Many have
confessed such an experience. I have heard many such confessions myself while engaged in discussions of Christian faith.
But those experiences themselves ultimately raise the most troubling questions of all for those who would like to believe
in Jesus in this era where all beliefs are open to challenge.
Human gullibility, the desire and ability to believe
the absurd, is as glaringly evident in modern times as it ever was. Supermarket tabloids attract buyers with headlines that
seemingly no rational person would believe. But would a rational person believe in Jesus? Christian beliefs have always
been largely absurd, even bizarre. So no one approaching those beliefs from human reason guided by scientific principles
could find them acceptable.
What if those Christians who claim to have had encounters with God are simply the more
gullible among us; and if they’d been in a different environment, they might as easily have had encounters with, say, aliens
from the Pleiades? What if such people are simply better at self-suggestion, so that even without consciously trying, they
can experience anything at all, as long as they believe it to be possible? Then the Christians with the clearest, most trustworthy
perceptions would be those who do not profess any personal knowledge of God. And those Christians, we have already seen,
depend entirely on others for their beliefs. If personal knowledge of God is never real but is simply another manifestation
of human gullibility, Christianity is a chimera.
There is little doubt that at least some claims of personal experience
of God arise out of self-suggestion. I believe emphatically that not all do. It was to a large degree my acknowledgment
and recognition of human gullibility that drove me to extremes in my search for God. I had to have personal evidence so clear
that I could not possibly believe that I had somehow generated internally my perception of God. Just how clear the evidence
must be for people, of course, depends on how critical they are of their own perceptions. It is the strength of my own encounters
with God that makes me believe that some and probably most Christian experiences of God are valid.
|
|
|
|
