The recent bombing attacks in Boston have once again raised the cry across the internet, rehearsing the perceived violence of Islam.  In several recent discussions, Christians have repeated the mantra that the Qur’an is filled with commands to commit violence against non-Muslims.  Islam, they say, is an inherently bloodthirsty faith.  Commonly cited as empirical fact are screeds such as this one:  “The Quran contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with nonbelievers for the sake of Islamic rule.”

It is important to note that these statements are made by people and on websites whose express purpose is to “expose” or “correct” the claim that Islam is a peaceful religion.  Frequently, such sites manifest considerable antipathy toward Islam and Muslims … for example the home page banner of the above-linked site describes Islam as “one really messed up religion.”  To put it kindly, the source of this purportedly-objective information is not remotely unbiased.

I propose an experiment for anyone interested:

1. Find an atheist. Not just an unbeliever, but someone who really hates Jesus.
2. Have that person start with the assumption that Christianity is a violent religion.
3. Now have him go through the Bible looking for proof of his preconception about our violence.  Be sure he doesn’t overlook the places where “a man after God’s own heart” (1 Samuel 13.14) celebrates the orphaning and widowing of his enemies’ families (Psalm 109:8-10). Be sure he lingers over the various causes of stoning people to death, and the genocides of the Pentateuch and Judges.
4. Check how many violent verses, from Genesis (or at least Exodus) to Revelation, your anti-theist finds.  Now convince him you worship a God of love and peace.

I hope you would object “but you have to understand the historical and literary context for those verses … progressive revelation, the nature of God revealed in Jesus Christ, old and new covenants, etc.  No one can fully understand those things who has not studied them in a perspective of submission to the God who inspired them.”  I agree.  This is a perfectly reasonable objection, whether you’re talking about the Bible or the Qur’an.  The fundamental truth is that it takes a person of faith to accurately interpret the texts of that faith.  If I want to know what the Bible means, I’ll ask a Christian, not a Muslim.  If I want to know what the Vedas mean, I’ll ask a Hindu.  If I want to know what the Qur’an means, I’ll ask a Muslim.

Furthermore, sola scriptura biblicist that I am, it is still true that to understand a faith or a “religion” (I really hate that word) requires more than merely dispassionate study of its texts (or even passionate study, for that matter).  Whatever one thinks of the thing called “Christianity,” one cannot really know it without interacting with a Christian–or many different Christians.  The community, the rituals, even some of the language, and yes–the sacred texts–are unintelligible without a knowledgeable insider to function as an interpreter.  If you don’t know any Christians, you don’t know Christianity.  If you don’t know any Muslims, you don’t know Islam (you may not, anyway, but I digress).

I am not suggesting there isn’t a whole lot of horrible violence committed by Muslims in the name of Islam.  There is.  One doesn’t have to be a Fox News devotee or a Limbaugh dittohead to see the headlines.  But when other Muslims I know and trust tell me that those violent, radical Muslims are abusing and even violating the Qur’an, I believe them.  Why do I believe them?  Because I have seen plenty of violent, radical Christians abusing and violating my own holy scriptures as a pretext to commit terrible acts … why should I expect it to be any different to other religions?  Satan corrupts everything.

We must oppose the bearing of false witness against our neighbors, and against those we style as our enemies.  But even that isn’t enough.  It grieves me deeply that when arguments such as the “109 violent verses” are used, they are usually in the context of opposing Muslims who are trying to make peace with us, or opposing Christians who are trying to make peace with Muslims.  This is not only tragic, it’s monumentally stupid.  If we have an ounce of self-preservation instinct at all, we should welcome anybody who extends an olive branch to anybody else.  To whatever extent any Muslim is a threat to me, it’s not the one who is preaching peace from the Qur’an who poses that threat.  We would also do well to remember that our Lord said “blessed are the peacemakers.”  He did not qualify that phrase with the adjective “Christian.”  Neither, I believe, should we.

I’m not Jewish, and this image is of a Jewish mezuzah, a container for a bit of scripture placed on the doorpost of a home.  But the mezuzah illustrates the concept of parents passing on their faith to their children (see Deut. 4:6-9), and is therefore relevant to this topic.

Not all my reasons for belief are evidence based.  I say this without shame and without apology.  I am at least in part a product of my own upbringing, both from the standpoint of what I was taught, and the societies in which I have passed much of my life.  So, I would suggest, are we all, and no less so if we reject our past, than if we accept it.  I would explain this in part by saying that there are a variety of forces that lead to one’s position on the Belief Matrix I’ve discussed before.  Differing bits of evidence may have vectors that impel one toward theism or atheism, or may affect the certainty level of the other axis on the matrix.  My own history pushes me in the direction of theism.

It does much more than that.  I grew up learning of Jesus in the context of a family that did not have tight denominational ties, but was strongly influenced by the Anabaptist movement, and the Mennonite Church and Church of the Brethren denominations.  While I do not fellowship with either group today, and while my positions are quite distinct from those of my parents in a number of ways, it is an incontrovertible reality that my basic Christian focus, my aversion to ecclesiastical authority, and my particular form of Sola Scriptura exegesis owe a great deal to my Mom and Dad (if you want proof of that, just spend a little time browsing my Mom’s blog).  I believe I’m my own man, but there’s no question I’m my parents’ son too (thanks Dad & Mom!).

There’s plenty of what I’ve come to believe that I did not learn from childhood.  Peruse the topical index on this blog and you’ll come across topics such as Open Theism, my questioning of the doctrine of the Trinity, or the nuances of my perspective on nonviolence, all of which came well after I left home, though I would argue they remain grounded in the same approach to biblical authority.  I’m a product of my upbringing, but I’m no clone.

Likewise, though I ground many positions (particularly ecclesiology and nonviolence) in the Anabaptist movement of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and though I have literal as well as figurative ancestry among the Anabaptists, I do not follow their lead without question.  I am no more in full agreement with every article of the Schleitheim Confession of the Anabaptists, than I am with the Nicene Creed to which I’ve previously objected.  I have taken the raw material I was served, including my parents’ faith and the teachings of my church(es), combined it with my own independent reading of the Bible, seasoned it with the thoughts of many others both published and not, and come up with a faith that is mine today.  This is a faith that is in some ways distinct from all my prior influences, but to deny their influence would be downright silly.

An important caution is in order, though.  I acknowledge the influence of my upbringing on my beliefs, but I know many who seem to believe that the way to be free of such influence is to reject whatever they were taught.  Nowhere have I seen this attitude in sharper relief than among those who, decrying the legalism or “narrow-mindedness” of their parents’ faith, profess atheism (or more honestly, anti-theism).  It takes but little reflection to realize that one who rejects his upbringing out of hand is influenced by that upbringing just as surely as one who accepts it.  “X” and ”Not X” are indistinguishable in one vital respect–both are equally and inextricably referential to “X.”  One can–and I believe ought to–attempt to step back and evaluate one’s heritage.  Such an exercise, if done honestly, likely will result in keeping some elements, refining others, and discarding still others.  But one cannot reasonably deny that one’s heritage has an influence.  Mine certainly has.

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One parenthetical note:  it is the reality of the influence my culture and upbringing has had on my own philosophy, that as much as anything informs my reluctance to accept the exclusivist claims many Christians (and maybe others) make about faith.  The vast majority of humanity see the world as they do, in large measure due to an accident of birth.  The world’s religions are geographically distributed, and while there is certainly overlap, it’s a reality that a person born in China is likely as not to be Buddhist; one born in India, Hindu; one in Latin America, Roman Catholic; and one in the Middle East or North Africa, Muslim.  I have written before that while I am not strictly universalist, I do not believe the Bible supports the common Christian claim that anyone who hasn’t appropriated Jesus’ salvation as they define it, is damned.  I rather lean toward the principle of “Available Light” (expounded at length by Moxey and Garrett, as well as the older Quaker concept of Inner Light) … that God evaluates each person’s response to that truth which has been revealed to him/her.

One of the greatest comedy movies of all time, I am convinced, is The Princess Bride.  And one of my many favorite lines, when Inigo has heard Vizzini describe one too many things as “inconceivable,” is “You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”  Well, that can certainly be said about apologetics, as I realized when a friend described his study of the subject a few days ago.  Since I’m in the middle of an apologetics series myself, and since I really don’t intend what many apologists do, it occurs to me that I ought to explain myself…to do an apologia of my apologia, as it were.

Take a look at any of several online etymologic dictionaries, and you’ll see that the term “apologetics” and the related word “apology” come originally from the Greek ἀπολογία (apologia), which was the term for the defense in a court of law.  It’s actually the term used in the New Testament when, for example, Paul made his defense before the crowd in Jerusalem (Acts 22:1), and by Festus when he’s describing Paul’s secular right of defense (Acts 25:16).  Perhaps more to the point of Christian apologetics, it’s the word used for the answer that Peter says we should be ready to give, when someone questions the reason for our hope (1 Pet. 3:15).  I find these uses interesting in that in each case, the defense is offered, not proactively, but rather in response to the questions or charges of another.  This alone may be a relevant object lesson.

There is, however, a different stream in Christian apologetics that we must acknowledge.  For want of a better term to characterize it, I’ll call it “pre-emptive apologetics,” or perhaps even better, “offensive apologetics” (and here I refer primarily to “offense” as the antonym of “defense,” not as the causing of emotional grief, though that is certainly a frequent secondary effect).   It’s what I see happening all over the Evangelical blogosphere, and it’s the attitude I often hear from some who style themselves apologists today.  There are many who seem convinced that sufficiently-compelling constructive arguments (often combined with the destruction of an opponent’s objections) will compel a person to adopt faith in Jesus, rather as CS Lewis testified was the case for him (“the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England,” he said of himself).

I’m actually dubious that pure conversion-by-argument is even possible, but whether it is or not, that is most emphatically not my purpose with this series.  Philosophically speaking, it seems to me rather counterproductive to attempt to win someone to grace by defeating them with reason.  Furthermore, confrontational apologetics maintains the focus on faith as propositional rather than practical … on winning a contest of belief rather than inviting the thirsty to drink.  I’ve maintained for years that credalism puts the focus on the wrong things; popular apologetics puts the focus on credalism.  Guess I’m at least consistent.

So what am I trying to accomplish?  Actually, I’m sorting through my own challenge to myself.  My life of faith, while (I hope) firm in conviction, has been essentially devoid of the experiential or the transcendent … the “relationship with God” so many Christians talk about.  As I’ve repeatedly expressed on this blog, I’m also deeply disturbed by the behavior of many who call themselves “Christians,” particularly when, as Gandhi observed, “your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”  I still struggle with why God seems to let such blatant misrepresentation of himself go unchecked, and often as nearly as I can tell, unanswered.  Yet I remain stubbornly chasing after some halting, imperfect attempt to follow Jesus.  I’m trying to explain why … to myself, and to anyone else who cares to listen.

I don’t know if what I’m writing will “convince” anyone else.  If it does, that’s God working in them, it’s for sure not the dazzling cogency of my thoughts and writing.  If I’m trying to convince anybody else of anything at all, it’s that it is possible to validate a lot of objections atheists and antitheists throw at the church (and I do think many of those objections are valid), and still come finally to a point of faith.  Well, and maybe one more thing … if I can convince a few Christians to let up, to show a little more grace and a little less self-assuredness, I’d consider that progress.

The heavens are telling the glory of God;
    and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
    and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
    their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
    and their words to the end of the world.  (Ps. 19:1-4)

Part of the reason I believe there must be a Creator is because I look around me.  I was raised in the home of an astronomer, so I’ve been enjoying the beauty and grandeur of the cosmos since childhood.  There is a sense that comes in observing in the beauty of the universe, that it got that way because somebody cared to make it that way.  From awe-inspiring views of nebulae and galaxies, the grand solitude of the mountains, the raw power of the ocean, to the incredible intricacies of life small to large, humanity has been inspired for millenia to conclude that all this was made for a reason.

This is not an argument for “Intelligent Design” and the people at “Answers in Genesis,” whose pseudo-science disgusts me to such a degree I refuse to link to it (Google it if you must).  There is, in my view, far too much solid evidence for the age and size of the universe, and for evolutionary processes in the development of life, to go down the various “Creationism” rabbit holes (for those who want to explore a thoughtful Christian approach to evolution, check out Biologos.org).   And since I don’t subscribe to a so-called “literalist” interpretation of the whole Bible, I have no particular reason to fear that science might challenge the basis of my faith.

But neither does my grounding in at least the basics of both cosmic and biological evolution challenge my conviction that there’s some sort of creator behind it all.  I think the so-called “Big Bang” theory does a pretty good job of describing much of what we observe on a cosmic scale–heck, I often joke that part of why guys like me enjoy explosions, fireworks, etc. is because we’re created in the image of a God who started it all off with the ultimate in fireworks.  Frankly, the idea that a singularity would cut loose with the necessary energy and matter to form the entire observable universe, almost demands someone or something to pre-exist that singularity and fire it off … and the notion that it would just appear out of nothing seems to me a much greater stretch than considering a creator.

Similarly with biological evolution.  That organisms change and adapt over time is obvious even on timeframes we can see, and nothing is stronger evidence for this than the frightening rate at which pathogens are developing resistance to most of the antibiotics we use to treat them.  I’ve only read excerpts, but Dr. Francis Collins book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief is a good place to look at how our DNA provides solid evidence for evolution.  Nevertheless, I believe the incremental nature of evolution–minute changes generation by generation, reinforced or eliminated by natural selection–is insufficient to explain at least two major thresholds in the development of life:

The first, of course, is life itself.  We can demonstrate that amino acids in a soup can organize into random patterns that might encode for proteins, but we’ve never observed any such soup make the leap from chemical organization to living organism, let alone living, reproducing organism.  That leap is not evolutionary, it’s revolutionary.  Igniting the fires of life required far more than lucky chance, a lucky mixture, and a lot of time.  I suggest those fires were deliberately set.

Second, assuming single-celled organisms that reproduce, their reproduction is by mitosis, or cell division.  It’s not a stretch to conceive that over time a colony of such reproducing organisms might begin to differentiate such that tissues with distinct functions begin to work together better as a multicellular organism instead of a blob all doing the same thing.  But it’s a leap of epic proportions to have organisms, whether single- or multi-celled, begin the process of sexual reproduction–a process that requires a variety of structures and systems all work together to facilitate the exchange of nuclear material between them, and the incorporation of that material into a third organism not entirely like either of the two parents.  So many systems need to be in place–systems that are completely useless until the reproductive process works as a complete unit–that again the development of this mechanism is revolutionary, not evolutionary.

So I see evolution as an obvious part of how life develops, but I still see a creator as the most probable explanation for the origin of that life, and the impeller of those revolutionary steps that life could not take on its own.  Still further down the developmental path, I rather suspect that sentience, self-awareness, and finally the desire to seek the divine (what C.S. Lewis referred to as “Homo divinus“) are all additional points of revolutionary change.  This perspective even harks back to Genesis (understood in a mythic form), when the writer tells us that God “breathed into [man's] nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Gen. 2:7).  The Septuagint provides an interesting understanding of those words, in that the “breath of life” is πνοὴν ζωῆς (pnoen zoes)–”pnoe” being the word also translated “spirit” (including Holy Spirit) or “wind,” and “zoes” referring to biological life; and then man became a “living soul” (KJV) which in the Septuagint is  ψυχὴν ζῶσαν (psuchen zosan) where the “soul” or “creature” is the word from which we get “psyche” or “psychology.”  In other words, God specifically gave the man life (God’s breath), but also gave him his psyche, which we might understand as cognition and self-awareness.

(It’s unfortunate that certain streams of Christianity have felt it necessary to set up their interpretation of Genesis in contradiction to observed biology, geology, and astronomy.  It was not ever thus, in fact Christian opposition to evolution comes much later than Darwin himself, and in fact one of Darwin’s most ardent contemporary supporters, Asa Gray, was a confessional Christian.)

There is one more point about the universe as we experience it that, to me at least, strongly leans toward the existence of not just a creator, but a benevolent one at that: beauty and our perception of it.  There is much I see around me that is just nonsensically lovely.  Whether it’s the many astronomic objects I’ve seen through my Dad’s telescopes (or the Hubble website, for that matter), the cardinal chowing down on our bird feeder just outside my window, or the gratuitous color display of thousands of sunsets, I find myself often struck by beauty that both in itself, and in my enjoyment of it, is completely unnecessary to our survival, reproduction, or any other evolutionary pressure.  There is evil and ugliness too, and I’ll get to those in a later post.  But they don’t, to me, diminish the reality that we experience beauty that doesn’t have to exist…beauty that is more, I suspect, than the result of happy chance.  I think it’s a gift.

I want to be perfectly clear:  none of what I’ve just described necessitates a Christian worldview.  As I said last month, “The heavens declare the glory of God…” says the Psalmist David (Psalm 19:1), but they don’t actually show us God’s name.  This is one of the points where the Intelligent Design folks get it badly wrong, in that they think once they’ve “proven” creation, their version of fundamentalist Christianity must follow.  In point of fact, people studying the heavens have come up with a pretty diverse set of creation myths and cosmologies down through the ages.  C.S. Lewis (I think…can’t find the quote at the moment) actually suggested that this very fact — that people see the divine in creation — is evidence for the existence of God.  I’m not sure I completely buy his conclusion, but it is nevertheless true that people who have been inspired by creation to envision a creator, have come to starkly different conclusions about that creator’s identity and character.  To find Christ (or not) requires different evidence altogether.  But on the schema of my Belief Matrix, I find the physical world to be strongly suggestive (note I did not say “conclusive”) of a creator, so this evidence, to me, tends heavily toward the Theism side of the curve.

This is a review, but mostly a recommendation, of Carl Medearis’ book Speaking of Jesus – The Art of Not-Evangelism.  I’ll get to the review in a minute, but I’ll start by saying up front:  seriously, this is a book you should buy and read.  If you’re a Christian who’s interested in evangelism, you should read it.  If you’re sick to death of Christians trying to evangelize you, you should read it too.  And if you think there’s something sort of cool about Jesus and can’t figure out why those Christians yammer on about Jesus but seem so not like him, you REALLY should read it!

This book is not new … Carl published it in 2011 and somehow I only learned about it a couple weeks ago.  But I’ve been in dialog with Carl over Facebook for a year or two, mostly around the topic that it’s possible to be unapologetically a fan of Jesus and still have Muslim friends, and even talk with those Muslim friends about Jesus.  He does this through the crazy notion that if you actually love people and treat them as friends instead of, say, part of the “enemy” or the opposing team, they often reciprocate.  He also has this weird idea that if Jesus really is as powerful and important as we say he is, maybe meeting Jesus is more important than thinking the right stuff about Jesus.  So Carl lays out the case for realizing that introducing people to the person, character, and way of Jesus is something entirely different from trying to “win” them to a religion.  As he says in the book:

I don’t want to redefine salvation.  I don’t want to redefine the gospel or even Christianity on the whole.  I suppose I want to undefine them.  I want to strip away the thousands of years of graffiti painted onto the gospel, turning it into a reasonable code of doctrines.  The gospel is not an idea.  It is not a belief.  It is not a favorite verse.  The gospel does not live in your church, it cannot be written down in a simple message, and it is not the sinner’s prayer.  The gospel is not a what.  It is not a how.  The gospel is a Who.  The gospel is literally the good news of Jesus.  Jesus is the gospel.

(emphasis in original)

People who’ve read my blog for any time know that one of my recurring frustrations is when people are driven away from considering the claims of Jesus, not because of who Jesus is, but because of the jerks we Christians can be (see this post if you want a refresher).  Under the guise of the “offense of the gospel,” Christians can be a downright offensive bunch at times.  As Carl put it, “We often blame Jesus when our evangelistic efforts fail … I don’t think it’s Jesus they aren’t liking.  It might be you.”

This book is a great thought-provoker.  One more quote to whet your appetite:

Maybe you’ll read this and think that I’m trying to make salvation easier or make a way for all the gays and liberals and Muslims and Buddhists to get in without going through all the “proper channels.”

Maybe yes and maybe no.  I’m not trying to change what salvation is because salvation is not my responsibility.  God didn’t put Carl Medearis in charge of deciding who stays and who goes.  That’s Jesus’ job, and He can keep it.

My job, no–my joy comes from sharing the good news of Jesus with people.  I point to Him, and He does all the heavy thinking.  I don’t have to convince anybody of anything.

I let Jesus run His kingdom.

Pretty good advice, if you ask me.  Go get this book and read the rest!

I made a statement at the end of a previous post on this subject, that needs a little explanation.  I said “I believe, and will attempt to show in future posts, that a preponderance of the evidence supports the existence of God, and that further evidence pushes me to the Christian interpretation of what that God does and wants.”   Tucked into this sentence is a point I need to clarify, which will seem self-evident to some readers and completely novel (even offensive) to others.  It is this:  The truth of Jesus does not necessarily follow from acceptance of Theism.

There is a common error among many Evangelical Christians (and some others) I have known, that the opposite of Christianity is atheism, and conversely the opposite of atheism is Christianity, as though faith is a merely a single, bivalued choice.  The claim is silly on the face of it, and it results in such ridiculous claims as calling Muslims or Hindus as atheists simply because they don’t believe in “the God of Christianity.”  We Christians aren’t the only ones to make such dumb assertions; I’ve run across some statements by radical Muslims that were pretty parallel, and I’ve also encountered some atheists who seem to think that if one card is plucked from the Christian stack the whole house must tumble (a point, amusingly, that they share with the “Answers in Genesis” types).

I suggest rather that the question of the existence (or not) of God is an independent one from the choice of Christianity as a faith practice.  As a different choice, it needs to be resolved on different evidence.  There certainly can be overlap…as CS Lewis and Josh McDowell (among others) have pointed out, there are claims in Christianity that would be necessarily false if in fact there is no God at all.  But the converse–that if there is a god then Christianity is necessarily true–is nonsensical.  “The heavens declare the glory of God…” says the Psalmist David (Psalm 19:1), but they don’t actually show us God’s name.  Societies throughout time, in fact, have looked at the heavens and concluded they must be created by someone(s) worthy of glory, but they have come up with wildly different notions about who that someone might be.  This is why I was careful in my Belief Matrix post, to discuss the spectrum between Thesim and Atheism, and not to bring the many variants of Theist belief into the question.

I acknowledge that plenty of people have come to their conclusions about God through a specific encounter with Christianity (or, as some would characterize it, with Jesus himself).  If one is attracted to Jesus and takes all of Jesus’ claims seriously, theism certainly comes with the package.  I certainly know of many who were attracted first to the life and behavior of one or more followers of Jesus, and came to their perspective on the divine through learning from those people whose lives they admired.  I rather suspect the same may be true of some Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and others as well.  I do not mean to suggest that the systematic way that I’m approaching this subject is in fact a path for anyone to convert (remember I said at the outset that this series is an attempt to explain where I am, not to convince anybody else).  It is, however, important to recognize that underneath a claim of faith there can be a number of things that are being represented as true:  things which, while they may cohere into a system of sorts, do not necessarily follow from each other in an inseparable chain.

As I alluded in my Epistemology post, I don’t think that there’s a clear line of reasoning that I can lay out, starting with one or two assumptions, adding a bunch of facts and observations, inferring some logical points and coming to a conclusion of faith in Jesus Christ.  For me it’s a series of disparate elements coming from orthogonal directions which, taken together, nudge me in a certain direction.  But I still think there is value in separately examining the evidence for and against Theism, and the evidence for and against Jesus specifically, if for no other reason than that people have been all too careless in lumping them together.  This is what I will turn to in the next few posts.

There is one final issue I should highlight here though.  I’ve had a couple off-blog conversations with people who’ve suggested that by highlighting what I do or don’t “believe” in this series, I’m missing the point.  They are partly right, as anyone who’s read my work over time will know, I’ve made the case before myself.  Discipleship–that is, living like Jesus in community with others who want to live like Jesus–is far more important than correct doctrine.  In this series, I suppose I’m partly allowing myself to be drawn into the “doctrine” question even though I really do consider it to be of secondary importance to the lordship of Jesus and what that means (ought to mean?) for our lives.  Nevertheless, to those who say to me that none of this matters if you just (1) meet Jesus, or (2) look at Jesus’ disciples, I have to respond that first of all, I haven’t “met” Jesus in the way the (1) folks are talking…I’d like to, but I haven’t (this post may be helpful here).  Secondly, if I had to rely only on what I have been able to “come and see” of those who claim his name, I don’t think I’d be a Jesus follower at all.  What I have seen, far too frequently, is either antithetical, or at best tangential, to the claims of Jesus himself.  Consequently, I need a different evidentiary path to explain why I haven’t just chucked it all by now (which I haven’t).  It is that path–my own weird, convoluted path–that this series is exploring.

In response to my previous post on the rules of evidence for my apologetics, a friend of mine who is himself a seeker of truth pointed out to me that I probably mischaracterized agnosticism as a simple midpoint between theism and atheism.  As he quite correctly pointed out, one can be an agnostic while leaning toward either atheism or theism, and that even agnosticism has at least two important variants:  those who believe one cannot know the truth about the existence or not of a divine being, and those who believe that we simply have insufficient evidence to know.  He was right on both counts.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the relationship between strength of belief and theism/atheism could be visualized as independent variables in a bivariate function, and that doing so might shed some light on my own perspective.  So I invite you to consider the following graphic to which I have given the working title “The Belief Matrix,” though that title may not survive further discussion:

As you can see, in the above graphic I have represented the spectrum of Atheism to Theism along the X axis, with the degree of certainty of one’s belief as a scale from zero to 100% along the Y axis.  I suggest that most people’s stance with regard to the existence or nonexistence of a divine being (any divine being, not necessarily tied to a particular religion) ranges somewhere along that parabolic function I have graphed.  True agnostics, as my friend pointed out, exist in that fairly small middle range with zero or near-zero certainty of their belief, though they may lean slightly toward atheism or theism.  As the strength of evidence (evaluated by whatever criteria the believer considers compelling) increases, the individual’s certainty regarding the existence or not of a God increases.  It is important to acknowledge that the strength of belief varies rather similarly among both atheist-leaning and theist-leaning individuals.

A very important part of my perspective, however, is my conviction that evidence alone can only take one just so far toward either end of the Theism scale.  That’s the meaning of the red (but fuzzy by design) “Evidence Horizon” I’ve placed partway up the certainty scale.  One can argue about just how high up the scale the Evidence Horizon should be placed, which is beside the point.  The purpose of this element in the graph is to show that there exists a level of certainty–again, on both Theist and Atheist sides of the midpoint–that can only be attained by a decision informed by factors other than strict evidence and reason.  Atheist or Theist, we call those factors “faith.”  As I have said in discussions before, the Muslim Shahada “There is no God but Allah” (or its equivalent in the Jewish Shema) is a statement of faith.  Drop the words “but Allah” from the end, and the remainder is still a statement of faith.

Even having crossed the Evidence Horizon, there remains a significant range of certainty among believers.  Doubt is still very much a possibility, perhaps a strong one, among people who’ve decided in faith to throw their hat into either the Theist and Atheist ring.  Although it is not a linear relationship, I would say the inclination of the individual to proselytize–that is, to attempt to win others to camps that occupy the same region on the curve–increases proportionally with the level of certainty.  It is only at the extreme ends of our curve, in the range I have labeled “Fundamentalism,” where uncertainty disappears.  It is at these extremes–again, extremes I have observed among Theists of various religions and also among Atheists–where people are not only certain of their own belief, they are upset or even angry that anyone else might find themselves anywhere else on the curve.  I have further observed that fundamentalists on both ends of the Theism scale, tend to claim that the Evidence Horizon is actually closer to the top on their end, and slopes toward zero at the opposite end of the scale. I disagree with both.

So where do I land on this curve?  I’ll get to that later.  Where do you land?  And does the function ring true to you?

In Scot McKnight book The King Jesus Gospel, which I reviewed a little while ago, Scot issued an interesting challenge: “I have always encountered people who boldly announce to me that they are ‘noncredal’ and even say ‘I don’t believe in the creeds’ because of their next words: ‘I believe in the Bible.’ I respond with one question, and I think I ask this question because I too was at one time one of their number: ‘What line or lines in the Nicene Creed do you not believe?’”  He states later in the same paragraph that “there’s nothing there not to believe.”

With the deepest respect to Scot, this post is my response to his question.  In point of fact, I have what I think are several reasonable objections to the Nicene Creed, which I’m going to lay out below.  First of all, here’s the text I’m using.  There are several variants, and I had to pick one, so I went with the version I found at www.reformed.org/documents/nicene.html:

The Nicene Creed

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.

Who, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.

And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life; who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets.

And I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

I’m not going to do a complete line-by-line commentary of the Nicene Creed because it’d get real boring real fast.  I will stipulate, in answer to the objections that I’m sure some will raise, that there is a historical context in which the various clauses of the Nicene Creed (and others) may be more fully understood.  But part of the error in insisting upon the creeds, in my view, is precisely that the creeds are taught in most churches as a thing to be believed and assented to, entirely devoid of their historical context.  In fact, if we looked more frequently at the controversies that were being considered, which influenced various clauses in the creed, I rather suspect more of us might come to the conclusion I have, that some of those old arguments don’t compel us as they compelled the Fathers who fought over them in the third, fourth and fifth centuries.

At any rate, the following paragraphs address my major thoughts or objections.

I believe …

Strange as it may seem, my first objection comes with the very first two words, “I believe.”  I’ve mentioned before that I see the Shema of the Old Testament, quoted by Jesus in Mark 12:29-31 among other places, as one of the best examples of a creed actually in the Bible.  The Shema starts off with a simple declarative statement “The LORD our God, the LORD is one.”  The focus is not the fact that we believe something, it is the reality that there is a God and He is one.  God is God, and God is there, and God is one, regardless of what you, I, or anybody else thinks or believes.  The shift from “there is a God” to “I believe in a God” may seem subtle to some, but to me it implies that the individual’s assent is the important thing.

Furthermore, the Shema goes from declaring that there is one God, to commanding that this God is to be loved as Lord.  The creeds, on the other hand, focus merely on “right thoughts,” that is, giving intellectual assent to the existence and character of God.  This is part of the shift from discipleship to religion against which I’ve argued repeatedly on this blog.

… the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds… (referring to Jesus)

This is not a section I actually take issue with, though I do take issue with the proposition that it matters.  What I mean by this is that this clause, along with the “begotten, not made” clause later, address the issue of Jesus’ pre-creation existence.  While I do see texts in scripture that suggest Jesus did in fact pre-exist creation (not least the first chapter of John, and John 8:58), I don’t know that a dogma of Jesus’ origin, and the timetable of his existence, is something we actually need to care about.  Sure, the biblical evidence suggests these clauses are true (I think).  But I fail to see what difference it makes.  I certainly don’t countenance the Constantinople Council’s anathematization of anyone who disagreed.

… God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God … (referring to Jesus)

I rather suspect that only a tiny fraction of everyone who recites this phrase has any clue what it even means.  I’m not sure I do.  I presume it’s referring in some way to Jesus’ divinity, and the commentaries on it that I find through a quick Google suggest the same, though interestingly I find an alternative translation “God from God, Light from Light” etc., which may even be compatible with the divine-yet-subordinate position that I have previously suggested is a more accurate characterization of what Jesus said about himself–that is, that he comes from, and is therefore distinct from, the Father.  So my objection to this phrase depends on how the speaker interprets it:  if as a classic Trinitarian construction that places Jesus as fully divine and equal to the Father, I object to the content; if rather it’s just something the speaker doesn’t comprehend, I then object to reciting as credal, words that have no meaning to the speaker.

I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life …

It’s in Pneumatology that I really start to take serious issue with the Nicene Creed.  This is one place where this creed goes far beyond its antecedent Apostles’ Creed, which merely stated “I believe in the Holy Spirit,” full-stop, with no qualification or theorizing.  Whatever the Holy Spirit is or is not (and on this I have previously written), I can think of no place in the Scriptures where the Holy Spirit is referred to as Lord, and “Giver of Life” is mis-attributed altogether.  The two texts to which I would point for this latter would be Genesis 2:7 and its beautiful New Testament mirror in John 20:22.  In Genesis it is God the Father who breathes the breath of life into man (“breath” and “spirit” are synonyms in Greek and, I’m told, in Hebrew too), and in John it is Jesus who breathes the Holy Spirit onto the disciples, initiating or symbolizing their new life in the new Kingdom.  The Spirit is, if anything, the life that is given, not its giver.

… who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified … (referring to the Holy Spirit)

I can find no place in the Scripture that admonishes or commands anyone to worship the Holy Spirit, nor states that the Spirit is glorified.  Nor can I think of any reference to people doing so.  The Breath of God is, as I wrote before, the tangible and very active presence of God working and speaking in the world, but it is never an object of worship.

There is more, I am sure, to be said, and this post is more of an opening for dialog than anything definitive.  Nevertheless each of the above objections is, I believe, a reasonable point to challenge the Nicea crowd for going beyond what is written in some rather substantial ways.

There remain areas where, while I say it differently, I do believe things that are substantially similar to the statements of the great creeds.  I illustrated as much in my post What IS a Christian, Anyway? I’m not saying the creeds are all wrong, but I do hold that emphasizing them is most assuredly wrong.  As Tom Wright stated in a recent lecture at Calvin College, “It is possible to check the credal boxes, and miss the larger reality to which they are the signposts.”  More than that, I would say without reservation that the Nicene Creed includes several boxes that ought not to be checked at all.

Tom (N.T.) Wright recently gave a lecture at Calvin College that I appreciated very much.  In it, he drew attention to an important issue I’ve written about here before: the over-simplification of faithfulness to Christ that takes place when creeds and statements of faith occupy a central position.  I know my own position is more extreme than Wright’s…he suggests putting the creeds in their rightful place while I suggest that the creeds themselves are part of the problem.  In context he still “loves” the creeds, while I accept the Apostle’s Creed as true though incomplete, and consider the Nicene Creed to be partially in error (a topic I intend to address in detail soon).  Nevertheless, I found Tom’s lecture to be refreshing in the extreme and I heartily commend it to you all.  You can read a bit of the background here.  The full audio of the one-hour lecture is also downloadable and though I usually don’t post podcasts, this is well worth a listen.

To whet your appetite, I transcribed one of the most salient (to me) passages which occurs between 8:20 and 10:34 in the audio:

The creeds were drafted in order to highlight points on which the church resolved major difficulties. But when the creeds began to be used as a teaching syllabus (as they often are to this day), then the problem begins, because of course the creeds jump straight from Jesus’ birth to his death … and I have a mental image at that point, of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John standing there saying ‘Excuse me, we spent a lot of time and effort telling you about all that stuff in between, and you just skip over it?  What’s that about?’

Now, I have nothing against the great creeds.  I love them, and I say them or sing them ex animo.  But they have accidentally encouraged—or the way they have been used has accidentally encouraged—a reading of the New Testament in which the main body of the four Gospels is not theologically load-bearing.  For many Christians, it would have been quite sufficient if Jesus of Nazareth had been born of a virgin, died on a cross, and never done anything in between except, perhaps, lived a sinless life.

The four Gospels then, function for many as the dispensible back story for the Gospel as preached by Paul … this is the de facto position of many Protestants and many Evangelicals—many conservative Evangelicals—the irony being, of course, that it’s the exact same position as that of Rudolph Bultman, with the only difference being that Bultman thought most of the stories were pious fictions.  But the reason why most Evangelicals would differ is not that the stories are doing anything theologically, in themselves, but simply to shore up a view of the inspiration of Scripture.  Not for the only time, swaths of Evangelicals are more anxious to protect a theory of Scripture, than to hear what Scripture actually says.

And toward the end, one more excellent quote (55:40 in the audio):

We have substituted the static belief in Jesus’ divinity for the active belief in what the Incarnate Son was actually doing.  It is possible to check the credal boxes, and miss the larger reality to which they are the signposts.

There’s much more to hear.  Take your time and give it a listen!

I had a friend ask me today what my definition of a Christian is.  I resisted the question to some degree, as I remain extremely troubled by the obsession many have, with drawing lines to delineate who is “in” and “out” of fellowship, orthodoxy, or whatever.  I am not taking anything back that I said in my Word About Creeds.  Nevertheless, if I claim to want people to submit to the lordship of Jesus Christ, it follows that I must have some idea about what this concept means…at least as I use the terms.

I hope I’ve made it obvious in my writing that while I believe the Christian church–particularly the church in the United States where I live–has severely messed up its witness and faithfulness to Jesus, I am not saying therefore that the people I criticize are (necessarily) not Christians.  It will give some Christians grief to see me quote the Quran at this point, but it’s eloquent when it says:

Unto God ye will all return, and He will then inform you of that wherein ye differ. (Al-Ma’idah, 5:48)

In other words, I presume that *all* Christians (and others, for that matter) get some things right, some wrong, and that our merciful Father will sort it out some day if, in fact, the sorting matters to him.

I am also not saying that all those who meet the criteria I give below are going to heaven, and all who aren’t are going to hell.  The issue of salvation is an entirely separate question–and in fact the wrong question to be asking at this juncture.

But with these caveats, I offer the following four criteria that I believe sufficiently define one who follows Jesus:

1. Jesus’ Divinity.  The New Testament is quite clear that Jesus represented himself as divine, and any follower of Jesus must acknowledge him as such.  This is not the same thing as endorsing classical Trinitarianism…as I have previously written, I personally believe that the “co-equal person” argument in the doctrine of the Trinity fails to wrestle adequately with those scriptures in which Jesus clearly delineated himself as other than, and subordinate to the Father.  I use the term “wrestle” quite deliberately, as I believe there’s a tension in the scriptural characterization of Jesus that can’t be fully resolved.  The Trinity is one limited, inadequate attempt to resolve it; my own characterization of Jesus as divine but submissive to the Father is another.  Either is a genuine attempt to be faithful to the way Jesus characterized himself, and either, I suggest, fulfills this first criterion.
2. Jesus’ Humanity. Just as the scripture is plain about Jesus’ divinity, it is categorical that from the incarnation on, Jesus became honest-to-goodness human flesh.  He ate, he bled, he suffered, he partied.  The Gnostic denial of Jesus’ flesh is outside the pale.  The follower of Jesus recognizes his true humanity.  (note in this and #1, I’m avoiding the classic phrase “Fully God & Fully Man.”  I think that phrase is actually nonsensical and does nothing to advance either understanding or orthodoxy).
3. Jesus’ Death and Resurrection.  The incarnate, fleshly Jesus really, truly died and was really, truly raised to life by the Father.  The many theological implications of this fact are the subject of some dispute, and I certainly have an opinion on them.  But there are genuine Christians who have very different opinions than I on what Jesus’ death and resurrection accomplished.  They are still Christians, and so am I.
4. Jesus’ Lordship. This is the point at which the I most clearly depart from the idea that a “credo,” a list of “what I believe,” is of utmost importance.  If one “believes” that Jesus is Lord, that “belief” can only be expressed in submission, obedience, and discipleship.  The fact that Jesus is Lord means that all the other things and beings that pretend to the throne are NOT lord.  Nations, individuals, belief systems, political philosophies & parties, all are subordinated to the call and command of Jesus, or else he isn’t Lord, and no amount of “believing” otherwise can change that.

I hope you noticed that all four of these criteria start with the name of Jesus.  That’s no accident.  It is the name of Jesus, and his position in your life, that makes you a Christian, or not.  And frankly, those who are, and those who aren’t, are to be found in some unexpected places.