Wanting to be Christian, Struggling to Commit

Faith & Science Conversation
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Hi Sean. I have been meaning to respond to this thread for a while. I have been swamped at school as one of my colleagues was injured and I was thrown a prep outside my wheelhouse.

So I have ten million thoughts going in a lot of different ways but ultimately I have had a salvific experience while reading the words of Jesus and the NT authors. The Grace of God is like the sun to me in a sense. To steal a CS Lewis quote. I believe in it not because I see it but by its light I see everything else. That is kind of the guiding principle of my life. Nothing makes sense without it. It is my default. Virtually an axiom of my worldview at this point. Biblical criticism is a tough issue because unlike many Christians, I am quite well versed in critical scholarship and a lot of it is quite strong and jarring to faith. To make a few points I strongly believe (these are proverbial hills I would intellectually die on):

[1] I think the God of classical theism is demonstrably provable and that includes the divine attributes. There is no denying the metaphysical arguments. This of course does not in and of itself, substantiate Christianity. But the elements of Christianity that overlap with classical theism are shown to be correct or cohere with reality on this basis.

[2] Jesus claimed to be God. The liar, lunatic or Lord trilemma still stands to a degree. It’s not a proof to me but we all have to answer the question of “Who do you say that I am?” This man whose beliefs and teachings essentially became the backbone of Western civilization.This is where I would cast significant doubt on a lot of modern historical Jesus research. The Jesus of the gospels and the early Church unequivocally claimed to be God. We can call him a liar, crazy or Lord and love him more than our own parents and even our children (more modern). Sane people don’t call themselves God and the only way around this in my mind is if the shoe fits.

[3] I think it is demonstrable the earliest Church believed Jesus rose from the dead and worshipped him as creator (Jewish monotheists extremely early). Historically, this is because of what Jesus himself said, did and why he was crucified (blasphemy).

[4] They had no reason to worship a crucified man from Nazareth unless they were absolutely convinced something remarkable happened. Furthermore, merely thinking Jesus rose from the dead does not justify the high Christology of the early Church in and of itself either. There is no reason to call a resurrected person Lord and Creator unless that extends from the mission and message of the person Himself.

[5] I think enough of the Gospels are accurate to give us a reliable portrait of the types of things Jesus said and did and what he generally believed. I am still quite critical but critical scholarship and the late anonymous dating of the gospels is not nearly as strong as some popularizers on the internet claim. It is quite conceivable, though not necessary, Luke-Acts was written before Paul died and this means per the synoptic problem Mark goes much earlier. I’ve seen two atheists (serious NT scholars) date Mark to ca 40 CE (Casey and Crossley).

[6] I also think that we use errant sources all the time without issue. What matters is the purpose of the Bible and the nature and extent of those errors. As. I wrote elsewhere: My own view is that the purpose of the Bible is not to teach us accurate facts about history or science, but to train us in righteousness, equip us to do good works and most importantly, lead us to salvation through Christ (2 Tim 3:14-17). I do not deny that Christianity is a historic faith. Certain events described in our sacred scripture certainly happened otherwise Christianity would not be true. Paul says as much plainly about the Resurrection of Jesus (1 Cor 15:14) and I hold this as true for other pivotal moments throughout salvation history. But the Bible is in the business of transforming hearts and saving lost souls. I believe it succeeds in this regard, and it has held up well enough for any modern person to say, “Hmm, maybe I should check this work out and see what it is all about.” For us Christians, the Bible serves as a window God. It may have smudges and cracks, but it still allows us to see through it and glimpse the character and nature of God, especially as revealed in Jesus. The Bible is absolutely normative for Christians and reliable for its intended purposes even if it has errors.

[7] I think as Christians we have to compartmentalize faith and historical readings.
Historical readings are naturalistic by default and they cannot reconstruct the fuller sense of scripture as they are not allowed to invoke a divine hand in their explanations. We cannot read the Bible in faith, as Jesus did, as the NT authors did, as 1st century Jews did through a purelyhistorical lens. History is often our best guess–based on naturalistic assumptions-- of what happened in the past. it is not to be confused with: “this happened in the past” for our acred scripture even though it is sometimes quite good. As I wrote here: "Interpretations of scripture gleaned through intertextual relationship go well beyond what the historical-critical method would comfortably say about these individual works taken in isolation. S.t Augustine famously said (Novum in Vetere latet, Vetus in Novo patet), “the New Testament is concealed in the Old, and the Old is revealed in the New.” Vatican II expressed similar thoughts:

“God… wisely arranged that the New Testament be hidden in the Old and the Old be made manifest in the New… The books of the Old Testament… acquire and show forth their full meaning in the New Testament. (Dei Verbum 16)

See that link for a full discussion of the sensus plenior of scripture.

[8] With all that said, including my personal experience and the idea of "my sheep hear my voice, I know them, and they follow me,"I choose to follow Christ and remain an Orthodox Christian and that means accepting the creeds and magisterial teachings of the Church. I do not need to prove all the Creeds or Church teachings absolutely true in order to adopt this posture. I will defend them but I am simply aligning myself with the earliest Church and disciples that I believe Jesus commissioned. There is continuity here going all the way back. I think there is solid evidence for my beliefs and I think Orthodox Christianity is correct. I don’t believe in things I feel can can be disproven. If they could I would have to drop them.

Vinnie

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This post is really perfect. Everything about it.

Especially this

Exactly.

Very true. I think historical criticism is useful insofar as it shows that it cannot, in fact, dismantle the historical claims of Christianity, such as the Resurrection, the fact that the early Church already worshipped Jesus as God and Creator, and the fact that present magisterial teachings can be traced back to the early Church, even if not in exactly the same form or with the same degree of definition, and at the same time without substantial contradiction.

But historical criticism cannot become the lens through which a Christian reads Scripture, for Scripture was written by the Church for the Church, and for communities that had already been evangelized.

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Hi Sean. With your permission I am responding to your message to me here:

Vinnie: I have had a salvific experience while reading the words of Jesus and the NT authors.

Sean: How does one identify a salvific experience? I can’t really pinpoint a moment. What was yours, if you’re okay with sharing?

My most dramatic experience was in my late teenage years. When I basically felt forgiven, saved, loved by God. My entire life was transformed. The song about being lost but not found hits very hard. This was in the context of reading about Jesus in the gospels. On my end, God used the Bible to transform and convict me and still uses it today. The words of Jesus reverberate and move me in ways nothing else can. It would not be rational for me to deny those experiences.

Of course, after my initial conversion I fell away a few years later because I was trained to think I could prove everything and the entire Bible was inerrant or Christianity might as well be a lie. I allowed myself to be misled by dubious, over-confident apologetics and found myself in a corner. Why? I’m sure sin and thinking I could run things better than God played a role, but also simply because I am an honest researcher and though some views are difficult to change, eventually mine do change when accumulating evidence against them becomes probative. I feel God didn’t want to pour new wine into an old wineskin so he let it burst and started fresh.

Daily life or faith is not an always on-fire thing in my experience. Mother Theresa said she spent years not feeling God’s presence. That is not comforting but at the same time it is. I go through my dry periods as well, now mostly due to me holding on to things not healthy for me. God’s presence is often much more subtle for. God works through nature, not in competition with it. Many Christians have let occasional deism creep into their theology as if God is out there and sometimes steps in to talk with us. In him we live, move and have our being. So looking for supernatural interventions in my mind is a category mistake from the start.

Vinnie: we all have to answer the question of “Who do you say that I am?”

Sean: I have heard this echo in my mind many times since the difficulties began. There are very few things I point to and think “Maybe that’s God.” But I do contemplate if the reoccurring nature of it is significant. In the end, I usually answer, “I don’t know who I say you are. I don’t know enough.”

I think that is okay but since you are skeptical and filled with doubts due to a lack of certainty, I’ll give you some advice. Doubt your doubts. Don’t only just doubt your religious beliefs. Be critical of everything and that includes your doubts themselves (where do they really stem from?) and whatever intellectual value you might think naturalism has. I personally do not think it has any.

I can’t force your hand and tell you who Jesus is, I can only tell you who Jesus claimed to be based on the evidence and what the earliest Church (30s and 40s) --which consisted of Jewish Monotheists—claimed Him be. Let the dead bury the dead, leave everything behind to come follow me, love me more than your parents, forgiving sins by his own authority. This man is delusional with an inflated ego of the highest order if He is not God. Jesus asks and expects things of His followers only God has a right to demand. A careful analysis of even non-miraculous portions of the Gospels reveals this.

The sayings and incidents I just mentioned about Jesus don’t have any reason to be doubted. They are not miraculous and quite against the grain of what ancient people believed. The majority of critical scholars accept some form of them as a part of history. A book like Brant Pitre’s Jesus and Divine Christology really hammers this home.

In my mind it would be detestable for an ordinary man to say, do and require many of the types of things Jesus did. Every first century source we have, including the Pauline corpus and all four Gospels clearly have an extremely high Christology. Paul calls him Lord and Creator quite early and we have creeds going to just after Jesus was crucifed. It is my opinion that the notion that Jesus was just a religious prophet that the later Church claimed was God is one of the most grievous errors in the history of NT criticism. I don’t feel it has even been driven by good history. It seems to have been an ideological effort where sholarship stacked the deck and dealt the hand it had forced.

I rejected CS Lewis’s trilemma for almost 20 years after reading lots and lots of critical scholarship. I now realize this was a great mistake. The evidence is that both Jesus and the earliest church made claims to divinity for Him.

Vinnie There is no reason to call a resurrected person Lord and Creator unless that extends from the mission and message of the person Himself.

Sean: That is a fair point. I mean, they could have embellished him, but we could say that of anything in history. It is hard to imagine why they would be so convinced, especially since other leaders had been crucified and not been given any divine identity.

Other people were raised from the dead as well or reported to have been. People thought John the Baptist had returned. We have no record of him being called God as far as I know, or for any of Jesus’s apparent resurrections. Going from a crucified criminal to being God due to resurrection alone is a huge leap. How about a prophet of God that God chose to resurrect? Critical scholars and their lilies of the field Jesus can’t actually explain why the early Church believed what it did. They see all the smoke and claim there wasn’t a fire behind it.

Vinnie: I think enough of the Gospels are accurate to give us a reliable portrait of the types of things Jesus said and did and what he generally believed.

Sean: How do we differentiate what is accurate and what is not, if we only have the four religious accounts? The resurrection is pretty well attested to in the faith, but the things Jesus teaches vary in the texts a bit.

What varies in regard to Jesus’s teaching? Maybe we could go over some specific texts? The gospels being religious is irrelevant to me. The gospels stem from early Christians, those most likely to possess accurate information about Jesus, the person they followed as Lord and Savior. How else do we reconstruct a first century man but by those who wrote about him? Who would know him best? His earliest followers. In my mind, historical reconstruction starts there. So it may be fashionable to claim the gospels are religious online but that is meaningless to me. All texts have an agenda and bias. Historically speaking, what matters is whether or not the authors were in a position to know what they narrate and whether or not they had reason to lie or fabricate material whole cloth.

So how do we differentiate? It depends.The purpose of the Gospels is not to give me a perfect portrait of Jesus that is as close to what a camera crew would have picked up as possible. Ancient authors often wanted to relate the substance of what a person did and not necessarily the exact words or even voice at times. Jesus primarily would have spoken in Aramaic. He would have taught the same think many times in many settings in differing ways just a I teach the same material differently from year to uyear and often times in the same school day to different classes. The Gospels are written in Greek-to-Greek speaking audiences. Ancient authors wanted to be accurate but our desire for exactitude does not correspond to what they would consider true or accurate. There are lessons to be gleaned for us on the level of individual stories and also at the narrative level of the whole gospels. They contain a tremendous amount of history, but they are not modern newspaper recordings of an exact play by play.

So historically speaking, you would need to examine things on a case-by-case basis. If you want historical arguments, then you have to read a lot of historical works and dialogue with scholarship. Recurrent attestation is a good start. It is a form of multiple attestation: when a theme or motif shows up over and over again in the tradition. For example, the kingdom of God shows up in a host of diverse material and teachings in the Gospels. Even if some of the individual incidents have single attestation, the fact that the kingdom of God is so prevalent suggest this was a widespread or programmatic issue Jesus taught about or focused on. Likewise, the sheer number of parables and healings indicates Jesus taught in parables and was seen as a wonder worker even if we can or cannot conclusively demonstrate any particular incidents are historical.

From the faith perspective, I simply approach the text with a hermeneutic of trust. I believe God inspired the text and there is a message or purpose in here somewhere that He uses to mediate the sacred. Reading the Bible is not to supposed to be an exercise in how clever I am at apologetics or how good I am at historical reconstruction. But I believe history supports this stance as well. The gospels are reliable for what I claimed.

Also of importance is date and authorship. If the gospels are written by who tradition says then they are obviously trustworthy in what they generally report. If they are late, anonymous works by unknown Christians then more skepticism is warranted. I don’t think either extreme here captures the truth of the situation. There are good reasons for placing Luke-Acts before the mid 60s and Mark even earlier still.

Vinnie: the Bible serves as a window God. It may have smudges and cracks, but it still allows us to see through it and glimpse the character and nature of God, especially as revealed in Jesus.

Sean: I suppose the popular idea is that the Bible spells out everything we need to know about God, and it must be accurate in every way. But how could a human work fully encapsulate God? Everything we do would only be a broken, foggy glass to peer through. I like the idea that God uses even that.

I don’t think it is accurate in every way, nor do I think it fully encapsulates God. My thoughts on inerrancy are here:

I would also say it is not even possible for us to fully encapsulate God who is the ground and source of all being itself. The mere thought to me is about a trillion times more absurd than a round square.

Jesus is the Word of God and is the closest or most exact representation of the God. The Bible is the word of God and serves so that we may believe in the Word of God. Full stop. No Bibliolatry here which includes sola scripture.

Vinnie: I don’t believe in things I feel can can be disproven. If they could I would have to drop them.

Sean Maybe that’s the issue, then. Christianity can be presented by reason as plausible, but so many other things can, too. Other things can hit a point of being “unprovable,” and therefore, “unfalsifiable.” Why should I believe this more than naturalism? I think that’s the wall I’m hitting, and I don’t know how to force belief either way.

Naturalism was ruled out in point one for me (cosmological argument). It is not an option on my menu. Naturalism in the form of scientism is self-defeating. I don’t feel it can justify or explain the purpose and meaning of life or abstract thought. Naturalism of the materialist variety tends to deal with mindless atoms and brute forces. Somehow these lead to value and purpose but no matter how many bricks you stack into a circle, no matter how high you pile them, they will not magically become a sphere.

For me the cosmological argument is solid and the divine attributes come with it. The evidence suggests to me that we should start by considering which of the monotheistic religions corresponds to reality the best. Naturalism is not a viable option and has nothing going for it in my opinion. As a theist I think purpose and value are real, mind-independent objective features of the world. The same goes for abstract concepts like triangularity. My perspective is the materialist typically says they are not but invents their own fluffy subjective religion to live by. Why would I want to trade in religious beliefs I think are real and objective for ones I knowingly and subjectively make up? No thank you.

Vinnie

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Undoubtedly!

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