for the love of doctrine

I am put off by the title of a Christianity Today interview with Jamie Smith. The title is “You Can’t Think Your Way to God:  Christian Formation means shaping our loves, says Jamie Smith, not just educating our minds.”

The title is true enough, but I wonder why it singles out “thinking” as the way we can’t work our way to God. Scripture is clear that we can’t love our way to God either. We can’t anything our way to God. The title makes it sound like there is something particularly deficient with thinking, when actually there is something deficient in any method of getting to God.

I gladly say that right doctrine is not enough to save us, for even demons know some accurate facts about God. We must love God and commit to him too. Of course, this is impossible to do without knowledge, because we can’t love or trust what we don’t know.

Bottom line:  I don’t understand the need to play doctrine and love against each other and then say that love is the thing. 1 John 3:23 clearly says that we’re commanded to both believe in Jesus and love each other. So it’s a both/and not an either/or.

Double bottom line:  the main question isn’t which route you’re going to take to get to God, whether believing the right thing or loving in the right way, because both ways are bound to fail. The question isn’t how we will get to God, but how God has gotten to us. He came to us with grace and truth, with love and right doctrine. We need them both, right?

against naturalism

This is the title of Alvin Plantinga’s opening chapter in a collegial debate he recently wrote with atheist Michael Tooley called Knowledge of God. Plantinga thanks Tooley for “his clear, rigorous, and detailed statement of a version of the atheistic argument from evil (p. 151),” and then pretty much dismantles it.

As I read Plantinga’s chapter I often thought that Cornelius Van Til would have loved this, for he basically proves Van Til’s point that belief in God is necessary to know anything. Van Til tried, unsuccessfully I think, to demonstrate that belief in the Christian God is necessary for knowledge. He relied on the unity and diversity in the Trinity, saying this solved the one and the many problem that beguiles philosophers, and he argued the idealist notion that comprehensive knowledge is necessary for all knowledge (we don’t know anything unless we know everything, and such comprehensive knowledge is found in God, who reveals some of it to us).

While interesting, Plantinga’s arguments are better. He argues that we only have warrant for our epistemic faculties if we believe they are functioning properly, but what would this even mean in a naturalistic universe? (Plantinga rightly asserts that naturalism is the dominant form of atheism). Proper functioning assumes a designer who intended his creation to function a certain way. If there is no God then the universe lacks intention, and so it would be impossible to say whether or not something is functioning properly. Even the concept of malfunctioning loses meaning. Plantinga says the problem is not merely that a naturalist can’t tell whether or not something is functioning properly, it’s that the concept itself lacks meaning in a naturalistic worldview (p. 21).

Furthermore, we only have warrant if we believe our epistemic faculties are successfully aimed at truth. But the best a naturalist can say is that they are aimed at survival advantage. For example, someone who is stricken with terminal cancer may choose to optimistically insist they will beat it. Their optimism may increase the time they have left, and so contribute to their survival, but no one would claim their beliefs are successfully aimed at truth (p. 11).

Finally, Plantinga argues that a naturalist can’t even account for the concept of belief. Naturalistic materialism (materialism is the dominant form of naturalism) can account for the “electro-chemical or neurophysiological” firings in our brains, but it cannot explain how these “neuronal events” are able to produce beliefs that have content. It’s not simply that naturalists don’t know how it happens but that they can’t see how it could. The content of beliefs is an immaterial thing. How could the material events in a physical brain come to hold immaterial content? The question itself makes little sense in a naturalistic world (p. 34-35).

Plantinga concludes that committed naturalists must give up the right to hold beliefs, including the belief that naturalism is true. And so naturalism is self-defeating, and no rational person could rationally hold it (p. 68-69).

This chapter should earn Plantinga an honorary doctorate from Westminster Seminary—not that either side needs this but wouldn’t it be nice to see?—and should become a staple of apologetics for years to come. If you’re into Christian philosophy, you need to read this.

I am very interested in this question

I blogged a few months ago about the inconsistency of defending abortion while lamenting the horrible shooting in Newtown. An editorial in USA Today picks up on this theme, noting that President Obama demurred during the Gosnell trial to comment on its proceedings, but…

“now that the trial is over, reporters should ask if President Obama still opposes laws that protect infants that survive abortions. After the school massacre in Newtown, President Obama suggested reforms to the country’s gun laws, saying, ‘If there is even one step we can take to save another child . . . then surely we have an obligation to try.’ So let’s find out the specifics of his proposed abortion reforms post-Gosnell.”

I would stop whatever I’m doing to hear the answer to that one.

the new legalism?

Anthony Bradley’s essay in World magazine is receiving some well-deserved attention. If that piqued your interest and you want to read more on the subject, I highly recommend Larry Osborne’s recent book, Accidental Pharisees.

 Osborne wisely and pastorally explains how we’re never free from the temptation to legalism. In fact, the more zeal we have for God the more we’ll be tempted to look down on those who don’t measure up (p. 46). And so we become “accidental Pharisees.” But is there any other kind? No one becomes a legalist on purpose.

Osborne cites five kinds of Christians who can easily become Pharisaical about what they care about most (p. 92-94):

1. Radical Christians:  these people think generosity is most important, and while they are careful not to give out a list, they are suspicious of Christians who live in large houses and drive expensive cars. Their parents’ generation worried about beer in the refrigerator; they worry about BMWs in the driveway.

2. Crazy Christians:  these earnest believers think that you’re only committed to God if you’re taking wild leaps of faith, getting yourself in trouble to see if God won’t bail you out. They suppose that normal Christians who punch a time clock and pay their mortgage on time probably aren’t as committed to Christ as they should be. What these “crazy Christians” forget is that they’re only free to take their risks because of the normal jobholders who have saved enough money to help them should they fall (p. 188).

3. Missional Christians:  these counter-cultural Christians think the badge of discipleship is earned by volunteering in a soup kitchen, tutoring at risk children, or moving from the suburbs to the inner city. They are suspicious of anyone whose life is too comfortable (there seems to be some overlap among these first three categories).

4. Gospel-Centered Christians:  these Christians are my favorites, because we care about right doctrine and everything written by John Calvin. However, if we’re not careful we can look down our noses at those believers, usually Arminians, who haven’t quite figured out the right way to think about God.

5. Revolutionary and Organic Christians:  these people are disillusioned with the traditional church and think that the most committed Christians are those who attend house churches. As with the missional and gospel-centered Christians, they are often suspicious of those who attend large “seeker” churches.

Osborne is not against each of these priorities per se, but simply warns us against turning a good thing into our god. We may have good reasons for our good thing (after all, it’s good for a reason), but we must avoid the trap of thinking that everyone has to live like us.

Osborne’s book is full of many helpful and liberating ideas. Here are a couple:

1. “Evangelists, pastors, teachers, ministry leaders, church planters, and missionaries have a public platform that makes it easy for them to present a model of discipleship that looks an awful lot like them. Their self-congratulatory stories and natural built-in bias toward God has called them to do can leave the rest of us wondering what’s wrong with us” (p. 173).

2. Osborne thinks that zealous Christians should balance their use of the Gospels with an equal emphasis on Paul’s epistles. While it’s true that Jesus told the rich young ruler to sell everything to follow him, it’s equally true that Paul encouraged Christians to lead a normal life, quietly working with their hands so they wouldn’t be a burden to others (1 Thess. 4:11-12). We need a Christian faith that makes sense of both kinds of passages.

I intend to try. In the Fall I have a book on faith and doubt coming out that will address a portion of this (I will argue against the radical and crazy guys—the Steve Martins of evangelicalism?—that faith is committing to what you know, not to what you don’t), and this summer and fall I will be researching and writing a book that takes the question straight on—can we serve Jesus and still enjoy our lives? How do we integrate the redemptive purpose of heaven with the earthly pleasures of creation? Until then, and perhaps even after then, I heartily commend Larry Osborne’s provocative and liberating book, Accidental Pharisees.

every 20 years

How will the new creation compare with the old? Maybe something like this.

Update:  I just sold the old one to a fellow who lived in my hometown in Ohio, so that makes me happy. I don’t know the right way to say this, but now my wife is the person/thing I have lived with the longest.

game on

Michael Bird has a prophetic post about where western culture is headed, and fast. It wasn’t that long ago when this essay would have seemed outlandish, even irresponsible. Now the future it predicts seems almost inevitable, because it’s already happening. This may not be the end, but it’s beginning to feel like we can see it from here. What an important time to be the church!

top billing

Last night I attended the installation ceremony for Todd Billings, who will now occupy the Gordon H. Girod Research Chair of Reformed Theology at Western Seminary. The evening was bittersweet, as Todd has been diagnosed with a rare blood disorder that has no known cure, but as he reminded us last night, the Heidelberg Catechism begins “that I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.”

Todd began his inaugural lecture by having the audience recite Question 1 of the Heidelberg, and then he compared this to the creed of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, which essentially says that the central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about yourself. God won’t interfere in your life unless you ask him to, and only then to resolve some problem and restore your happiness.

Todd argued that the Heidelberg begins with displacement—we are not our own—whereas the creed of MTD focuses entirely upon us and our felt needs. Todd noted that MTD comes out in theology today when leaders assert that their felt problems are the ones that Jesus had in mind, and then they leap over 2,000 years of tradition to discover “the real meaning of Jesus” that the church had buried all this time. Todd gave examples of Brian McLaren’s The Secret Message of Jesus on the left, the Patriot’s Bible on the right (what does Jesus tell us about the founding of America?), and N.T. Wright in the middle, whose 2013 Calvin January series lecture was entitled, “How we’ve all misunderstood the gospels.”

Rather than start with our own questions and then try to find some correlation in Scripture—which usually amounts to finding that Jesus was some misunderstood revolutionary whose dreams didn’t catch on until us—Todd said we must drill deeply into our own theological traditions until we hit the water table of the catholicity of the church. We must find those universal truths that Scripture and tradition have always taught us, for not only are they what is most important but also they are what will unite us together.

Jamie Smith gave a response that echoed these themes, which made it a very good night. Join me in prayer that God will heal Todd, for the sake of his wife and two toddlers but also for the sake of his church. God bless Todd Billings, and may he continue to bless the church through his ministry.