Undeception

“Just think of the natural sciences as they increasingly develop into a comprehensive knowledge of the world. A short time ago no one could have conceived of this development. What then do you suppose the future holds, not only for our theology, but for our evangelical Christianity? … There are those who can hack away at science with a sword, fence themselves in with weapons at hand to withstand the assaults of sound research and behind this fence establish as binding a church doctrine that appears to everyone outside as an unreal ghost to which they must pay homage if they want to receive a proper burial. Those persons might not allow themselves to be disturbed by the developments in the realm of science. But we cannot do that and do not want that. Therefore, we must make do with history as it develops.”

—Friedrich Schleiermacher, On the Glaubenslehre: Two Letters to Dr Lücke [1829] (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1981), p. 60.

H/T to my friend Matt Raymer for the foregoing and for his observation that although here we are nearing two hundred years since the above quote, Christians like Matt and I have had to rediscover from scratch so many of the lessons Schleiermacher learned so long ago.

Under the typical Protestant understanding of “faith” as “not doubting something that one believes without proof”, I as a young Protestant could never fathom why God would be so tickled by us believing in what we had almost no evidence for. This question came home to me most clearly whenever I heard informal apologetics arguing that the reason God doesn’t just show Himself to us is that if He did, no faith would be necessary, and God really wants us to have faith. Obviously this is quite circular, akin to being asked, “Why do we have to have faith?” and answering, “Because faith is necessary.”

So when I found out in third-year Greek (undergrad) about a related discussion that had been going on in scholarly academic circles, I was intrigued. The main question was about the Pauline expression ek/dia pisteos iesou christou (e.g. Philippians 3.9), customarily, but probably inaccurately, translated as “faith in Jesus Christ”, whereas scholars such as Richard Hays have argued for the reading “faith(fulness) of Jesus Christ”; I just posted my exploratory paper on this topic yesterday. As I described in another recent post, the Greek word that we translate as “faith” also carried the meaning faithfulness (notice that English uses the root “faith-” in both “faith” and “faithfulness” as well). In fact, there is no other word in NT Greek that translates as “faithfulness” as directly as pistis. So theoretically, whether Paul had meant to describe a concept more on the “faithfulness” side or on the “belief” side of pistis, or some hybrid of both “belief” and “faithfulness, he would have in all likelihood used the word pistis in any case. “Belief” and “faithfulness” are two very different English words and markedly different conceptually in our modern understanding, but the fact that the NT often uses them in their divergent semantics in places where the meaning is ambiguous suggests that pistis meant not either/or but indicated a concept closely related to both of them. After all, belief is in a sense a commitment to an idea, and I recognize this usage for “faith” and “believing” (Gk pist-euo) in the NT as well.

But rather than mere cognitive assent to an unproved proposition, I think the best way of viewing the semantic center of pistis is in the words commitment, dependence, trust, and devotion. As I said, “belief” plays a part, since we devote ourselves to things we believe in, and believe in things we are devoted to. But because no facts are unfiltered and uninterpreted by our minds, holding fast to beliefs is in essence dependence upon ourselves and our ability to properly parse those facts. What God requires is commitment to and dependence upon Him, amounting to total surrender. At very least, surely it is obvious that the faith that pleases God is not the type that is taken up and held to without a basis; above all, faith is not about being dogmatic about something we have no evidence for, nor likewise something we have mounds of evidence against.

Paul is the one whose teaching is the source of the common focus on belief in certain propositions. But I am coming to think that he instead was more concerned (at least in some of his writing) that we depend on our identification with Christ, whose surpassing faithfulness to God was displayed by his surrender to the point of death. It is for the sake of his faithfulness that we are saved. In turn, we identify with Christ by sacrificing ourselves (Rom 12.1). Paul’s view was shared by the author of Hebrews, who more clearly articulated it in Hebrews 3.1-6:

Therefore, holy brothers and companions in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession; He was faithful to the One who appointed Him, just as Moses was in all God’s household. For Jesus is considered worthy of more glory than Moses, just as the builder has more honor than the house. Now every house is built by someone, but the One who built everything is God. Moses was faithful as a servant in all God’s household, as a testimony to what would be said [in the future]. But Christ was faithful as a Son over His household, whose household we are if we hold on to the courage and the confidence of our hope. [HCS]

Paul seems to have argued that God grants us grace by associating us with Christ’s work. God graciously identifies us as faithful to Himself through our identification with Jesus in a relationship of joint commitment, not from our accomplishment of the works of the Law, which was regarded as within the bounds of human ability alone. Our faithfulness is not the prerequisite to this grace, but its goal. In fact, one reason why many Protestant biblical scholars are not at all happy with Hays’ reading of pistis christou is the extremely close association in Philippians 3.4-14 between our being identified with Christ’s faithfulness and our participation in His faithfulness:

…and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through (the) faith(fulness) [of] Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith(fulness). I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this… [Philippians 3.9-12a NRSV]

Notice how Paul explicitly states that his participation is not complete and that, inasmuch as it is not, he entertains the possibility of his own failure to attain to the resurrection from the dead! Notice also that this possibility acknowledged by Paul does not disappear no matter how you interpret pistis christou. The author Ephesians 2.8-10 put it this way:

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

If we take the view of I outlined above seriously, we notice that these verses essentially equate pistis with good works. A paraphrase of the verse reveals this: “By God’s grace you are saved through faithfulness, and this faithfulness is God’s gift as well, and not something the Law could have brought about. For it is God who has crafted us into instruments of doing good works [faithfulness] that He desires.” The key distinction is between “works” and “good works”. Paul never devalues “good works”; his criticism is of works of the Law (this post discusses what he probably meant by that), which is what Paul means by “works” when it is not qualified (unlike James). In fact, we are told that performing “good works” is what we are supposed to be about doing (2 Cor 9.8). This understanding of what “faith” is becomes clearest when we look outside of the epistles recognized by scholars today as authentic Pauline epistles: see Col 1.10, 2 Tim 2.21, 2 Tim 3.17; cf. also Hebrews (discussed above) and James (discussed below). Ephesians 2.8-10 isn’t saying that good works are not necessary — indeed, the opposite — but that no one is able to hold up his/her end of the bargain by doing good works apart from God’s grace, simply by following the Law. Reading “faith” and “works” in this light actually reconciles an apparent conflict between the theology of Paul and James, who wrote, “Faith without works is dead”. James seems to be arguing against precisely the sort of misinterpretation of Paul that Luther championed; this is why Luther famously rejected the book of James and called it an “epistle of straw”. It is important to realize that unlike Paul, James does not use “works” to refer specifically to any ritual “works of the Law”. He clearly articulates the kind of works he expects that are part and parcel of “faith(fulness)”:

If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. [James 2.15-17]

He seems to be referring to the “good works” of Ep 2.10, doesn’t he? And as if this weren’t obvious enough, James next appeals to the example of two individuals who lived outside the Law, Abraham and Rahab (vv. 21-26). I find myself under the impression that whether we are to try to please God by works of devotion or not wasn’t even an issue for Paul; this was taken for granted. Rather, he sought to emphasize that inasmuch as we accomplish good works, God is fulfilling His purposes through us:

Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose. [Phil 2.12]

Paul certainly contends that we don’t depend on our good works to please God; rather, we depend upon (=”have faith in”) God, submitting and surrendering to (=”having faith in”) Him to follow Him in faithfulness. It seems that, although energized by God’s grace, Paul expected believers to take the maintenance of faith in its true sense as a responsibility.

I’ve known many Christians so afraid of trampling on the work of Christ by depending on good works for salvation that they, in effect, looked down their nose at good works, chastising congregations that spend “too much” time and effort with ministries and programs and not enough with “worship”, by which they meant praising God and basking in His love (especially with music). I understand that many of them spend so much of their lives trying to earn favor with God by proving their own merit that once they encounter the grace that is Christ’s meritorious faithfulness they become intoxicated by it, with the result that they neglect their own “reasonable service” in response. Others find the notion of mental assent to true propositions to be the core framework for faith based on their misapprehension of what faith meant to the biblical authors, and understandably spend the bulk of their time in developing the perfect set of beliefs and disparaging those who don’t do likewise. I think these are all distractions at best, and outright perversions of biblical faith at worst. We are to show true worship to God not only by thanking Him, but by committing our best effort to modeling the faithfulness set before us by Jesus.

No soteriological answers here. But it’s fertile ground for discussion, isn’t it?

I have always thought that Hebrews 11.1 sounded beautiful, with a mystical air to it:

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (KJV)

Some of the mystery surrounding it resulted from its sounding so much like a riddle: a verse whose first few words signal a definition (“Now faith is…”) ends up leaving you more questions than the one you had about “faith” to begin with. What’s all this stuff about substance and evidence of the unseen? Faith is just “believing”, right?

Well, no. But this is the way many modern translations make it sound. When it’s said that “faith is the ὑπόστᾰσις of things hoped for,” a lot hinges on how one translates the word with funny letters, transliterated as hypostasis.

I could go way back into church history and show how this word is used by Christians to refer to how God was “grounded” or realized in the person of Jesus so that the man Jesus was also fully God (the “hypostatic union”). Or I could go much further back and break down its etymological constituents (Gk hypo- ‘below’ + stasis ‘standing’). But what do either have to do with Hebrews 11.1?

More helpful by far it is to make note of that term’s usage in pre-Christian Stoicism to distinguish actual existence, substance, from abstract existence. This is where the “substance of things hoped for” comes into play. Faith is the realization, the proof in the pudding of things hoped for, which not coincidentally is more or less equivalent to “the evidence of things not seen.” It’s parallelism.

So why, then, is hypostasis translated as “being sure” in the (T)NIV, “assurance” in the NASB, or “confidence” in the ESV? I mean, it’s obvious that there will be some “confidence/assurance/being sure” resulting from having evidence or proof, but is that rendering not heavily reliant on the idea of faith as “belief”? This verse in those translations leads to the impression that, “Faith is placing your hope in things that haven’t been proved yet.” That is not what faith is, in Hebrews or anywhere.

But especially in Hebrews: try inserting any of the above translations of hypostasis in Heb 1.3, where it is usually translated “nature” (which is…well, closer to the right meaning) or “being” (that’s much more like it). Let’s try plugging those words from Heb 11.1 into the NASB of 1.3 (which actually reads “nature”):

And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His being-sure…

And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His assurance…

And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His confidence…

These highlight the eisegetical problem of the (T)NIV, NASB, and ESV translations of Heb 11.1; they translated it based upon what they thought we knew about what faith is, not what the author of Hebrews was telling us it is.

Next, look at the only other use of hypostasis in Hebrews, viz. Heb 3.14:

(T)NIV: We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first.

NASB: For we have become partakers of Christ, if we hold fast the beginning of our assurance firm until the end,

ESV: For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.

These translations make a lot of sense to us on first blush due to our belief in the importance of persistent belief, which, it must be noted, is in no small part attributable to this verse (not exactly a favorite of Calvinists).

No doubt the “confidence/assurance” reading was influenced in v. 14 by the close parallel in v. 3, which happens to include a different word more consistently translated as confidence. But the parallelism between the verses cannot be credibly sustained upon close analysis: they’re saying different things, even though they use a similar construction.

It’s not “the beginning of our confidence” that must be held firm; this suggests “unwaveringly believing the same thing we did in the beginning,” placing the onus on uncompromising mental assent that’s easily extended to all kinds of doctrines and traditions learned “in the beginning” of our Christian walk. That interpretation’s great for keeping Christians in lockstep theologically. Here again, “confidence” and indeed persistence are involved, but in a more subtle way. Read the Holman Christian Standard version of this verse:

For we have become companions of the Messiah if we hold firmly until the end the reality that we had at the start.

[Unfortunately, then they go and legitimize the "confidence" translation by including it in a footnote.]

In other words, we may indeed be confident, but it’s confidence in the reality or substance we experienced at the beginning.

I think you can see that hypostasis hardly means confidence, particularly in Hebrews. It means ‘substance, reality, being, realization’ and other such.

Why does this matter? Because of what the other translations (“confidence”, “being sure”, etc.) have done to bolster the misunderstanding of “faith” parodied by Mark Twain: “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”

Generally speaking, faith, translating Gk pistis, is much better translated by “faithfulness” or “devotion”. This is especially true of Hebrews. Look at 3.2-6′s contrast of Moses’ faithfulness over little versus Christ’s faithfulness over much more. That’s where the whole “hold fast” aspect comes into play in both v. 6 and v. 14!

So let’s plug this back in to Hebrews 11.1. “Faith is the actualization of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Notice that belief in the unseen is almost present in this verse, but it’s parallel to “things hoped for/not seen”, not “substance/evidence”. The real meaning of pistis in this passage is the on-earth realization of what, or rather Whom, is believed. The author of Hebrews is describing belief and trust as the motivation for faith. He goes on in that chapter to describe people living out their belief and trust in God by their faithfulness. That’s why James was so baffled that people would say they “believed” (=had trust in) God while not presenting any substance or evidence.

What are your thoughts on these observations? I probably sound a bit more “confident” than I actually am on a lot of these points, but at this stage I’m convinced. I ask for your help in nuancing my understanding.

The most dangerous shyster is the one who has convinced himself to believe his own pitch.

Over at The Creation of an Evolutionist, Mike is continuing to blog through his weekly viewing of The Truth Project. He just completed Lesson Five. More so than the previous lessons, Lesson 5 focused on a critique of mainstream science, and evolution in particular. Bear in mind that Mike is about as fair-minded as they come, but he is shocked by Del Tackett’s blatant misrepresentations of clear facts and doesn’t hold anything back in his detailed analysis. Make sure you check it out, especially if you’ve seen TTP and didn’t notice anything wrong!

(Thinking about what Mike has told us about Lesson 5 has really gotten my dander up. You’ve been warned.)

In all honesty, it moves me to disgust to think of all the churches that purchase and publicize viewings of The Truth [sic] Project. I can just picture the viewers congregating, hoping to see the scientific disciplines and those who accept their consensus belittled in favor of their own half-baked, long since outdated, and yet completely unquestionable alternatives. I see them in my head, looking just like so many similar audiences of which I’ve been a part: sighing in relief at their growing confidence in their preset beliefs, grinning at one another as Tackett mocks his opposition with convenient lies and half-truths, laughing at all those simpleton atheistic outsiders as though their ears were being tickled with a feather reminiscent of his arguments’ combined intellectual weight.

This is what gets me: so many of these truly precious people live lives of humility and self-sacrifice out of genuine love for one another and for others in need, and yet here, in contradictory condescension, they accept wholesale dismissals of the virtual entirety of the scientific community and those convinced by their arguments.

Christians, self-professing lovers of truth, do you think “the church” is all about getting together to reaffirm your consensus just-so stories that you somehow suppose to be more valid because non-Christians cite actual evidence to the contrary? Despite the fact that hosts of other honest, truth-loving Christians acknowledge that evidence? Do you judge what’s true by what bolsters your inspired, inerrant, and infallible views on Scripture? Is it too much to ask that you examine all things to see if they are true?

I can understand believing in something despite a lack of evidence, something we all do in one way or another, believer and unbeliever alike. But it’s another thing entirely to invite people like Tackett into your churches and to uncritically accept all of his convenient “evidence” and characterizations of the opposition, disregarding even the mere possibility of actual contradictory evidence. Even if your predetermined conclusions are actually accurate, do you want to believe the right things for the wrong reasons? You can’t assume what these guys say is true any more than the Bereans blindly accepted what Paul said was true. This goes for much more than creationism/ID/evolutionism — it goes for anything your Christian teachers tell you. If you’re not going to fact check what they tell you, at least don’t dishonor the truth by gleefully accepting only what jibes with what you already believe and then feeling more enlightened than those who don’t.

A commenter on the previous post raised an interesting point that leads me into something I’ve been wanting to explore here. He wrote:

I don’t see why it would be logically necessary that [the Bible] is 100% true. However, if we allow that it isn’t, then how are we to determine which parts are true? There is no way of knowing, which is damning [for the whole book]. An empirical test would be nice, but as we all know there is no such thing.

How we “determine which parts are true” is especially important in regard to the Bible’s supernatural claims. Being natural and living in a natural world, we find these claims almost impossible to evaluate. Hence, we tend to allow the truth of the spiritual claims of Scripture to piggy-back on the verifiable claims: typically, as the verifiable claims fare, so confidence in the unverifiable fares. This is obviously inductive reasoning, and not a very robust form of it either: conceivably, one could read a set of verifiable events in a newspaper, create out of whole cloth any number of stories detailing supernatural events supposedly related to those newspaper events, and publish a book integrating both the newspaper and the manufactured fantasy stories. Obviously, no one need seriously entertain the bogus claims’ truthfulness simply because of the truthfulness of the verifiable claims.

Now, I don’t think that the supernatural and other unverifiable events of Scripture were all created out of whole cloth. My point is that a healthy dose of humility in our bibliology is warranted: for instance, even if we find out that the Khirbet Qeiyafa fragment establishes that Hebrew writing and even specific content from Jewish scriptures date further back than scholars now suppose, it doesn’t necessarily follow, as some have apparently concluded, that “extreme liberal biblical criticism” has ceded territory specifically over to “conservative” forms of criticism. Doubtless, there are versions of “extreme liberal biblical criticism” that will take evidence like this (if it proves valid) in stride. The fact is, even if proof for the resurrection of Jesus were uncovered, there would be possible explanations other than those given by the writers of the New Testament.

When the conclusions of certain biblical critics is characterized as “extreme” or “liberal”, it has already been judged from a confessional standpoint. Is this fair? I happen to think that our confessions should be sufficiently grounded by evidence before allowed to sit in judgment of contrary evidence. This leads me to muse: those who approach a particular ancient text from the same position as everyone throughout history except some Jews and Christians and who seek to verify what they can using the carefully honed skills of historical and textual criticism are “liberal”, and those who posit an unnatural (“supernatural”) influence that throws out all other humanity’s understanding of the text are the ones called “conservative”? What in heaven’s name do “liberal” and “conservative” even mean anymore?

An excellent introduction to the nature and importance of historical studies for biblical interpretation is a short (142 pp.) and readable book called The Burial of Jesus: History and Faith by Dr. James F. McGrath. In this book, McGrath uses a critical examination of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ burial and resurrection coupled with our extra-biblical knowledge of first century Palestinian burial practices as an example of the kind of conclusions that an historian not committed to affirming inerrancy might draw. While the preponderance of his suggestions are not as scandalous as evangelicals might fear, many of the ideas he as an historian must entertain will certainly not sit comfortably with even more liberal evangelicals. But importantly, this is not his only point: he also seeks to present an explication of and apologetic for using the tools of historical study on our beloved Bible. Most evangelicals are skeptical of using these tools except when it is expected to not affect or to bolster their already formed conclusions; they tend to view historians who come to non-evangelical conclusions about Scripture as atheists seeking to undermine faith. This skepticism is understandable, but somewhat misplaced, since “…there is much evidence that there are many people working in the fields of history and Biblical studies as an expression of their faith rather than because of opposition to it” [emphasis original]. Moreover, engaging the findings of historical study should be a crucial part of our interpretive process. His book undertakes to explain how:

…the very common approach of taking Biblical stories uncritically at face value, and using them as a reason for dismissing evidence not only from history but from science and other sources of knowledge, is fundamentally misguided. Historical study provides us with the only tools available to us for knowing about the past. (p. 8 )

The historical data in Scripture is examined like we examine any other ancient text purporting to record historical events. Because first-hand observation is naturally precluded, empirical tests are never exactly conclusive when dealing with certain types of historical data; this means that most attempts to determine historicity are inevitably indeterminate. An historian gathers an idea of the likelihood of certain events but, as long as he is working as an academic, he must remain ultimately agnostic, no matter what his hunch might be.

At some point though, people generally aren’t content with accepting indeterminacy about such events: they will generally come to their own, ultimately untestable, personal conclusions one way or another. Some will consider errors in the Bible’s depiction of demonstrable events and then look askance particularly at the indemonstrable events, concluding, “None of it’s true.” Others like myself find that the supposition that the Bible testifies to certain fundamental transcendent truths explains more than it causes trouble for, especially when taking into account the experiences of ourselves and others we know and love. So, without contradictory evidence, but also without proof, we believe; the problem I’m critiquing is that not all of us recognize that it is in fact without proof that we believe. But as McGrath also argues, excessive dependence upon empirical proof can be just as misguided.

There are many questions that we cannot answer with absolute certainty, and yet we find ourselves willing to accept some things in the absence of absolute proof. Most of us consider this world that we inhabit to be real. Sometimes, we must take reason as far as it can take us, and then keep moving forward beyond what we can prove. (p. 12)

In his latest post, Mike mentions a Facebook conversation with someone puzzled by his rejection of inerrancy; I was involved with the conversation as well. As Mike described, this individual raised the common IYCBIAYCTAOI objection (if-you-can’t-believe-it-all-you-can’t-trust-any-of-it), asking, “Why do you believe the Bible is true?”

I responded by asking, “What makes you think it’s necessary that the Bible (as in the entire thing cover-to-cover) be ‘true’ (by which I assume you mean perfectly conforming to and accurately depicting objective reality)?” It’s this question I want to explore in this post.

Among other things, he responded that unless the OT (for instance) is 100% accurate, we cannot bear witness to Jesus. But this is manifestly false: the first century apostles evangelized to Gentiles who had no reason to accept the OT’s reliability, which wouldn’t even have been available to them in print, since copies of Scripture were not carried around for distribution in the first century. Yet somehow, these Gentiles believed the witness of Jesus’ apostles anyway. Moreover, early believers didn’t even have a New Testament to witness to Jesus; hearsay and word of mouth were all they had to go on. I contend that we’re no better off — nor worse off — than they are. We too are dependent on the testimony of fallible humans who have experienced God in Christ, and by faith we trust Him to lead us through fellow believers’ human testimony.

One of the most annoying things about the divide over inerrancy is that people like me who reject it are somewhat forced by the nature of the debate into the position of pointing out the flaws in Scripture. But I dearly treasure the Bible: even while not positing its perfection, I find it to be an invaluable witness to what our faith is supposed to be about. We depend on the Bible no less than we depend upon a guy at the gas station to give us directions. Could his directions be imperfect? Could it be 13 miles down the road instead of 10? Might we have been told to turn left at “the third red light” despite there being only two lights and a four-way stop? Yes, but we have no reason to believe he’s lying to us, and plenty of reasons for trusting that he has an idea of what he’s talking about and that we’re a lot better off having asked for directions than having driven around unguided. Besides, when we’re seeking direction (in both the literal or metaphorical sense), aren’t we supposed to trust God to deliver us to our destination?

So although I reject inerrancy, I still do find the Bible invaluable as an historical witness to God’s work in the world, and especially in the personhood of Jesus. This makes it all the more necessary for us to honestly and earnestly dig down inside the Bible and recognize how, when, why, and by whom it was constructed: this is the goal of biblical studies, which includes the disciplines of textual and historical criticism often unjustly maligned as being destructive of the text. And yes, we may end up discarding commonly accepting beliefs about the Bible like “Paul wrote 2 Timothy” or “We inherit Adam’s fallen nature because of his sin,” but if our faith is truly in God and not those beliefs about Scripture and what we’ve been told it says, we’ll come out on the other end with our faith purer for having stripped away the distractions.

For inerrantists, the Bible must be accurate through and through. For one thing, they want it to be provable as inerrant in order to substantiate the doctrines they have been taught. After all, you can’t prove anything with a source that’s got problems, right? And this is what they can’t allow: the Bible must not only be usable to prove the validity of their faith to others but, to an alarming extent, to themselves as well. I still believe God shows evidence of Himself in life circumstances, that He speaks to us in various ways; I believe I have experienced Him at work in my life in many ways. But none of it constitutes “proof” of any kind. My own faith bears a striking resemblance to the faith we see in the Bible. For instance, Abraham is a model of biblical faith: how much do you think he understood about the Bible, the atonement, or bodily resurrection? Or even the nature of God: like even many Israelites of later periods, he almost certainly wasn’t a true monotheist: YHWH was simply the supreme God, the right God rather than the only God. How much did any of this matter? He walked with God.

Biblical faith, the kind that pleases God, is not presented as carefully maintaining certain propositions about God (no one seems to be able to agree on just which ones) while stubbornly and myopically defending the interpretation of those propositions accepted by one’s tradition. Biblical faith is believing in God as a person, even when He isn’t fully understood; its key characteristics are trusting and allowing Him to guide us. Christians are guided by the example He provided us in the person of Jesus. The Christian faith can’t be proved, certainly not through a book that requires the reader to accept it as proof a priori – no matter how much we expect or would like for that to be the case.

Let me ask you: why is it logically necessary, rather than merely preferable for one reason or another, that the Bible be entirely true through and through? (Please try to answer without begging the question of its divine authorship and what that should look like.)

My friend Mike Beidler‘s not busy enough being a military diplomat in the Middle East right now. You know, things going so swimmingly, he doesn’t have anything at all to do. Since he’s been over there, he’s joined a group that is watching Focus on the Family’s film series The Truth Project that seeks to reinforce the predominant American evangelical worldview — you know, the Truth.

An important component of this project, of course, includes a critique of evolution, which, also of course, has bugged Mike a bit. I saw him writing up his thoughts in brief form on Facebook and decided to twist his prompt him to channel these interesting thoughts toward his recently inactive blog.

I succeeded.

Your assignment? Go read it, and give him enough responses so that he feels pressured to continue.