In case any of you were wondering what the Biblical ark looked like, or how big it was; now you can know. A believer in Europe actually built an ark to scale.
Pretty cool!
Friday, February 20, 2009
Dude built and Ark
My dad recently came across this story on the net and passed it on.
In case any of you were wondering what the Biblical ark looked like, or how big it was; now you can know. A believer in Europe actually built an ark to scale.
Pretty cool!
In case any of you were wondering what the Biblical ark looked like, or how big it was; now you can know. A believer in Europe actually built an ark to scale.
Pretty cool!
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Faith and Facts
Yesterday (2/15), Pastor Jeremy preached out of Genesis 5. This chapter is the genealogy linking Adam to Noah, and we focused on Adam's great-great-grandson, Enoch. I want to further touch on how Hebrews 11 characterizes Enoch, and how that can shape our understanding of faith. Genesis 5 says that Enoch walked with God, and Hebrews 11 says that Enoch pleased God. As Pastor Jeremy said, the Septuagint (that’s the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew text) took “walked with God” to be synonymous with “pleased God.” This gives us a picture of what it actually means to please God. It seems to be a picture of a close personal relationship. Now, by “personal” I do not mean private. Rather, I mean that Enoch’s relationship with God was, in a way, no different from any of his other relationships with people. People are persons, and God is a person (well, three persons). In that sense, we all relate to one another and to God in exactly the same way—as persons. However, I’m sure that Enoch’s relationship with God was unique. It was unlike any other relationship he had both in that each relationship is unique in and of itself and this specific relationship was with God. So, part of pleasing God is to be in this kind of relationship with him (note that I haven’t spelled out exactly what that relationship looks like, and I’m not going to do that here).Now notice what that relationship is not. It is not a relationship between a knower and facts or doctrine. Rather it is a relationship between persons. Does this mean that we should forsake doctrine, evidence, and common sense in order to thrust ourselves blindly into the arms of God?
I think not.
Hebrews 11 does interpret “walked with God” to mean “pleased God,” but then it goes on to say that without faith, it is impossible to please God. Specifically, anyone that comes to God must believe that God exists and that God rewards those who seek him. It is important to think about how the author of Hebrews phrased these requirements. He says that we must believe THAT _________. In the blank, we fill in a statement of fact: either “God exists,” or “God rewards those who seek him.” This is a little odd since we just noted how Enoch’s relationship was with God, not with any fact, but here it says that the faith that pleases God is constituted by assent to these two facts. Maybe we should have expected it to say that anyone coming to God should believe “in” him, or “trust” him, since “believing in” and “trusting in” typically take persons as their objects (as opposed to facts). Whatever our expectations, it’s certainly not what the text says. The text says facts matter to faith.
If facts matter to faith, then we can’t forsake doctrine, evidence, and common sense, even if that means we CANNOT thrust ourselves blindly into the arms of God. We have a bit of tension here: Pleasing God means having a real relationship with him as a person. But at the same time, since our faith, a necessary component for pleasing God, is constituted by facts, we have to submit that personal relationship to the standards of doctrine, evidence, and common sense.
This isn’t a contradiction. It’s not even a paradox.
We shouldn’t get caught up in thinking of our relationship with God as either this “personal” relationship where we experience God or an “evidential” relationship where we merely assent to the truth of factual statements. It’s both. I’ll give a quick and simple example before I get into the technical stuff. Valentine’s Day was two days ago. After all the Hallmark bull gets trashed and after all the roses wilt and after all the candy is eaten, Valentine’s Day is a day to celebrate the love we experience in our most intimate relationships, say the relationship with a spouse. It is a day to “know” your spouse like Adam “knew” Eve (if you don’t know what I mean, maybe this will help: Cain was born nine months after Adam “knew” Eve). This “knowing” is the deepest way to express love between two humans. BUT, guys, if you don’t know that your wife likes fire-and-ice roses as opposed to red ones, if you don’t know that your wife likes to get her feet massaged, if you don’t know any of the million and a half other FACTS about your wife that she expects you know, it’s VERY unlikely that you’ll get to “know” her in any other way. So having a “personal” relationship with your spouse entails knowing lot’s of facts about your spouse. So, at least at this point, we can see that Hebrews 11 isn’t asserting a contradiction.
Now I’ll move to the more technical stuff. Despite the fact that marriage is hard work, it’s not really all that difficult to find out the relevant facts about your spouse. We learn, or should learn, most of these prior to getting married. We continue to learn about our spouse throughout the marriage. But learning the relevant facts about God is a bit harder. There may be some who already object. Perhaps, there is someone who learns all they need to know about God from his experience of God. For example, perhaps one learns about God solely through prayer and meditation. I would ask why you think you are communicating with God. How do you know that the still small voice is not a demonic whisper? How do you know you’re not just delusional? The only way to answer these questions rationally is to appeal to some type of evidence. Another way to answer the question is to show that everything communicated to you is in line with Scripture and doctrine. Last, common sense can serve as judge too (although this one is a bit tricky; common sense tells us that God could not command us to do something immoral, but God could very well command us, against our common sense, to give our last dime to a struggling missionary). We just have to take common sense on a case-by-case basis. Fortunately, the other two categories are usually sufficient. Therefore, if you’re concerned about knowing that it is really God with whom you’re in contact, then you’ve got to appeal to facts.
Like I said, getting to the facts is difficult. The most important facts, the facts about the trustworthiness of the Bible, facts about whether Jesus was really resurrected, facts about fulfilled prophecy, and facts about the creation of the world, are buried in philosophy books, biblical commentaries, science books, and academic journals of all types. So accessing the facts is difficult, but understanding them is difficult too. That understanding takes time to read and think; it takes time that we usually set aside for TV. The facts require the use of our reason, and that’s not always easy.
When we get these facts, we’ve got a good basis from which to judge the truth or falsehood of a statement like “God exists.” This is an important step because it partly constitutes our faith. Latin has two words for faith, fides and fiducia. St. Augustine used the Latin word fides to refer to this part of faith. This is the step where we are aware of the claims of Christianity and of the evidence for and against those claims. It is the step where we say, “These claims are true; I believe them.” It essentially rational. I mean that you can’t have fides without engaging your reason. Therefore, blind faith in some kind of god (even the God of the Bible) without well-reasoned beliefs about what that God is like or if that God even exists, will never amount to the kind of faith that pleases God. It is only the kind of faith that pleases God that saves.
(A qualification is in order here. I do not mean to suggest that everyone must go back to school and get PhD’s in archeology, physics, philosophy, biology, ancient Near Eastern languages, Greek, etc. to be able to have fides faith. I do mean to suggest that you should do everything possible to learn everything you can about whatever you can. God has not called us all to be scholars, but he has called us all to love him with all our minds. Loving him with our minds means a lifetime of learning about God and creation.)
Once fides is in place, St. Augustine claimed that fiducia is the next step. Fiducia in this sense is something like “trust.” When we get fides, we learn what God is like. Learning that God is all good, all powerful, all knowing, ever present, and trustworthy puts the groundwork in place to actually trust him. We move from mere assent to facts into trusting a person. Fiducia also entails our own obedience and faithfulness. Since God is all knowing and trustworthy, we can have confidence that what he asks of us is best for us. When we learn that Jesus really did physically resurrect from the dead in history (as opposed to the resurrection being some kind of myth communicating “spiritual” truth), if obeying him means persecution and death, we can have confidence that we will be raised too because he promised that. Fiducia is, then, that part of faith that is the personal and experiential relationship with the Father, through Christ, in the power of the Spirit. But remember, fiducia is grounded in fides. The only way one comes to have a genuine personal relationship with God is through genuine well-reasoned and rational belief.
It is important to point out that neither fides nor fiducia are individually sufficient to guarantee the kind of faith that Hebrews claims pleases God. You must have both. Believing a laundry list of facts does not necessarily lead to any kind of relationship. I know lot’s of things about President Lincoln, but I don’t have any kind of relationship with him. I only have fides regarding Lincoln, and I cannot have fiducia because he’s dead. On the other hand, I’ve already shown that a genuine close relationship with another person (say one’s spouse) is impossible without a foundation of facts about the person. You can’t have real fiducia without fides. You may have fake fiducia. If real fiducia is something like the relationship one has with one’s spouse, fake fiducia is something like going to a prostitute. You get an ecstatic experience within the context of a sham relationship. There is no intimacy, no trust, no commitment. There is only raw experience with who knows who. Therefore, the difference between the prostitute and one’s spouse is the presence of intimacy, trust, and commitment. That intimacy, trust, and commitment only comes about in a context where husband and wife know about each other, that is, they have fides. I think it goes without saying that fake fiducia won’t please God. If doesn’t count as faith, and thus it doesn’t save.
Last, I think the Augustinian conception of faith is the right explanation of what’s going on in Hebrews 11:6. It is interesting that, while no one knows who the author of Hebrews was, it is very clear that the author had a solid understanding of Jewish thought and was heavily influenced by Paul’s teachings. Paul says that salvation does not come by works, but by faith, and Hebrews echoes that: those that pleased God such that he counted them righteous were those that had faith. Thus, the Pauline line is that nothing you can do can save you. But some scholars try to claim that Paul and James (James, the brother of Jesus, who wrote the book of James), had different and incompatible conceptions of faith. James wrote the following:
“Faith that doesn’t lead us to do good deeds is all alone and dead! … You surely believe there is only one God. That’s fine. Even demons believe this, and it makes them shake with fear” (2: 17-19 CEV).
So the contradiction is supposed to be that Paul says that faith and not works saves, and James says that faith and works saves. Which is it? Well, given what we know about fides and fiducia, we know that this is no real contradiction. Saving faith is belief that leads to trust in and faithfulness to God. Trusting in and being faithful to God means you will have works. But we’ve already seen that mere assent to facts isn’t enough. Paul and James agree on this point. We know that works isn’t enough either; works alone amounts to fake fiducia. A major theme of Romans and Galatians (both written by Paul) is that works without faith in Christ is useless. A logical implication of James’ comments is that while it is impossible to have saving faith without works, it is entirely possible to have works without saving faith. Again, James and Paul agree. Last, we see that saving faith is assent to facts that leads to faithfulness, obedience, and trust. Faithfulness and obedience mean DOING things, DOING works! Paul tells Timothy to “[w]arn the rich people of this world not to be proud or to trust in wealth that is easily lost. Tell them to have faith in God, who is rich and blesses us with everything we need to enjoy life. Instruct them to do as many good deeds as they can and to help everyone” (1 Timothy 6: 17-18). We’ve already seen what James says. Therefore, there is no contradiction. Saving faith that pleases God entails that the Christian will have a robust and well-reasoned body of evidence that justifies her belief, and that belief will motivate her to do the things God has commanded out of a heart of trust and love.
Real faith takes reason and relationship. This is something you can’t do on your own. Paul says in Romans 1:18 that humans actively suppress knowledge of God. That means the only way you can move from fides to fiducia is by God acting first. His Spirit reaches out to all, and clears the way for us to come. Jesus stands at the door of our lives and knocks, and the Spirit draws us to open that door. But we must know who is drawing us and who is knocking if we’re going to have dinner with him.
This isn’t a contradiction. It’s not even a paradox.
We shouldn’t get caught up in thinking of our relationship with God as either this “personal” relationship where we experience God or an “evidential” relationship where we merely assent to the truth of factual statements. It’s both. I’ll give a quick and simple example before I get into the technical stuff. Valentine’s Day was two days ago. After all the Hallmark bull gets trashed and after all the roses wilt and after all the candy is eaten, Valentine’s Day is a day to celebrate the love we experience in our most intimate relationships, say the relationship with a spouse. It is a day to “know” your spouse like Adam “knew” Eve (if you don’t know what I mean, maybe this will help: Cain was born nine months after Adam “knew” Eve). This “knowing” is the deepest way to express love between two humans. BUT, guys, if you don’t know that your wife likes fire-and-ice roses as opposed to red ones, if you don’t know that your wife likes to get her feet massaged, if you don’t know any of the million and a half other FACTS about your wife that she expects you know, it’s VERY unlikely that you’ll get to “know” her in any other way. So having a “personal” relationship with your spouse entails knowing lot’s of facts about your spouse. So, at least at this point, we can see that Hebrews 11 isn’t asserting a contradiction.
Now I’ll move to the more technical stuff. Despite the fact that marriage is hard work, it’s not really all that difficult to find out the relevant facts about your spouse. We learn, or should learn, most of these prior to getting married. We continue to learn about our spouse throughout the marriage. But learning the relevant facts about God is a bit harder. There may be some who already object. Perhaps, there is someone who learns all they need to know about God from his experience of God. For example, perhaps one learns about God solely through prayer and meditation. I would ask why you think you are communicating with God. How do you know that the still small voice is not a demonic whisper? How do you know you’re not just delusional? The only way to answer these questions rationally is to appeal to some type of evidence. Another way to answer the question is to show that everything communicated to you is in line with Scripture and doctrine. Last, common sense can serve as judge too (although this one is a bit tricky; common sense tells us that God could not command us to do something immoral, but God could very well command us, against our common sense, to give our last dime to a struggling missionary). We just have to take common sense on a case-by-case basis. Fortunately, the other two categories are usually sufficient. Therefore, if you’re concerned about knowing that it is really God with whom you’re in contact, then you’ve got to appeal to facts.
Like I said, getting to the facts is difficult. The most important facts, the facts about the trustworthiness of the Bible, facts about whether Jesus was really resurrected, facts about fulfilled prophecy, and facts about the creation of the world, are buried in philosophy books, biblical commentaries, science books, and academic journals of all types. So accessing the facts is difficult, but understanding them is difficult too. That understanding takes time to read and think; it takes time that we usually set aside for TV. The facts require the use of our reason, and that’s not always easy.
When we get these facts, we’ve got a good basis from which to judge the truth or falsehood of a statement like “God exists.” This is an important step because it partly constitutes our faith. Latin has two words for faith, fides and fiducia. St. Augustine used the Latin word fides to refer to this part of faith. This is the step where we are aware of the claims of Christianity and of the evidence for and against those claims. It is the step where we say, “These claims are true; I believe them.” It essentially rational. I mean that you can’t have fides without engaging your reason. Therefore, blind faith in some kind of god (even the God of the Bible) without well-reasoned beliefs about what that God is like or if that God even exists, will never amount to the kind of faith that pleases God. It is only the kind of faith that pleases God that saves.
(A qualification is in order here. I do not mean to suggest that everyone must go back to school and get PhD’s in archeology, physics, philosophy, biology, ancient Near Eastern languages, Greek, etc. to be able to have fides faith. I do mean to suggest that you should do everything possible to learn everything you can about whatever you can. God has not called us all to be scholars, but he has called us all to love him with all our minds. Loving him with our minds means a lifetime of learning about God and creation.)
Once fides is in place, St. Augustine claimed that fiducia is the next step. Fiducia in this sense is something like “trust.” When we get fides, we learn what God is like. Learning that God is all good, all powerful, all knowing, ever present, and trustworthy puts the groundwork in place to actually trust him. We move from mere assent to facts into trusting a person. Fiducia also entails our own obedience and faithfulness. Since God is all knowing and trustworthy, we can have confidence that what he asks of us is best for us. When we learn that Jesus really did physically resurrect from the dead in history (as opposed to the resurrection being some kind of myth communicating “spiritual” truth), if obeying him means persecution and death, we can have confidence that we will be raised too because he promised that. Fiducia is, then, that part of faith that is the personal and experiential relationship with the Father, through Christ, in the power of the Spirit. But remember, fiducia is grounded in fides. The only way one comes to have a genuine personal relationship with God is through genuine well-reasoned and rational belief.
It is important to point out that neither fides nor fiducia are individually sufficient to guarantee the kind of faith that Hebrews claims pleases God. You must have both. Believing a laundry list of facts does not necessarily lead to any kind of relationship. I know lot’s of things about President Lincoln, but I don’t have any kind of relationship with him. I only have fides regarding Lincoln, and I cannot have fiducia because he’s dead. On the other hand, I’ve already shown that a genuine close relationship with another person (say one’s spouse) is impossible without a foundation of facts about the person. You can’t have real fiducia without fides. You may have fake fiducia. If real fiducia is something like the relationship one has with one’s spouse, fake fiducia is something like going to a prostitute. You get an ecstatic experience within the context of a sham relationship. There is no intimacy, no trust, no commitment. There is only raw experience with who knows who. Therefore, the difference between the prostitute and one’s spouse is the presence of intimacy, trust, and commitment. That intimacy, trust, and commitment only comes about in a context where husband and wife know about each other, that is, they have fides. I think it goes without saying that fake fiducia won’t please God. If doesn’t count as faith, and thus it doesn’t save.
Last, I think the Augustinian conception of faith is the right explanation of what’s going on in Hebrews 11:6. It is interesting that, while no one knows who the author of Hebrews was, it is very clear that the author had a solid understanding of Jewish thought and was heavily influenced by Paul’s teachings. Paul says that salvation does not come by works, but by faith, and Hebrews echoes that: those that pleased God such that he counted them righteous were those that had faith. Thus, the Pauline line is that nothing you can do can save you. But some scholars try to claim that Paul and James (James, the brother of Jesus, who wrote the book of James), had different and incompatible conceptions of faith. James wrote the following:
“Faith that doesn’t lead us to do good deeds is all alone and dead! … You surely believe there is only one God. That’s fine. Even demons believe this, and it makes them shake with fear” (2: 17-19 CEV).
So the contradiction is supposed to be that Paul says that faith and not works saves, and James says that faith and works saves. Which is it? Well, given what we know about fides and fiducia, we know that this is no real contradiction. Saving faith is belief that leads to trust in and faithfulness to God. Trusting in and being faithful to God means you will have works. But we’ve already seen that mere assent to facts isn’t enough. Paul and James agree on this point. We know that works isn’t enough either; works alone amounts to fake fiducia. A major theme of Romans and Galatians (both written by Paul) is that works without faith in Christ is useless. A logical implication of James’ comments is that while it is impossible to have saving faith without works, it is entirely possible to have works without saving faith. Again, James and Paul agree. Last, we see that saving faith is assent to facts that leads to faithfulness, obedience, and trust. Faithfulness and obedience mean DOING things, DOING works! Paul tells Timothy to “[w]arn the rich people of this world not to be proud or to trust in wealth that is easily lost. Tell them to have faith in God, who is rich and blesses us with everything we need to enjoy life. Instruct them to do as many good deeds as they can and to help everyone” (1 Timothy 6: 17-18). We’ve already seen what James says. Therefore, there is no contradiction. Saving faith that pleases God entails that the Christian will have a robust and well-reasoned body of evidence that justifies her belief, and that belief will motivate her to do the things God has commanded out of a heart of trust and love.
Real faith takes reason and relationship. This is something you can’t do on your own. Paul says in Romans 1:18 that humans actively suppress knowledge of God. That means the only way you can move from fides to fiducia is by God acting first. His Spirit reaches out to all, and clears the way for us to come. Jesus stands at the door of our lives and knocks, and the Spirit draws us to open that door. But we must know who is drawing us and who is knocking if we’re going to have dinner with him.
-Jeremy Green
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