Category: Christianity generally

Evidence never demands a verdict

I recently became aware of an upcoming event on a university campus. It was described thus (paraphrased to eliminate identifying references):

The Symposium is the single largest annual outreach event in our community.  This year, we’re hosting a debate on whether faith in God is reasonable.  Next day we’ll have over a dozen professors giving 30+ talks on matters relevant to faith and academics, science, comparative religions, suffering, etc. from a Christian point of view.  Thousands will be in attendance.

(Italics added) I question the efficacy of this approach. Evidence never demands a verdict.

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A few years ago, a young man – with several years’ history of schizophrenia and abuse of a prescription drug – went to his parents’ house at night, knocked on the door, and when it opened, systematically began pumping his father full of bullets, following dad as he fled across the road and calmly reloading.

Before you judge him for his drug abuse, you need to realize that “self-medication” is pandemic among people with serious mental illness. They take medicine to try to feel better even if those prescriptions aren’t prescribed and aren’t remotely appropriate for what’s ailing them.

For years his family had struggled to keep him in reality. There were interventions and hospitalizations. Still, he retreated into a private world with cassette tapes of some backwoods evangelist who had caught his fancy. The family, devastated by the tragedy, nevertheless agreed that their son/brother was insane. The evidence of his insanity before and after the shooting was overwhelming.

The state, correctly, perceived that it had a most difficult burden, whatever the law said about “burdens of proof,” of proving the defendant sane when he killed his father. So they hired the best Sophist money could buy, who flew in from the coast and put on a dog and pony show for a full week of court time. The gist of his testimony was that despite years of insanity behind him and years of insanity before him, the young man was stone cold sane when he committed the insane act on his father, toward whom he bore no ill will until he became mentally ill. “Trust me. I’m a Sophist.”

The jury, presumably not wanting this young man to show up on their doorsteps with pizza delivery in a few years after some psychiatrist declared his schizophrenia control “good enough,” endorsed the opinions of the Sophist.

The young man sits in prison, where he’ll become an old man, the world spared at least one pyscho pizza deliveryman.

Evidence never demands a verdict.

* * * * *

The evidence for God’s existence is ample.

  • The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows his handiwork. Day to day utters speech, and night to night shows knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. (Psalm 19:1-3)
  • Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. (Romans 1:19-22)
  • The fool hath said in his heart, “there is no God.” (Psalm 53:1)

I cite those verses not as syllogistic proof, or as an appeal to authority, but as the testimony of people who recognized God where they saw Him. I see Him, too, on all but the very darkest days of my life.

I don’t claim the proof is overwhelming. For various reasons, some can’t see, or won’t admit they see, the evidence. The former may be like color-blindness, or loss of the sense of smell.

The latter may just not want God showing up at the door and knocking. Some bring the Sophists in to reassure themselves. “Man, Bill Maher has, like, so nailed this god myth once and for all! Him and Penn Jillette!”

Evidence never demands a verdict.

* * * * *

The Symposium, I suspect, will convince few who aren’t already convinced. If it convinces anyone else, it will convince them merely of the god of the deists, the grand watchmaker who built it (or evolved it) all wound up.

I’m sure the sponsors want, shall we say, more than reluctant deists for their efforts.

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Modern Ironies

Two of the ironies of our era:

  • Newspapers unmistakably designed for people who can’t or don’t want to read.
  • Churches unmistakably designed for people who can’t or don’t want to worship.

(H/T Terry Mattingly in a talk from several years ago.)

It’s thus no coincidence that 20% of Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated. If worship is merely a second-rate rock or smooth jazz show with a moralistic therapeutic deist “be nice now” admonition (or political exhortation) thrown in, then to hell with it. Homo adorans needs more.

That 20% unaffiliation makes us, by the ironic way, more irreligious that our old atheist nemesis Russia, where believers of one sort or another are 88%. Might it have something to do with the dominant religion there being famous for the profundity and beauty of its worship?

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Rearranging the mosaic

Just in case you’ve never encountered St. Irenaeus’ timeless simile, here’s Fr. George Florovsky’s telling:

Denouncing the Gnostic mishandling of Scriptures, St. Irenaeus introduced a picturesque simile. A skillful artist has made a beautiful image of a king, composed of many precious jewels. Now, another man takes this mosaic image apart, re-arranges the stones in another pattern so as to produce the image of a dog or of a fox. Then he starts claiming that this was the original picture, by the first master, under the pretext that the gems (the ψηφιδες) were authentic. In fact, however, the original design had been destroyed — λυσας την υποκειμενην του ανθρωπου ιδεαν. This is precisely what the heretics do with the Scripture. They disregard and disrupt “the order and connection” of the Holy Writ and “dismember the truth” — λυοντες τα μελη της αληθειας. Words, expressions, and images —ρηματα, λεξεις παραβολαι —are genuine, indeed, but the design, the υποθεσις (ipothesis), is arbitrary and false (adv. haeres., 1. 8. 1).

Another reason why I cherish every accusation that Orthodoxy is stagnant and hasn’t kept up with the times.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Whatever it is, it isn’t football

The recently-departed Andy Griffith had a great routine, Football, as a stand-up comic before his long decades on television. It starts off with this:

It was back last October, I believe it was, we was gonna hold a Tent Service off at this college town ….

From there, he goes on to recount his first encounter with football. Like most humor, it’s less funny on repeat hearings, but I laughed until I cried first time. Treat yourself if you’ve never heard it.

I thought of it this morning as I learned that Jason Peters, Front Porch Republic’s “Bar Jester,” is taking a sabbatical from weekly, systematic blogging. To him I owe the tag “Krustianity,” derived initially from my favorite of his blogs, Mere Krustianity (if you’re not in “the club,” that’s an allusion).

Here is, for my tastes, the key excerpt:

If you find yourself in bars, as I sometimes rarely do, and if you find yourself in heated conversation therein with people hostile to religion, as I often do, you may have a strong desire, as I always do, to establish a widely agreed-on way of distinguishing between what you believe and what Colorado Springs believes. Well at long last I’ve done it:
If someone were to shorten the field by forty yards, widen it by twenty, give you thirteen downs to advance twelve yards for a first down, and award you six points for doing so, you’d rightly object to his calling this new game “football.” You’d say to him, “that one’s taken. Find another name.”
I think the same applies to that fairly old, solid, and stately religion known as “Christianity.” Those who have altered the faith beyond recognition should come up with a new name for what it is they’re practicing. I suggest “Krustianity.”

Yup. Whatever the new game is, it isn’t football. It seems almost providential that Andy started his story with a Tent Meeting, a progenitor of today’s chapels-cum-coffee-bars in improbable places like former big box stores, the apotheosis of Evangelical Krustianity. The “’Bible Harvest Chapel,’ which is a kind of movie theater retrofitted to a former big box electronics store” was the Bar Jester’s launch pad.

But with even Colorado Springs now trying to distinguish between what it believes and “what Colorado Springs believes,” there perhaps is room for hope that Krustians will again become recognizably Christian. My habitual pessimism has been challenged by lots of little signs, the size of a man’s fist, that people are starting to “get” things of various degrees of importance – things about which American culture generally, and American religious culture in particular, started on a real bender many decades (or even centuries) ago.

One such sign is the establishment of a Patristics Center at Wheaton College, which I grew up seeing as the Evangelical’s Jerusalem. Another is the widespread influence of Orthodox theology through western academic theology over the past century or so. Once you get to know the early Church writers, it’s hard to argue in sincerity – and I’ll give credit for a redemptive dose of sincerity to many Evangelicals (though fewer than I once thought) – that early Christianity was essential Evangelical, especially in its ecclesiology, its doctrine of the Church.

There are people with a financial interest in, indeed a livelihood tied up with, running places like Bible Harvest Chapel, but if the GOP can collapse in a decade, so can Krustianity.

The odds of “New Christians” getting it right will rise dramatically if they cease ignoring or even despising Christian history. “To be deep in history is to cease being Protestant,” Cardinal Newman said, but that’s a risk a person of integrity will take.

* * * * *

A side note may be in Order. I rarely write about mainstream Protestantism, and there are a couple of reasons for that.

First, I never was a mainstream Protestant, whereas I was unequivocally Evangelical for 29 years and equivocally Evangelical for an additional 20. I’m still connected, as closely as one can be connected to anyone, to an equivocal Evangelical.  In two weeks, I will be recovering from the 45th-year reunion of my class at an Evangelical boarding high school, which was and remains very formative in my life.

These people remain, in a sense, my spiritual family. I care about them. I want them to get it right without further ado.

Second, old habits die hard. As an Evangelical, I wrote off mainstream Protestantism as moribund. I now suspect there was more life there than I thought, but I still think it’s dying and, rightly or wrongly, I give its members less credit for sincere Christian faith than I give Evangelicals (as I said: old habits die hard), and thus have lower hopes for them becoming Orthodox instead of just lapsing into … oh, never mind.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.