The Beef: Naturalism's Stranglehold on Adolescent Education
Dear readers,
A friend's comments on the previous post forced me to dig deeper and extract the reasons for my recent plethora of apologetically oriented thoughts. Please read that post, then the following comments, before diving into this post. Here's where I will begin.
This is how I see the process of "coming to faith in Christ" working, at least on the front end:
1. Theism is accepted as possible.
2. Different theistic options are investigated and weighed.
3. If one chooses to investigate Christianity, he/she engages with the written sources of the faith and/or the community of faith (including the preaching of the Word).
4. If either of these commends the Christian faith, the person can stick his/her head in the sand to suppress the fear of the probability that there is a God who has claims on his/her life, or they can boldly press further in their investigation in one or both of the two ways listed above.
5. At some point, they are forced to judge the trustworthiness of the documents which they are investigating to communicate accurately the tenets of the faith. For some, this happens intuitively; for others, it requires a bit (understatement) of legwork. But for those who are willing to do the work, and are willing to submit themselves to sound methods of historical criticism, then the Scriptures will glaringly demonstrate their reliability, not least over against the entire remainder of documents of like age.
6. Once the reliability of Scripture has been established with a high degree of probability (which is demonstrably feasible and likely to be done), then one enters the hermeneutical process, whether cognizantly or intuitively. Hence, they are engaging with the text of Scripture and with secondary (or further-removed) works that aid them in the hermeneutical process.
7. From there the claims of faith can be weighed on an informed basis... which is all I’m contending for.
So we're still nowhere near proving Christianity to be true (not least because, as I've said elsewhere, just like every other worldview, it can't be done). But that's not my concern. Here's my beef. Students from elementary school up, and increasingly as they progress, until it climaxes in college, are being indoctrinated by naturalist verificationism, which, as we know is the inherent proprietor of atheism. Day after day, year after year, impressionable human beings are taught to think in exclusively naturalistic terms, and all other paradigms are, in the name of the 1st Amendment, deemed absurd. But thirteen years of indoctrination cannot be quickly nor easily undone. They cannot be undone in the very few hours per week that we spend cultivating our hearts and minds for God through church. Typical sermons are worthless for everyone but those who are hungry for them. Adolescents, on the whole, are not hungry for spiritual reality because the very air they breathe—from their naturalistic education to their “pop-nihilistic” (love your word, Michael!) culture—conditions them to believe that the Now (and a really pathetic version of it!) is all there is to live for.
I'm sick and tired of atheistic presuppositions having free reign over the academia that is the steward of the minds of people in their formative years. It's wholly unethical. It's depraved. It's unjust. It's dangerous, for crying out loud! Literally! We are forming heads without souls. Even prominent leaders committed to liberal education have awakened to this grave realization. Here is the gamble: naturalistic education creates brilliant monsters and a horrific world. Intelligence and education are less than worthless apart from a good soul—they are utterly destructive. In that sense, I would rather someone be a Buddhist than an atheist. Islam, on the other hand, “peaceful” or not, is militant in its determination to rule the world—just like Christianity is. I don’t blame them for it. I just do not accept Islam as a friendly neighbor to Christianity which can peacefully coexist. Their goals are the same, and they are in direct, head-to-head competition. We will never have peace. Nor should we pursue it.
Civilization is not in progress. Day after day, our capacity—and appetite—to destroy life grows. First, the automatic rifle, then fighter planes, then biological weapons, then nuclear (ok, so my chronology may be a bit off, but you get the point). Now we are creating life (embryos) in order to destroy it, for the so-called “betterment of mankind”. We are murdering millions of babies per year in this so-called “just” and humanitarian nation. Prisons cannot be built fast enough or big enough to contain the increasing flood of menaces to society. The world is turning to hell. Christ is the only hope. Either I believe it or I don’t. If I really believe it, I’ll defend it with my life. I have one life to live, and I can spend it deconstructively or constructively. At some point, I have to actually live as if something is definitely true. I have to run with what I’ve got, and let God confirm or reform my thinking along the way. I have to seek Him fervently in prayer. I have to take my brokenness and frustration to Him and expect Him to heal me. I have to take my questions to him and humbly trust that He will give me the answers I need, when I need them. And you know what? I’ve been at this crossroads, and I’ve done these things—every one of them. Not perfectly, but I’ve tested God and He has granted me peace that surpasses understanding—the kind of peace that only He can give.
A friend's comments on the previous post forced me to dig deeper and extract the reasons for my recent plethora of apologetically oriented thoughts. Please read that post, then the following comments, before diving into this post. Here's where I will begin.
This is how I see the process of "coming to faith in Christ" working, at least on the front end:
1. Theism is accepted as possible.
2. Different theistic options are investigated and weighed.
3. If one chooses to investigate Christianity, he/she engages with the written sources of the faith and/or the community of faith (including the preaching of the Word).
4. If either of these commends the Christian faith, the person can stick his/her head in the sand to suppress the fear of the probability that there is a God who has claims on his/her life, or they can boldly press further in their investigation in one or both of the two ways listed above.
5. At some point, they are forced to judge the trustworthiness of the documents which they are investigating to communicate accurately the tenets of the faith. For some, this happens intuitively; for others, it requires a bit (understatement) of legwork. But for those who are willing to do the work, and are willing to submit themselves to sound methods of historical criticism, then the Scriptures will glaringly demonstrate their reliability, not least over against the entire remainder of documents of like age.
6. Once the reliability of Scripture has been established with a high degree of probability (which is demonstrably feasible and likely to be done), then one enters the hermeneutical process, whether cognizantly or intuitively. Hence, they are engaging with the text of Scripture and with secondary (or further-removed) works that aid them in the hermeneutical process.
7. From there the claims of faith can be weighed on an informed basis... which is all I’m contending for.
So we're still nowhere near proving Christianity to be true (not least because, as I've said elsewhere, just like every other worldview, it can't be done). But that's not my concern. Here's my beef. Students from elementary school up, and increasingly as they progress, until it climaxes in college, are being indoctrinated by naturalist verificationism, which, as we know is the inherent proprietor of atheism. Day after day, year after year, impressionable human beings are taught to think in exclusively naturalistic terms, and all other paradigms are, in the name of the 1st Amendment, deemed absurd. But thirteen years of indoctrination cannot be quickly nor easily undone. They cannot be undone in the very few hours per week that we spend cultivating our hearts and minds for God through church. Typical sermons are worthless for everyone but those who are hungry for them. Adolescents, on the whole, are not hungry for spiritual reality because the very air they breathe—from their naturalistic education to their “pop-nihilistic” (love your word, Michael!) culture—conditions them to believe that the Now (and a really pathetic version of it!) is all there is to live for.
I'm sick and tired of atheistic presuppositions having free reign over the academia that is the steward of the minds of people in their formative years. It's wholly unethical. It's depraved. It's unjust. It's dangerous, for crying out loud! Literally! We are forming heads without souls. Even prominent leaders committed to liberal education have awakened to this grave realization. Here is the gamble: naturalistic education creates brilliant monsters and a horrific world. Intelligence and education are less than worthless apart from a good soul—they are utterly destructive. In that sense, I would rather someone be a Buddhist than an atheist. Islam, on the other hand, “peaceful” or not, is militant in its determination to rule the world—just like Christianity is. I don’t blame them for it. I just do not accept Islam as a friendly neighbor to Christianity which can peacefully coexist. Their goals are the same, and they are in direct, head-to-head competition. We will never have peace. Nor should we pursue it.
Civilization is not in progress. Day after day, our capacity—and appetite—to destroy life grows. First, the automatic rifle, then fighter planes, then biological weapons, then nuclear (ok, so my chronology may be a bit off, but you get the point). Now we are creating life (embryos) in order to destroy it, for the so-called “betterment of mankind”. We are murdering millions of babies per year in this so-called “just” and humanitarian nation. Prisons cannot be built fast enough or big enough to contain the increasing flood of menaces to society. The world is turning to hell. Christ is the only hope. Either I believe it or I don’t. If I really believe it, I’ll defend it with my life. I have one life to live, and I can spend it deconstructively or constructively. At some point, I have to actually live as if something is definitely true. I have to run with what I’ve got, and let God confirm or reform my thinking along the way. I have to seek Him fervently in prayer. I have to take my brokenness and frustration to Him and expect Him to heal me. I have to take my questions to him and humbly trust that He will give me the answers I need, when I need them. And you know what? I’ve been at this crossroads, and I’ve done these things—every one of them. Not perfectly, but I’ve tested God and He has granted me peace that surpasses understanding—the kind of peace that only He can give.
On much of this, I think that we're simply fighting separate wars. However, concerning your quote,
ReplyDelete"But for those who are willing to do the work, and are willing to submit themselves to sound methods of historical criticism, then the Scriptures will glaringly demonstrate their reliability, not least over against the entire remainder of documents of like age."
I wholeheartedly disagree. Again, you personally can take nourishment from such apologetic readings, and share your own personal story with others as your own personal story, but when it comes to announcing them to others as demonstrable evidence, you have only done half the research. I'm hitting on this point because such declarations are harmful to many who are hurt and questioning inside and outside of the church, and the lack of self-criticism in apologetics has driven some from the faith. Apologetics must be approached with fear and trembling, and with a healthy awareness of one's own ignorance; trumpets and triumphalism, and reliance on Evangelical myths without earnestly searching out the non-Christian view, destroy people. There is often no shortcut around long, painful, unresolved dialogues between the different positions.
I have found that most of the stock arguments for the historicity of the Bible are flawed, though we would have to bring up specific ones for me to show those flaws. Those that aren't, often miss the point (I don't care if there are more copies of the NT closer to the time of its writing than to those of Homer, or Caesar; I'm not basing my existence off of them, I don't hold Homer to be doing history, and Caesar isn't giving me anything hard to swallow like a man being the one true God).
But even besides this, I can hold that the majority of the Gospels and Acts are true, and historically reliable, and yet not believe in Christianity. For one thing, the Resurrection is the one event needed, and we can debate about the accuracy of documents concerning it (for the record, it doesn't matter that there are no good alternative explanations; it is a unique event even without miracles, and historical research by its very nature has trouble giving explanations for unique events. That doesn't mean the Christian answer automatically is the most probable). Even with a resurrection, we are not necessarily on the level of Christianity (though one may be hard-pressed to find a better explanation; I'm sure that Muslims would have no problem saying that Jesus were resurrected, though, if it weren't that they deny that God would let one of His prophets be crucified). Finally, even with historical reliability of the Gospels and Acts, we are no closer to establishing the reliability of the theological interpretations given in the rest of the NT (the Liar-Lunatic-Lord argument is another awful but often-produced argument; without this, and with the serious hermeneutical problem of determining whether Jesus actually claimed to be Lord, there is no connection between the reliability of the Gospels and the reliability of Paul).
On top of this, there are other factors to consider. Even if there were good reasons for believing the NT in and of itself, and it were reasonable to believe testimony, there are conflicting testimonies (such as, say, Islam; not to mention the testimonies of those who claim enlightenment in Buddhism) which take away from the immediate force of Scripture. Also, there is the fact that we should judge the tree by its fruit, as Jesus suggested, and despite the rhetoric in the pulpit, it is far from obvious that Christians are that much better than other groups who actually care about higher values.
In the end, I'm not merely saying that there is no proof. I'm saying that there is no "demonstrable" or "glaring" evidence at all, that Christianity is not quite so probable when one looks outside of the Christian bubble, and that our intellectual peregrinations in this life are always fraught with danger.
Forgive me for grossly oversimplifying things, but I'm really not at all concerned with proving Christianity to be true. I know some people are. I'm not. That's not my ballgame. Because I believe in the goodness of God and because I believe that the Bible is true when it says that unless the Spirit of God draws a person to Himself that person cannot be saved, I don't believe that Christian apologists have the burden of proof to demonstrate irrefutably the validity of their claims. I believe God is constantly drawing people to Himself and that the only thing standing between some of those people and faith in Christ is a probable apologetic for that faith. 99% of people do not think as rigorously as professional philosophers and are persuaded by less than watertight apologetics. I'm happy to entrust that other 1% to the ministry of those who are smarter and more intellectually resilient than I.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, you're exactly right. We are fighting separate wars.
And that's ok, right?
;-)
P.S. Have you read Blomberg's book? He doesn't stoop to the levels of reasoning you just decried. Although you do have to offer him a bit of grace for citing Lewis's "trilemma," since he points it out as a false trilemma. It's a "quadrilemma," he says, with the fourth option being, "Jesus didn't say the things the Bible says he said." Then the remainder of the book focuses on rigorously (and even-handedly, I think) refuting exactly that fourth alternative.
ReplyDelete"Sound methods of historical criticism" may indeed preserve the intellectual tenability of Christianity, which certainly distinguishes it from demonstrably false religions (Mormonism being a great example, primarily because it developed recently enough to be thoroughly debunked). As a product (or victim?) of a naturalistic public school/college indoctrination myself, I have to confess that it took Bruce Metzger and C.S. Lewis to pry open the door to faith for me.
ReplyDeleteRegardless, I still think the best, most convincing proof for Christianity is radical grace, mercy and love. The testimonies that I've heard over ten years of faith in Christ from people who have endured unfathomable suffering and violation, only to triumph over it with impossible measures of forgiveness and hope, would galvanize the hardest heart. The most intellectually fortified atheist is struck dumb when confronted with the reality of these lives.
While I hesitate to even say it, I suspect that when people encounter the power of faith communities (or even individuals) that are living out Christ's most audacious teachings, it almost doesn't matter to them if Christianity is true in the objective sense or not.
Hey M! So nice to "see" you again. :)
ReplyDeleteI think the biggest thing I'm learning from this conversation is that God reaches diverse people in diverse ways. Some people get hung up on verifiably proving this and proving that. Most people, unfortunately, are more persuaded by irrational rhetoric. I think I'd rather have the former as a skeptic than the latter as a Christian, but there's at least another group: the group you (M) just described. Although if they really do perceive irreconcilable inconsistencies within the Faith of Christianity and decide to "go with their gut" and be persuaded by love against their "better judgment", then I think there's at least a fourth group: people whose primary barrier to the faith is intellectual, but who give Christianity a chance when they see the profound change in Christians' and churches' lives. These people see the hollowness and shallowness of the presuppositions of their naturalist indoctrination (and the all-pervasive media stereotypes) and feel duped when they see that the Gospel is a viable--and beautiful--alternative. Again, in response to Michael, most people don't give Christianity a chance because of misinformation and the indoctrination of their educational and public media experiences: i.e. mischaracterizations and mud-slinging. Sometimes faith only needs a nudge... because after all, it's God who saves us.