Part II of "What makes you doubt Christianity?"

Here are the contributions I received from the original blog (here). I respond to some of them with reflections and/or suggestions for what to study. If you would like to contribute, please email me at johndanielwashere@gmail.com. 

The tension between law and grace, faith and works.

I've struggled with this one before, and have written on it here. One has to shed a lot of what Luther read into the text in order to come to terms with the seemingly contradictory statements regarding Christian life in Scripture. Christianity is about living the kingdom of God, embodying the reality that Jesus accomplished on the Cross. Thus, works consist of our active participation in the kingdom of God, in Christ's reality. The law is not made up of rules, but ways we can apply the kingdom to our lives. It is easy to turn this into legalism, but that's when we start regarding Scripture as a rule-book.

It's hard to deal with/love fundamentalists and/or people who believe and teach damaging doctrines.

How patriarchal the Bible mostly is.

One major consideration needs to be made when dealing with this issue: context. It also needs to be addressed on a text-by-text basis, and often simply considering the historical context will remedy the problem. There are so many good books on this topic. Why Not Women? is one that was highly recommended to me, but there are many others. That would be a good place to start. For an assessment of one text, see my, "Does Genesis 2 Support Complementarianism?" (here). It should be said, though, that the "patriarchal nature" of Scripture is often over-stated. In many places, the Bible is quite woman-exalting.

Most Christians are so certain of what that they believe that they never question it. A great many Christians do not engage in critical thinking.

Christian hypocrisy and self-righteousness, manifested in things like treatment of/talk about homosexuals, or people of other religions.

What about those who have never heard the Gospel?

I can see this one being very hard for Calvinists, but it isn't hard for me at all. While it is unfortunate that so many people in history, as well as in our time, are not subjected to the Gospel, if one affirms a great wideness in God's merciful saving love, we can feel at peace about this issue. I have written about this here. A good book to look at on this is A Wideness in God's Mercy by Clark Pinnock, as well as those cited in my blog on the subject.

"I know my level of intelligence and understanding and there are a lot of better equipped thinkers out there who do not believe what I believe. So I wonder, who am I to think this stuff is true?"

Prayer. How come some prayers are answered but most aren't? How come someone's headache is healed, but someone else's cancer isn't? Don't we serve an all-powerful, all-loving God? Why wouldn't he heal everyone if he could?

I have some pretty bad back and neck problems that I wake up with every single morning, so this was something I struggled with for a while (and still do, depending on how bad I feel on a particular day). I have written on the subject here, "Petitionary Prayer: What is it Good for?", but I also recommend Greg Boyd's book Is God to Blame?, as well as his chapter, "Praying in the Whirlwind" in Satan and the Problem of Evil. Vincent Brummer's What Are We Doing When We Pray? is another good one. There is a lot of really good literature on this topic, but those are good places to start, as well as the works cited in my blog.

The problem of evil and suffering. It is difficult to reconcile God's benevolence with the existence of things like cancer and AIDS.

All honest Christians struggle with this at one point or another. While I have read a lot on the subject, I can think of no better person to go to than Greg Boyd. Specifically, his book Satan & The Problem of Evil. If you're really into the topic, supplement it with his God at War. For a shorter, easier read, see Is God to Blame? There are tons and tons of books on this topic, but Boyd would be the perfect person with whom to start.

Pluralism. If I were born in other parts of the world, I would not be a Christian. Do I think Christianity is true simply because of my context? How can I be so bold as to claim that the religion I follow is THE truth? There are thousands of religions all over the world, and plenty have their holy books, what makes Christianity so special?

This is an issue that is often daunting to me, and very humbling when I speak of things that I 'know'. For me, this is where the rubber meets the road, faith-wise. I wrote a personal reflection on pluralism here, saying that, in the end, one has to look at the subjective truth claims of this world and ask oneself, "Which one is more worthy of my faith?" because we can't know that Christianity is actually true.

Angels and Demons, Heaven and Hell. They seem so make-believe, as if they were made up to deal with death.

This is a tough one. What makes it worse is how angels, demons, heaven and hell have been portrayed over the years. We tend to have a shared concept of angels as winged, effeminate and covered in white; demons as ork-like or dragon-like beasts; heaven as a golden city in the sky; and hell as a fiery pit with black castle-like buildings, where people are tortured by demons. I have tried to re-word these terms in an effort to steer away from these preconceived ideas--using terms like "metaphysical" instead of supernatural, forces of chaos, instead of demons, and others. Sometimes, when words have been ascribed images that make them ridiculous, we just have to come up with new ways of referring to them.

Another thing that helps me is to recognize the signs of their existence in the world. We have desires that go beyond our experience, that go beyond what we can satisfy. We have urges to do horrible things sometimes, and we often don't know why we do such things. Sometimes things happen that can only be sufficiently explained by divine hands (I find all other "natural" explanations dissatisfying). Other things can only be explained by an actual force of evil at work--attributing the misfortunes in nature to the trial-and-error process of evolution isn't going to do it for me. I can think of many examples, but you get where I am going. There are signs in the world around us that point us beyond, and affirm what we see in Scripture.

Debt-Free Living: A Christian Vocation

You know what one factor contributed the most to not only our recent financial crisis, but to the Great Depression as well? Debt. Debt is slavery. It inevitably leads to crisis.

Proverbs tells us, "the rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender" (22:7). This is what happens when the people at the top of the pyramid exploit the people at the bottom. They don't raise wages, but they have no problem having people borrow money from them. They have no problem putting people into debt-slavery. Both major financial crises in the last 100 years have resulted from this phenomenon.

What do we do? Stay out of debt. Get out of debt. Have you ever thought, "I wonder how much money I would have if I didn't have any debt"? The abundance is there. We just have to be good stewards of it.

Say what you want about Dave Ramsey, but he refuses to let people treat their debt as an ontological given, just a part of life that has to be accepted. He wakes people up to the reality that they can get out of debt; they don't have to be in slavery. He might be helping the economy more than any one politician because he lives to assist people in freeing themselves from debt.

But to do it, we have to get rid of our commodity fetishism. We have to stop spending money we don't have, especially on things we don't need. Karl Marx said, "Money is the alienated essence of man's labour and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it." Except, in the case of the bottom 90%, this money worship has become credit worship.

You can get out of debt. You can. Debt is not an ontological given! I paid off thousands of dollars on my car before I was a Senior in college, and now I don't have a car payment. My wife and I are killing off her last bit of student loan debt in the next two months. I am not just bragging, I am making a point: you can get out of debt!

If you are out of debt (or when you get out of debt), help others get out. If you really want to help the economy, get out of debt and help others get out of debt. We need to break down our autonomous, prideful, keep-it-to-yourself money management. We need to start being honest with our friends and churches about where we're at, and we need to start helping our friends when we can. If you don't have money troubles and your friend does, help your friend out--selflessly; as Jesus said, "You received without paying; give without pay" (Matt. 10:8) and, again, "give without expecting to get anything back" (Lk. 6:35). Or, as we are told in Deuteronomy 15, if anyone is poor among you, "do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward them. Rather, be openhanded and freely lend them whatever they need" (vv.7-8). A few verses earlier, we are told,

"there need not be any poor people among you, for in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you, if only you fully obey the Lord your God and are careful to follow all these commands I am giving you today. For the Lord your God will bless you as he has promised, and you will lend to many nations but will borrow from none. You will rule over many nations but none will rule over you." (vv.4-6; emphasis mine)

The abundance is there. Use it wisely; don't feed the system, don't go into slavery.

(See also, my blog on "Eucharist Money Management," here)

Verses Against Limited Atonement and Irresistible Grace

I think Calvinists might as well take a marker and black out these verses and all others like them, because no amount of spin-doctoring is going to reconcile them with their doctrines.

Limited Atonement

"[Jesus] is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for our sins, but for the sins of the whole world." 1 John 2:2

"[God] wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth." (1 Tim. 2:4)

"The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance." (2 Pet. 3:9)

"As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways!" (Ez. 33:11)

"I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." (Jn. 12:32)

"As in Adam all died, so in Christ all will be made alive." (1 Cor. 15:22)

Irresistible Grace

"The Pharisees and the experts in the law rejected God's purpose for themselves, because they had not been baptized by John." (Lk. 7:30)

"You stiff-necked people! Your hearts and ears are still uncircumcised. You are just like your ancestors: You always resist the Holy Spirit!" (Acts 7:51)

"Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing." (Matt. 23:37)

"All day long I have held out my hands to an obstinate people, who walk in ways not good, pursuing their own imaginations." (Isa. 65:2)

Passages could be brought against all the TULIP doctrines, but if L and I cannot be true, then the rest follow.

What makes you doubt Christianity? (Yes, I'm asking you)

Not too long ago, Peter Enns wrote a blog in which he asked people what issues they struggle with in their faith walks.

I would like to do the same. I am not planning to write a response to each one, but the answers provided will probably inspire reflections. However, I do plan to respond with suggestions of people to study on each topic.

What makes faith hard for you?
What issues do you struggle with?
What makes you tempted to walk away from Christianity?
What makes you doubt?
What makes you frustrated at God?
If you're not a Christian, what are the most significant parts of Christianity that make it hard to embrace?
If you were a Christian but aren't anymore, what made you walk away?

Please, comment in the box below or email me at johndanielwashere@gmail.com with your answers!

Book Review: The Problem of War in the Old Testament by Peter Craigie

Craigie, Peter C. The Problem of War in the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1978. $14.70. pp.7-125. ISBN 978-0-8028-1742-6. ★★★★☆

Working my way through books on the topic of divine war in the Old Testament, I come to Peter C. Craigie's classic work. Almost 40 years old, this book is still insightful and relevant. Craigie even makes note of the fact that Christians often teach their children the dire importance of abstaining from all things sexual, while war and violence are rarely stressed. Don't read Song of Songs yet, dear children, but reading violent war stories in books like Joshua is a-okay.(1) This observation of Craigie's is still quite apparent today.

The book is full of such astute observations, alongside a well-ground, well-nuanced, yet profoundly concise treatment of the Hebrew Bible's war stories. This is a breath of fresh air after reading Seibert's exhausting and repetitive 300+ page book (see my review here).

Craigie rightly emphasizes the seriousness of this topic, and of not taking it lightly. He wrote a good section on the abuse of the OT war tradition in Christian history, referring to many instances in which books like Joshua were used to justify horrid violence in the name of Jesus Christ.(2)

In his assessment of the divine war material, Craigie is honest about its implications, and equally honest about the the findings of scholarly research, like ancient near eastern parallels to the OT war narratives,(3) and even a striking comparison of the Israelite divine war tradition and that of Muslims.(4)

That all being said, I did not find all of his writing so well thought out. For example, in critiquing the progressive revelation approach to divine violence in the Hebrew Bible, Craigie says "the progression in revelation does not contradict or cancel out the earlier substance of revelation; it can only complement that substance."(5) This is not necessarily true. Sure, actual revelation could only be elaborated upon and complemented, but ancient Hebrew theology can be contradicted if their representation of God was not actual revelation of his nature. Given pieces of revelation to the mysterious puzzle of Yahweh, Isrealites could have filled in the gaps with their own ideology, no doubt shaped in large part by ancient Near Eastern culture. This is no critique of progressive revelation at all, because it doesn't deal with the actual claims of those who advocate the view.

Craigie's caricature of those who cannot accept the warrior portrait of God in the Hebrew Bible is also flawed, as he unfairly generalizes in a reductionist manner. He says,

the conception of God as Warrior may be said to be a primitive, pre-Christian notion; the Hebrews were simply identifying their God with war in the same way that other nations did at that time. They were, after all, an unsophisticated people (unlike ourselves!) with a course and lowly view of God, which was eventually to be outgrown in New Testament times.(6)

I cannot imagine a more simplistic over-generalization. He doesn't consider those that actually wrestled with warrior God images because genocide is a horrible thing to equate with the God of Jesus Christ. It often has nothing to do with being a superficial, chin-up, pseudo-sophisticated, pious aristocrat. Many of the ancient Hebrew portraits of God are simply terrifying, if we are honest with ourselves. Craigie does elsewhere acknowledge the need to wrestle with this material,(7) but his assessment of the people who wrestled with it and ultimately could not accept it is anything but sympathetic and nuanced.

Aside from an occasional statement, the book is overall quite solid, especially when he talks about ethics. His assessment of the problem the Hebrew warrior God presents to theology is not satisfying, but he himself said that he made no attempt to resolve the problem, but only sought to provide a framework with which further digging could be done,(8) and that he most certainly did. Even if one disagrees with aspects of that framework, it offers all useful tools for further study.

Easy to read, concise (I read it in 3 sittings), well-grounded and highly insightful, Craigie's work is essential to the study of war in the Old Testament. If you're interested in the subject, this is a fine place to start. 

Notes:
(1) See Craigie, The Problem of War in the Old Testament, 16-17 and 104-105.
(2) See ibid., 26-28.
(3) See his appendix, "War and Religion in the Ancient Near East," in ibid., 115-122.
(4) See Ibid., 25.
(5) Ibid., 37.
(6) Ibid.
(7) See ibid., 13-14.
(8) See ibid., 93.

Purchase The Problem of War in the Old Testament on Amazon (here)

Grace, Part II: Is Salvation a Human Choice?

I again use Grace Kelly to personify grace

So far, I have laid out that salvation and humanity’s coming-to-God is possible because the Spirit resides within us. However, there has still been talk of a required human response to God’s work in order for it to take effect, which still leaves the question of Philippians 2:13 open:  if “it is God who is at work in [us], enabling [us] both to will and to work for his good pleasure,” how can we say we choose God with our own free will? How can we say it is all God’s grace when it requires our response? I will begin this discussion with 3 foundational thoughts: 

First, as we have already seen, the breath of God in Adam’s nostrils gave him more than just life—that is, more than just mere being. It also gave him more than the presence of God’s Spirit within him; it equipped him with everything he needed to be a servant and lover of God.  To re-use a quote from Origen, he equipped Adam with “all the desires and all the impulses with which [he could] work towards virtue and make progress, and also planted in [him] the power of reason with which [he could] recognize what [he] ought to do and what to avoid.”(25) Included in this equipment was free will. He endowed Adam with the ability to choose to love him or hate him, embrace him or reject him.

Secondly, God sustains all things (Heb. 1:3; Col. 1:16). Paul said in Acts, “In him we live and move and have our being” (17:28). As Karl Barth notes, “It is on the free will of God that everything depends.”(26) Reality itself, then, is God’s grace. God’s breath in Adam’s nostrils reveals that the fact we breathe at all is God’s grace.

Finally, we are told that every perfect gift comes from the Father (Jas. 1:17). He is responsible for all the good, not only of that which he has directly provided, but of the good we have accomplished. Therefore, we should not boast in anything we do, for we branches do not support our root, but the root supports us (Rom. 11:18). 

The answer to our question, then, is that because of everything with which God has provided us, we cannot refer to any good that we accomplish as our own doing. He gave us the breath of life, the capacity for good, the ability to reason, the free will, the influence of his Spirit, etc. We might also add that he himself is goodness, and so nothing good can find its origin in us because all goodness is God’s self-communication.  

Consider this analogy. Let us say a man opens up a bank account for his son and places billions of dollars in it. Then he gives his son a debit card and the PIN. If the son purchases something, can it really be said that he pays for it? Can it be said that he makes himself able to use the money? No. His father gave him the money, and his father gave him the ability to use it (the debit card and PIN). That being said, the Son cannot just walk around and experience the benefits of the money he has in his account; he has to use the card his father gave him in order to experience it. But even the using of the card is attributable to his father, because he gave him the card.

Likewise, God has given us salvation and has given us everything we need in order to experience it and engage in relationship with him. We must make the decision to engage, but God is ultimately responsible for the decision because he is responsible for everything that brought us to the decision.

Origen

Heschel says that in establishing a relationship with God, the “initiative must be ours, yet the achievement depends on Him.”(28) Indeed, yet, God is even, in part, responsible for the initiative. Not that he himself made the decision for us, but he gave us the ability to make the initiative. He gave us will power. Again, he gave us every single thing we needed in order to choose him. As Origen said, “God does most of the work.”(27) But even the work we do is something for which God is responsible, even if indirectly.(28) 

“God is at work in us” does not mean that God is the one doing all the work. It means he is “enabling us to will and to work.” He is drawing us to him, luring us to him, and giving us what we need to come to him. Philippians 2:13 is referring to the supernatural existential at work, that divine immanence in us that is responsible for all the goodness we manifest, including our choice to follow God. Again, it does not do the work for us, as the Calvinist doctrine of irresistible grace implies, but it influences and entices us to embrace Christ. When and if we do, God is the one responsible, for he gave us reason and free will, and he gave us the Spirit to influence that reason and free will. And everything he gave us is a manifestation of his grace.(29) We play a part, and indeed a vital one, but it is most definitely nothing of which we can boast, for God is ultimately the one responsible.

Conclusion 

This study, rather than thinking of salvation as either the work of grace or a human choice, has embraced salvation as both the work of grace and a human choice. It emphasizes both the biblical teaching of God’s grace and providence, and the biblical teaching of human choice and moral responsibility. 

We need not believe that we have no part in our salvation in order to say with confidence that grace is the all-determining factor. I have often heard from Calvinists that because they know how sinful they are, they know that they could never choose God, so he had to have chosen them. A human can do nothing for God without grace, they say, so salvation must be solely the work of God’s grace and we must not have anything to do with it. This conclusion is understandable, but, as we have seen, it demonstrates a misunderstanding of God’s grace. Our free choice to serve and love God is itself a manifestation of grace, for such a choice would not be possible without it. God’s grace is the equipment with which God empowered humanity, and it was indeed sufficient in enabling humanity to walk freely to him. Thus, we can affirm with Paul that when we work out our salvation, it is God who is at work in us, enabling us both to will and to work for his good pleasure. 

Notes:
(25) von Balthasar, 195.
(26) Barth, 74.
(27) Heschel, 129.
(28) von Balthasar, 196.
(29) If this is true, one could then ask, “Doesn’t that mean God is indirectly responsible for evil?” Since this is not relevant to the topic of my paper, I will not spend too much time answering this question, but it is important to at least respond to, even if in a small way.
First, evil was not created when man sinned. Evil entered into this world through humanity’s sin, but its origin was found in Satan, before the earth was created. We do not know the nature of evil’s actual origin; all we have are the bits and pieces we find in some biblical and apocryphal books. For an overview, see Elaine Pagels, “The Social History of Satan: From the Hebrew Bible to the Gospels,” in The Origin of Satan (New York: Random House, 1995), 35–62. The question then becomes, “Is God responsible for evil’s entrance into this world?” No. Evil is not of God, and he was not responsible for its origin. He is also not responsible for Satan’s influence on creatures. The reason why he is—at least indirectly—responsible for the human’s choosing of him is because he has not only given them the ability to choose him, but he has done everything they need in order for them to choose him. Because he has not provided evil, and he has not provided the devil’s influence, but has only given humans the ability to choose to reject him, he is not responsible in any way—even indirectly—for humanity’s sin.
(30) As Origen says, God “gives everything as grace.” See von Balthasar, 196.