Posts Tagged ‘God’
Friday, April 16th, 2010
Yesterday Tom Woodward sent me an encouraging email about this article, which I originally posted just over three years ago, and I’ve decided to re-post it today. What follows is the same material, with half a sentence added on Stephen Meyer’s recent work and some dead links removed.
Update 6:50 pm: when I first posted this earlier today, comments were turned off. That was an error that I have just now seen and have corrected.
_______________________
I had a powerful “aha moment” one night last week, in which I believe I actually felt the revulsion many ID opponents have toward Intelligent Design. I was reading Thomas Woodward’s Darwin Strikes Back. He’s certainly not to blame for any bad feelings I felt; I think it was instead a kind of gifting moment, through which I was able to take on the other side’s perspective and gain new insight.
I was reading this passage on the Cambrian Explosion, which was a period during which (according to the fossil record) many thousands of new species suddenly appeared in a short period of geological time, about 530 million years ago. Woodward writes,
The name ‘explosion’ is used widely in the literature of professional paleontology in describing this dramatic fossil debut…. where we find not just gaps between slightly different forms but fossil chasms between different phyla that abruptly appear in the rocks…. The Cambrian gaps are persisting [in spite of new fossil finds]; with a defiance and stubbornness that is now legendary. What’s worse, those chasms are not just enduring; they are steadily increasing in number through discoveries of new bizarre creatures… in recent decades.
ID theorists point to the Cambrian explosion as evidence that gradualistic evolution does not explain the fossil record. Now, this was not new information to me, but it somehow struck me this time just how this must appear to some people. Here we have something like 200,000 species among the fossils, most of which arrived suddenly 530 million years ago and are now gone. ID (usually) says that each one of them, or at least each group or “kind,” required a special intervention to appear as a new species. What kind of an intelligence would do that? Why would this intelligence build up to these new species with a series of simpler forms, most of which are also gone now? Why would this intelligence create a dinosaur world that’s now been wiped away? I believe I have a sense now (though I still don’t agree, as I’ll explain later) of what some people say when they consider this intelligence as some kind of fictional bumbler mucking about in the world, creating in fits and starts, not getting it right for the longest time. It’s so much more pleasing–especially to our Western consciousness–to think of things coming and going through time in a natural way.
What kind of intelligence would do that? Intelligent Design theorists say they are making an inference to the best explanation: that we can draw a valid analogy from our everyday experience, which shows us that information and design always originate from intelligence, to some kind of intelligence behind the natural order. But why stop there? I wonder if it’s really possible to do as ID theorists do, which is to start from the natural evidence, and reason from there to bare intelligence. I don’t think it’s entirely wrong–in fact, it’s correct in a very powerful way. I’ll come back to that in a moment. For now, though, I’m suggesting that we shouldn’t stop there. Why just just reason to intelligence? Ought we not at least also reason to mystery? For if there is something analogous to human intelligence there, there is also something about it that is very hard to understand. It’s a theory of Mysterious Intelligence.
Then, as we continue to puzzle over why this intelligence would develop all those thousands of creatures, there seems to be another important analogy we could safely draw. When we see new people building things being built for no apparent purpose, it’s usually the result of some creative impulse. Art doesn’t have to have a purpose, other than to delight the beholder. In the case of natural history, if the creative impulse is part of the explanation, it seems playful and wasteful at the same time, or profligate. This mysterious, creative intelligence has resources to spare, and no compunction about using them! It seems to be leading us to a richer theory than simple ID; it’s a theory of Mysterious, Profligately Creative Intelligence.
But not just that. This intelligence seems likely not to be part of the natural world, yet it intervenes here. The world of the Cambrian explosion was stepped into frequently from outside. It’s haunted by this other-worldly intelligence. Otherwise, how would these 200,000 or so new species have arisen? So we seem to be moving toward a theory of Mysterious, Profligately Creative, Highly Involved Outsider Intelligence.
Finally, we might as well recognize that just about every ID theorist speaks of purpose, and great power is assumed; so we’re talking about a Purposeful, Powerful, Mysterious, Profligately Creative, Highly Involved Outsider Intelligence
This is anathema to modern man. A Purposeful, Powerful, Mysterious, Profligately Creative, Highly Involved Intelligent Outsider does not belong in our mindset. No wonder ID draws so much fire! We’re all naturalists to some extent. Even we who believe in God are so highly influenced by the scientific mindset, it’s hard to shake free of it for even a moment! African or Pacific Island tribes they may see spirits in every tree and rock–we see atoms and molecules and energy, and we know how they interact. We know what’s really going on, and it’s not spooks!
This is the problem with Intelligent Design. The opponents of ID keep pushing ID proponents to name the intelligence we’re talking about. We’re shy to do that from the scientific perspective, but this Mysterious Creative Outsider haunts every mention of ID. If you’ve been watching carefully, of course, you’ve noticed that if there’s an objection to this kind of Intelligence, it’s mostly emotional or aesthetic: we dare not countenance such a possibility because it just doesn’t fit the way we have thought the world is and we don’t like it. There are rational arguments along those lines too, but they’re nothing new, nothing that ID hasn’t already dealt with from the philosophical side of its efforts. But this exposes more clearly what ID is about. It’s not about bare intelligence: it’s aboutPurposeful, Powerful, Mysterious, Profligately Creative, Highly Involved Outsider Intelligence. From my perspective as a Christian, it’s about God.
At this point I must change the subject slightly for a moment, for an aside that makes things better in some ways and worse in others. Phillip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies and History at Penn State. He says that the most under-reported, possibly the most significant social movement in the entire world in the 20th Century was the global rise of Christianity, especially south of the Equator, in Asia, and in Muslim countries. J.P. Moreland quotes credible research showing that in the last 30 years of the century, serious Christians increased worldwide by a factor of 10, and the number of Muslims coming to faith in Christ in the last few decades is greater than in all previous history combined. Much of this explosion is fueled by miracles: dreams, vision, healings and the like. These things are credibly reported in sources like the Washington Post and the Orange County Register [the links have expired since this was first posted].
It seems that the world is not so immune to intervention by an intelligent outsider as we have thought. Maybe we Westerners are wrong about some things. (And maybe, as Moreland says at the end of that talk, it’s happening more in our part of the world than we’ve recognized.)
But the scientist says, “If God is doing this all the time, how can there be any such thing as science? If God is always intervening–interfering–how can we count on any regularity anywhere? Yet, clearly we can! So this does not add up.” That question is actually not so hard. Part of God’s intention in doing these things is to communicate himself to people. If he were always interfering, such that there was no such thing as a reliable natural order, there could be no communication in it. It’s a signal-to-noise ratio thing. God’s communication has to be different from the regularities of the world if it’s to be actual communication; thus there must be regularities. Those regularities define the way we usually experience the world, and God’s interventions to change that order are rare exceptions.
Aspects of God’s character enter in here that I don’t know how to derive as an inference from nature. Biblical believers know him as good, trustworthy, and faithful. To the extent that ID is intimating a Powerful Outsider whose goodness and faithfulness unknown, I can see how that would be just opening a conceptual door to chaos.
That, as I said, was somewhat of an aside, for I started out talking about ID from an empirical perspective, and then I looked at divine intervention from a theological perspective. The two views unite in this: the whole idea is an affront to the mindset of a universally predictable, controllable, regular, universal, natural reality. It’s a terrible assault on philosophical naturalism (PN, the idea that there is no reality except matter and energy and law and chance). That’s the emotional impact. The emotional effect of this does not mean it’s not true.
Lurking behind ID is what I would call PPMPCHIOID: Purposeful, Powerful, Mysterious, Profligately Creative, Highly Involved Outsider Intelligent Design. Opponents accuse ID of being disingenuous when it says it makes no claims, other than intelligence, regarding the identity of the designer it seeks. But don’t we all have PPMPCHIOID–or God–in mind? Isn’t ID being dishonest when it denies this?
I don’t think so. In fact, this apparent weakness of ID is also its strength. It offers so little about the Designer it seeks; but it does not try to offer more than its tools allow. To look for Design, signifying purposeful intelligence, is something we can do from within the empirical sciences. To look for the rest of it is beyond the reach of science.
You see, we have conceptual tools for identifying purposeful design in nature. Yes, I know this is the very point that’s most in controversy. There seems to be at least one such tool that is to be universally accepted, though: Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity (IC). Many scientists have taken Behe to task over this, but in very specific ways. They have said that his examples of IC are not really irreducible, or they have doubted that instances of IC in nature can really be proven. They have not (to my knowledge) ever credibly denied that IC–if reliably identified–signals the action of intelligence. So we have at least that one conceptual tool, going back all the way to Darwin himself. I believe William Dembski’s complex specified information (CSI) is also a strong indicator of intelligence, as is the origin of biological information, as discussed by Stephen Meyer in Signature in the Cell.
We don’t have empirically-based tools in biology* for identifying and discriminating other features of the designer, like Profligate Creativity, or even being Outside the natural order. At least, we can’t identify those things directly. If intelligence is identified, the philosophers can go to work and discuss whether what I have written here is true, that other characteristics inexorably accompany a finding of intelligence. So when an empirical research program says it’s only trying to identify intelligence, it is being both careful and honest. (It is not thereby trying to sneak God into the public schools.) It is trying to do just what it can conceivably do through its tools.
What’s both wrong and right about ID, then, is its bare minimalist claim of looking for purposeful intelligence in a designer of life. It is right in looking only for what it has the conceptual tools to potentially find. That there may be a PPMPCHIOID–an active creator God–lurking there raises all kinds of emotional reactions, which I think I understand better now. It’s hard to like ID if you don’t like the idea of a God being involved in the natural order.
And it’s really hard to like ID if you see it as a way to sneak God back into American public education. That’s the other rampant conspiracy theory surrounding ID. Plain statements of facts from ID leaders don’t seem to have lessened fears of this. To repeat those plain statements: as a scientific research program, ID is a minimalist theory, seeking only to identify instances of purposeful design in nature. Its educational agenda is even more minimalist: ID leaders aren’t trying to get ID taught in the public schools. (It’s been said a thousand times.) We’re only asking for a more complete accounting of evolution to be presented, including empirical challenges facing it. That’s all. How evil is that?
Well, for those who are guided by an emotional response guiding them. It’s also convenient: opponents routinely distort ID into something other than what it is; saying it’s a religious and political campaign. It’s a rhetorical hurdle that ID has to repeatedly clear on its path to doing actual science. But rather than focusing there, I want to give proper credence to the emotional and aesthetic challenge ID presents to people of a naturalistic mindset. As I said, I’ve had a taste of that feeling, and it’s powerful. It doesn’t determine the truth of ID, but we have to recognize it as a significant and real part of this controversy’s landscape, and treat it with respect.
*William Lane Craig and others argue to other personal characteristics of the Creator in their versions of the cosmological argument for God. I think they are right to do so. That situation is entirely different, however, from the biological one, and the same arguments do not necessarily transfer over into biology.
Friday, August 21st, 2009
Just published at BreakPoint: God and Science Do Mix, beginning,
In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that is replete with unintended irony, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss says, “Science and God Don’t Mix.”
With all due respect for a man who has contributed significantly to what we know about the universe, on this point Krauss is wrong…
Monday, July 6th, 2009
From Bill Vallicella:
One of the striking features of Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking 2006) is that Dennett seems bent on having a straw man to attack. This is illustrated by his talk of the “deformation” of the concept of God: “I can think of no other concept that has undergone so dramatic a deformation.” (206) He speaks of “the migration of the concept of God in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) away from concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts.” (205)
Why speak of deformation rather than of reformation, transformation, or refinement? Dennett’s view is that the “original monotheists” thought of God as a being one could literally listen to, and literally sit beside. (206) If so, the “original monotheists” thought of God as a physical being: “The Old Testament Jehovah, or Yahweh, was quite definitely a super-man (a He, not a She) who could take sides in battles, and be both jealous and wrathful.” (206, emphasis in original).
[Link: Maverick Philosopher: Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept]
Vallicella has insightful things to say about this. I would add that Dennett’s view of God in history is refuted very early in the Bible: the first ten words of Genesis.
Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
The question at New Scientist was, how did we ever come up with the idea of gods? The answer begins,
It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods. Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. “It’s not that religion is not important,” says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, “it’s that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress.” The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions….
Two thoughts on this:
1) “Science has largely shied away from asking why…. but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions.”
The obvious underlying assumption is that until science tells us, we don’t know; for there is no other way to know but through science.
2) “It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times…. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.”
This is marvelously consistent with our having been created in God’s image, for relating with God. What’s lacking in that answer? Sure, we can also “conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods, and monsters,” but this is easily understood also from a Biblical perspective: our relationship with God has been broken, and in our alienation we worship the creature rather than the Creator (Romans 1:20-23).
The New Scientist article proposes two cognitive features of humans as sources of our religiosity: the way wementally treat living things as opposed to non-living things, and an “overdeveloped sense of cause and effect.” There’s no need to doubt these are true of humans, from childhood on. There’s also no need to doubt that they contribute to beliefs in that imaginary world. But is there a need to assume that the explanation for religion is entirely natural and evolutionary? No, for God has spoken to us, we have his revelation of where our belief in him first originated, where it has gone wrong, and what he has done through Christ to bring us back to him.
Sunday, January 25th, 2009
This came to me by email this morning, and there are good questions here. The sender agreed that it would be good to answer here on the blog. I’ve changed her name here, as we also agreed.
Hi, I’m a Christian, but I’m having some problems. I was thinking that maybe some naturalists believe what they believe because naturally the universe just has to “be”, I guess, in the way that a circle and a square can’t be the same thing at the same time. And you can’t really create the fact that a circle and square can’t be the same thing because it just has to be so, which is the height of logic, isn’t it?
Also, I think, like Tom Clark said, a supernatural God, upon further investigation, wouldn’t actually be supernatural because that really wouldn’t be possible, again, in the same way that a square and circle can’t be at the same time. There always has to be a way and means for anything to happen, right? I mean, nothing could just simply happen with no way for it to happen. It seems like this would sort of answer the reason why for everything, maybe, in the way that, if there is anything at all than there simply can’t not be anything. So, because it just has to be, that’s why it is, like it’s impossible for it not to be.
Do you understand what I mean? Also, it wouldn’t matter if you had evidence for evolution or not because this fact would have to be so, anyway. I’ve been obsessing almost every waking moment over the past few days about science and psychology and I’m not sure I can really think of a way out of this argument. Please let me know what you think. Thanks. Heather.
Does the Universe Exist Necessarily?
There’s more than one question there, obviously. We’ll start by considering whether it’s possible that the universe exists just because it’s one of those things that had to be. Is the universe something that exists necessarily? Actually Heather wrote a significant piece of the answer to this herself, in the second paragraph of her email. She may not have intended it to be used in this connection, but it’s an insight that’s important for this issue:
There always has to be a way and means for anything to happen, right? I mean, nothing could just simply happen with no way for it to happen.
That’s exactly right. I would word it this way: everything that begins to exist must have a cause, or every event must have a cause. God is not an event, and his existence does not have a beginning, so his existence does not require a cause; he is eternal.
There was a time when scientists and other thinkers thought the universe might be eternal and beginningless. That was before Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding outward at great speed. Astronomers modeled what this must have meant going backward in time. It led to the rather surprising conclusion that billions of years ago, the entire universe must have been compressed into an almost infinitely small volume. That in turn implied that the universe began in a huge explosion, which astronomer Fred Hoyle derisively called a “Big Bang.” As you know, the name stuck.
This was rather upsetting to some scientists: they knew all too well what it implied, which I’ll come back to in a moment. There was hot debate over the Big Bang vs. Steady State theories until a couple of scientists at Bell Labs noticed a “cosmic microwave background radiation”—you could think of it as a small degree of heat—distributed everywhere throughout the cosmos. It was exactly what had been predicted by the Big Bang theory. That and some further research confirmed the Big Bang theory.
This means the universe began to exist. And remember, whatever begins to exist must have a cause. The universe could not have caused itself. You can’t even coherently describe what it would mean for something to cause its own beginning. It would have to exist before it existed if it were to do that! Since then the question has been what or who caused the Big Bang.
Is it possible, then, for the universe not to be? Certainly. Go back 15 billion or so years, and there was no universe. The universe’s non-existence is surely possible, since it did not exist more than about 15 billion years ago.*
Is God Part of Nature?
It will come as no surprise that I think the cause of the universe was God. I had been convinced on other grounds that God was the Creator, long before I became aware of things like I just discussed. But the Big Bang suggests a very powerful and personal God as the “beginner” (the one who begins) the universe. Whatever caused the Big Bang had to be immensely powerful, since the effect of his or its work was to create all the hundred billion galaxies that exist. The cause also had to be personal, though. If it were something impersonal, with no ability to choose, and yet it had the ability to cause the Big Bang, it would not have been able to choose to exercise that ability, or choose not to exercise it, or choose when to exercise it. This impersonal cause could not have existed without immediately causing the Big Bang, for where there is a cause capable of producing an effect, the effect necessarily happens immediately (taking all factors into account, obviously). The cause of the universe and the universe itself would be the same age, about 15 billion years old. This seems strange and highly unlikely; and it leads to further questions about what caused the cause.
This impersonal cause almost sounds like the picture of God Heather is wrestling with in the second paragraph, actually. It’s a being that’s part of the machine. A personal God who created the universe, not as part of himself but as a separate thing from himself, is not part of the machine.
But then how does God insert himself into the actions of the machine? He does it by his own spiritual power, which he first exercised through creation and continues to employ up until now.
Is That Really An Answer?
Is that a satisfactory answer? Not to some people: they want that “how” answer to be a lot more descriptive than that. Here’s the problem, though. When God works in nature, it involves an interface between his spiritual essence and the natural world we live in, which are two entirely different things. Part of the transaction has to take place on the spiritual side of that interface. People who press for a more descriptive “how” are asking for something that looks like a natural description, but if we gave a natural description, then we wouldn’t be talking about God, we would be changing the subject. The one who asks “how could God do this?” must expect and allow that the answer not be entirely in the form of a physical description. This is as logically necessary as that a square cannot be a circle.
To say otherwise would be analogous to asking how a magnet attracts iron, and adding “but you cannot answer in terms of the properties of a magnet.” If we want to know how God does something, part of the answer has to be given in terms of who and what God is. Thus it is simply wrong to expect the explanation to work entirely as we’re accustomed to scientific explanations working.
The next objection I’ve heard, following this, has often been, “But then you have no explanation!” To which I say, “God is the explanation! Do you insist that explanations involving God be just like physical explanations? Then you’re demanding that the way God the creator works must be just like the way his creation works. It’s saying that you’ll consider God as an explanation, as long as this God isn’t God. That doesn’t quite seem logical, does it?“
God is not one of us. To accept that is to be appropriately humble before him.
The Evolution Question
Your third question, Heather, was whether evolution itself might have been a necessity. I don’t think there’s anyone, even among highly committed evolutionists, who would say that the origin of life was inevitable in a universe that’s only natural. It happened (they say), and we’re, shall we say, the lucky beneficiaries, but it didn’t have to happen that way. If the origin wasn’t inevitable or necessary, then the whole rest of it could not have been either.
For this (and also to some extent for the first question) I would refer you here to read about the incredible odds against our universe being suitable for any complexity at all, much less the complexity of life.
The Other Big Question
You also asked, “Do you understand what I mean?” I hope I do. It’s always possible that I missed it completely, and that none of this is much help for what’s really on your mind. If so, please let me know and I’ll take another shot at it.
*Some think there might have been a different universe before the Big Bang. Rather than taking space to address that here I will refer you to these articles by William Lane Craig, especially The Existence of God and the Beginning of the Universe.
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008
Several commenters have raised questions about God and spirituality from a New Age perspective in the past two weeks. Anna’s is the most trenchant:
Who is God? Good question. Who really knows? I believe God to be overall consciousness. Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Bereket Teka had already offered an opinion:
Man is a thinking being, brought forth (or created) from a higher and supreme thinking being (God). As man can think and create his own reality, so can the “Universe” – which I prefer to claim it to be God, in his Omniscient presence in the universe. So, yes one can think and create his own reality – a reality that is governed by the highest thinking being and in accordance to the will and purpose of God.
I find that to be rather vague, and much too closely tied to the so-called “Law of Attraction” which claims we can create reality by our thinking. “Who is God?” remains a good question. We could back that up another step to “How could we even know the answer?”
Here’s what I find when I read New Age spirituality books: a whole lot of assertion, and little to support it. I’ve already expressed my strong doubts about Rhonda Byrne’s understanding of physics. She invents a whole new class of “energy” and makes unsupportable claims on its behalf. How does she know this energy exists? Her book, The Secret, is long on assertion and very short on solid evidence. Its appeal is to desire rather than to reason. As Henry Cloud has pointed out, that is not all wrong. Yet it is suspiciously convenient: believe that you are “God in a physical body,” and that “The earth turns on its orbit for You, The oceans ebb and flow for You,” and you can make your life anything you want it to be.
But I believe in the God of the Bible, about whom the same question is very frequently asked. How do we know this God is real? Proofs that can satisfy every mind do not exist, but in contrast to New Age spirituality, there is at least a plethora of strong evidence (see here and here for starters).
And who is this God of the Bible? He is actually the satisfaction of every true desire. New Age spirituality does not go wrong in seeking personal fulfillment. The true God is, however, the fulfillment of true desire, whereas much (most?) human desire is marred by counterfeit feelings and wishes. God is true love, true joy, true wisdom and knowledge, true mercy. These are commonly mentioned goods in the New Age literature, and yet books like The Secret settle for surface satisfaction. Why settle for money or comfort when you can have a forever relationship with the great and loving God of the universe? Why should we, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, reject God’s offer of a holiday at the seashore because we’re so enamored of making mud pies in the slum?
He is also Creator, and he stands in a position of Other next to his creation. He is an absolutely intimately, lovingly, connected other; but his relationship to creation is not sameness but of connected love. The closest analogies to that in human experience might be that of artist to painting, composer to music, sculptor to sculpture; and yet also in a different way parent to child. The artistic creator is not the artistic creation, but is indelibly expressed throughout. The parent is not the child but loves her with an unmatched devotion. God as creator shares in and is the perfect expression of these.
He is also true personhood, the ultimate expression of a Self. Compared to this, New Age belief that “all is one, God is all, all is God,” falls far short. Christianity teaches a relationship with God in which love is celebrated, not obliterated by the annihilation of self as in New Age.
He is also true justice, based on true holiness. Holiness in this context means God is morally perfect. He cannot do wrong, because his nature is fully good, unmixed with evil, not marred by rebellion as ours is. His justice flows from this: where evil exists, it is inexorably dealt with, for he cannot condone evil
God is not, then, the fulfillment of false desires: the desire for independence from our Creator, the desire to harm self or others, the desire for power and prestige for their own sakes, the desire to control others, or desires for many other kinds of satisfaction outside the context for which they were created. We believe we can get what we want apart from God. That cannot be, though: he did not create us that way. Yet we proceed on that false basis and violate God’s holiness. We deserve his justice.
Yet he is also true mercy, through the work of Jesus Christ. Christ was in fact God in the flesh. In him we can see the fullness of God’s moral perfection; we see the character of God. Always loving, always teaching, sometimes rebuking, always standing for true worship of the true God; always standing against hypocrisy and perversion of religion; never compromising; so thoroughly unwilling to bend on these principles that he was killed by the enemies he made in the process. Even his death was in his plan, though. Through it he paid the penalty demanded by God’s justice for our rebellion, so that, justice being satisfied, God can express his mercy toward those who accept Christ’s work for them.
Jesus Christ is also the ultimate answer to “Who is God, and how would we know?” He said he was God in the flesh, and he backed it up through his perfection of life, his miracles, and ultimately his resurrection from the grave. Seeing his character, we know much about the character of God. Seeing his works, we have strong confidence that we are in touch with truth.
This God is not one we would have made up. He is not molded to our everyday surface wishes. He is a God whose awesome power, otherness, and justice are to be “feared:” to be held in absolute, terrific awe and reverence, knowing how much more infinitely great and good he is than us. He makes strong demands upon us: he demands that we live according to the plan for which he created us. He metes out justice where we fail to meet his demands. In his love, through Christ, he takes the payment of justice upon himself. Then he helps us meet those demands and we discover what they are, and discover more of what God is through them: His demand, ultimately, is that we live for the greatest and deepest possible love and joy.
The pantheistic “God” of New Age spirituality already seemed exceedingly unlikely. Now, in comparison to the true God, this false god also seems bland, pale, and boring.
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008
Returning to this series after a short break, I’m also taking a short detour. What Christ does for us depends on who He is.
It’s just a few weeks since the Christmas season, and I’m sure readers know about Christ in a manger, born to a virgin. The gospel of Luke tells us He was conceived in Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit. In human terms he was of the lineage of David. David had been the king of Israel many years before, and to him God had made a promise that his offspring would have an eternal kingship. Jesus Christ, many generations, was God’s fulfillment of that promise.
But Christ was also “conceived of the Holy Spirit,” as the Apostle’s Creed phrases it, indicating His godly lineage; He was and is in fact, God Himself (all references from the English Standard Version):
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1)
The following context identifies “the Word” with Jesus Christ. He took a dispute with unbelieving religious leaders to a climax with this:
“I and the Father are one” (John 10:30)
And they understood exactly what he was getting at, even though they disagreed:
The Jews answered him, It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God. (John 10:33)
He is what no mere man could ever be, the exact representation of God, as spoken in Hebrews 1:2-4:
In these last days he (God) has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.
And there we see much more of the greatness of Jesus Christ. He is “heir of all things,” meaning that all creation is to be handed over to Him and put under His rule. He is the One through whom all creation was made (and “without him was not anything made that was made,” John 1:3, somewhat a redundancy but an intentional one for clarity). He “upholds the universe by the word of his power,” He made purification for sins, a topic we’ll return to later as we consider what Christ has done for us. He rules next to God the Father. He is far superior to the angels, with the most excellent name of all.
Paul wrote similarly in Colossians 1:15-20,
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities–all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
How the superlatives run rampant! And this is hardly the beginning; to do this topic justice would take a book (like this one, for example).
I was listening yesterday to a podcast on this by William Lane Craig (mp3; note also his follow-up on how Christ’s deity came to be recognized by the early church). Craig was making no attempt at raising emotions; he was explaining and teaching, not stirring up anything intentionally. And yet I was moved to deep worship. This man Jesus, whom we know by His life and teachings on Earth, is also the God who holds the universe together! Theologically He is understood as being one person, having both a human and divine nature (more on that here or here). Certainly there are mysteries there about how this can be true, but that it is true is as certain as anything the Bible teaches.*
The greatest passage of all describing the majesty, the sacrifice, and the exaltation of Jesus Christ is Philippians 2:5-11:
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
We will indeed all bow to Him. We will all, someday, recognize His divine majesty, and part of our worship will be based on recognizing how He sacrificed Himself on our behalf. None of us sees it clearly now, but on the day of his full revealing, it will no longer be a matter for doubt or debate.
As we move later into the story of Christ’s life on Earth and His work on our behalf, this backdrop of His divine identity will be essential at every stage.
Part of a Series: What Christ Does For Us
Related: How To Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions. This post elicited a short question, to which I’m writing a very long answer in the form of this series.
*Though this is an apologetics-oriented blog, I reserve the right at times to state what I am convinced is true without explaining each time why I am so convinced. The purpose of this series is not to prove the story of Christ but to tell the story of Christ. That story is powerful in its own right. For those who doubt or question it, by following this series you will at least know better what you are doubting and questioning.
Click To Play:
Or Download Here
Click To Play:
Or Download Here
|
|
