Make it Known

A Sunday School teacher I had as a teenager (Ms. Brenda Woody), who happened to be a longtime teacher and coach at my school, once described the relationship between faith and works in the following way (paraphrased),

“Say there’s a man who claims to be a basketball fan.  Maybe he even believes he is a basketball fan.  But he doesn’t play basketball.  He doesn’t watch basketball.  He doesn’t donate time or money to basketball clubs.  He’s not that familiar with the rules of basketball.  He can’t tell the difference between pictures of George Mikan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, or LeBron James.  He doesn’t have a favorite team or make time to watch them.  He doesn’t even own a basketball.  Is such a man really a basketball fan? No, he’s not.”

I’ve thought back to that statement many times in the approximately 10 years since I heard it.   The more I think about it, the more accurate I think it is in describing the relationship between saying and/or believing you’re a Christian and actually being a Christian.  If you truly are a Christian, you will fulfill the Great Commandment and Great Commission.  That involves baptism, studying the Bible, prayer, and fasting.  You’ll at least try.  Really try.  You might not always succeed, but you’ll truly, genuinely, make an attempt to do so.

But the deeds themselves are not enough to be a basketball fan either. You can hate basketball and still do many of those things. Even the demons know the truth of Christ, and tremble (James 2:19).

God requires what you do to be done in the right spirit (Micah 6:6-8, Joel 2:12-13, Mark ch 7), but He makes clear that being in the right spirit is made known to Him by your actions.  Psalm 139:23-24 and Jeremiah 17:10:

²³Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts:  ²⁴And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

¹⁰I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.

God searches your heart and mind by your actions, to see if there is any wicked way in you.  There will be no real, pleasing “fruit” of your doings unless these things are done in the spirit. Do the things for God that He commands, and do them in the right spirit.  Make it known to God that you’re a fan in this way, and He will lead you.

Faith and Reason

A friend posted on my facebook page that what I write reminds him of the Benjamin Franklin quote, “The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.”  My response: I try to see through both, and don’t find them to be contradictory.

The reason why is the crowning mathematical and philosophical achievement of the 20th century, Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem.  There are many facets to it and implications of it, and for the layman (or anyone not well versed in academic papers about symbolic logic), I recommend the book Godel’s Proof.  It’s outstanding.  One implication is this: in any logically consistent system, there are three kinds of truth.  There are axioms (things assumed to be true), things provable from the axioms (necessary logical implications), and things that are true that are not provable from the axioms (possible truths that are true).  None is any less true than any other, but all of the things that are true in a logically consistent system fit into one of the three, and reality is a logically consistent system.

If the the Bible is to be believed, it makes it clear that the beliefs that constitute faith are not provable, but nonetheless true.  Faith is evidence of things unseen (Hebrews 11:1).  There is a way that seems right to man, but in the end leads to death (Proverbs 14:12).  If the beliefs that constitute faith were provable, faith would be evidence of things obviously seen.  There would be no way that appears right to man, but in the end leads to death.

So clearly, if the Bible is true, it falls into the third category: things that are true that are not provable.

To see strictly by reason, in the terminology of Franklin’s day, was to be thoroughly agnostic about all things that were not provable.  Even after Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, some people still adhere to this ideology.

Which is silly on at least two fronts.  For one, a result of Godel’s Proof is that axioms cannot be proven.  The best you can hope for is to display that your axioms are consistent with one another.  You can’t prove them to be true, let alone consistent with this complex, massive, space-time governed thing we call reality.  Without the axioms, you have nothing to generate necessary logical implications from.  Without axioms and necessary logical implications, you have nothing with which to compare possible truths.  To be governed strictly by proof is to be a total epistemological skeptic.

Nobody is an epistemological skeptic, aside from possibly acknowledging it in the academic sense.  You breathe.  You eat food.  You drink water.  You do these things because on some level, you choose to live your life in accordance with the notion that these things are beneficial or prudent.

Another reason that notion is silly is because it’s limiting.  Even if (and we’re playing pretend here) you had a set of axioms that you knew, without a doubt, were true and governed all reality, and even if you knew you had the complete set of those axioms, reality is massive and complex.  There’s an entire third set of truth out there. In a massive, complex system such as reality, it’s far greater than your axioms or the things proven by them.  Just one, trivial, unprovable truth, when combined with the hypothetical axioms or things proven by them, would lead to a vast set of true things all its own.

So can I prove the Bible is true? No (by its own admission in the verses above), but non-believers have spent thousands of years trying to prove it untrue and all have failed.  One wrote an excellent book about his attempt, Josh McDowell’s Evidence that Demands a Verdict; he ended up converting in the process.

But unless we completely distrust our senses, we know this: the Bible exists.  It was written over a span of roughly 1500 years, by roughly 40 different authors, on 3 different continents, in 3 different languages.  It is consistent with itself and all verifiable history.   That’s remarkable in and of itself.  It contains hundreds of prophesies that have either been fulfilled or that the Bible states would be fulfilled in the Second Coming of Christ.  Many of its authors were so convinced of the truth of what they wrote that they preferred martyrdom to recanting their testimony.

Which leaves you with a question: is there more evidence that this possible truth is true or not?  And either way, what are you going to choose to believe?

It’s not shutting the eye of reason.  It’s using both eyes.