Tag Apologetics

Compel Them to Come In, But How?

Todd R 1 Comment

Luke 14:23 “Then the master said to the servant, ‘Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.”

This verse is part of a larger parable about how the master invited many, but many of those declined the invitation.  So, the master, wanting a full house, asks the servant to go outside the original invitation list and bring in whoever will come.  However, the use of the word “compel” has led members of the church over the centuries to use the verse as justification for the use of violence to bring people into the church.

Observing the methods of the state and other Christian sects of his day, even Saint Augustine – one of the most influential writers in all of Christian history – used this verse and other “proof texts” to justify force.  Augustine argued that Christ used force to compel Saul (who became the Apostle Paul) to believe in and follow Him and therefore provided a precedent (text here).  Augustine’s arguments were copied in defense of the Spanish Inquisition and other blemishes on the historical record of the church.  Essentially, this verse has been used to justify the means toward an end.

Critics of Christianity have, of course, jumped on the opportunity.  Christopher Hitchens, one of the “New Atheists”, makes statements like “The real axis of evil is Christianity, Judaism, and Islam”, and that religion is “the main source of hatred in the world”.  The evidence comes from well-known historical events, and incidentally these arguments have helped sell a lot of books.

However, is “Christianity” the culprit, or are people the problem?  Did some followers of Christ get the wrong message?  Could Augustine have been wrong?  Are all those who claim to act for Christ really being faithful to Him?  Is it logical, or even responsible, to blame the actions of a group of people on a person they claim to follow, even if the one would clearly disapprove of them?

Isn’t lumping all Christians, Muslims, and Jews in with the most violent examples of people who claim those faiths like lumping all atheists in with Stalin or Mao?  Because some practice a perverse form of the original philosophy, does that make the whole philosophy rotten?  Is the philosophy at fault?

The Bible is very clear that there is a distinction between those who call themselves Christian and those who actually are – a distinction that many who criticize “the church” ignore.  Matthew 7:21-23 says: “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven.  Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’  And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’”

The Bible is also very clear that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).  Nobody’s perfect, or even close.  Most of the Bible is the story of the failures of people who can’t follow the will of God, but that God loves and accepts them anyway.  More failures should not be a surprise, and the church would be wrong to ignore them – but instead these are evidence that man needs help, and that God’s capacity for forgiveness is vast.

Apparently the “New Atheists” find themselves in an interesting position.  They are actually in agreement with Jesus, who saved his harshest words for those who used the church for its own purposes and twisted His commands.  He hated hypocrisy, and called out hypocrites in public quite often, calling them a “den of thieves”, and a “brood of vipers”, among other names.  From this perspective, “Christianity” is not the culprit of these crimes, but some people calling themselves “Christian” are the culprit.  Or, another perspective: Christopher Hitchens’ “hypocrite” or “demon” is Martin Luther’s doctrine of “Simul justus et peccator” (simultaneously righteous yet still a sinner).

So, what does all this mean for the modern church?

A better interpretation (unless you are an Inquisitor or a New Atheist) of “compel them to come in” is found in Matthew Henry’s commentary on Luke 14:23, which says “compel them to come in, not by force of arms, but by force of arguments.  Be earnest with them; for in this case, it will be necessary to convince them that the invitation is sincere and not a banter; they will be shy and modest and will hardly believe that they shall be welcome.”

In Jesus’ day, a Gentile would have been shocked to be invited into a Jewish community, and likely would have been apprehensive or suspicious.  As I wrote earlier, the people who were not on the original guest list might need some convincing.  After all, Jehovah had always been the God of the Jews, and there was a good degree of history between the two groups.  Would an outsider need a compelling reason to come in, or would a simple hello suffice?

Exactly what these compelling reasons are is too large an issue for this post, but I’ll say that if force or reason (alone) is the method of compulsion, the church will likely be full of hypocritical people.  Their brain is convinced, or they are afraid to say no, but they aren’t really committed.  A church full of these people is not likely to be “compelling” to the next generation of churchgoers.

The larger issue is the pressure the church has always faced to increase membership, and if the results don’t come, there’s a big temptation to find a way.  After all, if hell is a terrible place, and we don’t want people to go there, don’t the ends justify the means?  However, God supplies the means, and ignoring them shows a lack of faith, not a strength of conviction.  The Inquisitor is not a hero of the church, but a villain.  God tells us how He wants the church to witness to the world, and it does not involve violence.

In our desire for “results”, we often become like the disciples in Mark 9:14-29.  Unable to drive out a spirit, the disciples became agitated.  The problem?  Jesus reminds them: “This kind can come out only by prayer”.   Disciples of God are supposed to accomplish God’s ends by God’s means.

God’s chosen means do not depend on reasoned arguments and force of strength, “But God chose what the world considers nonsense to put wise people to shame. God chose what the world considers weak to put what is strong to shame.”  (1 Cor 1:27) When preaching to the Corinthians, Paul “didn’t use intellectual arguments. That would have made the cross of Christ lose its meaning.” (1 Cor 1:17) This is, of course, the same Paul that Augustine says is the precedent for conversion by force.

The church has sometimes pursued an end by force that cannot be achieved by reason or forceful compulsion but must be catalyzed by God Himself.  As I pointed out in another post, if being witness to incredible supernatural events cannot compel belief, why would so many believe that logic or force could compel belief?

“For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.”  (1 Cor 1:25)

Notes From the Tilt-a-Whirl: Book Thoughts

Todd R 1 Comment

What do you get when you combine equal parts whimsy, theology and apologetics?  A book called Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl by N.D. Wilson.  Subtitled “Wide-Eyed Wonder in God’s Spoken World,” I would have never come across this book, and wouldn’t have considered reading it if I had, except that a relative (and blog reader) strongly recommended it.  However, the fact that the book begins with “I am a traveler” was a good starting point considering my blog’s typical greeting.

How to describe this book?  I think it was written as an antidote to this quote from the early pages of the book itself: “Marx called religion an opiate, and all too often it is.  But philosophy is an anesthetic, a shot to keep the wonder away.”  The book makes Christianity exciting and wonderful.  It dwells on how interesting, and often bizarre, this world and universe are, and how it can only be explained by an infinitely creative Creator God.  As a bonus, I learned a lot about nature from this book!

The book’s main point of view is that God is an artist, constantly creating in ways that we can’t reproduce or even fully understand.  God is always speaking things into existence and sustaining those things, including us.  “The world cannot exist apart from the voice of God,” and we are “a glop of paint, a character on a stage, an extra in a musical” in God’s creation.  Everything we create is an imitation of His infinite creativity.  Even the painter Jackson Pollock, when trying to create art that looks random and without design, can’t avoid the fact that he is its creator and that he created it on purpose.  It wouldn’t exist otherwise.

There’s also a good deal of philosophy in this book, but in a philosophy-for-poets kind of way that goes just deep enough so you can follow where he’s going, which is usually to show how the philosophy falls short of what the gospel offers.  He covers a lot of different viewpoints and always with a touch of whimsy (and at times a little condescension).  There’s a bit of Hume, a bit of Nietzsche, and a few others.

My favorite part of the book was his answer to an unbeliever who asked him whether he thought she was going to hell.  I won’t spoil it here (you’ll have to read it to find out), but I’m not sure C.S. Lewis could have come up with a better response.  If or when I’m asked that question, I hope I remember it.

For some the book’s whimsicality may seem irreverent as it explores our strange universe in all its forms over time.  For instance, Wilson at one point wonders: “As for God, His Son turned water into wine.  And so we end the story before He turned that wine into urine.  (Should we deny that He did?)”.  Sometimes Wilson goes for shock value to make us think, and here he asks us whether we really consider how complex and yet orderly this world really is, and how we think about the miracles Jesus performed.  And speaking of shock value, now is also probably a good time to warn you that there is a little bit of bad language in the book, if that bothers you.

So, if you’re looking for something to read that is likely very different from other things you read (at least for me), pick up Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl by N.D. Wilson.  It was very funny, thought-provoking and edifying all at the same time.  I look forward to reading it again, and soon!

Check it out.

The Last Enemy is Death

Todd R Leave a comment

In life there are many difficult questions, and two of the hardest are also common objections to Christianity: 1) Why doesn’t God do anything about the evil in this world? and 2) Why do bad things happen to good people?

However, the Bible does not leave Christians without hope in the face of these questions.

First, part of what God is doing about the evil in this world is the fact that everyone dies.  The Bible teaches that every bad thing in this world is a result of sin – people deviating from God’s purposes – and that because of that sin the world is cursed[1].  Not only do people hurt each other, but the creation itself, including human nature, is not in its ideal state.

Death was not originally part of this world, but came in to the world as a result of sin and is a constant reminder of it.  In Genesis chapter 5, there is a genealogy from Adam to Noah.  The phrase “and he died” is repeated over and over again and is a reminder that this world is not perfect.  God created a consequence for the sin of mankind: death.  While the Bible doesn’t explain why there was a snake in the garden or why Adam and Eve sinned, it does describe what God is doing about it.  When we ask why bad things happen, we acknowledge that bad things exist, that they shouldn’t exist, and that they can happen to anyone.  God isn’t doing nothing about the evil in the world – we all die and that is part of the judgment.

So, the two objections to Christianity (Why doesn’t God do anything about the evil in this world? and why do bad things happen to good people?) end up being contradictory because part of what God does about the evil in this world is that bad things (death) happen to everyone.

However, the Bible teaches that there are two deaths: a physical death and a spiritual death.  In the first, our soul is separated from our body and our body dies.  In the second, our soul is separated from God eternally and our soul dies but exists forever away from God’s presence and blessings.  A second thing that God is doing about the evil in this world is that the first death is universal, but the second death is not.

Fortunately, judgement and death aren’t the only things God is doing about sin.  What does this mean?  Note the second half of God’s curse on the serpent from Genesis 3:15 –

“I will put enmity between you and the woman,
            and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
            and you shall bruise his heel.”

Who is being bruised here?  In the last phrase, Satan is injuring Christ through the crucifixion, but it’s described as a wound to the heel because it is not fatal.  Jesus was raised to life eternal.  On the other hand, Christ shall bruise the head of Satan – a fatal blow that he will never recover from.  This was determined from the beginning.

While judgement comes to all in physical death as a result of sin, through Christ there is a way out from spiritual, eternal death.  Jesus has paid the price for our sin and has conquered eternal, spiritual death as a result.

“The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” – 1 Corinthians 15:26

Praise God!

[1] See Genesis 3:19 and 3:22

Faith in the Face of Objection

Todd R 1 Comment

Perhaps I’m odd in this way, but I find that one of the main things that bolsters my faith is the flimsiness of objections to Christian belief.  Sometimes these objections catch us off guard if we haven’t thought them through, but on more investigation, we find that they just seem ignorant.  I remember one of the very first Sunday school groups I was in after becoming a Christian, that a couple of the college students in the group, who had grown up in the church, said the Gospels aren’t reliable because John’s is so much different than the other 3.  In their view, the 4 writers couldn’t have been writing about the same person, and perhaps as a result Jesus was not real.  First, I had to deal with my shock that these people were in a Bible study even though they had serious doubts about Scripture’s reliability and authority, as well as about Jesus’ identity.  Second, I realized I didn’t have a good answer to this “problem.”  So, in this post I’m sharing what I discovered since this early experience.

Most Bible students and scholars agree that Jesus spent about 3 years of His life in public ministry., from His first miracle of turning water to wine in Cana, on through His resurrection and ascension to heaven.  Yet, we only have 4 short books, the Gospels, telling us what He did during his entire life of about 33 years, with a focus on the last 3.  To me, it’s surprising we have so little documentation of Jesus’ life especially since the Gospels make it clear that Jesus was a very busy person, often having to hide from the crowds that followed Him everywhere.  Why is this?  Why isn’t there more to read about Jesus’ life?

Somewhere I read that each Gospel is really a passion narrative (a story of His suffering, death and resurrection) preceded by a brief introduction.  Compare this with a modern biography of an important figure that might be hundreds of pages.  The 4 writers weren’t writing a biography of Jesus in the way we might expect them to but were trying to give us enough information about who He was and what He’s done for us so that we have a basis for believing in Him.  Writing for different audiences and at different times, the writers selected what they knew about Jesus to fit what they wanted to communicate.  They weren’t trying to answer every question we might have.  That would have taken much longer, and wasn’t really necessary.

In John’s Gospel, the very last verse (21:25) says:

“Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

As I noted, John’s gospel is sometimes criticized as inauthentic because it is so different than the other ones.  But how John closes his Gospel shows that there was so much from Jesus’ ministry that he could have chosen to write, and that he didn’t include everything.  John just made different choices than the others.  For example, John records only 7 miracles that Jesus performed, when in reality there must have been hundreds or thousands.  The Gospels say Jesus was sometimes up all night healing people.

John also wrote about 7 “I am” statements that aren’t in the other Gospels.  To John, the number 7 seemed to be important and maybe useful tool for organizing his thoughts among all he had to choose from.  Considering Jesus spent hundreds or thousands of hours teaching His disciples and others, it’s not naïve to think that John alone would find this group of similar statements and decide to structure His Gospel around them.  They likely were spoken months and even years apart from each other, so the pattern might not have been as obvious as it is to us, who are reading a brief, curated summary.

So, sometimes when objections to our faith catch us off guard, it sometimes means that the person making the objection (and us) haven’t thought it through.  We may not figure out the answers to everything, because God wants us to trust, not necessarily understand, but knowing that He is reliable doesn’t require our knowledge to be complete or perfect.

As one of my favorite Bible commentators, Warren Wiersbe, often wrote: “We do not live on explanations; we live on promises.”  We can’t know everything, but we can know as Psalm 40:5 proclaims, that:

“You have multiplied, O LORD my God,
            your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us;
            none can compare with you!
I will proclaim and tell of them,
            yet they are more than can be told.”

Amen.

The Body of Christ is Irreducibly Complex

Todd R Leave a comment

Among the various camps in the debate between creation and evolution is a set of ideas called intelligent design (ID).  A key part of ID is “irreducible complexity,” a term that comes from the book Darwin’s Black Box, by Lehigh professor Michael Behe.[1]

In short, irreducible complexity argues that evolution by chance, without an intelligent designer driving it, is unreasonable because the multiple systems in a complex organism like a human body – circulatory, digestive, endocrine, muscular, respiratory, and so on – are all interdependent on each other.  The circulatory system alone, with the heart pumping blood through an elaborate system of arteries and veins, is difficult to imagine developing by chance occurrence, but a chance evolution of that system alongside all the other parts it is dependent on is even more far-fetched.  All systems evolving together in lockstep without failing is a much more difficult problem to explain scientifically without a Creator.  The circulatory system takes what the respiratory and digestive systems take in and deliver it to the other systems that use it.  Without the other parts, it has no function and cannot survive and further evolve.

An isolated, inanimate, heart. Photo by Ali Hajiluyi on Unsplash

However, my intent here is not to prove intelligent design, but to consider the apostle Paul’s words about the church as the body of Christ.  In 1 Corinthians 12:12, he wrote: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.”  He continues that no part of the body can say it is not a part of the body because it has a different function than another part (1 Cor. 12:15-16), and also that no part of the body can say it doesn’t need all of the other parts (1 Cor. 12:21).  Those who are in Christ Jesus cannot be divided.

Paul follows his description of the body with 1 Corinthians 13, a powerful statement on the supremacy of love, and in context a gentle rebuke to the idea that a body can survive as individual, unrelated units.  In a human body, any part can only survive by serving the other parts.  Even an organ as incredibly complex and important as a heart cannot survive if it decided to pump blood only for itself.  Where would it get its nutrients?  How would it flee from danger?  As Paul wrote: “If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell?” (1 Cor. 12:17).  Even an organ as important as the heart is useless in isolation.  It gets its very life and purpose by what it does for the body.

As Jesus said to His disciples in John 13:34-35 – “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.  By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

As the song says, they will know we are Christians by our love, and the church Jesus came to build is irreducibly complex.  There is no appendix[2] in the church, which is the body of Christ.  All members are absolutely essential.

[1] Behe, Michael.  Darwin’s Black Box (1996).
[2] While we commonly think of this organ as useless, God as our Maker didn’t put it there by accident.