Yale University and Repealing the First Amendment

Yale University and the First Amendment

Now, I have evolved over the past few years into a position of political indifference. I simply don't care to get involved in American politics. The message I hear from most evangelicals in America is that they believe that America should not only be a Christian nation, but an evangelical nation. I say that to say this, I am not pointing out the dangers of losing our first amendment rights. That is not my point in this very brief post. What I am pointing out is something far worse than that. And yes, evangelicals (of which I am one), there is something worse than losing freedom of religion or freedom of speech, or all freedoms as far as it goes. I am point out the obscene lack of intellectual energy being displayed by these so-called academically gifted kids. These are supposed to be the brightest among us. These kids are the world of tomorrow. Listen to the comments they are making about repealing the first amendment! Any self-reflective adult would hear "repeal the first amendment" and absolutely react with sheer outrage. But not these especially academically gifted kids at Yale. Of course all we see are those that mindlessly went along with the request. We do not see how many told the guy to take a hike. Nevertheless, there seemed to no shortage of kids willing to repeal even this guys right to repeal amendments. The self-defeating nature of what he was doing was profoundly ironic and not once do we see any of these kids pick up on the prank.

These are those whom God is selecting from today as He brings men to Himself. Pastors should be aware that one of the tasks of the Church is to equip new Christians to be excellent thinkers. God created us as rational, intellectual, thinking beings. We glorify God when we exercise those skills to the best of our ability and for His glory. We dishonor God when we neglect these things. Pastors fail in their duties when they neglect to hold their flock accountable for being intellectual sloths. It is more than embarrassing; it is shameful and sinful for Christians to neglect the discipline of critical thinking.

Expressions of Autonomy

Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?” Gen. 3:1

This is no doubt a very familiar text to most Christians. And yet, I am curious how many Christians have actually participated in a thorough exegetical study of this event. From what I can tell, we may be spending a disproportionate amount of time defending the historicity of this account while neglecting it’s theological significance altogether. The challenge for the pastor, the teacher, and the apologist is that we must do both. We must defend the historical accuracy of the temptation and fall of man while at the same time emphasizing it’s theological and practical implications.

My purpose in referencing this text is to demonstrate that there is a strong relationship between this historical event some 6,000 years ago or so and what I see taking place in the Church, well, since it’s inception really, and especially in contemporary times. But there is a difference that I shall come back to toward the end of my remarks. The goal of this post is to prick your thinking about those who cut against the basic teachings of the Christian community. I am not talking about teachings that could be more ambiguous, such as eschatological issues or specific texts that may be more or less difficult to interpret. My focus is on those clear teachings of Scripture and how the consequences of the fall in the Garden tend to impact how we handle those teachings and why. Additionally, I don’t only want to point out how some handle those teachings but how the rest of the community responds versus how it ought to respond.

When we think about autonomy we should think about the capacity of a person or a system to make it’s own decisions about its actions. We think about a system that operates independent from external forces or authority. We think about the idea of independence. Now, I write this blog within an American context. Nothing is more valued and prized in American culture than the idea of independence. Every American has been baptized into the ideology of independence. It is the greatest goal of every American. This ideology happens to fit perfectly with the theological issue with which I am dealing in this post: the human quest for autonomy. I could take a philosophical angle for those readers who are more interested in apologetics or I could take a purely theological angle and point out the more practical issues confronting us in the Church. I have decided to do the latter.

The temptation in the garden of our first parents was a temptation to think and act autonomously. It must be pointed out that the very beginning of autonomous thinking starts with interpretation. It is an issue of hermeneutics from the very start. Satan began immediately by asking the question: has God said? The Christian in modern times is confronted with two very clear attacks against God from this perspective. Either the Word of God is denied outright by subjugation to human standards of justification or it is re-purposed with the tools of secular philosophy, science, logic, language, and psychology. In both cases, man has reinterpreted his situation in a way that elevates him to the place of prominence. Protagoras lives on, but it was the snake and not Protagoras that invented this philosophy.

Jesus Christ said, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.” (Matt. 16:24) But the serpent’s promise stands in glaring contradiction to the words of Jesus: “For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Gen. 3:5) On the one had man has the serpent promising unconditional autonomy and on the other hand we have Jesus, God of very God, demanding unconditional surrender. Logically speaking, you can’t have it both ways. Either we surrender everything we are at the feet of Christ or we buy the lie of the serpent’s promise that we do just fine without God. As a result, we have invented such ideas of evolution as set over against creation, the belief that we can know things either rationally or empirically or critically without any reliance on revelation, and finally, we have even convinced ourselves that we can establish the necessity of objective morality to avoid the chaos that serves as an ever present threat in the world. But these things are not the focus of this blog today. My focus is on the goings-on in the Church and how this very same infectious autonomous thinking is impacting or threatening to impact the body of Christ.

For example, the view that Scripture is not fully inspired and inerrant is the product of autonomous thinking. It places man in the position of being the judge and jury of “this says the Lord.” Rather than submitting to God’s word, God’s word is submitting to autonomous human reason and man sits in judgment over God’s word as opposed to taking up his intellectual cross and following Christ.

The view that the God of the OT is corrected by the revelation of God in the NT through the person of Jesus Christ is a product of autonomous human reason, not rigorous scholarship. The basis for this work is grounded in philosophical objections regarding how the OT describes God because it offends and contradicts our humanistic projections of how and what we want God to be. Rather than accept God’s revelation of Himself, we reject it in preference for our own idea of God.

Christians also express autonomy when they reject much of the reformed teachings that came out of the reformation, but which also have their ground in Scripture. When we reject divine sovereignty and election, it is usually on the basis that such a God does not comport with the sort of God we think exists. The question that every Christian has to ask is if the God that exists in their mind is actually the same God that is revealed in Scripture. And this question must be asked within the humble context of recognizing the presence of sin in the form of autonomous desires to corrupt and twist God’s revelation of Himself so that we can be satisfied with the God we think is there.

The lack of support in the Church to adhere to and display the Christian ethic as laid down in the biblical text is another expression of human autonomy. There are churches that sit by silent when they encounter couples shacking up together but who also want to become members of the community. And I know of cases where churches, evangelical churches have split over elders refusing to allow such people to become members. I also know of numerous churches that entirely ignore the process of excommunication over such serious sins as illicit divorce, adultery, and other sexual sins. These are expressions of human autonomy.

One of the most obvious expressions of human autonomy attempting to gain a foothold in the Church is gay theology. The homosexual has a very strong desire, not only to be, tolerated, but actually accepted, approved, and even celebrated. The notion that the homosexual movement simply wanted to be tolerated is a myth. The movement wants to be celebrated by every facet of society and is not willing to leave any group standing that does not go along with it’s agenda. In their attempt to gain approval from the Church, they engage in some of the most outrageous, absurd, and even pernicious treatment of Scripture. They are driven by an autonomous desire to do their own thing their own way without regard for thousands of years of scholarship. The homosexual movement has adopted a hermeneutic that is overtly biased, clearly anachronistic, and thoroughly eisegetical at bottom. The agenda is to preserve autonomy in sexual behavior.

The sin of our first parents and of their progeny was and is autonomy. The desire for autonomy has led to the infectious condition of total depravity. While the Christian has been born again, the fact remains that we still have the sinful nature to deal with. This reality ought to make us more humble. We must see in ourselves what we can clearly see in our first parents in the garden. Even in their unfallen condition, the temptation to autonomous living was a reality with which they had to deal. And if they had to deal with it in their unfallen state, how much more must we be on our guard for it in the state in which we find ourselves.

We must respond by doing precisely what Jesus demanded. Jesus demanded nothing less than complete, entire submission to God’s Word in how we reason, in how we do philosophy, in how we live our lives, our values, in how we work, in how we relate to one another as husbands, wives, parents, sons, daughters, elders, teachers, pastors, employees, employers, and fellow believers in Christ. There is no domain in which Christ is not LORD over our lives. He controls what we think, say, and do. An unwillingness to submit to Christ in all things is an unwillingness to submit to Him in anything.

A Schizophrenic America

Recently, Mark Cuban set off a firestorm of controversy with his comments about racial prejudice. The networks and social media were apparently exploding like a nuclear weapon had gone off. In a country where judging has been condemned now for decades and where truth is no longer objective and morals are relative, we sure don’t act like we really believe what we say we believe. What I would like to do is be able to make it one day without someone praising the sexual perversion of homosexuality or talking about the deplorable state of racist attitudes. America has become the single greatest symbol of hypocrisy in the history of nations at this point. What’s more, the American Church has been all too eager to follow the lead of the culture. America has become a self-righteous country filled with self-righteous people that have no hesitation about affirming their own self as the source of their own righteousness.

What are the facts concerning prejudice and homosexuality? In a recent poll, 31% of blacks said that their own demographic was more likely to be racist than not. But you never heard anything about this poll on mainstream media. Full disclosure about homosexuality is just as hypocritical in America. The list of diseases found with extraordinary frequency among male homosexual practitioners as a result of anal intercourse is alarming:

Anal Cancer 
Chlamydia trachomatis 
Cryptosporidium 
Giardia lamblia 
Herpes simplex virus 
Human immunodeficiency virus 
Human papilloma virus 
Isospora belli 
Microsporidia 
Gonorrhea 
Viral hepatitis types B & C 
Syphilis²⁵

Sexual transmission of some of these diseases is so rare in the exclusively heterosexual population as to be virtually unknown. The point is that America is no longer interested in the facts. She has no interest in anything other than establishing her own self as god of the globe. She murders her own unborn children as if she were removing a hangnail. In fact, she not only defends such behavior, she brags about it. I have been saying for some time now that the networks are about to explode with same-sex displays of affection. Last night, while trying to watch a movie for a few minutes (I can only sit there for maybe 15 minutes or so), the commercials contained two different clips of men kissing. So we have arrived. I have some hope that real men will begin to react like any real man should react. However, my experience is that the modern domineering woman will demand that her husband get on board with the rest of this godless culture and show more tolerance for such behavior. The sad fact is that we stopped raising real men for the most part a few decades ago.

The true Church in America has come to the place where she is now going to be forced to look at the situation differently. It is no longer a country that tolerates Christianity. Sure, it will tolerate the hypocrites and the liars that claim to be Christian but are not. However, the minute you start talking about what the Bible teaches or what God says, you can plan on being dismissed immediately or worse. Christians in America are entering the conditions that most Christians throughout most of the history of Christianity have had to live in. There have been exceptions here and there, but for the most part, most Christians have lived in cultures that were moderately to extremely hostile to Christian principles. This was certainly the case for those Christians living in the first-century Church and who had the privilege of being recipients of the letters and writings of the NT at its inception. Hence, Christians in those cultures had to think differently about their respective cultures. And so too must we. In fact, sound thinking has move to the forefront of Christian behavior in short order. No longer can the Church afford “check-the-box” behavior for her weekly programs, be it Sunday school, Bible study groups, and especially during Sunday morning worship. Our weekly gathering must be with the intention of equipping for both godly living and godly thinking. Moreover, that we are called to contradict the lies of Satan wherever they appear cannot be over-emphasized. Confrontation, refutation, and correction with the hope of conversion are inherent in the Christian message. Examine the ministry of Christ, of Paul, of Peter, and of John. Only a blind person can miss the constant battle for truth and for sanctification that these men were engage in. Some of us think that we should only concern ourselves with sanctification, with serving one another, with pure living. Others think we should only concern ourselves with evangelism and apologetics. Both groups are wrong. We have to be passionately concerned about both.

Part of our problem in the Church has been a terrible imbalance in training and equipping our people. Attending a Sunday school program where a teacher spends 20 minutes talking while 70% of the class is frankly unengaged is NOT equipping your people. Donuts and coffee and 30 minutes of small talk about nothing mixed in with 10 minutes of how Jesus healed my cat and 10 minutes of Bible study is an embarrassing joke for the Church. Yet we convince ourselves we are doing something when we do these things. We are not doing anything that matters, anything eternal, anything that will last. We are crossing an item off our to-do list, or better yet, our bragging list.

It is time for Churches to put serious rigor into their structure or their people are sure to find themselves in conversations without a clue as to what to say. The sad fact is that most Christians don’t even want to bring up the gospel. They are afraid to do so. Why? Many are ashamed and don’t want to be marginalized. Most of us are simply incompetent. Gospel sharing bottomed-out many years ago and many conservative churches have not bothered with evangelism and apologetics since. Couple that with the fact that there are more objections to the Christian message today than there ever has been in America and Christians don’t talk about it because they don’t want to be embarrassed. In addition, many Christians are just too lazy to bother with such work. They don’t see a need. These people think the gospel amounts to Jesus being able to fix your problems and give your life meaning and purpose. For them, that is the gospel. What it is, is a humanistic, deistic, moralistic version of the gospel and Christianity that is as idolatrous as the ancient god Dagan. Somehow we think that because we tattoo Jesus, Christianity, and love on it that this makes it okay. Moreover, even genuine believers may give it a past under the false thinking that it is not real idolatry because it sort of mimics Christianity.

Another sad attitude on the part of leaders is that they think, for some strange reason, that people can think hard about work, performing their jobs well, spending energy thinking things over, but when it comes to Christian truth, we must remain in a constant state of the simple, and at all cost, avoid the complex. We make almost no effort to challenge our own people with the truths they claim to believe. That is a costly mistake. You can be sure that outsiders are going to be challenging the faith more and more. Why shouldn’t we put as much effort into rightly dividing God’s word and into refuting error as we put into our jobs? Such an attitude is not only confusing, it is spiritually detrimental to the believer.

So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding. (Eph. 4:17-18a) Christians are commanded not to think like the godless culture around them. We are not to reason like they do, nor to follow their pattern of living. Gentiles think autonomously. They begin with their own self as the starting point, as the reference point for what is right. America has completely redefined marriage because she thinks she is god. America has called murder abortion and made it a woman’s health issue rather than a solution to unwanted consequences resulting from promiscuous behavior. Do not believe the polls. If you did, you would think that the average woman has had 4 sex partners during her life. College women alone are reporting numbers ranging from 10-12 to around 30 during college alone. No one can watch reality TV, read anything about sexual behavior in college and young people and think that a survey that suggests such a low number has any credibility. We understate sexual activity in heterosexual and homosexual men and women and overstate the number of homosexuals and “committed” homosexual relationships. Why? America is a nation of hypocrisy. It is that simple. She is a God hating idolater. She is a country that has been moving to replace God with herself for decades now.

We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. (2 Cor. 10:5) This is a war of the mind, of knowledge, of thought. Its time Christians take it seriously.

A Manual for Creating Atheists: A Reliable Epistemology

Chapter three of “A Manual for Creating Atheists” is truly a very difficult chapter for intelligent people of faith to read. This is not because it offers some profound intellectual challenge to faith. Rather, it is because  Boghossian waxes extremely insulting in the chapter. However, the Christian must resist the temptation to be drawn into Boghossian's unkind ad hominem. Instead, we must critically examine the truthfulness of his propositions, all the while pointing out his philosophical bias, his wild conjectures, and his unproven philosophical assumptions.

Boghossian begins this chapter by setting a priori knowledge and analytic statements over against synthetic statements and a posteriori knowledge. This is an old argument between rationalists and empiricists and one that will likely never be settled. Specifically, he attacks certainty. He writes, “Certainty is an enemy of truth: examination and reexamination are allies of truth.” One cannot help but wonder how knowledge advances or progresses if it has no foundation upon which to advance. I shall return to this criticism later in the post.

Boghossian asserts that, “Faith taints or at worse removes our curiosity about the world.” Seemingly, faith leads to certainty about facts of the world and such certainty allays curiosity. Boghossian thinks, “Faith immutably alters the starting conditions for inquiry by uprooting a hunger to know and sowing a warrantless confidence.” The author of this project speaks with the strangest level of confidence for a man that thinks such confidence is the enemy of knowledge and truth. It is odd to read someone criticize the idea of certainty with such a high degree of, well, certainty.

Boghossian then makes this very puzzling statement, “Once we understand that we don’t possess knowledge, we have a basis to go forward in a life of examination, wonder, and critical reflection.” This statement would be humorous if it wasn’t so disturbing. The critical thinker has to wonder what the basis of our examination and critical thinking might be if we are all ignorant of it. How can one know that we have any basis at all for the pursuit of knowledge? How can one understand that they are knowledge-less? To understand implies a degree of knowledge. And to have adequate understanding to know that exploration is needed and desirable seems like a healthy degree of knowledge. Apparently Boghossian hasn’t the foggiest notion that knowledge depends upon knowledge, and so too does the very notion of examination, wonder, and critical reflection. The necessary precondition for knowledge is knowledge. I must confess that I find Boghossian’s line of reasoning here utterly absurd. At a minimum, knowing that one does not know is knowing. What then is the basis for that knowledge? Boghossian will eventually be forced to disclose his own foundation of beliefs and it is there that we shall find his faith.

From here, the author makes an ethical statement, which is also quite puzzling given his epistemological proclivity: “Wonder, curiosity, honest self-reflection, sincerity, and the desire to know are a solid basis for a life worth living.” I cannot help but ask how Boghossian knows that there is such a thing as “a life worth living.” What does “a life worth living actually look like?” Additionally, is there only one “life worth living” or are there more? Furthermore, what justification can he provide for such a sweeping and universal claim? I wonder if there isn’t an element of faith somewhere in Boghossian’s own worldview. Indeed, if it can be shown that such is the case, the implications for Boghossian’s project could turn out to more than just a little hysterical. After all, his entire thesis, the unreliability of faith as an epistemological method, would rest upon the very thing he so desperately wants to avoid: faith.

The goal of the Street Epistemologist is to “help people destroy foundational beliefs, flimsy assumptions, faulty epistemologies, and ultimately faith.” We cannot tell if Boghossian is speaking of the notion of foundationalism or if he means specific beliefs. As far as it goes, everyone enters this discussion with foundational beliefs. They are impossible to destroy. They can only be replaced with competing foundational beliefs. In addition, I intend to show that every epistemological position is, at bottom, a faith position. The only different is the object in which the faith is placed.

As we move through this particularly offensive, closed-minded, and arrogant chapter, the author once against makes one more outlandish statement about faith: “After all, faith is by definition the belief in something regardless or even in spite of the evidence.” The idea is that Christian faith has absolutely no evidence to offer and in fact, it exists in spite of the evidence against it. Boghossian then points to the Gervais & Norenzyan 2012 study that supposedly concludes that analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief. What Boghossian does not tell us is that most of the subjects in that study came from a liberal Canadian university, hence, highly underrepresenting the typical North American population. Suffice it to say that the study to which Boghossian refers is a real howler.

Boghossian spends a lot of time on what he calls “Doxastic Closure.” This is what happens when a person holds to a belief that is resistant to revision, supposedly regardless of the evidence. Boghossian says, “This puts people in a type of bubble that filters out ideologically disagreeable data and opinions.” I wonder if “doxastic closure” is the same thing as dismissing the reliability of faith as an epistemology from the start, because it does not meet one’s ideas of their criteria for justification.

Boghossian tell us that doxastic openness is a willingness and ability to revise beliefs. One has to wonder what sort of evidence Boghossian would need in order to justify a belief. Suppose someone asks him to be open to changing his criteria for justification, how do we think he might respond? Boghossian’s view of his ability to be purely objective about these matters seems more than a little naive.

I could continue my review of chapter three, but I will stop with one more Boghossian assertion that is nothing short of outrageous. He writes, “This section will unpack two primary reasons for this appearance of failure: either (1) an interlocutor’s brain is neurologically damaged, or (2) you’re actually succeeding.” He continues, “In Short, if someone is suffering from a brain-based faith delusion your work will be futile.” If Boghossian means for people to take his project serious, then he should leave aside such insulting conjectures and ad hominem and explain to his atheist colleagues that it could be due to the fact that their arguments rest upon a hopeless irrationalism, are not supported by the evidence, and most of all, contradict the truth of God revealed in Scripture, which is actually why intelligent Christians reject them. One has to do more than link together a bunch of ad hominem statements if they hope to persuade others of the validity concerning their point of view.  

The Christian response to Boghossian then is to ask him to justify the certainty with which he condemns certainty. Boghossian claims that certainty is an enemy of the truth and about this he seems to be quite certain. Boghossian’s whole enterprise seems to be that faith aims for certainty. His argument goes something like this: examination and reexamination are allies of truth. Certainty endangers examination. Without examination truth is endangered. Faith produces certainty. Therefore, faith endangers truth. But one has to ask why truth ceases to be truth once we become certain of it. I am certain that 2+2 = 4. I do not need to examine the equation again. I do not need to reexamine the equation again. I am certain it is true. Boghossian tells us that truth is threatened by certainty, but he fails to illustrate for us just why he thinks this is the case.

Boghossian’s claim that faith removes our curiosity about the world is manifestly misleading. The fact that Christian theism asserts that there are some things, about which we can be certain, does nothing to quell intellectual adventure or curiosity about the many things we do not and even cannot be certain about. It does not follow that certainty about the existence of God leads to certainty about all of reality. The fact of God’s existence does nothing to eliminate mystery, adventure, or curiosity of all of the facts of God’s universe and of the revelation of Himself both in nature and in Scripture. Apparently Boghossian is unfamiliar with the voluminous materials and documents produced by theologians over the centuries, all designed to inform, to question, to wonder, and to search for the truth.

Boghossian implies that he believes there is a life worth living. This implies that life has value, worth, and meaning. It also implies that not just any life has value, worth, and meaning, but rather, a specific kind of life. Moreover, without saying so, it implies that there is at least one kind of life that is not worth living. Now, apparently, the life worth living is a life filled with wonder, curiosity, honest self-reflection, sincerity, and the desire to know. But why isn’t a life filled with certainty, apathy, insensitive selfishness, insincerity, and epistemological disinterest? In addition, why isn’t the life that mixes these traits worth living? Are there more than one lives worth living? Why this life and not that life? Boghossian opens Pandora’s Box and closing it is not a task I would desire.

Over and over again Boghossian claims that faith is based on a lack of evidence. Or he tells us that faith is unreliable and unreasonable all because of its apparent lack of evidence. What Boghossian has not done so far is tell us what type of evidence he means. One man is convicted for murder because there were two credible eyewitnesses that saw him do it. Another man is convicted of murder because of the forensic evidence gathered at the scene and his inability to provide a legitimate alibi. What exactly constitutes evidence? This is the problem of the criterion. If Boghossian is going to assert that faith is not rational, then the burden of proof is on him. And such proof must begin with what he means when he uses such terms as evidence, reasonable, justification, warrant, and rational. We know that self-evident propositions exist. They do not require evidence to be rational. We do not require justification in order to believe them. And we know that other propositions are not self-evident. Boghossian needs to explain to us sooner rather than later, precisely what is the nature of these propositions that require warrant and exactly what that warrant must look like in order to be rational.

The problem so far with Boghossian’s epistemology is that it is guilty of epistemic circularity. Epistemic circularity is a malady from which an argument for the reliability of a faculty or source of belief suffers when one of its premises is such that my acceptance of that premise originates in the operation of the very faculty or source of belief in question. [Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, 119] When Boghossian asks us to accept his standard for what is rational in order to determine what is rationally justifiable, he is asking us to accept what is essentially an epistemologically circular argument. Epistemic circularity is only curable in Christian theism where the source of all knowledge is transcendent. On to chapter four.

The Christian and the Intellect: Biblically Positioned Critical Thinking

This post will disrupt my series on “A Manual to Create Atheists” ever so briefly, in an attempt to address the area of intellectual ethics in the Christian worldview. Since the Christian worldview encompasses every part of the human person, and since the intellect is central to the human person, it follows that Christian ethics has much to say about how Christians use or, unfortunately, neglect intellectual activities. There are two extreme states of the intellect that every believer must avoid. The first state that we must avoid is the state of an undisciplined, uncontrolled insatiable intellectual curiosity where speculation reigns supreme. The second state is no better, and perhaps may be worse, namely, the state of a radical intellectual lethargy, which I also call intellectual sloth. This latter state is just as undisciplined as the former.

The purpose of this post is to demonstrate that the Scripture takes a high view of intellectual perseverance and discipline within the Christian community. That is to say, Scripture encourages and praises the principle of a disciplined approach to intellectual performance on the part of God’s people and it proportionately condemns the idea of intellectual lethargy. The perlocutionary goal of this post is to persuade the reader to “give themselves” more fully to intellectual excellence. I hope to convince you that the reward is worth the effort by showing you first and foremost that the immediate reward is actually pleasing God.

My aim is to goad you, as a Christian, to either take up the goal of becoming a critical thinker, or if you are already progressing in that skill, to encourage you in your quest. However, it is no easy task to become a biblically positioned critical thinker. It is not something that just comes to you. Like philosophy, or logic, critical thinking is not a skill that you can acquire through rote memorization. It is a skill that requires tremendous focus, methodical study, and intense discipline. Critical thinking is not something a person just does once in a while. It is something you become. How does this relate to Christianity? What is the relationship between critical thinking and Christianity?

I believe Scripture has a lot to say about relationship between Christianity and critical thinking. 1 John 4:1 says, Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. The Greek word dokimadzete (δοκιμάζετε) carries the sense of scrutiny. The act here is primarily mental in nature. In this case it means to examine, to give to intellectual scrutiny. The idea is to attempt to learn the genuineness of something (Louw-Nida). In addition, the word is an imperative, which means it is a command. The word is employed once by John and Peter, and twice by Luke. The other 18 occurrences are in Paul. In fact, Paul informs us that the unregenerate scrutinized God and after their own evaluation considered the acknowledgement of God unworthy of their approval.

Paul uses the word in Rom. 12:2 to inform the Roman Christians that the renewal of the mind is precisely how we engage in the process of intellectually scrutinizing the will of God. This involves exegesis, logic, and questions. Lots of questions. Paul tells the Corinthians that they are to scrutinize themselves. (1 Cor. 11:28) He repeats this command in 2 Cor. 13:5. In Gal. 6:4, each man is told to scrutinize his own work. Phil. 1:10 tells us that it is through this intellectual scrutiny that we are able to identify those things that are excellent. Paul tells the Thessalonian Church to scrutinize all things carefully. (1 Thess. 5:21)

Paul informs the Corinthian Church that he is “Destroying speculations” and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God. This word, logismos (λογισμός) has the sense of a statement containing a logical conclusion. It is intimately related to the idea of an argument, a logical argument. Those of us in American culture typically think of an argument in incredibly differently ways from how the ancient Greeks thought about it. One has to bear in mind that Corinth was situated just beside Greece, the birthplace of western logic. Therefore, we have to understand the meaning of this word in its more technical sense. It was much more technical than the American idea of a mere disagreement. It was a disagreement but far more intellectual than we might imagine. The point here is that Paul viewed the use of the Christian intellect as central in spiritual warfare, in refuting the false teachings of the enemy, which are viewed as intellectual and spiritual weapons designed to spoil and thwart the spiritual growth of Christians. We battle these intellectual weapons with our own sanctified intellectual weapons, but intellectual nonetheless.

Paul prays that the Philippian Christians’ love would abound in real knowledge. To the Colossians his prayer was that they would be filled with the knowledge of God’s will. In the next verse, Paul links “walking in a manner worthy of the Lord” with “increasing in the knowledge of God.” Peter informs his audience that they are to add to their moral excellence, knowledge. Peter words were literally to supply or to furnish knowledge. The idea is that we are insure that we also furnish knowledge along with our moral excellence. Knowledge is something that is both given and acquired. We add to the knowledge imparted to us at salvation, knowledge of other spiritual truths. Genuine acquisition of knowledge is an intellectual enterprise that is wrought with troubles, and one that requires more energy than most people in our culture are willing to expend. The sad fact is that this state of affairs is at times even more truthful of Christians than it is of unbelievers.

The Proverbs inform us that we are to make our ears attentive to wisdom, to incline our heart to understanding, to cry out for discernment. The idea is that effort is clearly being made to gain understanding. Understanding is an intellectual constituent. Praying is not enough. If you pray for understanding and never tackle Scripture, listen to a sermon or lecture, read a book, it is likely that your understanding will be quite limited. Prayer helps, but it alone will not produce much by way of understanding. God has chosen specific methods for how Christians are to acquire knowledge. Christians are supposed to love understanding, to love knowledge. The one who loves instruction loves knowledge, but the one that hates correction is stupid. Every time you put forth the effort to learn, you are engaging in the practice of correcting yourself. You are correcting your understanding. And this correction should also produce a change in your conduct. You conduct yourself according to how you understand moral principles. Intellectual performance is the self-correcting behavior designed to produce spiritual growth in the knowledge of Christ. Those who hate intellectual discipline hate knowledge. Knowledge should be pleasant to our soul (Pr. 2:10). Wise men store up knowledge (Pr. 10:4). Prudent men act with knowledge (Pr. 13:16). The sensible are crowned with knowledge (Pr. 14:18). The lips of the wise spread knowledge (Pr. 15:7). The mind of the prudent acquires knowledge, And the ear of the wise seeks knowledge. (Pr. 18:15) It is not good for a person to be without knowledge (Pr. 19:2).

For too long now Christians have been satisfied not to spend energy on intellectual acumen. We have neglected genuine Bible-study, in preference for shallow talk about nearly anything that doesn’t require laborious thought. We would rather rehearse how the game went or will go or how the vacation was or what is the goings on at work than we would anything remotely resembling intellectual labor. We prefer to spend our free time watching American reality TV. Who needs all this abstract theological talk? Christianity, we hear from nearly every quarter, is about a relationship, not about doctrine. This kind of witless and mindless thinking has robbed Christianity of almost all its intellectual acumen, and stripped away nearly every shred of critical thinking that it had remaining over the last thirty years or so. It is dishonoring to God for the Christian to neglect the wonderful mind He gave us. We should endeavor to explore the vast potential of the human intellect in a way that seeks to express the spectacles of His grace and saving redemption. This requires that we devote lots of vigor, being diligent to achieve a level of intellectual acumen that makes us skilled discerners of truth claims so that we can spread God’s truth on the one hand and effectively refute detractors of God’s truth on the other. In short, it makes us biblically positioned critical thinker.

Responding to Hays' Article on Critically Thinking About Miracles

Critical Thinking on Miracles - Steve Hays

i) It's striking that MacArthurites like Ed and Fred are utterly oblivious to the fact that their objection to modern charismata parrots the atheist objection to God's existence. If there is a God, why doesn't he heal amputees? If God exists, why doesn't he cure every patient in a cancer ward?

Same thing with atheists and prayer studies. If God answers prayer, then that ought to show up on double-blind experiments. 

Charismatics can respond to the cessationist objection in the same way cessationists respond to the atheist objection. If a cessationist defends himself by saying God doesn't heal amputees because it's not God's will to heal amputees, and God has a good reason for not doing so, then a charismatic can defend himself by saying God doesn't empower a modern-day Christian to heal amputees because it's not God's will to heal amputees, and God has a good reason for not doing so–either directly or indirectly. 

ii) Likewise, Jesus and the apostles didn't try to prove themselves by searching for sick people to heal. Rather, sick people came to them. 

iii) Now, bad arguments can be persuasive because they contain a grain of truth. The element of truth lends a specious plausibility to a bad argument. And that's the case here. 

I think Fred is calling the bluff of charismatics. And up to a point, there's nothing wrong with that. It's like calling a psychic's bluff by taking the psychic out of her controlled environment, where she can manipulate the variables, and putting her in a situation where she has to do cold readings. 

Notice how Fred prefaces the challenge:

if contiuationists are correct that signs and wonders are a part of the normal Christian experience and they are happening with regularity among God’s people, then there should be gifted individuals who should do extraordinary signs and wonders with their laying on of hands. 

And there are undoubtedly continuationists who claim that. So that's a fair challenge.

iv) However, there's no reason to think the alternative to cessationism must be believing that "signs and wonders are a part of the normalChristian experience and they are happening with regularity among God’s people."

v) For instance, how do cessationists define faith-healers? Let's take a comparison:

a) A Christian prays for a cancer patient. The next day, the cancer is gone.

b) A Christian lays hands on a cancer patient and prays over the patient. The next day, the cancer is gone.

Is (b) a faith-healer, but (a) is not? Is that the distinction? If not, is there some other differential factor?

vi) What if a Christian has the "gift of healing," but doesn't claim to be a faith-healer? Suppose he or she simply acquires a reputation for having the ability to heal, without doing anything to cultivate that image or advertise that fact? Is that Christian a faith-healer? 

vii) If a Christian is a healer, does that mean he or she must be able to heal anyone and everyone? If a serial killer with terminal cancer comes to her, and she lays hands on him or prays for him, and he still dies of cancer, does that mean she's a fraud? 

What if it wasn't God's will to heal the terminal serial killer? Unlike the faith-healer, God knows who this individual is. God knows what this individual will do if miraculously cured. Therefore, God blocks or withholds healing. 

viii) If someone claims to be a faith-healer or miracle-worker, then we have every right to demand evidence. That, however, is different from proposing an artificial litmus test. 

If Jesus heals a women who suffers from internal bleeding (Mt 19:18-26), but he doesn't heal someone dying of radiation sickness, the latter doesn't cancel out the former.  We should judge each case by the evidence for (or against) each case. The fact that nothing happened in one case isn't evidence that nothing happened in another case.    

ix) It's also illogical to prejudge the question of modern charismata by charismatic claims. Whether or not modern charismata occur is irrespective of what charismatics claim, one way or the other. It's undoubtedly the case that many charismatics make exaggerated claims or entertain exaggerated expectations. However, disproving exaggerating claims–which is a worthwhile exercise in itself–does nothing to disprove modern charismata. 

If a weather forecaster predicts that it will rain 5 days in a row, and it only rains 3 out of 5 days, his prediction was false. But his mistake doesn't falsify the reality that it rained 3 days out of 5. He was partially wrong, but he was partially right. The event is independent of his claims. Disproving his specific claims does nothing to disprove a weather event. 

Cessationists and charismatics can't prescribe or proscribe reality. It will be whatever it will be, regardless of their prognostications. 

Ultimately, you need to judge the question of modern miracles, not by what cessationists or charismatics claim, but by what really happens–or doesn't. If the incidence of miracles is lower than the rate which Pentecostals optimistically predict, the mismatch disproves Pentecostalism, but it does nothing to disprove the miracles which do occur–assuming they occur. It's unfortunate that so many cessationists fail to draw that fundamental distinction.

I wanted to take a moment to respond, albeit briefly, to Hays' criticism. Cessationists do not assert that God cannot or never heals cancer patients through the prayers of believers. The fact that God heals someone of cancer through prayer does not indicate that a person has the gift of healing.

The only thing you need to understand in order to recognize the extreme weakness in Steve's argument is the fact that we are not talking about facts here. Steve is not talking about anything real. Steve is talking about hypotheticals, speculations, what-ifs, possibilities, the abstract. Notice that Steve's healers, miracle workers, and tongue-speakers never have names. They are nothing more than components of Hays' arguments. They do not rise to the level of actuality. With all due respect to Steve Hays, what we are interested in, what I think Fred Butler is interested in, what it seems John MacArthur and the rest of us are interested in is what is actually the case. What is the actual state of affairs that have obtained in terms of the miraculous and revelatory gifts of the NT era?

In addition, Steve spends more time arguing for the possibility that these gifts have continued than he does really interacting with our very real, very pastoral, very loving concerns. It is not the case that we simply don't like this theology so we pick a fight with those who subscribe to it. That isn't it at all. What we know for sure is a clear and serious issue from Scripture is the practice of claiming that God is speaking and working in certain ways. We know this claim is incredibly serious. In other words, if anyone says God said, then God most certainly had better said! If someone says, behold! The work of God in your midst! Then it better be the work of God. In and of itself, such claims are as serious as any claim could be. In addition, the people who naively accept these claims, if they are false, are being lied to and hurt by the millions. That is a very serious matter. However, it seems to be something for which Steve Hays show little concern.

Concerning whether miracles ever occur, that is a red-herring in this argument. It is one Hays continues to parade about as if it means something. It does not. John MacArthur does not deny the possibility that God may work miracles and/or heal if such is His will. Strange Fire has never been about that! Hays, in my opinion knows better. His latest post seems more like a bit of a retraction to me than anything else. I am thinking of the current political debacle known as Obamacare. Strange Fire is concerned with the claims that faith-healers and miracle workers along with open revelation continue to this day. It is a distinguishing mark among modern Charismatics. Those who reject these views are in the small minority, a fringe element of Charismatics that are so small, they don't show up on the Charismatic radar.

What Hays needs to do if he wants to advance his argument and regain any credibility for his position is to provide some actual evidence that healings and miracles are a routine occurrence within a specific person's ministry. That would be helpful. Otherwise we are left to counter his hypothetical, non-existent miracle workers, pointing to a massive lack of any empirical evidence for his imaginary world, and that just isn't much fun nor is it much of a challenge. These are real concerns about real claims of real miracle workers and the real impact they are having on real people. That is the state of affairs we are concerned with as opposed to the imaginary miracle workers and healers that Hays loves to pretend could exist somewhere in the world. In my opinion, there is very little critical thinking in Steve's article on that subject. Steve seems to be saying the same thing as Alice:

"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary-wise; what it is it wouldn't be, and what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?"