The Knowledge of God, Degrading Passions & A Depraved Mind

Christianity can be shown to be, not “just as good as” or even “better than” the non-Christian position, but the only position that does not make nonsense of human experience. – C. Van Til

I thought I would take some time to share my theological and philosophical reflections lately as I continue to explore the wonderful phenomenon of how humans experience knowledge. Unless you are a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic, you acknowledge that human beings are able to know and function within this state of affairs we call reality. Oh my, I have lumped epistemology and metaphysics together in the same sentence. What will the academic philosopher think of me now? Frankly, prof., I don’t really give a darn. All in good jest of course. I want to turn your attentions to Romans 1, a chapter that I believe serves as a basic foundation for a distinctly Christian epistemology. In this chapter we not only touch on modern controversies of epistemology, but also on some of the modern moral controversies of human sexuality; controversies which stem, as we shall discover, from man’s unethical approach to how he interprets himself, his experience of the world, and yes, his experience of God.

 As he lays the foundation for what he is about to discuss with the Roman Christians, the apostle Paul tells them that the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ. He then informs these ancient Christians, and us I might add, that the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteous of men, who by the way, are suppressing the truth in unrighteous. Now, there is no question about the fact that God is revealing his wrath. That is clear enough. But why is this happening? Paul uses a very interesting Greek word to draw his inference. Please remember, this inference is the revealed truth God. God is revealing these things through Paul. What Paul writes, God speaks. The Greek word dioti is an adverbial causal conjunction. It modifies the verb apokalupto. Paul is about to tell us why God is revealing his wrath from heaven. Dioti is a marker of a causal connection between the idea in v. 18 and what is about to follow in v. 19. The reason is linked to man’s knowledge of God. Paul says that that which is known about God is evident within them. These are they who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. And who does that? All unregenerate men do that until the glorious light of the gospel is used to open their eyes and that work is only performed by the Holy Spirit. This knowledge of God is evident within them for God made it evident within them. When God makes knowledge evident within someone, I would say we are safe to assume that they know. They are in possession of knowledge. They know and experience the truth of God’s existence.

After clearly point out that men are in possession of the truth of God, and that these men willingly suppress that truth, Paul goes on to expand on his indictment. And make no mistake about it, this is an indictment. Paul elaborates on this fact by saying that God’s invisible attributes, his eternal power, and his divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made. Therefore, they are without excuse. Notice that Paul did not say that men ought to infer God from what was made. Paul said that men do actually see clearly and understand something about God’s attributes, his eternal power, and his divine nature through what has been made. The experience of being created in God’s image as well as the experience of God’s created order ensure that all men everywhere know God; they possess the truth about God by way of their experience of these things. And this experience is impossible to avoid. It is the experience of reality, God’s created world.

After expanding his indictment, Paul feels the need to elaborate even further. He says that even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God nor did they given thanks. Instead, they went down a different path. They became, humanity became mataioo in their dialogismos. They become utterly worthless in their reasoning, in their cognitive faculties. Man possesses the truth about God. He knows God. He understands enough about God to render him without a defense for this behavior. There is no excuse for men to reject belief in God. There is no excuse for men to refuse to give God thanks in all things. None! This behavior is condemned by God as idolatry. The traded to image of God for a different kind of image. Rather than accepting the truth that humanity is creating in the image of God and owes God all that he is, they, we, exchanged that image for a variety of different ones. In modern culture, we have exchanged the image of God for evolutionary theory. Paul has told us the wrath of God is being revealed. Now he is about to tell us how that wrath is being revealed.

Paul uses the Greek conjunction, dio, to tell us how God is pouring his wrath out on the earth. We saw a hint above when Paul references the complete uselessness of unregenerate cognitive faculties. Now he tells us, using this little word which is a logical inferential. It is the conclusion of his indictment. For this reason, God gave them over to the lusts of their own hearts. How is God’s wrath revealed from heaven? First, God gave them over to degrading passions. Atimia is a Greek word that has a sense of a state of dishonor or disrespect. The Greek word, Pathos employed by Paul in this instance, carries the sense of a strong desire. In other words, God’s wrath is revealed in the shameful, dishonorable, and disrespectful strong desires of humanity. This behavior is evidence of the wrath of God. And it is brought about because humanity experiences God in everything they do and refuses to interpret that experience righteously, giving thanks to God for all they are. But that is not all. Not only is humanity suffering from shameful strong desires because of its obstinate behavior, there is more.

God not only gave humanity over to degrading passions, he also gave them over to a depraved mind. Here the Greek word is adokimos, and it means unqualified, worthless, base. God has given unregenerate men over to a mind that is worthless. The word for mind carries the sense of intellectual perception, understanding, you know, the cognitive faculties of human beings. In this context it means a mindset, a way of thinking, an attitude, an outlook, or, a worldview. Unregenerate men display the wrath of God upon the human race by way of embracing a worthless, unqualified, base worldview. The thought-pattern of unregenerate humanity is debased.

In summary then, we observe the revealed wrath of God on humanity in the form of unregenerate men having sank into the moral confusion of even the most basic of human behaviors, sexuality. We witness the degrading passions of homosexuality not only being freely expressed in our culture, but we also observe a frightening dogmatic insistence on celebrating such behavior. Moreover, we observe an irrational and extreme hostility toward those who disagree with these practices. Second, the wrath of God is also revealed in the expression of an anti-God, anti-Christian worldview that reduces not only to moral confusion but also to an irrationalism that only be made sense of in the Christian worldview. We murder innocent babies in the womb. We celebrate perverted sexual promiscuity. We affirm men who want to be classified as women. We are forcing our young girls to share bathrooms and shower facilities with the opposite sex. And somehow, this is supposed to be progress? What we see in American culture in particular is the clear revelation of the wrath of God in the immoral sexual perversion of homosexuality along with the absolute abandonment of anything remotely resembling a worldview or mindset that makes sense. In closing, man knows God exists. Man understand something about God within God’s created order. This knowledge comes to him. Man is the passive recipient. This knowledge is unavoidable. But man forces his own interpretation on things. He rejects the Creator, exchanges God for anything but God, to include evolutionary theory. He interprets everything apart from God refusing to acknowledge or thank God in any way. God reveals his wrath by turning men over to degrading passions and lusts as well as depraved minds. Man’s desires and cognitive faculties are spiraling downward without restraint. And in it Christians are instructed to interpret this phenomenon as the revelation of the wrath of God.

This condition makes one wonder why God stopped to save any of us. Why do that? The purpose of God’s electing and saving grace is located in God. Indeed, the mystery of the loving-kindness and grace of God is above and beyond anything we could ever hope to understand.

Christian Belief: Justification, Rationality, and Warrant

From Thales to Socrates to Plato to Aristotle to Epicurus to Descartes to Kant to the Enlightenment, philosophers have been attempting to construct a view of the world that satisfies man’s insatiable appetite for understanding both, who we are, and what this state of affairs in which we find ourselves, is exactly. Indeed, these philosophers have produce more intellectual fodder than one can possible keep track of. As one might expect, Christians have been exposed to these diverse philosophies as well. This exposure has produced some good results but it has also had devastating consequences in numerous areas of Christian belief and praxis. You see, these philosophies have been, for the most part, entirely pagan, attempting to arrive at an answer to the question of our world apart from, without relying on, God for their answer. And this is exactly the sort of influence that the Christian must guard against according to the apostle Paul: “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ.” (Col. 2:8)

Recently, I told a young man studying philosophy at a local seminary that the basis of Christian belief is not philosophical arguments, or historical evidence. He was stunned and I was stunned that he was stunned. We both were stunned. He wanted to know what the basis of Christian belief is if it is not those things. So the point of this post that I want you to get if you get nothing else is this: the basis for Christian belief, what makes it justified, rational, and warranted, in essence, what makes it real knowledge, is the revelation of the Christ event in Scripture. And make no mistake about it, the entire corpus of Scripture is pointing us to the Christian event. If that is not what makes Christian belief justified for you, rational for you, warranted for you, knowledge for you, then there is nothing Christian about your Christian belief. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle cannot lay the foundation for Christian belief. They were not capable of providing such a foundation for something so majestic, so spectacular, and to be clear, so supernatural. Christianity is a supernatural belief, a transcendent reality, and only a supernatural foundation can serve as the foundation for such a thing as Christianity. This means that a supernatural experience is required in order to impart the sort of knowledge necessary if Christian belief is going to be justified, rational, and warranted.

Cornelius Van Til writes, “From these considerations, it follows that if we develop our reasons for believing that a true knowledge of God and, therefore, also of the world, is possible because actually given in Christ, we have in fact given what goes in philosophy under the name of epistemology.” [Survey of Christian Epistemology] The basis of Christian belief is the Christ event that is Christian Scripture. If the basis of Christian belief is something other than Scripture alone, then that Christian belief is not a belief that is Christian. Rather, it is a belief that is formed within the presuppositions of pagan philosophy. And pagan philosophy, at its core, is antithetical to Christian belief. Pagan philosophy rests on a foundation that is hostile to Christian belief. In fact, pagan philosophy, by nature is antithetical to Christian belief. The apostle Paul tells us that pagan philosophy is on par with “empty deception,” and is according to the tradition or standards of men, rather than according to, or in accord with Christ. Christian apologists in modern Western Christianity have to a large degree uncritically accepted the wisdom and philosophy of men like Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates. And this explains why, when someone says to them that the basis of Christian faith is not rational arguments, they are stunned. They spend hours studying pagan philosophy and minutes reading Paul. This trend is deeply disturbing because these men are filling our churches, becoming pastors, youth leaders, and Sunday school teaches and they are passing on their unbiblical methods to unsuspecting and poorly equipped Christians.

So what is a Christian to do when someone challenges your beliefs? There are two types of challenges you should prepare for: 1) De jure challenges the rationality of Christian belief while 2) De facto challenges the facts of Christian belief. I am dealing with the former challenge that says, in general, that something is basically wrong with Christian belief. The claim is that Christian belief is irrational or not justified. There is apparently not enough evidence to not a good argument for Christian belief. How does the Christian prepare to deal with such a challenge? Let me say for starters that you do not run out and study The Organon in hopes that this will help you. It will not. What then is the Christian to do? You are to stay true to your belief and here is how you do just that.

First, you must remember what produces Christian belief in the human person to begin with. Christian belief is not produced by unaided human reason upon reflection about the events of Scripture. And He was saying, “For this reason I have said to you, that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted him from the Father.” (Jn. 6:65)           Jesus answered them, “To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been granted.” (Matt. 13:11) I could produce dozens of places in Scripture that testify to this truth: Christian belief is granted to those whom God regenerates and to no one else. Christian belief is for the Christian, basic. To say that a belief is basic is to say that it is not believed based on some other proposition or belief. It is self-evident. This is why Christian theism holds that Christian Scripture is self-justifying. We do not believe the Bible is “God speaking” based on an argument but rather based on the inward testimony and the Holy Spirit we know it immediately.

Alvin Plantinga says it well when he writes,

“The deliverances of the sensus divinitatis are occasioned by the circumstances; they are not conclusions from them. It does not work by way of an argument. My apprehension and experience of the beauty of nature of the moral guilt involved in the conscience are not evidences for God. It is that I simply find myself with the belief that God is disapproving of my behavior. It is in that circumstance that my belief arises, or better, is revealed, uncovered, becomes obvious.”

The ability that a Christian has to form Christian belief is not the product of natural cognitive processes. Those processes are held in bondage to the curse of sin. Man cannot and is not willing to see the truth of Christian belief so long as he is dead in his trespasses and sins. It is only when the Holy Spirit comes rushing in to instigate a rebirth that our cognitive processes are now able to see and know the Christ who died for us properly. And this belief arises immediately, not because someone made a great argument or preached a wonderful sermon but because God has called that sinner out of darkness into His glorious light, into His kingdom, indeed, into His family.

We should not worry that the unbeliever is going to object to our model. He has his own model and that model comes with its own set of presuppositions and standards. This is not to say that we have an equal stand-off with the Christian having his system and the unbeliever his own. The Christian can and should demonstrate to the unbeliever how, on his own principles and presuppositions, his system, when all is said and done, is reduced to skepticism or irrationalism. But that is not the purpose of this post. The purpose of this post is to remind the Christian what is the basis for Christian belief. It is the Christ event that is Scripture. We know this because God the Holy Spirit regenerates our heart and mind, making it known to us. Otherwise, we would never know that Christian belief is true knowledge. We do not examine evidence and study argues and from these things infer God. It is in within the circumstances of regeneration that Christian belief arises in the heart by the sole work of the Holy Spirit. From that circumstance we know immediate that all that the Scripture testifies about is true. After all, the Spirit of God, God Himself, witnesses to the things that are in His own word. What greater argument or evidence could anyone ever present than the testimony of God?

Christian belief then is formed in the heart by the Holy Spirit as He works the miracle of regeneration within God’s elect. As a result, our cognitive faculties are delivered from the bondage of sin, and regenerated so that now we can receive instruction, think correctly, understand, and know the things which God has prepared for us. It is impossible for the Christian to explain this in such a way that an unbeliever will not object to it. Because the experience transcends human reason, the unbeliever, so long as they are an unbeliever will reject this model. Some will give it lip service, but in their heart they will not receive it because only God can make them capable of receiving it.

In the end, the Christian has to be concerned, not with the unbeliever’s de jure objections, but rather with being faithful to the gospel, to basic Christian theology. It isn’t the reaction of the world that should shape how we deliver the truth or how we defend the faith. Our primary concern has to be what says the Scripture. God regenerates through the foolishness of preaching. Unless we keep this ever before us, we will always find the seductive methods of pagan philosophy irresistible because of how they are received and how that reception makes us feel about ourselves.

A Sound Christian Philosophy of God (Part 1)

The word philosophy comes from a combination of  the two Greek words phileo*  and sophia. In its most basic sense, it means a love of wisdom. Proverbs 2:6 informs us, “For the Lord gives wisdom; from His mouth come knowledge and understanding.” When the Christian talks about wisdom and being wise, it must be understood that he is not talking about the same thing the non-Christian is talking about when he talks about wisdom. For the Christian, the very beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. Absent the fear of God, wisdom in the sense of how the Christian uses the term, is for all intents and purposes, absent. What this means is that a familial relationship with God resulting from the supernatural experience of regeneration is a necessary condition for wisdom. In other words, if there is no fear of God, then wisdom is impossible. The only possibility for wisdom to exist in the life of any human being is for there to be a healthy and right fear of God. Apart from the presence of a biblically defined fear of God, wisdom simply cannot exist.

Curiosity - the desire to understand and know - lies at the root of all science and philosophy. Man, as created in the image of God, has an insatiable appetite for knowledge. The Hebrew word translated wisdom in Proverbs 2:6 is ḥākam. In ANE use, it carries falls into the domain of knowledge, understanding, to inform or explain. Clearly, then, philosophy has an indelible link to knowledge and knowledge an indelible link to God. The basic meaning of the verb. is suggested by the qal., be/become wise; gain wisdom.

A more detailed, but still uncontroversially comprehensive, definition [of philosophy] is that philosophy is rationally critical thinking, of a more or less systematic kind about the general nature of the world, the justification of belief, and the conduct of life. The aim of this project is to explore what makes for a sound philosophy of God. What sort of being is God? How do we know that God is one kind of being and not another kind? How does the existence of this particular kind of God and our knowledge of Him impact and shape human  values or morality?

In most cultures, the term “God” is somewhat ambiguous. The range of possible meanings is far too broad to hope that one could have any meaningful conversation about such a subject, at least not at any depth. The difficulty in defining the term God creates a serious challenge for anyone considering the subject of a philosophy of God. The term God can mean one thing within one worldview or paradigm and something completely different in another. For example, when a Christian talks about God, he means something radically different from what the Muslim means when he talks about God. Unless this fact is taken into account, meaningful conversation about the subject of God is nearly impossible. Another challenge is represented by the question, just how close in our respective definitions of God do we have to be before we are considered to be speaking about the same being? This is no small challenge.

The question of a philosophy of God falls within the field of philosophy of religion. But that conversation is anything but clear. For instance, one writer says, “In the major theistic traditions, philosophers have distinguished between religious truths discoverable and even knowable through human reflection unaided by divine revelation and religious truths that we can know or reasonably believe only through special revelation.” This statement actually leaves off one very important view: reformed Christianity, or what some would call, biblical Christianity. Many Christian philosophers would argue that biblical Christianity holds that all knowledge of God is revelational and that knowledge apart from divine help in one way or another is simply not possible. This is an important difference that seems to be overlooked by one of the most fundamental sources of philosophical study available. In other words, some would contend that biblical Christian holds that God is the necessary precondition for human knowledge. Second, that man cannot attain genuine knowledge independent from God is a view that many reformed philosophers and theologians affirm. If a standard reference tool like The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy is lacking in such clarity on something as basic as fundamental views on religious epistemology, that is enough to make the point that it is extremely critical for us to understand what we mean when we use the term God within the context a philosophy if we hope to experience meaningful dialogue on the subject. The truth is that the dictionary has ignored, to its own detriment, the doctrine in Christianity known as general revelation, and in place of general revelation, it has inserted autonomous human reason.

There is tremendous confusion around the subject of God today and, to be sure, this confusion began several thousand years ago, in a garden, when only two human beings existed at the time. If men are to develop a sound philosophy of God, they will need a reliable source, not to mention a competent teacher. 

The ChallengeOne of the basic problems for developing a sound philosophy of God is that God is unlike anything human beings find in nature. God is not a physical being with physical properties. This makes it impossible that one should develop a sound philosophy of God with something like the tools of science alone. However, this has not stopped some philosophers and theologians from employing such tools to demonstrate that science can provide for a sound view of God. The principle of causality has been a popular tool employed over the years. But it has been shown to fall far short of its aim. Thomas Aquinas employed an argument from sufficient cause along these lines. But such an argument does not tell us anything about the God that exists. It only tells us, supposedly, that some God is the sufficient cause of the universe. And that is simply not helpful when one is interested in understanding the sort of being that exists that we call God. It seems to me that the Muslim God could have been just as sufficient a cause of the universe as the Christian God. The philosophical proofs for God fail for very similar reasons from the first to the last of them.

The nature of the proofs for God’s existence is the reason the arguments fail and it is also the reason the arguments cannot produce a robust philosophy of God. The basic problem is that the traditional proofs for God all begin with man. If we go back to the Cambridge Dictionary, we realize that each of the proofs begin with the presupposition of autonomous human reason. If God is unlike anything in the physical universe, it seems difficult to imagine how something within the physical universe, namely man, could, in and of himself, string together a constructive and meaningful philosophy of something so vastly different from himself. However, as fascinating as it might be, this fact has done nothing to hinder man from undertaking the philosophy task of not only proving that God is, but what sort of God this God actually is. One could shrug this behavior off as mere intellectual curiosity but such a response seems inappropriate given the sheer amount of attention the subject receives. Still, we could say that the subject of belief in and about God is a very intriguing psychological phenomenon and nothing more. Yet, something in our psyche tells us that is more than that, much more. 

Given the constructive task of philosophy and the nature of the subject of God, one can readily see the challenge posed by the goal of a sound philosophy of God. God seems to be, for all intents and purposes, hid from view. He seems to be as slippery as the word slippery could mean and then some. But the challenge is not only seen in the nature of philosophical inquiry coupled with the nature of the subject with which we have to do; it is also felt even more forcefully when we turn to the nature of the inquirer: man. Man has several impediments that get in the way of his project which involves coming up with a sound philosophy of God. First, he is a finite creature with exceptional limitations. Not only are his tools of science limited, but his intellect is limited as well. There is only so much that he can do with a subject like God and he can do no more. But man is also challenged with what are the inevitable consequences that God’s existence introduce. The possibility of a friendly God, a God that man can get along with is not at all a problem. But what if God is not like that at all? What if God is the sort of being that man does not like? What if God is an enemy, hostile, possessing attributes and characteristics that man finds repulsive? Would man still be interested in such a God? What if there is something within the nature of man that makes man a natural enemy of the sort of God that exists? Would man still be interested in knowing and learning about this God? What if man could not, at the same time, preserve his desired lifestyle and live in harmony with the God that is? Would man be tempted to pretend that some things about this God could be ignored? How many things could man ignore about this God before man has actually created an entirely different God than the one that is actually there? 

We see then that Man has an ethical interest in the sort of God that exists. This raises another challenge for man. Can man approach the subject of a sound philosophy of God from neutral ground? Is man capable of an ethically and morally neutral epistemology when it comes to his knowledge of God? Of all the challenges man faces in his quest for a philosophy of God, this one proves to be, in my opinion, the most difficult.