Category: Apologetics

What Does “God Gave Them Over” Mean? A Study in Divine Retribution by Dr. S. Lewis Johnson

 An Exegetical Study of Romans 1:18-32

Preaching to his Sunday congregation in Bern, Switzerland, at the Münster on Romans 1:18–32, Walter Lüthi said, “In the words that we have just read we are told the whole truth about our condition. There may well be people among us who cannot bear to hear the truth, and would like to creep quietly away out of this church. Let them do so if they wish” (Walter Lüthi, The Letter to the Romans: An Exposition, trans. by Kurt Schoenenberger. Richmond, Va, 1961, p. 19). There is much justification for Lüthi’s words, for Paul’s canvas upon which he has painted his picture—dark, foreboding, threatening, flashing with lightning and crashing with thunder—is crammed with forms and figures, fights and shadows, of sin, wrath, and judgment. And the revelation of wrath is total and complete, encompassing all and rendering all without excuse and under condemnation, both individually and collectively.

Isaiah has spoken of judgment as God’s “strange work” and His “strange act”  (cf. Isa 28:21 – There is nothing unusual about the Hebrew adjectives, translated “strange” in the AV, except perhaps their emphatic position. That is their meaning. The NASB has “unusual” and “extraordinary.”), and the idea that it is strange because contrary to His goodness and grace, while a popular contemporary misunderstanding of his words, is not only out of harmony with the context of Isaiah 28:21, but it also does not agree with the total picture of the being and attributes of God in Scripture. His retributive justice is one of His essential properties, and in this passage in Romans it comes to the center of the stage. In the threefold paredōken (AV, “gave up”; vv. 24, 26, 28) the problem is plainly before the reader. It is the purpose of this article to analyze and, if possible, clarify the meaning of the term, setting it within the context of the theology of the being and attributes of God. But, first, a word regarding the flow of the Pauline thought in this section of the letter.

After having introduced this message to the Romans (cf. 1:1–7) and stated his theme, the gospel (1:16–17), the apostle skillfully and in detail develops the case-history of human sin and condemnation (1:18–3:20). The section moves from the declaration of Gentile sin (1:18–32 – Martin prefers to define the subjects as “the Greek religious type, man without special revelation,” but the sense is the same. Cf. James P. Martin, “The Kerygma of Romans,” Interpretation, XXV, July, 1971, 311) through Jewish sin (2:1—3:8) to the climax of the apostolic diagnosis that “all the world” is guilty, with every mouth stopped, speechless in the terror of condemnation before a holy and righteous God (3:9–20).

In the immediate context Paul, in his endeavor to prove that the only righteousness available to man is that obtained by faith, declared that God’s displeasure toward sin has been revealed from heaven (1:18). It follows, of course, that all who are charged with ungodliness or unrighteousness stand under His wrath and cannot obtain acceptance before God by their character or conduct. That the Gentiles are guilty and, therefore, inexcusable is evident, because they have enjoyed a revelation of God’s eternal power and deity and yet have rejected it (1:19–20 – Notitia and assensus, two of the basic elements of faith, may be present as a result of God’s revelation of Himself in nature, but the vital element of faith, fiducia, is never given through natural revelation. In its place is the rebellion of suppression. Cf. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. by John T. McNeill and trans. by Ford Lewis Battles, in The Library of Christian Classics, Vol. XX, 2 vols.; Philadelphia, 1960; T. H. L. Parker, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Knowledge of God. Grand Rapids, 1959; Edward A. Dowey, Jr., The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology. New York and London, 1965. A recent article of some worth by Gerald J. Postema is “Calvin’s Alleged Rejection of Natural Revelation,” Scottish Journal of Theology, XXIV, November, 1971, 423–34.).  And not only have they rejected the light of this truth, they have given themselves up to idolatry (1:21–23). The Pauline picture of the religious history of mankind is one of retrogression, not progression, of devolution, not evolution, downward, not upward. In unbelief man has passed from light to futility to folly. Thus, the divine wrath has found its justification in human rejection of “the truth of God” (1:18, 25).

There remains, therefore, only one alternative for God and man, divine retribution, and it is this that the apostle so solemnly, and yet vigorously (Godet thinks there is more than vigor here; there is a feeling of indignation. He writes, “The verses have something of that παροξυσμός, that exasperation of heart, of which the author of the Acts speaks xvii.16 when describing Paul’s impressions during his stay at Athens” F. Godet, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, trans. by A. Cusin [2 vols.; Edinburgh, 1881], I, 177), proclaims in the final section of chapter one (1:24–32). The dio (AV, “wherefore”) makes the connection. In the light of the rebellion just described the inference of vindicatory justice is drawn. Sin justly brings judgment (The Byzantine text and some of the leading representatives of the Western text have a καί, AV, “also” following διό. If this were genuine, it would suggest the harmony of the nature of the punishment and the offence. Godet has put it well, “They sinned, wherefore God punished them; they sinned by degrading God, wherefore also God degraded them,” I, 177. Zahn appears to incline towards its genuineness, too. Cf. Theodor Zahn, Der Brief des Paulus an die Römer. Leipzig, 1910, p. 96.), a judgment expressed most clearly in the following three verses of this final section of chapter one.

The Biblical Revelation

Verse 24 – Wherefore God gave them over (Gr., paredōken) in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, that their bodies might be dishonored among them.

Verse 26 – For this reason God gave them over (Gr., paredōken) to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for the unnatural.

Verse 28 And just as they did not see fit to retain the full knowledge of God, God gave them over (Gr., paredōken) to a depraved mind, to do the things which are not proper (Rom 1:24, 26, 28).

The Interpretation of the Revelation

The essence, the heart, the Leit Motif of the passage and the divine judgment is expressed in the threefold paredōken (AV, “gave up,” vv. 24, 26; “gave over,” v. 28), repeated as a terrifying refrain (Cf. M.J. Lagrange, Saint Paul Épître aux Romains (4th ed.; Paris, 1930, p. 28. He remarks that the term’s threefold occurrence is not climactic, but is a kind of refrain.).  It is a term over which there has raged considerable debate, and it is to the elucidation of it that this article is addressed. Generally speaking, there are three contending viewpoints.

First, perhaps the favorite interpretation of the term is that has prevailed since the time of Origen and Chrysostom, in which the paredōken is taken in the permissive sense. According to this view God passively permitted men to fall into the retributive consequences of their infidelity and apostasy. The active force of paredōken is surely contrary to this view. It is not that God permitted rebellious men to fall into uncleanness and bodily dishonor; He actively, although justly in view of their sin, consigned them to the consequences of their acts. It is His divine arrangement that men by their apostasy should fall into moral impurity, sin being punished by further sin, and He himself maintains the moral connection between apostasy and impurity by carrying out the judgment Himself (Cf. Heinrich August Wilhelm Meyer, Critical and Exegetical Handbook to the Epistle to the Romans, trans. by John C. Moore from 5th German ed. 2 vols.; Edinburgh, 1881, I, 86).

Second, another popular view, which became current after the time of Augustine, takes the paredōken in the privative sense. According to this interpretation God deprived man of an aspect of His work of common grace. He withdrew His hand that had restrained men from evil. Godet has expressed and illustrated this interpretation about as well as it can be set forth. “Wherein did His action consist?” he asks. And the answer follows, “He positively withdrew His hand; He ceased to hold the boat as it was dragged by the current of the river. This is the meaning of the term used by the apostle, Acts xiv.16 : ‘He suffered the Gentiles to walk in their own ways,’ by not doing for them what He never ceased to do for His own people. It is not a case of simple abstention, it is the positive withdrawal of a force” (Godet, I).

At bottom this view is the practical equivalent of the permissive view. This is evident from the fact that Godet uses Acts 14:16 as illustrative of the sense. However, in that passage the verb used is eiasen (AV, “suffered”), which normally means simply to permit. As Meyer pointed out a long time ago, “Therefore Chrysostom not only explains it by εἴασεν, but illustrates the matter by the instance of a general who leaves his soldiers in the battle, and thus deprives them of his aid, and abandons them to the enemy. Theodoret explains it: τῆς οἰκείας προμηδείαςἐγύμνωσε  (The clause may be translated, he stripped [them] of his own), and employs the comparison of an abandoned vessel. Theophylact illustrates the παρέδωκεν by the example of a physician who gives up a refractory patient (παραδίδωσιν αὐτὸν τῷ ἐπὶ πλέον νοσεῖν – The words may be rendered, he delivers him over for further suffering” – Meyer, I). These illustrations express quite well the privative view, but the Pauline language is stronger than this. The expression, “God gave them up to uncleanness,” describes a judicial act, (John Murray, The Epistle to the Romans 2 vols.; Grand Rapids, 1959),  a “judicial abandonment” (Charles Hodge, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. Philadelphia, 1886, p. 40). The active force of paredōken must not be glossed over (Cf. Otto Michel, Der Brief an die Römer. 11th ed.; Göttingen 1957, p. 58; Zahn, pp. 96-97. Both point out that Paul’s expression must not be weakened, but neither develops the question theologically).

Therefore, finally, it becomes clear that the term must be given a judicial sense (Schlatter points out that παρέδωκεν is the usual word for the sentence of a judge. Cf. A. Schlatter, Gottes Gerechtigkeit. Stuttgart, 1959, p. 66).  The meaning is not simply that God withdrew from the wicked the restraining force of His providence and common grace, although that privative sense is included in the judicial sense, but that He positively gave men over to the judgment of “more intensified and aggravated cultivation of the lusts of their own hearts with the result that they reap for themselves a correspondingly greater toll of retributive vengeance” (Murray). The usage of the word in both this epistle (4:25; 6:17; 8:32) and in the other Pauline Epistles (cf. 1 Cor 5:5; 1 Tim 1:20) supports this force (See Friedrich Büchsel, “δίδωμι et al.,” Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. by Gerhard Kittel, trans. and ed. by Geoffrey W. Bromiley, II Grand Rapids, 1964, 170. The positive force is present in each occurrence). The interpretation is also in harmony with the occurrence of the precisely identical form in Acts 7:42, where, in speaking of Israel’s apostasy in the days of Moses, Stephen says, “Then God turned, and gave them up (Gr., paredōken) to worship the host of heaven.” Both the Romans and the Acts passages describe the act of God as a penal infliction of retribution, the expression of an essential attribute of God’s nature and being, and it is thoroughly consistent with His holiness.

There is another striking occurrence of the identical form of the verb in Ephesians 4:19, and that passage serves to remind the interpreter that the infliction of punitive justice does not compromise the free agency and responsibility of man. In that passage Paul, speaking of the sin of the Gentiles, writes, “Who being past feeling have given themselves over (Gr., paredōken) unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.” In the midst of the retributive action of God there is no coercion of man. God does not entice or compel to evil.  Man remains responsible and can even be said to be giving himself over to uncleanness while God gives him up to the judgment of his sin.

Concluding Questions

There is hardly any passage in the Bible that says plainer than this one that moral depravity is the result of the judgment of God. And this raises an interesting question that concerns the present moral condition of the nations of the world, and particularly of the United States of America. The question is this: What is the real significance of the spread of immorality, crime, and violence in western civilization? To compound the problem, the newspapers are filled with stories of clergymen encouraging sexual license. Many Christian ministers, contrary to the Apostle Paul’s teaching, no longer regard homosexuality and other sexual aberrations as a sin. It is rather a sickness, or a weakness. In an article in one of the national news magazines a few years ago homosexuality was referred to by the author as “an undesirable handicap” (“Homosexuality,” Time, October 24, 1969, p. 82). To many today it is nothing more than a deviation from the customary sexual patterns, a third sex. Occasionally, in what must seem to the Christian the ultimate evil, homosexuality is traced to God Himself, for, it is said, He made men and women what they are (Of course, the truth of the matter is that homosexuality is a perversion of the created order. Cf. C. K. Barrett, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. New York, 1957, p. 39).

Some thirty years ago the famous Harvard sociologist, Pitirim Sorokin, in his book The Crisis of Our Age, warned that increases in crime, suicides, mental breakdowns, revolutions, and war have been symptoms of civilizations in the midst of death pangs. In another article on homosexuals in Time magazine the author wrote, “At their fullest flowering, the Persian, Greek, Roman and Moslem civilizations permitted a measure of homosexuality; as they decayed, it became more prevalent” (“The Homosexual: Newly Visible, Newly Understood,” Time, October 31, 1969, p. 65).  Later Sorokin in his The American Sex Revolution pointed out that sex anarchy leads to mental breakdowns, rather than the other way around, as the Freudian psychologists have taught (Cf. I. E. Howard, “The Fever Chart of a Sick Society,” Christian Economics, April 6, 1965, p. 4. Howard’s brief article is very suggestive, and the writer is deeply indebted to it).  Further, he pointed out that increasing sexual license leads to decreasing creativity and productivity in the intellectual, artistic, and economic spheres of life. What, then, are the sources of the problems of the present age? As Howard indicates, “Spengler had a biological answer: civilizations grow old and die like any other living thing. Toynbee has a religious answer: civilizations fail to respond to the higher challenges of the Spirit and therefore fossilize. In his Civilization and Ethics, Albert Schweitzer tried to find an ethical answer. St. Paul had still a different answer” (ibid).

The Pauline answer is plain, and Romans 1:24 expresses it most impressively and succinctly. When man rebelled and sinned, God “gave them up” to uncleanness in the lusts of their hearts that by their own activities their bodies might be dishonored. In other words, sexual rebellion, license, and anarchy is the retributive judgment of God. The civilization of the western world, including the particular civilization of the United States of America, is not a civilization in danger of contracting a fatal disease. That civilization has already contracted a malignant and fatal cancer through its unbelief of the message of God in Christ. It is now hurrying on with increasing speed to final climactic destruction. Civilizations do not die because of violence, crime, immorality, and anarchy. These things are the evidences that death already is at work, a death brought on by disobedience to the revelation of God. Charles Hodge was referring to these principles when he said, almost one hundred years ago in reference to the Christian body of truth, “Religion is the only true foundation, and the only effectual safeguard for morality. Those who abandon God, He abandons. Irreligion and immorality. therefore, have ever been found inseparably connected” (Hodge).

It should be carefully noted that the apostle is not speaking of eternal punishment in these three verses. What he has specifically in mind is a judgment that pertains to this life, not to the life to come. But, on the other hand, it is also plain that Paul’s words lead on to the doctrine of everlasting torment (cf. v. 32 – Cf. Barrett, p. 38. He writes, “God’s judgment has already broken forth; only he has consigned sinners not to hell but to sin—if indeed these be alternatives.”).  The vindicatory judgment inflicted by God is continued in the life to come in a more terrible and permanent form if the escape through the gospel of the cross is neglected. The doctrine of eternal punishment has never been popular, and it is less so now. Even evangelical seminaries seem embarrassed by it.27  There is an old story about Boswell and Dr. Samuel Johnson that contains solemn truth. When the latter once appeared over fearful as to his future, Boswell said, “Think of the mercy of your Savior.” “Sir,” replied Johnson. “my Savior has said that He will place some on his right hand, and some on his left.”

It is doubtful that there is a doctrine in the Bible easier to prove than that of eternal punishment (cf. Matt 25:46 – The twofold use of the adjective aiōnion AV, “everlasting” and “eternal” with kolasin, AV, “punishment” and zōēn, AV, “life” indicates that the punishment for sin is just as long as the life that God gives the faithful. Both are eternal. Many other passages express the same truth), a fact that reminds one of an incident involving Henry Ward Beecher and William G. T. Shedd, both eminent leaders of their day. The North American Review engaged the two men for articles on the subject of eternal punishment, knowing the views of the two men. Beecher had once commented, “I believe that punishment exists, both here and hereafter; but it will not continue after it ceases to do good. With a God who could give pain for pain’s sake, this world would go out like a candle.” Shedd was asked to write an article supporting the doctrine, and Beecher was asked to answer it. When the proof sheets of Shedd’s article were sent to Beecher he telegraphed from Denver to the magazine’s editors, “Cancel engagement. Shedd is too much for me. I half believe in eternal punishment now myself. Get somebody else.” The reply was never written by anyone. Shedd remained unanswered (Cf. Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology. rev. ed.; 3 vols.; Philadelphia, 1907, III, 1052–53). There is no answer, biblically, logically, or philosophically to the doctrine of eternal punishment.

There is a final question that one might ask regarding Romans 1:24 and its declaration of divine retribution. When did the retribution occur? When did God “give up” the nations? Is the apostle referring to a specific event or time in the past, or is he simply interpreting broadly man’s history? In the collective sense the rebellion of men against God had its inception at Babylon, and it has been surmised that Paul may have had in mind the construction of the tower of Babylon and its destruction, with man’s scattering, by God (cf. Gen 11:1–9). It is doubtful that Paul had this in mind. On the other hand, there are two things that point to the fall of man in the Garden of Eden as the event the apostle was thinking about. In the first place, the fact that Paul traces the entrance of sin into the human race specifically to Eden in Romans 5:12 suggests that 1:24 is to be understood in the light of that important event. It was there that man rebelled against light, the light of both natural and special revelation, and turned to darkness. And it was there that judgment was inflicted on account of his sin, a judgment that consisted of wrath and death, accompanied by consequent immorality and wickedness, as history indicates.

In the second place, the terminology of verse 22–23 points fairly clearly to the Genesis account. For example, the phrases “to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things” (v. 23) is surely reminiscent of “the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” (Gen 1:26; cf. vv. 20–25). And, further, the phrases “the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image (lit., the likeness of an image) made like to corruptible man” appear to come from the Genesis account’s “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (1:26). It thus seems that Paul was thinking of the Genesis record in the Romans passage, and this would support the view that he regarded God’s giving up of man to uncleanness as occurring at the time of the fall, recorded in the early part of that same Genesis record.  There, then, man fell into sin, judgment, and condemnation, with their inevitable companion, the retributive justice of immorality, crime, and all manner of evil.

In conclusion, one must conclude from Romans 1:24, 26 and 28 that retributive justice is an attribute of the living God and a necessary feature of His actions toward unbelieving man. To the question, “Can God really give man up to judgment?,” this passage provides a resounding “yes” answer. But, in fact, it is not the final and convincing answer to the question. That comes from the cross of Jesus Christ, which in the cry it elicits from our Lord, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” unmistakably affirms the fact that God can give man up to judgment. It was there that the sinless Man bore the judgment of God upon sin, and it forever proclaims the true nature of sin—it is worthy of the penalty of spiritual and physical death—and God’s hatred of it with His necessary condemnation of it.

One might say, “Does God, then, really care?” The answer to this question also is obvious, and it, too, comes from the cross. It was God who gave the Son as the vicarious sacrifice; it was He who initiated the work that produced the remedy for sin and condemnation. And it was the Son who voluntarily bore in agony the depths of the vindicatory judgment for sinners. And if that is not sufficient evidence of God’s love and concern, reflect further upon the fact that it is also He who has revealed to men their lost condition and the significance of the atoning death, inscribed its interpretation in the written Word of God and preserved that Word for countless millions to read and ponder. Isaiah was right. Although righteous and necessary, judgment is His “strange work” and His “strange act.”

Article above by Dr. S. Lewis Johnson adapted from Vol. 129: Bibliotheca Sacra Volume 129. 1972 (514) (123). Dallas, TX: Dallas Theological Seminary.

More About Dr. S. Lewis Johnson – A Tribute to Dr. S. Lewis Johnson
 by Fred G. Zaspel
 – January 30, 2004:

On January 28, 2004, Dr. S. Lewis Johnson passed away at age eighty-eight. He was a Biblical scholar and theologian of rare abilities and of international renown, and he was a beloved friend. His influence on my own ministry would be difficult to measure. The hundreds of tapes of his preaching and teaching have gone free of charge to thousands of people all over the world, and it was by means of these tapes that I first became acquainted with him. When he first came to preach for me I asked the congregation if any had previously heard him. No one had, but I was quick to assure them all that they had indeed heard him often! Over the years he came to speak at our church and at our pastors’ conference many times, and even in his latest years it was challenging and blessed to hear him expound the Word of God with such precision and clarity.

Dr. Johnson was born in Birmingham, AL and grew up in Charleston, SC. He was always quick to assure everyone that his smooth, dignified, and pleasant southern accent was actually “English in its pure form.” He graduated from the College of Charleston with an B.A. degree in 1937 and was converted through the teaching of Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse while in the insurance business in Birmingham. He left the insurance business in 1943 to enter Dallas Theological Seminary, from which he received the Th.M (1946) and Th.D. (1949) degrees. He completed further graduate work at the University of Edinburgh, Southern Methodist University, and in the University of Basel. Remaining at Dallas Seminary Dr. Johnson was Professor of New Testament from 1950 to 1972 and Professor of Systematic Theology from 1972 to 1977. He later served as Professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, IL, and as Visiting Professor of Systematic Theology at Tyndale Theological Seminary, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Dr. Johnson preached and lectured in many places, large and small, taught countless home Bible studies, and was involved in starting several churches. In 1963 he and others planted Believers’ Chapel in Dallas, and it is from the Chapel that so many thousands of his tapes have gone to the benefit of countless people.

He was in so many ways a man to emulate. He was a true gentleman. He was always personable and a great delight in conversation. His humor was always good, and his wit was always quick. He was a careful student of the Scriptures with unusually superior abilities as an exegete and theologian. His abilities with the original languages were clearly superior, and when discussion began he would always lead from his Greek and Hebrew text. He was a man of conviction, willing to step down from a noted career rather than surrender his beliefs. He was passionate for the gospel, and his heart was always hot for Christ. He was a humble and godly man. I have said many times that if God would allow me to grow old as gracefully and as saintly as Dr. Johnson I would become proud and ruin it. He was a model scholar, a model teacher, a model preacher, a model friend, and a model Christian. He was that rare combination of so many abilities and virtues. I thank God for him and feel much the poorer without him.

Among his greatest passions was the faithful expounding of the nature of Christ’s atoning work. He clearly cherished any and every opportunity to demonstrate from the Scriptures the success and effectiveness of Christ’s death as a substitute for His people. And when it was his turn to listen, elderly though he was, he would sit right up front with his Greek and Hebrew Bible in hand. And though virtually every speaker he would hear would necessarily be a man of comparatively inferior abilities, he seemed always just to delight in hearing the Word of God preached. And afterwards he was always eager to fellowship with younger preachers and laymen alike and discuss the things of Christ and examine the Word of God together.

The last time I spoke with Dr. Johnson, about a month or so ago, it was evident that he was growing tired and frail. He fell ill earlier this month, but his illness was brief before the Lord took him home to glory. He leaves behind him his wonderful wife Martha whom we love dearly also, and our prayers are now for her. By his tape ministry I came to love Dr. S. Lewis Johnson before I ever knew him, and I count it a great blessing to have known him. Probably no one outside my own father has taught me more, and few could ever be more beloved. I praise the Lord for him.

Dr. Gleason L. Archer on Does The Bible Testify To It’s Own Inerrancy?

“The Witness of the Bible to its Own Inerrancy” by Dr. Gelason L. Archer

Does the Bible actually assert its own inerrancy as the revealed Word of God? Does it really lay claim to freedom from error in all that it affirms, whether in matters of theology, history, or science? Are proponents of this view truly justified in their insistence on this high degree of perfection in Scripture, or are they actually going beyond what it affirms concerning its own authority? These questions have been raised by those who advocate a lower concept of biblical authority, and it is important for us to settle them as we seek to come to terms with the Bible’s own witness.

Before we launch into an examination of specific passages in Scripture that bear upon this question, it would be well to define as clearly as possible the basic issues involved. Otherwise we may lose sight of the objectives of this type of investigation.

Preliminary Considerations

Inerrancy is attributed only to the original manuscripts of the various books of the Bible; it is not asserted of any specific copies of those books that have been preserved to us. Some early portions of the New Testament have been discovered by archaeology (such as the Rylands Papyrus 457 fragment of John 18, and the Magdalen fragment of Matthew 26), dating from the second century AD., within a century of the original composition of those Gospels. The earliest complete copy of an Old Testament book is still the Dead Sea Scroll of Isaiah (lQIsaa), dating from the mid-second century B.C. There are some Qumran fragments of the Pentateuch that are even earlier, coming from the third or fourth century. All these tend to support the received text of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures as preserved in the standard scholarly editions (Nestle and Kittel). There is far more textual support for the text of Holy Scripture than there is for any other book handed down to us from ancient times, whether the works of Homer, the Attic tragedians, Plato, Cicero, or Caesar. Nevertheless, these are not the original manuscripts, and minor errors have crept into the text of even these earliest and best copies of the books of the Bible. There are occasional discrepancies in the spelling of names, in the numbers cited in the statistical records, and similar matters. It is the special task of textual criticism to analyze these errors and choose the best of the variant readings according to the standard rules (or “canons”) of this science.

Yet there is an important qualification to be made in regard to the range or degree of error that has crept into our received text of Scripture. That is to say, the extent of deviation from the exact wording of the original manuscripts of the Bible must somehow have been kept within definite limits, so as not to pervert the sense or the teaching of the passage in which it occurs. Otherwise it could not serve as a trustworthy record of God’s redeeming love for mankind or of his will for our salvation. Since the Bible repeatedly affirms that it sets forth the revealed Word of God (“Thus saith the Lord”), rather than the mere conjectures or traditions of men, it must have been preserved in a sufficiently accurate form to achieve its salvific purpose for the benefit of the human race. God is present in Scripture as the omnipotent Lord of history, and as such he could not have allowed his redemptive plan to be thwarted by a seriously defective transmission.

What confirmation do we have that God has in fact maintained that kind of control over the preservation of the manuscripts? The answer is in the critical apparatus appearing in the scholarly editions of the Old and New Testament. Many hundreds of ancient manuscripts have been carefully consulted in drawing up this apparatus, both in the original languages themselves and in the languages into which they were translated (from the third century B.C. to the fifth century AD.). Yet a meticulous examination of all the variant readings appearing in the apparatus shows that no decently attested variant would make the slightest difference in the doctrinal teaching of Scripture if it were substituted for the wording of the approved text. (By “decently attested variant” we, of course, exclude all merely conjectural emendations, with which the apparatus of Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica is needlessly encumbered. We refer only to deviations indicated by actual Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or Syriac manuscripts as over against the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible, or the Nestle edition of the New Testament.)

The same finding can hardly be sustained for any other ancient document preserved to us in multiple copies, whether the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Behistun Rock inscription of Darius I, or the Middle Kingdom novel known as The Tale of Sinuhe. These all present differences in wording that affect the actual message or teaching of the document. Only of the Bible is it true that such a degree of deviation is not found. How may this be accounted for? It is best accounted for by the supposition that God the Holy Spirit has exercised a restraining influence on the preservation of the original text, keeping it from serious or misleading error of any kind.

So far as the text of the New Testament is concerned, the testimony of Frederick Kenyon is quite conclusive:

Repeated mention of divergent manuscripts and families of texts may perhaps give the impression that the text of the New Testament is abnormally uncertain. Such an impression can best be corrected by an attempt to envisage the early history of the text and its present condition. So far from the New Testament text being in an abnormally unsatisfactory state, it is far better attested than that of any other work of ancient literature. Its problems and difficulties arise not from a deficiency of evidence but from an excess of it. In the case of no work of Greek or Latin literature do we possess manuscripts so plentiful in number or so near the date of composition. Apart from Virgil, of whom we have manuscripts written some three or four hundred years after the poet’s death, the normal position with regard to the great works of classical literature is that our knowledge of their text depends upon a few (or at most a few dozen) manuscripts, of which the earliest may be of the ninth or tenth or eleventh century, but most of the fifteenth. In these conditions it generally happens that scientific criticism has selected one manuscript (usually but not necessarily the oldest) as principal authority, and has based our printed texts on this, with some assistance from conjecture…. In the case of the New Testament … the vellum manuscripts are far earlier and far more numerous; the gap between the earliest of them and the date of composition of the books is smaller; and a larger number of papyri have (especially since the discovery of the Chester Beatty papyri) given us better means of bridging that gap. We are far better equipped to observe the early stages of textual history in the manuscript period in the case of the New Testament than of any other work of ancient literature (Frederick G. Kenyon, Recent Developments in the Textual Criticism of the Greek Bible. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1933, pp. 74-76).

The Original Manuscripts

The question naturally arises in this connection: If we do not now possess the inerrant original manuscripts, what is the point of arguing that they must have been free from all error? Why do we not simply accept the fact that textual errors have crept into the wording of the Bible as we now have it and try to make the best of it in its imperfect form? Is it not enough for us to maintain that even in that form it can present us with an “infallible rule of faith and practice” (to use the standard phrase of the Westminster Confession of Faith)?

In answer to this, it should be pointed out, first of all, that there is a great difference between a document that was corrupted with error at the start and a document that was free from mistake at its original composition. If the original author was confused, mistaken, or deceitful, then there is little to be gained by employing textual critical methods to get back to an approximation of the original form. The errors and misinformation inhere in the archetype itself and serve only to the disadvantage and hurt of the reader. Only if the original was correct and trustworthy is any useful purpose served by elimination of copyists’ errors. The pursuit of textual criticism itself implies a trustworthy original, the original wording of which has decisive importance.

Second, it should be observed that the controlling influence of an inerrant model is part of our daily experience today, even though none of us has access to that model. In the Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., there is preserved a perfect pound, a perfect foot, a perfect quart – all the basic measures of weight, length, and volume, in relation to which all other pound-weights, rulers, quart bottles, and other measures are judged. Very few Americans have ever seen these standard models in Washington with their own eyes. Yet none would contend that we may completely disregard them on the ground that all we ever see are approximate measuring devices.

Third, if mistakes at any level characterized the original manuscripts of the Bible, the effort to discover in them a truly “infallible rule of faith and practice” becomes an exercise in futility. Most of the doctrinal teaching contained in Holy Scripture comes to us in a framework of history and science. For example, the opening statement of the Apostles’ Creed affirms that God the Father Almighty was the creator of the universe, and this certainly involves an unqualified rejection of the theory of mechanistic evolution, which so dominates the thinking of non-Christian scientists today. The subsequent affirmation of the virgin birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ likewise has a definite bearing on scientific theory today, for it is commonly thought that no events can take place in nature that do not constantly recur so as to be subject to scientific observation and analysis. Again, the bodily resurrection of Christ is both a scientific and a historical event, along with its theological importance for the salvation of sinners. Christ’s sufferings and death on the cross under the authority of Pontius Pilate are likewise events in history. Therefore, if the Bible may have erred in its statements concerning history and science (interpreted, of course, in the way the original author intended them) the doctrinal or theological affirmations for which they form the framework must also be subject to error.

Authority of the Old Testament

The Old Testament shows no awareness whatever of any supposed line of distinction between theological doctrine and miraculous events. This is true of the accounts of Moses’ time, concerning both history and science. Psalm 105, composed four or five centuries after the Exodus, heartily reaffirms the historicity of the ten plagues on Egypt as recorded in Exodus 7-12, and renders thanks to the Lord for this display of his power in redeeming Israel from her bondage. Psalm 106 likewise exalts the name of Yahweh for the miraculous parting of the waters of the Red Sea and for the sudden destruction of Dathan and Abiram as they sought to set aside Moses and his revelation. These saving acts of God are referred to as factual episodes in the history of redemption. And so are the battle of Gibeon (which features the prolongation of the day and the destruction of the enemy by a catastrophic hailstorm) and the fall of the walls of Jericho at the sound of a trumpet blast (see Isa. 28:21; 1 Kings 16:34).

Ancient Israel was as sure of the reality of the Red Sea crossing as the apostolic church was of Christ’s death on Calvary. So no matter how rationalists and antisupernaturalists scoff at these episodes as fabulous and nonhistorical, the Hebrew Scriptures themselves affirm them without qualification as actually having taken place on the plane of history.

Much more could be said concerning the testimony of Holy Scripture to its own plenary inspiration. One of the best discussions concerning these matters is to be found in chapter 2 of L. Gaussen’s Theopneustia: The Bible, Its Divine Origin and Inspiration, (L. Gaussen, Theopneustia: The Bible, Its Divine Origin and Inspiration, trans. by David D. Scott. Cincinnati, Boston, and New York: Blanchard, 1859) where he points to innumerable passages in the Old Testament that assert unequivocally that the words of the prophets were the words of God. Not only in the Pentateuch (Exod. 4:30; Deut. 18:21, 22, and the numberless instances in Leviticus) but also throughout the prophets we meet with such affirmations as “The LORD has spoken [the following words],” “The mouth of the LORD has spoken,” “The word of the LORD came to saying” (Josh. 24:2; Isa. 8:11; Jer. 7:l; 11:1; 18:1; 21:1; 26:1;27:1; 30:1,4; 50:1; 51:12; Amos 3:1; passim).

Hosea begins, “The word of the Lord that came to Hosea….” This fullness of inspiration is asserted of the Psalms as well: “Sovereign Lord,… who by the mouth of our father David, thy servant, didst say…” (Acts 4:24-26, quoting Ps. 2:1, 2). So also Peter says of David in connection with Psalm 16:10: “Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants upon his throne, he foresaw and spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that He was not abandoned to Hades, nor did His flesh see corruption” (Acts. 2:30, 31). Very clearly, then, God is here said to have spoken by the mouth of David, even though the actual speech and inscripturation were done by David himself. Second Peter 1:20 speaks of the Old Testament in general as the “prophecy of Scripture” (prophteia graphs) and clearly affirms that it did not come by the will of man (as if invented or thought up by the human author on his own initiative) but only as the human author was moved by the Holy Spirit and thus produced in his own human words exactly what God intended him to say. These inspired writings were truly the words of God (even though conveyed through the human instrumentality of the prophet) and contained a full and complete magisterial authority.

This authority is constantly recognized by the Gospel writers, who often remarked: “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the Prophet” (Matt. 1:22; cf. 2:5, 15, 23; 13:35; 21:4; 27:9, passim). As Gaussen points out, “Nowhere shall we find a single passage that permits us to detach one single part of it as less divine that all the rest” ( Ibid, p. 67). That is, the distinction between the doctrinal-theological and the historical-scientific drawn by some modern writers on this subject is completely foreign to the attitude of the New Testament authors toward the Old.

Christ’s Unqualified Acceptance of the Old Testament

Jesus of Nazareth clearly assumed the errorlessness of the Old Testament in all its statements and affirmations, even in the realms of history and science. In Matthew 19:4, 5 he affirmed that God himself spoke the words of Genesis 2:24, with reference to the literal, historical Adam and Eve, as he established the ordinance of marriage. In Matthew 23:35 he put the historicity of Abel’s murder by Cain on the same plane of historical factuality as the murder of Zechariah the son of Barachiah. In Matthew 24:38, 39 Jesus clearly accepted the historicity of the universal flood and Noah’s ark: “For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they did not know until the flood came and swept them all away….” This record, bearing upon both history and science, has been scornfully rejected by those who trust in the infallible accuracy of modern scientific empiricism.

The same is true of the account of the prophet Jonah’s preservation from drowning through the agency of a great fish that three days later spewed him forth on the shore. Yet Jesus put his crucifixion and resurrection on the same historical plane, saying, “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt. 12:40). In the same way, Christ goes on in the very next verse to confirm that the heathen population of Nineveh really did repent at the preaching of Jonah, just as recorded in Jonah 3:7-9. Even though this account has been treated with skepticism by modern scholarship, the New Testament indicates that Jesus regarded it as sober fact.

In the light of these passages, it seems clear that Jesus regarded the Hebrew Bible as completely trustworthy and reliable in all that it affirms in matters of theology, history, and science.

This conclusion carries with it a corollary that renders indefensible the view that the inerrancy of Scripture extends only to its doctrinal teaching. The New Testament teaches that Jesus Christ is the incarnate God. For example, John 1:14 proclaims him the eternal Word who at the Incarnation became flesh and dwelt among men as Jesus of Nazareth. If, then, Jesus was mistaken in regarding the Old Testament as completely trustworthy, reliable, and inerrant in matters of doctrine, history, and science, it must follow that God himself was mistaken about the inerrancy of the Hebrew Scriptures. And the proposition that God was mistaken is surely a theological issue if there ever was one! It turns out, then, that errancy in matters of history and science leads inevitably to errancy in matters (and very important matters!) of theology as well. Once the dike has been breached, it is eventually washed away.

Some have suggested that Jesus was actually aware of the true authorship and date of composition of the various books of the Old Testament, and that he had personal knowledge of the historical and scientific mistakes embedded in the Hebrew Scriptures. Nevertheless, for the sake of more effective teaching in the area of theology or ethics he found it best to accommodate himself to the widely accepted views of his contemporaries. In other words, he pretended that Moses had personally written all the Pentateuch under inspiration, that Adam and Eve were actual historical persons, that Noah’s flood took place exactly as described in Genesis 6-9, that Jonah was swallowed by a great fish and later expelled by it on the shore of the sea – even though he knew these events were not actually true. In order to avoid unimportant “side-issues” of authenticity and accuracy on these secondary levels, he simply went along with public opinion while presenting his doctrinal teaching. This interpretation of Jesus and his treatment of higher critical issues finds special favor in certain liberal Roman Catholic circles.

Yet when subjected to logical scrutiny, it must be recognized that this view is impossible to reconcile with the truthfulness and holiness of God. If Jesus of Nazareth knew that the story of Jonah’s deliverance through the fish was altogether fictitious, he could never have used it as a historical type of the experience of burial and resurrection that he himself was shortly to undergo. This kind of accommodation would have bordered on the duplicity employed by unscrupulous politicians in the heat of an election campaign. But in contrast to this ,Jesus made plain to his hearers that “he who sent me is true, and I declare to the world what I have heard from him” (John 8:26). Again, “I speak of what! have seen with my Father” (John 8:38). The words of Jesus were the words of God, and the God who pronounced judgment on falsehood could not himself have resorted to falsehood in the proclamation of his saving truth.

There is a further serious objection to this theory of accommodation. The four Gospels make plain that Jesus refused to accommodate himself to certain mistaken views current in his own time. Take, for example, his repeated affirmation in the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said to the men of old … But I say to you…” (Matt. 5). Or again, the remarkable statements in John 8:24 (“I told you that you would die in your sins,… you will die in your sins unless you believe that I am he”) and John 8:44 (“You are of your father the devil”). Nothing could be farther from accommodation to popular opinion than this. The same is true of his strict position concerning divorce (Matt. 19:9) and allegedly non-binding oaths (Matt. 23:16-22) and his downgrading of the importance of kosher restrictions concerning foods in favor of that which controls the motives and attitudes of the heart (Matt. 15:11-20). Jesus never stooped to accommodation in order to ingratiate himself with his public. As Peter affirmed of him, “He committed no sin; no guile was found on his lips” (1 Peter 2:22).

Inerrancy Essential For Biblical Authority

We are faced with a basic choice in the matter of biblical authority. Either we receive the Scripture as completely reliable and trustworthy in every matter it records, affirms, or teaches, or else it comes to us as a collection of religious writings containing both truth and error.

If it does contain mistakes in the original manuscripts, then it ceases to be unconditionally authoritative. It must be validated and endorsed by our own human judgment before we can accept it as true. It is not sufficient to establish that a matter has been affirmed or taught in Scripture; it may nevertheless be mistaken and at variance with the truth. So human judges must pass on each item of teaching or information contained in the Bible and determine whether it is actually to be received as true. Such judgment presupposes a superior wisdom and spiritual insight competent to correct the errors of the Bible, and if those who would thus judge the veracity of the Bible lack the necessary ingredient of personal inerrancy in judgment, they may come to a false and mistaken judgment – endorsing as true what is actually false, or else condemning as erroneous what is actually correct in Scripture. Thus the objective authority of the Bible is replaced by a subjective intuition or judicial faculty on the part of each believer, and it becomes a matter of mere personal preference how much of Scripture teaching he or she may adopt as binding.

In contrast to the view of the Bible as capable of error in matters of science, history, or doctrine (certainly such doctrine as is contained in a historical or scientific framework), we find that the attitude of Christ and the apostolic authors of the New Testament was one of unqualified acceptance. Christ may have illumined the basic intention of the Ten Commandments by setting forth their spiritual implications (“But I say to you…”), but never did he suggest that any affirmation or teaching in the Old Testament required validation by modern critical scholarship. He clearly presupposed that whatever the Old Testament taught was true because it was the infallible Word of God. It needed no further screening process by human wisdom in order to be verified. “For truly, I say to you,” said Jesus, “till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law [Old Testament] until all is accomplished” (Matt. 5:18). His statement in John 10:35, “The Scripture cannot be broken,” carries the same implication.

Those apostolic authors whom he taught or inspired proclaim the same full authority of all Scripture. Paul says in 2 Timothy 3:16: “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” In Hebrews 1:1, 2 we read, “God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son.” This asserts the same infallibility for the writings of the Old Testament as for the words of Jesus himself. In 1 Peter 1:10, 11 the apostle states: “The prophets who prophesied of the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired about this salvation; they inquired what person or time was indicated by the Spirit of Christ within them when predicting the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glory.” This clearly implies that the Holy Spirit was within the Old Testament authors as they composed the books of the Hebrew Scriptures and that he guided them into words of infallible truth sure of fulfillment, even though the human authors themselves may not have fully understood all that these words predicted. Especially instructive is 2 Peter 1:20, 21: “First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” As they wrote down God’s revelation, the Old Testament authors were supernaturally borne along (like sailing vessels impelled by the wind, pheromenoi) to record God’s truth, which is not to be manipulated or perverted by one’s own personal interpretation or preference. Despite all the imperfections of the human writers of Scripture, the Lord was able to carry them along into his infallible truth without distortion or mistake.

Both Christ and the apostles affirm, then, that what the Bible says, God says. All these passages add up to this: that accuracy inheres in every part of the Bible, so that it is to be received as infallible as to truth and final as to authority. When the Scripture speaks, it speaks as the living, operative Word of God (Heb. 4:l2 – zn and energs), which penetrates to man’s innermost being and sits in judgment on all human philosophies and reasonings with an authority that is absolutely sovereign. This, then, is what the Scriptures teach concerning their own infallibility. Not only are they free from all error; they are also filled with all authority, and they sit in judgment on man and all his intentions and thoughts.

This objective authority of the Bible carries with it an important consequence as to its interpretation. Scripture must never be construed according to a man’s personal preference or bias just to suit his own purposes. It must be carefully and reverently studied with a view to ascertaining what the human biblical author (guided by the divine Author) intended by the words he used. This makes historico-grammatical exegesis an absolute necessity. We fall into misinterpretation when we err in understanding the Hebrew or Greek words that compose the original Scripture itself, supposing them to mean something the ancient writer never intended, simply because the English words of our Bible translations might be so construed. We grievously err in our interpretation when we interpret figurative language literally; we likewise err when we interpret literal language figuratively.

The authority of Scripture requires that in whatever the author meant to say by the words he used, he presents us with the truth of God, without any admixture of error. As such it is binding on our minds and consciences, and we can reject or evade its teaching only at the peril of our souls.

Old Testament Quotations In The New Testament

It has often been observed by careful students of the Bible that a certain number of the Old Testament passages quoted in the New are not quoted with literal exactness. Often this is accounted for by the fact that a completely literal translation of Hebrew does not make clear sense in Greek, and therefore some minor adjustments must be made for the sake of good communication. But there are a few instances where the rewording amounts to a sort of loose paraphrase. Particularly is this true in the case of quotations from the Septuagint (the translation into Greek of the entire Old Testament by Jewish scholars in Alexandria, Egypt, during the third and second centuries B.C.). For the most part, the Septuagint is quite faithful to the Hebrew wording in the Old Testament, but in a small number of instances there are noticeable deviations in the mode of expressing the thought, even though there may be no essential difference in the thought itself.

Some scholars have drawn the conclusion from such deviations that the New Testament authors could not have held to the theory of verbal inspiration; otherwise they would have gone back to the Hebrew text and done a meticulously exact translation of their own as they rendered that text into Greek. It has even been argued that the occasional use of an inexact Septuagint rendering in a New Testament quotation demonstrates a rejection of inerrancy on the part of the apostolic authors themselves. Their inclusion of the Septuagint quotations that contain elements of inexactitude would seem to indicate a cavalier attitude toward the whole matter of inerrancy. On the basis of inference from the phenomena of Scripture itself, it is therefore argued that the Bible makes no claim to inerrancy.

To this line of reasoning we make the following reply. The very reason for using the Septuagint was rooted in the missionary outreach of the evangelists and apostles of the early church. The Septuagint translation of the Old Testament had already found its way into every city of the Roman Empire to which the Jews of the Dispersion had gone. This was virtually the only form of the Old Testament in the hands of Jewish believers outside Palestine, and it was certainly the only form available for gentile converts to the Jewish faith or Christianity. The apostles were propagating a Gospel that presented Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of the messianic promises of the Old Testament. Their audiences through out the Near East and the Mediterranean world were told that they had only to consult the Old Testament to verify the truth of the apostolic claims that Jesus in his person and by his work had fulfilled the promises of God. Had the New Testament authors quoted these promises in any other form than the wording of the Septuagint, they would have engendered uncertainty and doubt in the minds of their hearers. For as they checked their Old Testament, the readers would have noticed the discrepancies at once – minor though they may have been – and they would with one voice have objected, “But that isn’t the way I read it in my Bible!” The apostles and their Jewish co-workers from Palestine may have been well-equipped to do their own original translation from the Hebrew original. But they would have been ill-advised to substitute their own more literal rendering for that form of the Old Testament that was already in the hands of their public. They really had little choice but to keep largely to the Septuagint in all their quotations of the Old Testament.

On the other hand, the special Hebrew-Christian audience to which the evangelist Matthew addressed himself – and even more notably the recipients of the Epistle to the Hebrews – did not require such a constant adherence to the Septuagint as was necessary for a gentile readership. Hence Matthew and Hebrews often quote from the Old Testament in a non-Septuagintal form, normally in a form somewhat closer to the wording of the Hebrew original. And it should also be observed that in some cases, at least, these Greek renderings (whether Septuagintal or not) point to a variant reading in the original form of the text that is better than the one that has come down to us in the standard Hebrew Bible. It should be carefully noted that none of this yields any evidence whatever of carelessness or disregard on the part of the apostles in respect to the exact wording of the original Hebrew. Far from it. In some instances Christ himself based his teaching on a careful exegesis of the exact reading in the Torah. For example, he pointed out in Matthew 22:32 the implications of Exodus 3:6 (“I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”) on the basis of the present tense implied by the verbless clause in Hebrew. He declared that God would not have spoken of himself as the God of mere corpses moldering in the grave (“He is not God of the dead, but of the living”). Therefore Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob must have been alive and well in the life beyond at the time when God addressed Moses at the burning bush four or five centuries after they had died. Similarly his discussion with the Pharisees concerning the identity of the one referred to as “my lord” in Psalm 110:1 really turned upon the exact terms used in that clause or sentence. He therefore asked them, “If David thus calls him Lord, how is he his son?” (Matt. 22:45). In other words, the Messiah must not only be David’s lineal descendant, but he must also be his divine Lord (kyrios)!

Returning, then, to the apostolic use of the Septuagint, we find that this line of reasoning (that inexact quotations imply a low view of the Bible) is really without foundation. All of us employ standard translations of the Bible in our teaching and preaching, even those of us who are thoroughly conversant with the Greek and Hebrew originals of Scripture. But our use of any translation in English, French, or any other modern language by no means implies that we have abandoned a belief in Scriptural inerrancy, even though some errors of translation appear in every one of’ those modern versions. We use these standard translations in order to teach our readership in terms they can verify from the Bibles they have in their own homes. But most of us are careful to point out to them that the only final authority as to the meaning of Scripture is the wording of the original languages themselves. There is no infallible translation. But this involves no surrender of the conviction that the original manuscripts of Scripture were free from all error. We must therefore conclude that the New Testament use of the Septuagint implies nothing against verbal inspiration or Scriptural inerrancy.

In the light of the foregoing discussion, we are left with no defensible middle ground. No reasonable alternative is left but to reduce the Bible to the status of a mixture of truth and error requiring the validation of its truth by human reason or else to take our stand with Jesus Christ and the apostles in a full acceptance of the infallible, inerrant authority of the original autographs.

Article above adapted from Gleason L. Archer’s Chapter in James Mongomery Boice, ed., The Foundation of Biblical Authority. London & Glasgow: Pickering & Inglis, 1979. pp. 85-99.

About the author – Gleason L. Archer Jr. (1916-2004 – B.A., M.A., Ph.D., Harvard University; B.D., Princeton Theological Seminary; L.L.B., Suffolk Law School) was a biblical scholar, theologian, educator, and author. He served as an assistant pastor of Park Street Church in Boston from 1945 to 1948. He was a Professor at Fuller Theological Seminary for 16 years, teaching New Testament, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic. From 1965 to 1986 he served as a Professor of Old Testament and Semitics at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois. He became an emeritus faculty member in 1989. He also served for many years as a minister of the Evangelical Free Church of America. The remainder of his life was spent researching, writing, and lecturing.

Archer served as one of the 50 original translators of the NASB published in 1971. He also worked on the team which translated the NIV Bible published in 1978. I give this introduction, because many people are not familiar with Archer (unfortunately), but he was a brilliant Christian scholar who could have excelled as a lawyer (his father was the founder and president of Suffolk Law School), and chose to use his exceptional gifts to defend the inerrancy and integrity of the Scriptures over the span of his entire adult life. I would say that along with Bruce Waltke and Walter Kaiser Jr., he was one of the most influential Old Testament Evangelical Scholars at the end of the Twentieth Century. Legend has it, (I have not been able to verify whether this is 100% true or not) that he was so gifted in languages that for fun (and as a challenge) he would study the Bible in a different language every year to continue to grow and develop mentally.

Is Christianity a Crutch for the Weak? by Dan Story

“Only Jesus Christ Meets Human Needs At Their Deepest Level”

What Crutch and Weak Mean to a Christian

Christianity is a crutch for weak people! Obviously, my definitions of crutch and weak are different from the critic’s. Nowhere in Scripture is a Christian’s faith seen as a crutch in the sense of an escape from the reality of a fallen, suffering world (John 17:15). Likewise, nowhere are Christians portrayed as weaklings. On the other hand, throughout Scripture our faith is seen as a supporting pillar, an anchor, a means to healing broken and damaged lives. Likewise, throughout Scripture, believers are seen as depending on and drawing strength from the person who created and sustains them (2 Cor. 12:9–10) and who offers them life more abundantly (John 10:10). It’s in these senses that Christianity is a crutch and Christians are weak. We gladly accept the power of God to us through His Son Jesus Christ (John 14:16).

Why We Need a Crutch

There are three basic needs all people seek to fulfill in order to have peace of mind.

First, physical needs: food, shelter, rest, warmth, and so on.

Second, emotional or psychological needs: love, acceptance, self-esteem, and many others. These two needs are tangible and easy to identify, and they are fulfilled by either our physical environment or other people. We need food and shelter to live; we get this from our environment. We need love, acceptance, and a feeling of worth to function happily in human society; we get this from human relationships.

Being human also means that we seek to satisfy a third basic need: spiritual fulfillment—peace of mind with regard to a belief in a supernatural Being who can answer life’s most perplexing questions in a relevant and believable way that is consistent with reality. The quest for spiritual peace of mind is a worldwide phenomena and a characteristic of mankind as far back as history and archaeology allow us to investigate. As mentioned earlier, all peoples in every culture exhibit a belief in supernatural beings and seek to live in harmony with them. Cultures that have attempted to suppress this instinctive drive have invariably met with failure. The religious fervor in atheistic communist countries, now that religious freedom is returning, is an open acknowledgment that no society can totally suppress humankind’s spiritual need.

C. S. Lewis and others have argued effectively that every natural desire the family of man exhibits is a manifestation of a real and necessary human need. In the physical realm, we crave food because we are hungry; we crave warmth when we become cold; we crave sexual fulfillment because we are created to enjoy intimate physical relationships. Likewise, in the psychological realm, we desire love because we were created to be loved, self-esteem because we were created of value. In the same manner, we crave spiritual fulfillment because God has placed this desire in us. As fourth-century theologian Augustine said, “Thou [God] hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.”

It is logical to assume that if man possesses a natural desire for something in which the world offers no fulfillment, there is something outside the world that will fulfill it. In short, we will have no longings that are unfulfillable, including spiritual longings.

It is crucial at this point to see something very clearly. Of the three innate drives we seek to fulfill, the spiritual drive is the most vital for peace of mind. Let me explain. Physical health does not necessarily lead to peace of mind. The suicide rate among handicapped people is far below the national average. Many handicapped people experience a genuine peace of mind as a result of spiritual fulfillment. Likewise, neither money nor material possessions guarantee peace of mind. Many spirit-filled poor people are vastly more content and happier than many rich people. Nor does emotional fulfillment necessarily lead to peace of mind. The suicide rate among mental-health workers (psychologists, therapists, etc.) is as high as it is in any other profession (some say higher). One would expect that those most knowledgeable in the means of attaining emotional good health would be the ones most likely to achieve it, but that’s not necessarily true. As another example, many thousands of prisoners, isolated from normal social interactions, and after years of living angry, violent, and bitter lives, have come to possess a profound peace of mind and deep spiritual fulfillment by experiencing God’s love and forgiveness.

What’s my point? This: Whereas fulfilling spiritual needs can result in peace of mind in spite of unfulfilled physical or psychological needs, the opposite is not true. Fulfilling physical or psychological needs does not lead to peace of mind without spiritual fulfillment. Regardless of how satisfying one’s life is with regard to good health, material prosperity, and emotional contentment, there exists a longing for something that this earth or human relationships cannot provide: spiritual peace of mind. And only God through Jesus Christ can satisfy that longing.

Two Objections

Before moving on, I want to address two objections that may have surfaced in your mind.

1. “I’m not a religious person, and I don’t go to church. I have peace of mind without religion, so obviously religion is unnecessary in order to have peace of mind.”

I’m not saying no peace of mind can result from good health or emotional stability. Obviously, fulfilling either of these two needs will result in a certain amount of satisfaction or else they would not be real human drives. But this is a much different kind of peace of mind than what one attains through spiritual fulfillment. Peace of mind that relies on good health, financial security, or emotional stability is tenuous and will vanish if these things are threatened. On the other hand, peace of mind founded on spiritual fulfillment will never die because its stability rests on the eternal power of God, not on human strength, success, or earthly objects.

2. “I agree that spiritual peace of mind supersedes all other human drives. But Christianity is not the only religion that offers spiritual fulfillment. Millions of people around the world worship other gods and follow other religions, and they too experience what you call ‘peace of mind.’ ”

This objection contains a degree of truth. Spiritual fulfillment can be achieved in non-Christian religions. But the error here is that other religions are fakes. In other words, as pointed out numerous times throughout this book, they are perversions of religious truth. They are not genuine revelations from God. If Christianity is the only true religion, then Christianity alone will offer eternal peace of mind. False religions can only offer a false sense of security because they do not have the correct answers to life’s bewildering questions, especially to What happens to me when I die?

To see this played out in real life, one needs only to examine religious conversions. Many millions of practitioners of false religions have converted to Christianity. They all acknowledge that Christianity is the only true religion and that what they thought previously was spiritual peace of mind turned out to be spiritual deception. On the other hand, it is very uncommon to see Christians convert to non-Christian religions. It is much more natural to walk from darkness to light than it is to walk from light to darkness (John 8:12). The few non-Christian religions that do boast a constituent of former Christians (such as Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses) all use the Bible as a “holy book” and parallel many of their teachings with Christian doctrine, thereby employing a subtle and deceptive way of enticing Christians into accepting their heretical beliefs.

How Spiritual Fulfillment Works

Christianity offers spiritual fulfillment in two ways.

The Philosophical Approach

I earlier defined spiritual fulfillment as “peace of mind with regard to a belief in a supernatural Being who can answer life’s most perplexing questions in a relevant and believable way that is consistent with reality.” Thus, in the Christian world view, spiritual fulfillment is gaining answers to precisely the same questions that the non-Christian world cannot answer:

•            Who am I? What is my status in relation to the rest of life and the cosmos?

•            Where did I come from? What is the origin of my existence?

•            Why am I here? What purpose do I have for my existence?

•            What happens to me when I die? Is there life after death, and how do I obtain it?

All of these questions are unanswerable by science or philosophy because they involve issues beyond the scientist’s or philosopher’s ability to respond. They are unanswerable by non-Christian religions because they do not have divine revelation. These questions can only be answered by an all-powerful, all-knowing Intelligence who stands above and apart from humanity and yet who loves His creatures so much that He invites them to share in a loving personal relationship with Him. This describes only the God of Scripture. Since God created man, He knows exactly what man needs to achieve eternal and complete happiness.

Christianity is true precisely because it offers answers to life’s great mysteries that are in total harmony and consistency with the world as it exists. Unlike other religions, the Christian world view is coherent and believable; it is not mystical, esoteric, or far-fetched.

The Practical Approach

Christianity is also true because it meets human needs at their deepest level in a pragmatic way. Being a Christian is not always easy, but it promises something no other religion in the world can offer: it replaces the old, beaten self with a new spirit-filled self. Christianity has been the world’s most successful religion not only because it is the true revelation of God but because it makes changes in the inner man. While other religions have rules and regulations to follow, Christianity has a risen Savior that promises a born-again life (John 3:3) if we trust in Him. Jesus assures us that He “came that [we] might have life, and might have it abundantly” (John 10:10, nasv; see Phil. 4:5–7, 19).

Jesus is our crutch because we cannot attain eternal peace and life without Him. Only God has the answers to the questions of life, and only through Jesus Christ can we experience spiritual peace of mind. Prominent theologian J. I. Packer put it like this: “Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life’s problems fall into place of their own accord.”

Is Christianity a crutch for weak people? Yes, in the same sense that gasoline is a crutch for an automobile. As Lewis said, Christians “run” on Jesus Christ—not because they are weaklings, but because God’s power becomes our power through acknowledging our dependence on Him. The apostle Paul says it best:

And He has said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ’s sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:9–10, nasv).

Article adapted from Dan Story. Defending Your Faith. Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2004, 223-228.

About the Author in his own words: I was born in Phoenix, Arizona, the youngest of three siblings. From birth to the eighth grade, I lived in two states, six cities, and twelve houses (that I can remember). My wife and I were both nineteen when we married, and we have two children and four grandchildren. We presently live in Ramona, California. My hobbies include hiking, wildlife photography, traveling (especially to national and state parks), and mountain biking. 

I have had two great passions in my life. The first is rooted in one of my earliest childhood memories. At the time, my family lived in Seal Beach, California, and my father owned a mining claim in a remote section of the Tonto National Forest in central Arizona.

When I was four or five years old, I visited the mine with Mom and Dad. I credit that trip into the arid wilderness as the beginning of a lifelong love for nature and all things wild, lonely, and beautiful—an enchantment that has never weakened nor ever departed during all the ensuing years. 

When I became an adult, my love for nature became the focus of my life (other than my family and closest friends) and dominated my recreational and writing activities throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. With my wife, kids, and friends, I camped, backpacked, hiked, and explored numerous wilderness areas throughout the Western United States. My wife and I joined the Sierra Club, volunteered at a wildlife rescue center, and were active in various local environmental undertakings, including promoting California’s “Bottle Bill” and establishing a large open space preserve in San Diego County.

My first published magazine article in 1974 was titled “Helping Children Learn an Ecology Value,” followed by “The Wild Chaparral,” “Clocking the Cuckoo” (about the Roadrunner), and a two and a half year series of “Animal of the Month” articles published in a Sierra Club newspaper. In short, nature was my life and protecting and enjoying it was my passion. 

This changed dramatically after I became a Christian in 1981. My passion soon changed from delight in nature (creation) to worshipping the Creator. Although my enthusiasm and love for nature did not diminish, it was no longer the center of my life. In fact, my thesis for a master’s degree in Christian Apologetics was a 330-page book titled, Environmental Stewardship: A Biblical Approach to Environmental Ethics. After graduating in 1988, however, my focus in writing changed. Instead of defending the wilderness, I took up the case for Jesus Christ and began to write books and booklets, and to teach classes and workshops, on how to defend the Christian faith. 

Today, my ministry focuses primarily on Christian environmentalism (“creation care”). My writing and teaching includes topics on biblical environmental ethics and stewardship, ecological issues, wildlife, and other nature related topics (all from a Christian perspective and often with an apologetic emphasis). 

For a list of the books and articles I have published in the area of Christian apologetics, Christian environmentalism, wildlife and nature, click on “Published Works.” For information on my creation care and apologetic workshops, click on “Workshops.” 
For my credentials and ministry experiences, click on “Credentials.”

How Can We Agree to Disagree on Theological Issues?

Dealing with Differences by Dr. Roger Nicole

We are called upon by the Lord to contend earnestly for the faith (Jude 3). But that does not necessarily involve being contentious; it involves avoiding compromise, standing forth for what we believe, standing forth for the truth of God — without welching at any particular moment. Thus, we are bound to meet, at various points and various levels, people with whom we disagree. We disagree in some areas of Christian doctrine. We disagree as to some details of church administration. We disagree as to the way in which certain tasks of the church should be pursued. And, in fact, if we are careful to observe a few principles that I would like to expound for you, then I would suggest that they might be valuable also in disagreements that are not in the religious field. They also would apply to disagreements in politics or difficulties with people in your job or friction within the family or contentions between husband and wife or between parents and children. Who does not encounter from time to time people who are not in complete agreement? Therefore, it is good to seek to discover certain basic principles whereby we may relate to those who differ from us.

In order to approach this subject, there are three major questions that we must ask; and I would like to emphasize very strongly that, in my judgment, we need to ask them precisely in the right order:

(1) What do I owe the person who differs from me?

(2) What can I learn from the person who differs from me?

(3) How can I cope with the person who differs from me?

First, I suggest that we need to face squarely the matter of our duties. We have obligations to people who differ from us. This does not involve agreeing with them. We have an obligation to the truth that has a priority over agreement with any particular person; if someone is not in the truth, we have no right to agree. We have no right even to minimize the importance of the difference; and therefore, we do not owe consent or indifference. But what we owe that person who differs from us, whoever that may be, is what we owe every human being — we owe them to love them. And we owe them to deal with them as we ourselves would like to be dealt with or treated (Matt. 7:12).

And how, then, do we desire to be treated? Well, the first thing that we notice here is that we want people to know what we are saying or meaning and that we have taken into consideration and understand what those with whom we disagree have said. In short, I would say we owe our opponents to deal with them in such a way that they may sense that we have a real interest in them as persons, that we are not simply trying to win an argument or show how smart we are, but that we are deeply interested in them — and are eager to learn from them as well as to help them.

Second, we need to ask the question: “What can I learn from those who differ from me?” It is not censurable selfishness to seek to gain maximum benefits from any situation that we encounter. It is truly a pity if we fail to take advantage of opportunities to learn and develop what almost any controversy affords us.

The first thing that I should be prepared to learn is that I am wrong and the other person is right. Obviously, this does not apply to certain basic truths of the faith like the deity of Christ or salvation by grace. Yet, apart from issues where God has spoken so that doubt and hesitancy are not permissible, there are numerous areas where we are temperamentally inclined to be very assertive and yet can quite possibly be in error. When we are unwilling to acknowledge our fallibility, we reveal that we are more interested in winning a discussion and safeguarding our reputation than in the discovery and triumph of truth.

Moreover, we may learn from one who differs from us that our presentations, while correct as far as they go, fail to embody the truth in its entirety on the subject in view. Although what we assert is true, there are elements of truth that, in our own clumsy way, we have overlooked. The person who differs from me may render me great service by compelling me to present the truth in its completeness and thus avoid pitfalls created by under-emphasis, over-emphasis, and omissions. Thus my account will be “full-orbed” rather than “half-baked!”

Finally, it is also proper to raise the query: “How can I cope with those who differ from me?” That is to say, how are we to argue with others?

In evangelical circles, biblical arguments carry a maximum of weight if properly handled, for they invoke the authority of God Himself in support of a position. Yet we must ever strive to take account of the fullness of biblical revelation to have the boldness to advance as far as it leads, and the restraint to stop in our speculations where the Bible ceases to provide guidance.

Beyond this, we must also employ general arguments, namely logic, history, and tradition. While the authority involved is not on the same level as the Bible, it has a bearing on the discussions and must be considered by those who wish to make a strong case.

Perhaps the most important consideration for the Christian is to remain aware at all times of the goal to be achieved. Are we attempting to win an argument in order to manifest our own superior knowledge and debating ability? Or are we seeking to win another person whom we perceive as enmeshed in error or inadequacy by exposing him to the truth and light that God has given to us?

The article above appeared originally May 15, 2009 @ http://www.ligonier.org/blog/teacher/roger-nicole/

About the Author: Dr. Roger R. Nicole (1915-2010) served as a professor of theology at the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts and Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida. Dr. Nicole received his A.B. from the Gymnase Classique, Lausanne; his M.A. from the Sorbonne, Paris; his B.D., S.T.M., and Th.D. from Gordon Divinity School; and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Dr. Nicole was a Baptist minister and the author of numerous books and articles. He was long regarded as one of the pre-eminent theologians by his peers in America. He devoted his lifetime to defending orthodox Christian doctrines under attack – in particular the inerrancy of the Scriptures; the Classical View of God’s Omniscience and Sovereingty; and the Penal Substitutionary atonement of Christ.

Book Review: The Mormon Faith – A Theological Assessment by Dr. William W. Wells

A Concise and Cogent Comparison of Mormon and Christian Theology 

In this short book Dr. William W. Wells has done a superb job of honing in on the essential theological differences of Mormonism and the Historic Christian faith. John Maxwell has made the statement, “Everything rises or falls on leadership.” Dr. Wells wastes precious little time in demonstrating in his book that in religion everything rises or falls on its theological underpinnings.

After a brief introduction, and history of the Mormon faith – Wells defines Christianity by focusing on its essence or ontology. He brilliantly illustrates historically and theologically what indeed suffices for the reality of Christianity. He clearly and concisely illustrates the theological foundations of Christianity centering on three core affirmations: (1) The character and nature of God as Triune; (2) The person and work of Jesus Christ; and (3) The creation and nature of humanity.

Wells compares and contrasts the theology of the Mormon faith with that of the Christian faith by using their own statements of doctrine from their founders using their own words from the primary sources of theological belief consisting of the King James translation of The Bible, The Book of Mormon, The Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrine and Covenants – what Mormon theologians refer to as “The Standard Works of the Church.”

In comparing and contrasting the foundations of Historical Orthodox Christianity from the Bible and Church history with the Mormon teachings on their understanding of the nature of God, man, Christ, creation, and salvation the only similarities are the terms or language used by each. The definitions, doctrines, and practices of Mormonism and Christianity could not be further apart. Wells does very little by way of interpretation or application – he allows the authoritative documents of Mormonism and Orthodox Christianity to speak for themselves.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to understand what makes Mormonism tick, and how it is absolutely unrecognizable from anything that resembles what C.S. Lewis called “Mere Christianity.” Mormonism as articulated by its own authoritative documents is actually a total departure from the core foundational doctrines of the Christian faith. It is not mere Christianity – it is mere heresy. The Mormon faith is not Christian based on its theology in any way shape or form.

This isn’t to say that Mormons and Christians share many of the same values and even beliefs. However, when it comes to all of the key elements that make one a “Christian” – the facts in this book speak for themselves – Christian theology and Mormon theology are about as close as Hawaiian weather and Antarctic weather are alike.

Wells with the uttermost graciousness has simply provided the cardinal theological beliefs of Mormonism and Christianity side by side and in a very compelling way has shown that they are distinct, different, and not remotely close. I highly recommend this book as a resource to find out the truth about what Mormons really believe (from their own authoritative documents) and what Christians really believe (from the Bible and Church History) and why this is of eternal significance.

Dr. Wells has shown that theology – what people believe about God, creation, mankind, salvation, and eternity is of massive importance. I hope that this book receives a wide reading by Christians, Mormons, and anyone concerned about their own soul, and the souls of others.

About the Author of The Mormon Faith: Dr. William Wells completed an undergraduate degree in Anthropology at Wheaton College and graduated from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, IL. He also earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Religion from Syracuse University in NY. Upon completing his doctorate in 1970, he taught at the University of Hawaii, Hilo College and later at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C. & the Graduate School of Theology at Wheaton College. In his forties, Dr. Wells left academia and a few years later joined Wycliffe Bible Translators. Now retired after twenty years of service with Wycliffe, he lives in Southern California where he continues to teach and write. He has also written A Brief Introduction to the Bible; and Faith of Our Fathers: An Introduction to the Evangelicals.


Discipleship in Facebook World

Face-to-Face Discipleship in a Facebook World by John J. Bombaro

Three decades of data have revealed near systemic evangelical ignorance of the Scriptures, ignorance of theology, church history, Christian art, architecture, and iconography and, correspondingly, ignorance of Christian deportment, both social and practical (The abiding mass media and academic depiction of the average evangelical as an emotive, anti-intellectual fundamentalist given to cult of personality groupthink, in fact does have a basis in credible research. While we may sense misrepresentations on South Park and The Simpsons, data evidences that popular opinions about evangelicals may be more stereotype than unfair caricature. See, e.g., David F. Wells, No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993; Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994; and Michael S. Horton, Made in America: The Shaping of Modern American Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991).  Ignorance abounds with the information superhighway literally at our fingertips and Kindles glutted with books.

This ignorance, however, has little to do with intelligence or ability, and everything to do with literacy—the kind of literacy that results from catechesis, interpersonal catechesis. Our evangelical churches are illiterate because catechesis rarely takes place, and when it does it is usually unremarkable and undemanding, thanks to our seeker-sensitivity complex. And it is only interpersonal, challenging catechesis—face-to-face discipleship between the catechist and catechumen—that can dispel such illiteracy, so that the baptized may not only recognize the story in its various manifestations (the contents of the Bible, confessional articles, liturgical appointments and rites, and so forth), but also own it as their integrated worldview and lifestyle. It was this kind of discipling that Jesus expected from his ministerium (Matt. 28:19; John 21:15-18). Interpersonal discipleship fortifies the church against flaccid nominalism. Modern technologies, for all their usefulness and genius, have not and cannot fill the gap between Christian initiation and catechetical confirmation; only face-to-face discipleship can.

After decades of unbridled optimism, catechists were beginning to make a U-turn on the necessity of employing modern technologies as the principal means of discipling. To be sure, cautionary statements have been issued since the 1980s by the likes of Neil Postman, C. John Sommerville, D. G. Hart, and Neal Gabler, that modern technology was not all it was cracked up to be, particularly in connection with religious learning (See Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in an Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin Books, 1984; and Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage, 1993; Sommerville’s How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society. Downers Grove: IVP, 1999; Bruce Kuklick and D. G. Hart, eds., Religious Advocacy and American History. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997; and Gabler’s Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality-Starring Everyone. New York: Vintage, 2000).

Biblical literacy rates are down, learning is increasingly a passive activity, the line of demarcation between educating and entertaining has been blurred, and—for all the time spent in front of electronic media devices (averaging nine hours a day for high school students)—American pupils are scoring lower than their Eastern and Sub-Continent counterparts in the fields of mathematics, science, language acquisition and proficiency, to say nothing of catechetical retention (See Gary M. Burge, “The Greatest Story Never Read: Recovering Biblical Literacy in the Church,” Christianity Today 43, no.9 (1999): 45-49; E. Christian Kopff, The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1999); and Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2008). As one Sudanese pastor said, “I’ll take any one of my catechumens over a dozen of yours in America.” This Anglican priest was making the point that discipleship is about quality, not quantity. It is baptism that gives us quantity. Face-to-face discipleship gives us quality. But then came Facebook as the latest Christian-consumer expectation within the church. Face-to-face discipleship now competes with Facebook discipleship.

Old School Discipling through Personal Presence

Biblical models of discipleship entail corporate settings (cf. Acts 2:42; Heb. 10:25) and more intimate contexts for mentoring (cf. Acts 8:26ff; 10:27-48; the Pastoral Epistles). Jesus’ ministry to the assembled masses and pedagogical retreats with his disciples provide paradigmatic case studies for intentional catechetical ministry that has been replicated by the apostles and succeeding generations within the church. Indeed, when Jesus commissioned his disciples as apostles (hoi apostoloi) in John 20:21-23, he intended a personal, intimate, and present ministry. The Father “sent” (apestalken) the Son in human flesh to “be with us” (John 1:14), to minister grace and truth. In the same way (kathos) the Son sends his personal representatives—the apostoloi—to minister the grace and truth of God. Anything otherwise would yield Docetism, impinging upon God’s incarnational purposes and presence (Docetism [from the Greek dokeo, “to seem”] refers to a heretical Gnostic doctrine in the early church that held that Jesus only appeared [seemed] to have a human body, and so his incarnate representation, suffering, and death on the cross were merely apparent [virtual], not real). Personal, present representation is therefore the essence of Christian ministry—the ministry of disciple-making through holy baptism and the formation of the disciple through catechetical instruction (Matt. 28:19-20).

Given this biblical precedence and two millennia of ecclesial emulation of the discipling process, is it possible to take a digital approach to, say, the Lenten form of Christian discipleship? I don’t think so. Cyber-social networks such as Facebook facilitate neither the corporate setting nor the context for mentoring as intended by the Father and the Son.

The tradition of Lent is the liturgical calendar season of forty weekdays before Easter, observed by many Reformation traditions and consisting of penitence and fasting. It stretches from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday. Despite attempts to spin the significance of the biblical number “40” into something wonderfully transformative (à la Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life), forty-day periods in the Bible always are associated with trials of temptation, affliction, fasting, repentance, and suffering while entreating God for grace. One thinks of Moses, Elijah, and Jesus himself fasting in the wilderness. One also thinks of global judgment for forty days in Noah’s lifetime, as well as the first generation of Hebrews that experienced the Exodus, who also spent forty years wandering and never entering the Promised Land. Lenten seasons, be it with Moses and the Hebrews, Elijah and the Israelites, or Jesus and his “last Adam” representation of humanity, were never exclusively about individual self-discovery. They have always been far more corporate in the disciplines of repentance and entreaty. These experiences necessitated challenging encounters with familial (head of household) and communal spiritual shepherds (prophets and priests).

Maintaining continuity with the Old Testament and holding Jesus’ wilderness trial as the paragon, the church enters the season of Lent. Since the third century, entire congregations have embraced and participated in the drama of Lent that reaches its apogee on Good Friday when the Messiah was crucified “for us and for our salvation,” only to give way to corporate relief on Easter morning. Lent was a church affair, and it was bound up with the formation of disciples by way of catechetical preaching, instructing baptismal candidates and confirmands, and shaping Christian character through the rigors of spiritual disciplines—praying, fasting, meditating, self-denying, serving, and studying. It was all very corporate, all quite interpersonal. We repented together, we mourned together, we celebrated together. Moreover, it was decidedly low tech: personal presence, Word, sacraments, brotherly consolation, encouragement. Christians touched and ate together in 3-D.

Today, Lent seems to have suffered from the encroachment of our Facebook society. I say this because, like so much else in American evangelicalism, even Lent seems to have been reduced to an exercise in isolation, militating against biblical categories of discipleship. What was once a parish exercise is now more frequently referred to as an individual experience enjoyed from the comforts of home or wherever one can WiFi a 4G network. Evidencing this trend are not only sparsely attended Lenten services (in the ever-shrinking sphere in which it remains), but the way we as evangelicals think about the world. A Facebook instant message (IM) exchange shared by a friend may be typical:

A: Doing lent?

B: You mean giving up something?

A: No u know the whole lent thing—church and all.

B: Not really. How about you?

A: Me neither tho I was thinking I’d renew my new years resolutions.

B: Cool. I’ll pray for you.

This exchange came from a West Coast evangelical church’s Facebook forum titled, “The Fellowship Wall.” For this and other churches, posting, texting, and blogging sometimes constitutes Christian fellowship and the substance of discipleship. Where once catechisms were employed and midweek Lenten services pocked calendars, now it is good enough simply to have connected electronically. Clip, paste, send. And we all say “Amen.”

New School Discipleship through Facebook

There can be no doubt that Facebook and social networks such as Myspace and Twitter are displacing interpersonal mediums of discipling. In a broader sense, they are filling a socialization vacuum about which Robert D. Putnam so ably wrote in his groundbreaking book, Bowling Alone (Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). I thank Brian Thomas, vicar at Grace Lutheran Church, San Diego, for this insight and his conversation on much that follows. Putnam’s data showed how Americans have become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, our democratic structures, and church. He concluded that radical individualism, narcissism, consumerism, moral relativism, and a profound sense of entitlement fragment communities and organizations that, by their very nature and existence, operate on a fundamentally different principle than autonomy. With the loss of this social capital through civil engagement new, more convenient, and personally defined civic forms have arisen, but have done so by accommodating an America that is radically individualistic, narcissistic, consumerist, morally relative, and entitled. Facebook is the most successful new civil forum, and it is finding a welcome home in the church—the very entity designed by God to provide a totally different solution to communal disengagement from docetic enterprises like Facebook.

The gravitation toward employing cyber-social networks for activities once understood to require personal presence is seen in every corner of evangelicalism. Church Facebook pages abound. A decade ago a common query was, “Does this church have a website?” Now the question is, “Is this church on Facebook?” That is because Facebook provides unique features, carries a certain status, and facilitates particular expectations for its nearly 650 million patrons. Facebook is an innovative cultural force shaping societal expectations about identity and a sense of belonging, which is why churches are enlisting its novel methodology. Per usual, evangelicalism is eager to give people what they want (convenience and low commitment) instead of what disciples need (challenging and engaging discipleship).

The contents on church Facebook pages range from posting intimations to sermon podcasting to forums for discipleship. Subscribers say that the need to employ Facebook-type interfaces is natural and fitting: It’s just another tool for marketing, conveniently connecting believers, evangelistic endeavors, and Christian education. After all, the church has a history of technological employments—the printing press, Christian radio, television, theater. Evangelicals expect that the utilization of technology will terminate in enriching humanity with the Word of God or, synonymously, increasing catechetical literacy. At the same time, we would do well to remember the observations of Marshall McLuhan: “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964, xi.). If the ideas of McLuhan have any traction, and the medium of social networking is really a message about virtuosity or unreality (corresponding to McLuhan’s aphorism: “The medium is the message”), then church-via-Facebook will have the opposite effect upon discipleship and enriching Christian communities because it is not, by design, a conducive forum for the biblical discipleship of believers. It promotes tweets not tomes. It is not demanding but user friendly. It does not foster spiritual disciplines as there’s no accountability. How, then, can we expect a tool that truncates our sensory engagement with reality (limiting it to an LCD panel) to play a role in reversing catechetical illiteracy?

A related conversation emerged in my University of San Diego class, “Protestantism in the USA.” My students confirmed a suspicion I held. They believe that old “brick and mortar” churches are becoming increasingly redundant because evangelicalism is leading the way toward a fully personalized spirituality—done at home online. They reasoned, “You choose your friends online. Why not choose your church?” By this they did not mean utilizing a search engine to ascertain which church you would like to attend, but rather choosing whom you would like to have in your self-determined cyber-congregation, something quite different from the Body of Christ where those you might otherwise decline an invitation to view your page sit down next to you, hold your hand during the Lord’s Prayer, and may even share the chalice with you during Holy Communion. They were saying that there will be no need to attend church because there is even now the possibility of forming your own virtu-church in the same way one customizes an iTunes collection. And in good keeping with the evangelical accommodation of individualism through self-application Bibles and a flattened ecclesiological topography, virtu-church provides the ideal setting for self-feeding where, when, how, and with whom you like. It’s the next logical step in consumerist Christianity. They reported that this was not only a possibility, but a present reality: “I hardly ever go to church,” confessed one student, “I stay connected through Facebook and I can do it from anywhere.” The class nodded in universal agreement—assembling with believers is superfluous when Facebook is omnipresent. There was no perceived need to improve their catechetical literacy: they knew how to navigate the site.

Facebooked

After class, however, a student told me how her Emergent church went belly-up through Facebook, confirming another suspicion I held. This particular fellowship did all of its intimations, connecting, and correspondence through the online social network. Before long, the homilies and prayers were simply posted, and assembling took place online, with the discipling of new believers being facilitated by way of the IM tool. “It was so exciting,” she said. The Facebook app on your phone allowed you to carry the church in your pocket and contribute through PayPal.

Then, of course, the social networking within the church became more exclusive. Facebook is, after all, a gateway or filter. Consequently, undesirables were precluded or excluded. (So much for evangelism.) The IM walls became forums for gossip. (So much for fellowship.) Mentors and neophytes never actually met for discipleship because the gateway fixed a buffer between catechist and catechumen. The church emerged and disbanded within four years. Facebook’s exclusivity principle cut them off from the wider Christian world and, in fact, one another. The medium mangled the message. In the end, they were still “bowling alone.” Facebook changed their church dynamics because there was no need to leave the house for the lanes of corporate or catechetical discipleship. They were taught that it was enough that they were bowling on Wii.

The cyber-solution to civic engagement resulted, in this case, in greater exclusion and isolation, proving once again that disciples cannot be made or discipled online: there’s no water, no bread and wine, no living thing transmitted through 1s and 0s. It was never intended to be so in a church that requires its catechumens to “take, eat” (Matt. 26:26). Facebook’s methodology cannot establish a mentoring context where interpersonal engagement entails the entire person in the discipling process, addressing issues of character, disposition, emotions, and body language. This only happens when someone is there, really there. To give one’s time writing an e-mail is one thing, but to give of the self through personal presence sets discipleship on an entirely different and elevated plane. Personal presence is the essence of gift giving (John 3:16).

For all the “friendships” being made online, there are still no hugs, handshakes, or looking in the eye. And that’s the irony of online social networks. The medium of Facebook is the message of the unreal; Myspace is no place; “friends” are files; chat is voiceless; templates establish individuation. What is more, when the whole world is denying that God is real, for churches or catechists to resort to the domain of virtuosity sends the wrong theological message. If the sheep are suspended in the Ethernet, then what of the Shepherd?

The domain of virtuosity cannot convert ecclesial settings where catechist/catechumen relationships envelop the totality of our humanity—mind, will, emotions, and physicality. Discipleship therefore must take place face to face since the church curates the substance of Christian faith and practice through embodied transmission. Stated differently, authentic discipleship requires personal presence because the living medium remanates the living message to living recipients.

As an ordained minister, it is one thing for me to text, e-mail, or phone a parishioner, and another thing for me to be present. Pastoral visitations hold significantly different weight from electronic communications, and the effect they have is likewise dissimilar. That’s because disciples who have cut their teeth on old school catechesis expect their pastor to be there instead of stockpiling e-messages. The Son of God showed up to take away the sins of the world. In like manner, the pastor needs to show up to baptize, absolve, commune, commiserate, counsel, and catechize if Christ’s apostolic commissioning is to be accomplished. Being a disciple of Jesus (whether catechist or catechumen) means that loving others comes at the price of sacrifice. There is something real, urgent, and authenticating for our humanity about having to be there in person. The physics of voice and sound, the force of human emotion and passions, and indeed, touching are effective tools in the ministry of the Holy Spirit through earthen vessels. This is the high expectation of Christ and discipleship in the real world. Conversely, the expectations of Christians who live in a Facebook world are low. The pastor is a flat screen image, like a celebrity pastor whose multicampus sermon broadcasts are streamed to smartphones. You may never meet your pastor in person let alone receive catechesis or a hospital visit from him: hence, discipleship happens on your time, when you want to log in. The convenience of cyber-socializing in a risk-free domain devoid of self-giving love perpetuates evangelical ignorance precisely because one is not being a disciple, a learner of Christ, which takes place in the context of where two or more are gathered—really gathered.

Principles of Facebook

As far as discipleship is concerned, Facebook must be placed in the same category of brilliant technologies that, when misappropriated, “bite back.” Edward Tenner has convincingly argued in his well-documented Why Things Bite Back: New Technology and the Revenge Effect that technologies in fact do have their appropriate sphere of utility that, when transgressed, results in unforeseen and unintended consequences (Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: New Technology and the Revenge Effect (London: Fourth Estate, 1996). Christian discipleship and fellowship are at least two planes that, when transected with Facebook, have the opposite effect; that’s because, as far as compatibility with Christian community building and discipleship is concerned, the fundamental premises upon which Facebook rests (viz., exclusivity, self-identification, and convenience) are antithetical to the kingdom Christ created. Just ask the Galatians to whom Paul wrote.

The fundamental premises behind Facebook are the concepts of adolescent clique, exclusivity, and reliving (in a virtual way) high school and college popularity and posturing. Individually and collectively, these principles are ill-suited for Christian discipleship.

“Clique” is antithetical to the building of Christian communities, expanding conversation, and communion in both its vertical and horizontal dimensions. Jesus, Paul explains, broke down walls of separation (Eph. 2:16), and so the revolutionary social network of the church was sexless, ageless, raceless, and without socioeconomic status (Gal. 3:28; Col. 3:11). The Facebook principle of clique erects walls of separation by way of “friendship” segregation. It dissolves fellowshipping into Facebooking among those we discriminate as worthy brethren. While biblical discipleship advances maturation, America’s prevailing social network promotes a return to adolescence—the period of life where our self-identity is most confused and unfounded, indeed, self-referential. No wonder we’re attracted to Facebook and Myspace: they facilitate opportunities to go back and remake ourselves in an ideally self-determined fashion. You can upload your independent spiritual profile by tweeting the new you. This attraction will persist so long as no event-oriented, identity-making fixtures such as holy baptism, Holy Communion, holy confirmation, and holy matrimony (the things of face-to-face discipleship) persevere with us. And since God-given means of disciple making and discipling cannot be experienced in the two-dimensional realm, then identity makers default to pop culture rites of passage such as driving age, drinking age, launching your Facebook profile, and sexual encounters. Don’t believe me? Ask a teen or collegian or, better yet, any “real housewife.”

British author A. S. Byatt, an avowed atheist who openly describes herself as “anti-Christian,” has seen this quite clearly (See http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/25/ as-byatt-interview). In a recent interview, Byatt laments the loss of the Christian metanarrative that once provided her Western culture with its existential orientation manifested through conversation, communities, and communion (See http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/video/2010/aug/25/as-byatt-facebook). Now, she says, with the grand biblical story effectively purged from public discourse, all we have are autobiographies, anonymity, and autonomy.

It was this Christian metanarrative—passed on through the catechetical process—she explains, that told us who we are, where we are going, and what it all means (Hence the definition of catecheo: “to sound again,” i.e., the catechumen repeats or reproduces the catechism. Cf. Bombaro, “A Catechetical Imitation of Christ,” Modern Reformation 18, no. 2 (March/April 2009): 31-35). Without that picture of reality, observes Byatt, we Facebook. Facebook is synonymous with “Selfbook” (my term) where living takes place before the cyber-mirror through which the virtual self legitimates the spatiotemporal self (if the spatiotemporal matters anymore). “It is a mirror,” she explains, “because there’s no picture.” By “picture” Byatt means an objective world about which we live and move and have our being, the external referent to the real. To sustain that picture requires work: storytelling, rituals, contextualizing, the discipline of self-sacrifice, and deference to the governing story. To sustain existence in a Facebook world, however, one must blog, upload, or tweet. I tweet, therefore I am. One’s identity is forged and altered and altered again to sustain self-actualization.

It doesn’t matter that no one is listening, because you are engaging a mirror—the projection of your ideal self, however conceived (regardless, none of it happens in real time in a real community anyway). This, I believe, is why Byatt says that Facebook and Twitter are gods. Life lived not only through but literally in front of the digital portal to the unreal world is life lived coram Deo, before the face of God or, which is to say the same thing, yourself. In this sense, Byatt intimates that we confirm McLuhan’s prophecy: “We become what we behold.”

Without a comprehensive picture of reality to either embrace or discuss in dispute, all we are left with is ourselves or, more accurately, the ideal of ourselves. It naturally follows that we are self-obsessed, but now it is an obsession not with our incarnational existence but a dehumanized virtual one. Plato would be proud. But that’s a scary prospect: detachment from reality to retreat into the pseudo-self, where one projects a hologram to those deemed worthy of “friendship.” No wonder Byatt worries about the loss of conversation, communities, and communion. Discipleship is impossible when the catechist and catechumen are the same person.

In the 1980s and 90s one was remade or, better, renamed by way of consumption of phenomenological goods, be it clothing, cars, or house. Matter mattered, even if it was too much. Personal presentation and personality were inseparable from you. Today, however, one need only tweet the new you—personal presentation and personality edited and “photoshopped” before posting. Before, Madonna was the paragon of change, but that took time, even if it was only two years between album releases. Facebook has retired her “material girl” paradigm for an immediate ethereal one. We don’t need her example of postmodern transformation that, one could argue, was tethered to her vocation, because one can be instantly born again by way of texting. Texting or blogging about yourself is the new revelation—a fresh word from you about you. Unlike God’s real-world elocution, in a Facebook world the word is ours. We are the sovereign speakers, and therein lies our evangelical ignorance: news about me is never the good news. It has to come from outside of me to save me from me. We need God’s Word to save us from the tools we’ve misappropriated that have us sinking deeper into ourselves. It is for the sake of the gospel that we need face-to-face discipleship in a Facebook world.

Self-Giving in Discipleship

Virtual living reflects negatively upon the incarnation and our own “enfleshment.” It must—just like the Roman Catholic Church’s “Confession App” (where there is no real person, no real voice, behind that “Confession App”; no one is present in persona Christi), (See http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Latest-News-Wires/2011/0208/Confession-app-for-iPhone-approved-by-Catholic-Church). so too with the imago Dei: there need not be a real person behind my Facebook page. There is no image of God in us when what we are is a digitized self-projection, a two-dimensional facade. We’re right back to the First Commandment. It’s just about the image of me, the idea of you. It is fantasy living, a kind of voyeurism, because through this nonreality we project ideas of idyllic perfection. Perhaps it is a way to deal with sin, a form of self-justification. But I suspect that we know better because our expectations for friendship are low on Facebook, and that tells me our expectations of God and ourselves are equally low. With no living encounters there can be no accountability or responsibility for oneself, let alone another. It should come as no surprise that Facebook is now the preferred forum for posting suicide notes.

We have to get in touch with reality again. When banking can be done online, filling the tank happens at the pump, self-checkout eliminates human interaction, and social networking is two dimensional (like the image of ourselves), then perhaps now more than ever the church must reestablish face-to-face discipleship to recover our humanity.

Perhaps an unimpressed utilitarian approach toward this Internet tool might be the church’s best approach to the social networking phenomenon since, at least in this case, the adage, “We make the tools and then the tools make us,” seems to obtain.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m no Luddite. There’s some usefulness to Facebook. It’s just that I am still working on what that may be, since a good deal of my time is spent counseling couples whose marriages have been obliterated by affairs started on social networks. Still, when the premise of what is now a global institution divides, distorts, and dilutes, then at least within the church we have to recognize that this medium (in which the spatiotemporal self is suspended for the hologram life) is perfectly ill-suited for virtually everything that pertains to Christian life and faith, except for maybe the intimations.

The Facebook blog is no substitute for the fellowship hall, to say nothing of the Communion rail. For all of their admirable qualities, social network technologies simply cannot facilitate corporate repentance or the interpersonal bond between catechumen and catechist. Mind you, they were never intended to do so. Their genius has other applications; thank God for that. I never want to go back to the days without modern plumbing, dentistry, or computers. But given the way Christ built the church, we have to acknowledge that there is no “spiritual discipline” app.

The art of discipleship requires work with difficulty, which is why the church meets together. The catechist “sounds down” to where the catechumen is at so that in turn the catechumen may “sound again” the catechism. All of it presupposes being present with one another, having personal relationships in spatiotemporality. There is therefore no hiding or anonymity in biblical discipleship. It comes with risk—someone may see your secondhand couch, the dishes in the sink, or the pimple on your nose. But that is what God’s household is like: all are called out of the blogosphere to their Father’s table to break bread. We’re not supposed to stay in our rooms texting or tweeting or Facebooking. The church is a social network with real beings, real warmth, real self-giving, real challenges—challenges to love the “other,” the “different,” the not-your-demographic, and to do so as an expression of our baptismal identity. The ethos of baptism leads the disciple to Communion—the “with union” meal. Jesus made us “friends” in the church; and as members of the Body of Christ, our lives are intertwined. We need the mutual support and encouragement we offer to one another as we reflect on our sin and seek God’s mercy in Jesus the Son for relief, sounding again the catechism that dispels ignorance and liberates us from the bondage of contemporary Zeitgeists like dehumanizing social networks.

This article originally appeared in the “Word and Sacrament: Making Disciples of All Nations” July/August 2011 Vol. 20 No. 4 Page number(s): 17-23 edition of Modern Reformation.

About the Author: Rev. John J. Bombaro (Ph.D., King’s College, University of London) is the parish minister at Grace Lutheran Church in San Diego, California and a lecturer in theology and religious studies at the University of San Diego.

Homosexuality from God’s Perspective

“What the Bible Really Still Says About Homosexuality” by Kevin DeYoung

On Tuesday afternoon, CNN ran an article on its Belief Blog by Catholic priest (sort of) Daniel Helminiak entitled “My Take: What the Bible really says about homosexuality.”  The article is amazing for including so many bad arguments in so little space. A quick trip through the piece will show you what I mean. Helminiak’s writing will be in bold and then my response will follow.

President Barack Obama’s support of same-sex marriage, like blood in the water, has conservative sharks circling for a kill. In a nation that touts separation of religion and government, religious-based arguments command this battle. Lurking beneath anti-gay forays, you inevitably find religion and, above all, the Bible.

We now face religious jingoism, the imposition of personal beliefs on the whole pluralistic society. Worse still, these beliefs are irrational, just a fiction of blind conviction. Nowhere does the Bible actually oppose homosexuality.

These two paragraphs perfectly depict how many see any Christian opposition to homosexuality or gay marriage. We are undercover (or not!) theocrats trying to impose our personal preferences on the rest of the country. But the charge of legislating our morality is not as simple as it sounds. For starters, the government legislates plenty of morality already—morality about killing, stealing, polluting and a thousand other things we’ve decided are bad for society or just plain wrong. Moreover, the arguments being made in favor of gay marriage are fundamentally about morality. That’s why you hear words like justice, love, and equality. Most gay marriage advocates are making their case based on moral categories, if not religious and biblical.

What’s more, the pro-gay marriage side would like to see the state reject a conjugal view of marriage in favor of a new, heretofore unknown, definition of marriage. And in insisting upon the state’s involvement, they want this new definition to be imposed on all. We may not all have to like gay marriage, but the government will tell us what marriage means whether we like it or not.

In the past 60 years, we have learned more about sex, by far, than in preceding millennia. Is it likely that an ancient people, who thought the male was the basic biological model and the world flat, understood homosexuality as we do today? Could they have even addressed the questions about homosexuality that we grapple with today? Of course not.

Here we have an example of progressive prejudice, the kind that assumes we have little to learn from the benighted masses who lived long ago. Whether they thought the world was flat has nothing to do with whether ancient people can teach us anything about sexuality. Such a tidbit is thrown in, it seems to me, as a rhetorical cue that these people were as dumb as doorknobs and can’t be trusted. More importantly, Helminiak distances himself from an orthodox understanding of biblical inspiration. Instead of approaching the Scriptures as the word of God, his first step is to position the Bible as a book by ancient people who don’t know all the things we know.

Hard evidence supports this commonsensical expectation. Taken on its own terms, read in the original languages, placed back into its historical context, the Bible is ho-hum on homosexuality, unless – as with heterosexuality – injustice and abuse are involved.

That, in fact, was the case among the Sodomites (Genesis 19), whose experience is frequently cited by modern anti-gay critics. The Sodomites wanted to rape the visitors whom Lot, the one just man in the city, welcomed in hospitality for the night.

The Bible itself is lucid on the sin of Sodom: pride, lack of concern for the poor and needy (Ezekiel 16:48-49); hatred of strangers and cruelty to guests (Wisdom 19:13); arrogance (Sirach/Ecclesiaticus 16:8); evildoing, injustice, oppression of the widow and orphan (Isaiah 1:17); adultery (in those days, the use of another man’s property), and lying (Jeremiah 23:12).

But nowhere are same-sex acts named as the sin of Sodom. That intended gang rape only expressed the greater sin, condemned in the Bible from cover to cover: hatred, injustice, cruelty, lack of concern for others. Hence, Jesus says “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 19:19; Mark 12:31); and “By this will they know you are my disciples” (John 13:35).

How inverted these values have become! In the name of Jesus, evangelicals and Catholic bishops make sex the Christian litmus test and are willing to sacrifice the social safety net in return.

There is really only one argument in the foregoing paragraphs: the sin of Sodom was about social injustice not about sexual immorality. No doubt, there were many other sins involved, as Helminiak rightly observes. But there is no reason to think homosexuality per se wasn’t also to blame for Sodom’s judgment. For example, Jude 7 states that Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities “indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire.” Even the NRSV, translation of choice for the mainline (and the version Helminiak seems to be using), says “pursued unnatural lust.” Clearly, the sins of Sodom lived in infamy not simply because of violent aggression or the lack of hospitality, but because men pursued sex with other men.

The longest biblical passage on male-male sex is Romans 1:26-27: “Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another.”

The Greek term para physin has been translated unnatural; it should read atypical or unusual. In the technical sense, yes, the Stoic philosophers did use para physin to mean unnatural, but this term also had a widespread popular meaning. It is this latter meaning that informs Paul’s writing. It carries no ethical condemnation.

Compare the passage on male-male sex to Romans 11:24. There, Paul applies the term para physin to God. God grafted the Gentiles into the Jewish people, a wild branch into a cultivated vine. Not your standard practice! An unusual thing to do — atypical, nothing more. The anti-gay “unnatural” hullabaloo rests on a mistranslation.

Besides, Paul used two other words to describe male-male sex: dishonorable (1:24, 26) and unseemly (1:27). But for Paul, neither carried ethical weight. In 2 Corinthians 6:8 and 11:21, Paul says that even he was held in dishonor — for preaching Christ. Clearly, these words merely indicate social disrepute, not truly unethical behavior.

This line of reasoning is also common among revisionists. There is little to say in its favor, however, and Helminiak’s argument—that para physin “carries no ethical condemnation”–is particularly weak.

1) He makes the rudimentary error of forgetting that words have a semantic range of meaning. Just because Paul used “against nature” or “dishonorable” in non-ethical settings (sort of), doesn’t mean those words and phrases cannot carry ethical weight in another context. It’s like suggesting that if FDR once said “this soup is terrible” and later said “what the Nazis are doing is terrible” that he couldn’t possibly mean anything more than “what the Nazis did was kind of strange and not my personal preference.”

2) The context in Romans 1 tells us how to understand para physin. Paul has already explained how the unrighteous suppress the truth about God seen in nature and how they exchange the glory of the immortal God for images of created things. In both cases Paul contends that people believe a lie which prevents them from seeing things as they really are (1:25). Then in the very next verse he singles out homosexuality as “contrary to nature.” He is not thinking merely of things that are unusual, but of acts that violate the divine design and the ways things ought to be. For Paul, the biological complementarity of the male-female union is the obvious order of things. A male-male or female-female sexual pairing violates the anatomical and procreative design inherent in the one flesh union of a man and a woman. That Jewish writers of the period used comparable expressions to describe same-sex intercourse only confirms that this is what Paul meant by the construction.

3) Even more obviously, we know Paul considered same-sex intercourse an ethical violation, and not simply something uncommon, because of what he says in the very next sentence. Helminiak conveniently cuts off Paul’s thought halfway through verse 27. Notice what Paul goes on to say: “Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error” (NRSV). When you read the whole verse, Helminiak’s “non-ethical” argument becomes implausible. Paul thought homosexuality not just unusual, but wrong, a sinful error deserving of a “due penalty.”

In this passage Paul is referring to the ancient Jewish Law: Leviticus 18:22, the “abomination” of a man’s lying with another man. Paul sees male-male sex as an impurity, a taboo, uncleanness — in other words, “abomination.” Introducing this discussion in 1:24, he says so outright: “God gave them up … to impurity.”

But Jesus taught lucidly that Jewish requirements for purity — varied cultural traditions — do not matter before God. What matters is purity of heart.

“It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles,” reads Matthew 15. “What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.”

Or again, Jesus taught, “Everyone who looks at a women with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). Jesus rejected the purity requirements of the Jewish Law.

In calling it unclean, Paul was not condemning male-male sex. He had terms to express condemnation. Before and after his section on sex, he used truly condemnatory terms: godless, evil, wicked or unjust, not to be done. But he never used ethical terms around that issue of sex.

Helminiak’s argument seems to be: Paul said homosexuality was an impurity; Jesus set people free from the purity requirements of the Jewish law; therefore, homosexuality is not wrong. This reasoning is so specious that it’s hard to know where to begin. Jesus did recalibrate the purity laws, but Mark 7:19 makes clear that the episode in question was about declaring all foods clean. Jesus was not saying for a second that anything previously called “unclean” or “impure” was now no big deal. Helminiak again connects words in a facile manner, suggesting that because Jesus fulfilled certain aspects of the ceremonial code, now anything described with the language of impurity cannot be condemned. Nine times in his epistles Paul references “impurity” and it is always in the context of vice and immorality (Rom. 1:24; 6:19; 2 Cor. 12:21; Gal. 5:19; Eph. 4:19; 5:3; Col. 3:5; 1 Thess. 2:3; 4:7). Besides all this, Jesus explicitly lists “sexual immorality” (in the passage Helminiak quotes) as one of the things that defiles a person. The Greek word is porneia which refers to “unlawful sexual intercourse” (BDAG), especially, for the Jew, anything condemned by the Law of Moses.

It is simply not true that Paul, or Jesus for that matter, never considered homosexuality an ethical matter. To cite just one more example: in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and 1 Timothy 1:9-10 Paul uses a rare Greek word, arsenokoites, which is a compound from two words found in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13. Paul thought the prohibition against homosexuality in the Old Testament was still relevant and the sin was still serious.

As for marriage, again, the Bible is more liberal than we hear today. The Jewish patriarchs had many wives and concubines. David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, and Daniel and the palace master were probably lovers.

The Bible’s Song of Songs is a paean to romantic love with no mention of children or a married couple. Jesus never mentioned same-sex behaviors, although he did heal the “servant” — pais, a Greek term for male lover — of the Roman Centurion.

These are wild assertions without any corroborating evidence. Whatever one thinks of Leviticus 18 and 20 for today, it’s obvious that the Torah considered homosexual activity an abomination. It’s absurd to think that any ancient Israelite would have any celebrated David or Jonathan or Ruth or Naomi or Daniel if they were homosexual. It is the worst kind of special pleading and reader response to conclude against all exegetical, theological, and historical evidence that any of these Old Testament heroes were gay.

Likewise, there is no evidence to suggest that the centurion’s servant was his lover. The leading New Testament lexicon (BDAG) gives three definitions of pais: a young person, one’s own offspring, one who is in total obedience to another. If the word somehow means “male lover” in the Gospels, we need evidence greater than Helminiak’s bald assertion.

Paul discouraged marriage because he believed the world would soon end. Still, he encouraged people with sexual needs to marry, and he never linked sex and procreation.

Were God-given reason to prevail, rather than knee-jerk religion, we would not be having a heated debate over gay marriage. “Liberty and justice for all,” marvel at the diversity of creation, welcome for one another: these, alas, are true biblical values.

The link between sex and procreation did not have to be articulated by Paul because it was already assumed. God’s design from the beginning had been one man and one woman coming together as one flesh. This design is reaffirmed throughout Scripture, not least of all by Jesus (Matt. 19:4-6) and by Paul (Eph. 5:31). An important aspect of this union is the potential blessing of children. The prophet Malachi made clear that procreation is one of the aims of marriage when he said about a husband and wife, “Did he not make them one, with a portion of the Spirit in their union? And what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring” (Mal. 2:15).

None of this proves the case against gay marriage as a government injunction (though that case can be made as well). What careful attention to the Bible does show is that the revisionists do not have a Scriptural leg to stand on. From the first chapter of the Bible to the Law of Moses to the New Testament, there is no hint that homosexuality is acceptable behavior for God’s people and every indication that it is a serious sin.

This is why I appreciate the candor of honest pro-gay advocates like Luke Timothy Johnson:

The task demands intellectual honesty. I have little patience with efforts to make Scripture say something other than what it says, through appeals to linguistic or cultural subtleties. The exegetical situation is straightforward: we know what the text says…I think it important to state clearly that we do, in fact, reject the straightforward commands of Scripture, and appeal instead to another authority when we declare that same-sex unions can be holy and good. And what exactly is that authority? We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience and the experience thousands of others have witnessed to, which tells us that to claim our own sexual orientation is in fact to accept the way in which God has created us. By so doing, we explicitly reject as well the premises of the scriptural statements condemning homosexuality-namely, that it is a vice freely chosen, a symptom of human corruption, and disobedience to God’s created order.

Of course, I disagree with Johnson’s approach to the authority of Scripture and his liberal deference to experience. But I commend him for acknowledging what should be plain: the Bible really really calls homosexuality a sin. A sin that can be forgiven in Christ like a million other sins, and a sin that can be fought against by the power of the Holy Spirit, but still a sin. That’s what the Bible says. And as the CNN article demonstrates, it takes a lot of contorted creativity to make it say something else.

About the Author: Kevin DeYoung is the Senior Pastor at University Reformed Church (RCA) in East Lansing, Michigan, right across the street from Michigan State University.  DeYoung has been the pastor there since 2004.  He was born in Chicagoland, but grew up mostly in the Grand Rapids, Michigan area.  He roots for da Bears, da Bulls, da Blackhawks, the White Sox, and the Spartans. He is married to Trisha, lives in Lansing and has five young children, and, for some reason, a bunny. He is the author of numerous excellent books including: Freedom and Boundaries: A Pastoral Primer on the Role of Women in the Church; What is the Mission of the Church? (co-authored with Greg Gilbert); Why We Love the Church and Why We Are Not Emergent (both co-authored with Ted Kluck); and The Good News We Almost Forgot and the forthcoming The Hole in Our Holiness: Filling the Gap between Gospel Passion and the Pursuit of Godliness.

The article above is adapted from Kevin DeYoung’s blog on The Gospel Coalition’s website:  “DeYoung, Restless, and Reformed” – May 16, 2012 blog entry at http://thegospelcoaliton.org/blogs/kevindeyoung/

How to Share the Gospel With Muslims by J.T. Smith

Editors’ Note: Christians didn’t discover the need for missions in the Muslim world on September 11, 2001. The Middle East is the homeland of our faith, too, the site of many great acts of God’s miraculous redemption. Long before the Twin Towers fell in Manhattan that clear fall day, Christians debated why the church has struggled to gain a hearing for the gospel where the call once sounded freely. Yet in the last decade, debate has intensified as we agonized over the depth of many Muslims’ hostility toward Christianity. Missionaries and academics have wondered aloud whether the problem extends beyond Western politics, military intervention, and spiritual bondage to the very way we present the gospel. Could our methods be to blame? Could more sophisticated contextualization unlock many more hearts for Christ?

These are the questions we asked experienced pastors and missionaries to answer this week. Whether you’re planning to take the gospel overseas yourself or supporting those who do, we hope these articles will help you make wise, informed decisions about this great missionary challenge of our generation.

“How do you pray?”

Ahmed and I had been sitting at a little teashop talking about various things when he asked this question. Like many other Muslims, he was curious about how Christians pray. I began to explain how our hearts need to be purified in order for us to approach God in prayer. He agreed and wanted to know more. “What do you say when you pray?” he asked. I told him that we can speak to God as a loving father. I then went on to show him the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6.

“Is that from the Bible?” he asked. “Yes it is,” I answered. He responded, “That’s beautiful! Can I get one?” From the beginning, it was obvious that God was working in Ahmed’s life to draw him to Jesus. It was a blessing to introduce him to Jesus the savior—whom he had only known as Jesus the prophet.

As we talk about Insider Movements and how we should or shouldn’t be sharing Christ with Muslims, two dangers can emerge. First, people can become a leery of Muslim evangelism out of fear of doing so incorrectly. We should have no fear in sharing the gospel with Muslims. It is the gospel that we are sharing, after all. It is powerful to save!

Second, we must remember that Muslim evangelism should not be merely talked about and debated on blogs or in academic circles. It is something that should be done wherever we find Muslims. In that endeavor let me offer some words of counsel to all who seek to make Christ supreme among Muslims.

Ground yourself in the fact that God is sovereign in salvation.

Muslims come to faith by a supernatural work of God, by which the Holy Spirit opens their hearts (Acts 16:14) and grants them the gift of repentance (2 Tim. 2:25). We believe that a Muslim coming to faith is not intrinsically connected to our form of contextualization, but rests solely on God’s divine intervention (Dan. 4:35; Ps. 115:3; John 6:64-65) and our humble obedience to proclaim the gospel (Acts 1:8; Matt. 9:38, 28:19-20). God is not concerned with glorifying a method; he is concerned with glorifying his Son. Strategies are useful and necessary, but none of them offers the “key” to Muslim evangelism.

Be diligent in working to understand the local culture and determine the best way to present the gospel.

God’s sovereignty is not meant to make us lazy, careless, or vague in our evangelism. It gives us hope, because our finite attempts to share the gospel are backed by an infinitely powerful Savior who has “ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev. 5:9). Wanting to present the gospel clearly and knowing that God’s grace is irresistible are not mutually exclusive.

When it comes to understanding the local culture, we should seek to do two things:

(1) Know Islam. We need to ask ourselves, What are Muslims longing for? What keeps Muslims from attaining this? Don’t be afraid to read the Qur’an or other religious sources. These things will give you great insight into Muslims hearts and minds.

(2) Use their language. When I say “language” I’m referring to two things. First, speak their actual language. If you want to see a church planted among Arabic-speaking Muslims, learn Arabic. If you’re working among Pakistanis, learn Urdu. If among Bengalis, learn Bengali. Second, speak the language (figuratively) that communicates to them. My wife and I lived and worked among Arabic speakers. We learned early on that we could not get people to listen by presenting a beautiful apologetic syllogism proving Jesus is God. We had to use stories, parables, and passages from their religious books.

Center your gospel presentation on Jesus and the Bible.

The degree to which Muslim-background believers seek to retain their previous religion correlates with how we present the gospel to them. In other words, if we use the Qur’an extensively in our evangelism, we risk encouraging a sentimental attachment to it. Muslim-background believers may see the Qur’an as the means by which they understood the gospel and therefore have a harder time letting it go. If we present the gospel as fulfilling their previous religion, we open ourselves up to future problems.

I am not against the proper use of the Qur’an in evangelism. I am concerned with how much we use it. We should not give it center place in our gospel presentation. Jesus is the only way to the Father. Muslims must believe Jesus is their savior, and this belief can only come from the Scriptures. The story of redemption cannot be told from the Qur’an.

Don’t force your ideas on them.

Muslim evangelism can be messy; discipleship can be even worse. Each convert I worked with was different. I made it a point to preach the gospel and let it linger, giving them the time and freedom to think through the implications and determine how they should be applied in that particular culture. We should not attempt to impose our ideas or forms on Muslim-background believers. This means we shouldn’t impose either Western or Islamic expressions of Christianity on them. This is where much of the tension comes from.

We all have an idea of what we hope to see, and how we do Muslim ministry will be determined by our desired outcome. Insider Movement advocates envision implanting the gospel in a Muslim culture with the hopes that it will grow like yeast and lead to transformation from the inside out. In order to do this, they believe, the message must take on Islamic form. Anything less will be viewed as foreign and suspect. Others argue that Muslims need to be called out of Islam and gathered into a separate body with a clear Christ-centered identity. Anything less, they claim, would be viewed as syncretistic.

I would argue that both are correct. The gospel will take on a form of the culture that it is speaking to; if it doesn’t, it will not be understood. But the gospel will also speak with a prophetic voice within the culture that calls for transformation. It goes in and calls out. Our goal is to preach the gospel of Christ from the Scriptures and let the Spirit transform lives and communities.

In the end, expressions of the church or faith communities among Muslims may challenge all our views at some point. However, if these expressions are orthodox in their beliefs, Christ-centered in their view of the gospel, and not deceptive in their practices, we have cause for rejoicing. May God give us wisdom, grace, patience, and boldness as we seek to share the gospel with Muslims.

J.T. Smith and his wife have been ministering to Muslims for the past ten years. They have spent the last four and a half years in the Arabian Peninsula seeking to plant churches among Arabs. This article originally appeared on http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2012/05/15/how-to-share-the-gospel-with-muslims/

Homosexuality and Its Quest to be the New Normal by Eric Raymond

President Obama’s recent statement concerning his views of same sex marriage has generated no small amount of discussion and controversy. In what was doubtlessly a political calculation the President made that statement couched in political and attitudinal terms. That is, this new take is his personal view. He has personally has come to a place where he can now accept and stand behind same sex marriage.

This change is not restricted solely to the President. Advocates for Gay rights have tirelessly worked to change the public perception of same sex couples. Over the last 15-25 years America has done a near 180 on the issue. The attempt has been to sanitize and normalize homosexuality.

There have been countless actors, musicians, athletes, and politicians who have publicly spoken out in favor of Gay rights. Many from these same spheres have themselves disclosed that they themselves are gay. It has become commonplace to have television shows and movies with gay characters. Characters like Oscar on The Office have helped to gradually move the meter on public opinion.

Now NBC is set to debut a new show this fall entitled The New Normal. What is the premise? Two guys are married and of course can’t have a child of their own. They hire a surrogate to begin their family.

This is not simply an attempt at normalization from Hollywood it is a realization of it on Main Street. In a short period of time recently my wife and I saw a gay couple walking on our block, my son saw two guys kissing at their lockers at school, we visited a potential home purchase owned by two men, and have seen many (many) gay couples at the grocery store. And listen, we are in Omaha! This is, after all, “somewhere in Middle America.” While it may not yet be “The New Normal” homosexuality is surely becoming more or prevalent and more accepted.

Now, what does this mean for Christians? What does this mean for missions?

Among other things,

It means that we better get justification and sanctification clear. This is such an epidemic in evangelicalism; we aim to justify the church and sanctify the world. The world is not going to keep the Ten Commandments, walk in the Spirit, or glorify Christ…they can’t! They are unbelievers and they will act like it. This should not surprise us. We can recall our own unbelieving lives and we have read passages like Romans 3. The transformation into Christ likeness comes out of being declared not guilty and righteous in God’s eyes (Rom. 5.1). This comes by the merit of Christ in his doing and dying for sinners like us. We cannot expect unbelievers to look and act like believers. Having our these theological categories straight will greatly aid our interaction with the new normal.

It means that we better be clear about the character of God. The repeated theme is that “God made me this way and he would not want me to be unhappy.” The issue is not as much about the morality of the unbeliever but the character of God. Who is God? How did he create? Why did he create? How does he communicate what morality is? How do we know what he values? All of these questions drive us back to the Word of God for objectivity rather than subjectivity. God’s love is characterized by holiness and truth. You cannot know or experience the love of God apart from truth. In order to feel his love we must know him. Before we go about arguing about the cultural usages and understanding of particular Greek words there is priority to understand and communicate who God is.

It means that we better be clear about the problem. Far too many times I have heard evangelicals talk about homosexuality like our job was to get them to become heterosexual. If we can just get them to be straight then our work is done. The Christian objective in missions is to see people become Christians! This means that we want to see all sexual sinners become worshipers of Jesus. This includes fornicators, adulterers, porn-addicts, homosexuals, or whatever other category you can think up. The goal is to become a believer who turns from the worship of self to the worship of God. It is to turn from rebellion that is characterized by the suppression of truth to the submission that is characterized by obedience to the truth (Rom. 1.18-25; 3.19-27). The central issue is worship, or idolatry. The central answer is always the gospel.

It means that we better be clear about our tone. Can you lovingly engage a homosexual with the gospel in a winsome, tactful and still faithful way? Can you love them? This is really a question that I think evangelicals need to wrestle with and decidedly answer “yes, we must!” Pivoting out of the points above, that is out of the gospel, we have to see our own weakness and neediness. Who among us is not needy of the grace of Christ? Then we must lovingly and faithfully talk to others about it. If you can’t get control of yourself and speak the words of grace and truth to someone who is straight or gay then you need to ask God to give you a bigger heart. Ask him to shake you of pride and work gospel compassion down into you. I know that God is saving a lot of people from a gay lifestyle and I pray that he will continue to do so. As missionaries we need to speak and act like we actually want him to.

CONCLUSION–Be Prophetic from the Center!

The “new normal” is upon us. How will we respond? D.A. Carson has rightly said, “It is easy to sound prophetic from the margins, what we need is to be prophetic from the center.” That is, preaching against issues that flow out of a rejection of the gospel (sexual sin, abortion, etc) are peripheral and must be addressed by means of the core gospel, that which is of first importance.” (1 Cor. 15.3-5) In light of these ever-changing times, may this timeless charge become the “new normal” for us as evangelicals.

About the Author: Erik Raymond has been writing at Ordinary Pastor since 2006. He lives in Omaha with his wife and kids while pastoring at Emmaus Bible Church. Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/erikraymond. This excellent article was adapted from his website http://www.ordinarypastor.com on May 15, 2012.

The Problem of Evil by Gregory E. Ganssle

“How Can God Have All Power and Be Loving and Yet There Be Evil?”

What philosophers call “the problem of evil” is a family of arguments from the existence or nature of evil to the conclusion that God does not or probably does not exist. The oldest form of the argument is that the mere existence of evil is logically incompatible with God’s existence. If God exists, evil could not, and if evil exists, God could not. I call this argument the “charge of contradiction.” The claim is that there is a logical contradiction in asserting that God is all-powerful, God is all-loving, and that evil exists. Wouldn’t this kind of God eliminate all evil? The existence of God, in this view, is on a par with a square circle. Given the existence of evil, it is impossible for God to exist. The challenge is to show that theism is logically consistent.

Few today, including atheists, think this argument succeeds. If God might have a good reason to allow evil, then it is possible that both God and evil exist. We need not know what God’s actual reasons are, but if it is possible He has one, then the argument is defeated. Most think it is possible that God has good reasons to allow evil and that, therefore, there is no contradiction between God’s existence and the existence of evil.

Today, the most important form of the argument against the existence of God from evil is called the “evidential argument from evil.” The one who presses this argument admits that the existence of God and the reality of evil are not logically incompatible. The argument is that the amount and the kinds of evil we find in the world is strong evidence against the existence of God.

Even though it is possible that God has a reason to allow the evils we find in the world, it does not seem likely that there are good reasons for some of the evils we see. We cannot prove that there is no good reason, but if we have lots of cases in which it seems as though there is none, we will conclude that there probably is no good reason to allow these evils. If it is true that probably there is no good reason to allow these cases of evil, then it is probable that God does not exist. This argument is called the “evidential argument” because we cannot prove that there is no good reason to allow the particular evils we are thinking about. These evils do, then, look like good evidence that God does not exist.

In order to begin to answer this argument, we must think about the claim that it is probable that no good reason exists to allow the evil in question. Why should we believe this is true? The one who puts this argument forward will appeal to cases of evil in which it is difficult to find a reason that might fit. Does this mean we ought to conclude that it is probable that there is no reason? No.

The reasoning here goes as follows: It seems like there is no reason to allow this evil therefore, probably there is no reason to allow it. Sometimes this kind of reasoning is strong and other times it is weak. Let me illustrate. The argument is of the form: It seems like there is no x, therefore, probably there is no x. The Bible has numerous cases where one could mount this argument. Let’s take the case of Lazarus’s death in John 11. Lazarus was likely in the prime of his life. He’s a good man and a close friend of Jesus. Lazarus becomes ill and dies. The citizens of his village, Bethany, could see such an evil and after three days of mourning come to the conclusion that there is no reason for this. Therefore, God doesn’t exist. Then Jesus comes to Bethany. Lazarus’s sisters, Mary and Martha, chastise Jesus for not getting there sooner. As we read John’s account, we see that unbeknownst to Mary and Martha, Jesus had reasons for delaying. Moreover, there were reasons Lazarus was permitted to die in the prime of his life. When Jesus arrived at Lazarus’s tomb, He prayed and then called Lazarus to come out of the tomb four days after his death. The reason for Lazarus’s sickness, death, Jesus’ delay, and Lazarus’s resuscitation was that God’s glory might be seen.

Some of the citizens might have thought they had a strong case against the existence of God the three days after Lazarus died. But subsequent events place the evil of Lazarus’s death in a much different context. In light of this context, Lazarus’s death is seen to be part of a much greater good than anyone in Bethany could imagine.

The pattern that we see in this and numerous other biblical cases shows that there are times when we can’t say, “If God had a reason to allow this particular case of evil, we would probably know what it is.”

There are two reasons we can’t always make this claim.

First, we can figure out reasons that God might have for many (perhaps most) of the evils in the world. For example, both human freedom and a stable, cause-effect universe are necessary for any meaningful action. Meaningful action, then, may be a reason that God allows various kinds of evil.

Second, it is reasonable to think that God will have reasons that we cannot grasp for allowing evils in our lives. In fact, to think that we should be able to figure out God’s reasons for allowing every case of evil implies that we think God is not much smarter than we are. If God is the almighty creator of the universe, there will be evil the reason for which we cannot discern. This is exactly what we should expect if there is a God. It cannot be counted as evidence against God.

So even though it might seem, at first glance, that there are no good reasons to allow certain evils we see, this does not provide strong evidence that these evils are really unjustified. The argument that the kinds of evil we see make it unlikely that God exists has been seen to be pretty weak.

The philosophical problem of evil has to do with what is reasonable to believe. To what degree is it reasonable to believe in God in light of what we seem to know about evil? We have seen that evil does not contradict God’s existence. Nor is it strong evidence against the existence of God. The evil in the world, then, does not make it unreasonable to believe in an all-powerful and all-loving God.

Cabal, T., Brand, C. O., Clendenen, E. R., Copan, P., Moreland, J., & Powell, D. (2007). The Apologetics Study Bible: Real Questions, Straight Answers, Stronger Faith. Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers. The Article above is by Gregory E. Ganssle, 736-737.

About the Author: Greg graduated from the University of Maryland in 1978. He earned a Masters of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Rhode Island (1990) and a PhD. in Philosophy (1995) from Syracuse University where his dissertation on God’s relation to time won a Syracuse University Dissertation Award.

He has taught philosophy at Syracuse and is currently a part time lecturer in the philosophy department at Yale University. Greg is also a senior fellow at the Rivendell Institute. The Rivendell Institute combines ministry to Graduate Students and Faculty with Academic Research.

Greg has spoken on over fifty campuses throughout the USA. Greg’s main interests are in philosophy of religion. He also thinks about the integration of faith and the academic enterprise.

Greg has been married to Jeanie since 1985. They have three children: David, Nick, and Elizabeth.