Crash the Future

I was just reading in Second Corinthians 11 and something struck me about it… mind you, this is not the central point of this brief passage… Paul is getting very sarcastic with the Corinthians and is having to point out what they would consider to be qualifications because they have not been using critical thinking. The basic situation is simple. People have been questioning Paul’s authority as an apostle, unthinkingly accepting the attacks against him. Paul goes ahead and answers those attacks on the same foolish grounds which people use to attack him. As he answers, the sheer weight of his argument comes cascading forth in an overwhelming summary, and Paul demonstrates quite clearly that the Corinthians have been guilty of not using critical thinking in their assessment of attacks on Paul.

Just this afternoon I read through some of the responses on the Summit Church’s website answering the question they posed, “Why I’m not a Christian…” It seemed as though there were three most common responses: 1) the hypocrisy of Christians, 2) the lack of belief in a knowable, universal Truth, and 3) the idea that belief in God is unreasonable. The first of these I fully recognize as a heart-breaking, yet often valid assessment of American Christianity as a whole. The next two, however, both demonstrate a severe lack of critical thinking, both on the part of the person attacking Christianity and on the part of Christians as a whole. The simple fact that people can make this claim in our culture and make it largely unchallenged with critical thought is a sad statement on our condition as the American Church.

All too often we in the church nowadays respond with no better answer than, “Well, the Bible says…” That answer is not sufficient if the person to whom we are speaking does not even recognize the authority of Scripture. Let me be clear, I’m not denigrating the authority of Scripture in the slightest. I am only saying that we cannot base our arguments on Scripture when someone else is arguing from a non-scriptural perspective. We need to be able to explain the reasonable nature of our beliefs.

Part of the problem is that we often have subconsciously bought into the lie that faith is “blind” or that it is, “believing in something you can’t know”. That isn’t faith at all. Biblical faith is believing in something that is unseen, but that is reasonable. “Blind faith” is just plain stupidity. Blind faith is when we have no reason to think that something may be true, but we believe it anyway. For example… blind faith is me walking into a dark room I don’t know and deciding to sit down, assuming that a chair will be there to hold me up. I have no reason to believe it, and I might be right, but there’s a decent chance I’ll be hitting the floor. Biblical faith on the other hand is walking into the room, flipping a light on, seeing a chair in which I’ve never sat, and deciding to sit down. I can’t “prove” (prior to sitting in it) that the chair will hold me up. However, I can have reasonable faith that it will, given my subconscious visual assessment of its soundness and my previous experience with chairs. This is biblical faith.

There are plenty of reasons to believe in the gospel and the truth of Scripture. It is an incredibly cohesive and cogent worldview. It is a shame if we are not doing the hard task of thinking through why we believe what we do and how we can reasonably explain that faith to someone who doesn’t recognize the authority of Scripture.

In upcoming blogs I’ll give a brief summary of some ways that Christians much wiser than I have responded to the second and third reasons listed above for not being a Christian.

PS – I’ve been noticing that this lack of critical thought is sadly lacking in our assessment of the media and the analysis of our presidential candidates. I hope that whenever we read something or hear something in the media we examine it critically, whether it’s a media source that drives us nuts, our favorite talk radio host, or anything in between.