EVIDENCE
The best and most authentic evidence for Christianity is a Christian. Unfortunately, the worst evidence is the same. Evangelicals have been convinced that the priority in the church needs to be evangelism. After all, isn’t that how Christ built the church? No. That’s how mega churches were built and Billy Graham Crusades were held to challenge people to invite Jesus into their heart to a life of faith. As important as evangelism is…we must now fervently focus on discipleship. More than converting others to a faith in Jesus Christ we know little or nothing about, it is time to put ourselves to the task of training, discipling and exercising our mind of Christ. It is our time to go further into scripture and deeper into Christ himself. “This is the whole of Christianity…the Church exists for nothing else but to draw men and women into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, even the Bible itself are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful, you know, whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose.” C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity, page 199.
The Joke
Do you remember the old joke: “What do you call someone who graduates at the bottom of their class in medical school?” The answer: “a doctor.” But, you probably won’t seek them out to become their patient or to ask them about their medical expertise. Similarly, “what do you call someone who walks down a church aisle for an altar call or tells people they made a statement of faith but never does anything to go on further and higher in their education about Jesus Christ, their love of God or their walk in the Spirit?" A Christian. And similarly, you probably won’t seek out that shallow, in-name-only Christian to be with—much less to be like—would you? Or do you?
What about the church people? Right. What about them? The difficult pill to swallow is many people within the church are judgmental and make following Jesus into a set of rules, a formula or simply a ritual. Is it their love of Jesus that compels them to live their lives openly as a follower of Christ or are church people—religious people—compelled by their position, status or external appearance? Is Christianity dead or living within the hearts of men, women, students and children? What does the evidence reveal?
Consider the possibility of the existence of a real, living and desiring supernatural God that wants more from you than the occasional nod or quick note of gratitude. What does this God want from you? What does this God want for you?
Knowing Jesus Christ and who He claimed to be and believing in Him are worlds apart—His world and your world to be exact. Believing in Jesus Christ as a real and accessible Savior develops a whole new way of being within us. Realizing that Jesus is knowable and wants a relationship with you will take courage and faith. The Apostle Paul convinced those around him of the same Truth in the first century that we must be convinced of in the twenty-first century. God loves us. God desires a relationship with us and God has more for us than we can imagine. There is a level of relationship that He’s waiting for…will you come and see?
What level of Christian commitment are you at…really?
Saved by …?
We’ve dealt with superficial cliches before. What is Christianity anyway? Inherent in the Biblical notions of faith and grace is a trustworthy transference of merit that is necessary to become right with God: I must recognize my own insufficiency and humbly accept that the efforts Jesus Christ already put into action were on my behalf. This is not the end but the beginning for the follower of Christ and most likely creates confusion. Somehow grace has become a synonym for absence of intentional effort and faith has become synonymous with mental cruise-control.
It sounds like this:
1) “I cannot earn my salvation.” Yes. But, this belief has given way to “I don’t really have to do anything about my salvation and spiritual life. Jesus did it all.”
2) “I can’t see God—all I need to do is believe He exists.” Correct. But, this doesn’t mean that you’ve learned anything or made significant changes in your life that reflect you’re likeness to Jesus.
Neither of these views are Biblical and do not encourage a growing, exciting, confident relationship with Christ. Many Christian leaders—from the New Testament times to right to this moment—have addressed this: Faith is not opposed to knowledge; it is opposed to sight. (Hebrews 11:1) Grace is not opposed to effort; it is opposed to earning. (Ephesians 2:8)
There seems to be a scarcity of Christians who think through their faith and can talk about the positions of theology or biblical interpretation with accuracy, passion or precision. It’s like we’ve allowed the absence of intentional effort and the cruise control take over…and we’re not quite sure what we have. So what shall we do?
Pastors and theologians are important but what about the ordinary Christian who goes to work or takes care of their family each day? Do the people sitting in the pews or in their cars or in their homes understand their faith? What is a disciplined life of Christ? Perhaps there is more to this Christianity than merely trying to exist on meager morsels of a sermon or attending a small group each week. You can watch all the Jesus television you want today and search YouTube for teachers that you agree with or even financially support.
But, the issue is this—we as Christians have failed to think and live as our Lord did and as His apostles did and as truly vibrant followers of Jesus Christ did for previous generations because we failed to cultivate and exercise our mind of Christ. Christianity is no longer the thinking faith it was intended to be.
Have we been left with this: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul but with none of your mind….?
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Tim Keller Reason for God Series Click Here
The Life and Writing of CS Lewis Part One and Part Two (Eric Metaxas interviews Secretary to CS Lewis Walter Hooper) Click Here
How Paul Invented Christian Theology (N.T. Wright Apologetics Lecture) Click Here
Anti-Christ or Anti-Intellectual?
We have a pandemic problem. It’s spread globally in social media, government, education, business and even the church. The effect of this pandemic has caused serious mind-numbing. Consider what is legal today that was illegal only a few years ago. We now live in one of the most anti-intellectual eras of Western civilization. Some may say we live in a non-intellectual era where we’ve lost our capacity to think and discern between what is true, false, real or a lie.
Anti-Intellectual means we make the choice not to exercise our capacity to think through what we hear or listen to. “I just don’t want to hear it!” We’ve distanced ourselves from the rhetoric because many will confess that lies are so interspersed with facts that we cannot untangle the mess ourselves and we need help in doing so. It’s like someone closing his eyes because he’s lost confidence in the existence of light—humanity in general and Christians in specific—closed our eyes and lost confidence in truth.
Shallow thinking is the result. Shallowing living is the evidence. Shallow faith is the turning point. No longer will we be satisfied with the way things are. Our Christian character and conviction won’t allow this situation to stand and we will not give into the socially constructed trends, feelings or infatuations. Life is bigger and more exciting when well lived.
Superficial Christians are the evidence of Superficial Christianity. Jesus was not superficial and his apostles were certainly not superficial. But, they did need to be called to accountability and to discipline. Deep Christians are thinking Christians. They do not depend on pastors, theologians, teachers, church membership or stating what they believe to pass as active Christianity.
Deeply passionate Christians love and live out of a sense of intimacy with God. Deep Christians reject the calls to forfeit the cultivation of their minds because Christianity is too exclusive, too provocative, too dangerous, too revolutionary…or too violent! Deep Christians pursue Truth because it produces clarity and integrity. We think through what we believe not to convert others but so that we can be understood by others.
Consider this: the Christian mind needs to be recognized for what it is—something different, something distinctive and revealing a transformation that is available for everyone who believes. There is renewal, a fixing and relational healing of the mind. Deep thinking Christians do not belong to an inside Secret Service group but they are believers transformed by a greater awareness of being saved by grace through faith.
C.S. Lewis puts it like this: “God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers…Anyone who is honestly trying to be a good Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.” Mere Christianity, page 78.
What in the world is postmodernism?
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”― Sun Tzu, The Art of War. 1838
Fight the good fight for the true faith. Hold tightly to the eternal life to which God has called you, which you have declared so well before many witnesses. 1 Timothy 6:12
Do you know your opponent? There is nothing more delirious than fighting the same enemy over and over again. Whether in personal life, sports, business or religion—to win is to know your enemy.
We have the same enemy that we’ve been fighting since Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden. Tactics and strategies have developed over time as faith and commitment to the work of the LORD has ebbed and flowed.
We live in uncertain times. There is a sense of endings and of new beginnings without clear directives. It is a time of personal responsibility. Factions have invaded every aspect of our lives. It seems as though we live in a fractured world.
Post-modernism challenges global, all-encompassing world views, be they political, religious or social. It reduces Marxism, Christianity, Fascism, Stalinism, capitalism, liberal democracy, secular humanism, feminism, Islam, and modern science. All the systems of the world are of equal value including those of witchcraft, astrology or private cults. The postmodern goal is not to formulate an alternative set of assumptions but to convince you of the impossibility of establishing any such foundation for knowledge of the Truth.
Examples of Modern thought:
Naturalism: reality is restricted to what we see in nature. Nature has immanent laws or general laws that operate without any intervention by a transcendent God. These laws are the cause of all that occurs. Newton’s Law of universal gravitation, the law of conservation of matter, and Mendel’s law of segregation are examples. There are also theories such as Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Humanism: the human is the highest reality and value. Humanity is the end of all reality and exists independently of any service to a higher being.
The scientific method: knowledge is good and can be attained by human beings. The method best suited is the scientific method which came to fruition during the Modern Era (Ottoman conquest of Constantinople 1453 to the French Revolution 1789) During this time, globalization was introduced which included colonization.
Reductionism: the scientific method was considered the only method of gaining knowledge so that various disciplines sought to attain the objectivity and precision of the natural sciences. Humans in some cases are regarded as nothing but highly developed animals. Racial hierarchy suggested the hierarchal structure of the human race. For example, Nazi theory and propaganda made this a reality in the 20th century.
Progress: because knowledge is good, humanly attainable and growing—we are to progressively overcome problems that threaten the human race.
Nature: is dynamic, growing and developing not fixed. Nature itself is able to produce the changes of life forms through the immanent process of evolution rather than requiring explanations of terms from a creator and designer.
Certainty: knowledge is seen as objective and is able to attain certainty. This belief requires foundationalism which is the belief that it is at least possible to base knowledge on some sort of absolute first principles.
Determinism: what happens in the universe follows from a fixed cause. The scientific method could discover the laws that regulate and control the universe. Not only physical occurrences but human behavior are believed to be determined and under this control.
Individualism: the ideal of the knower was the solitary individual, carefully protecting his or her objectivity by weighing all options. Truth being objective, individuals can discover the truth by their own efforts. The truth is self-evident. Humans can free themselves from the conditioning of their own time and place to know the ultimate reality itself.
Anti-authoritariansim: the human is considered the final and most complete measure of truth. Any externally imposed authority, whether than of a group or of a supernatural being must be subjected to scrutiny and criticism by human reason.
Postmodernism essentially rejects, undermines and calls into question every one of these modern ideas. It deconstructs the previously held beliefs of all things and allows for interpretation. This perspective was most famously articulated by a French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) who is the founder of deconstructionism. Everything is interpretation and all we can really know is signs and the relationships between them. There is no ultimate Truth and no meta narrative to understand the story of our lives.
The post-modern mind can be understood as an open-ended, indeterminate set of attitudes that have been shaped by a great diversity of intellectual and cultural currents which range from pragmatism, existentialism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis to feminism, theology, philosophy, the interpretation of biblical texts and even deconstructionism itself.
Do you know your opponent? Well…maybe there is a better question for us to ask. I believe it is important for us to use our reasonable and rational minds. It is time for us to be smart—and engage with the opponent in ways that are not always diminished by emotions or threats. Christians must understand the cultural milieu that Christianity now lives and Christians must discern our way through this clear and present danger. It is our time now to ask…do you know Jesus Christ?