Part one of two – let’s be honest about the who and what of our underlying presuppositions…
“[Christ] told us to be not only ‘as harmless as doves,’ but also ‘as wise as serpents.’ He wants a child’s heart, but a grown-up’s head. He wants us to be simple, single-minded, affectionate, and teachable, as good as children are; but He also wants every bit of intelligence we have to be alert at its job, and in first-class fighting trim.” C.S. Lewis ~ Mere Christianity
Many believe that people must check their intelligence at the door of faith in order to be a Christian. Certainly atheists and agnostics think so, but believers also act as if intelligence is something that must be discarded or even worse, not to be trusted.
A read through the Bible, however, reveals that God is as concerned about a person’s mind as He is about a person’s heart. In fact, the mind and the heart are often mentioned together. (See Matthew 22:37; Mark 12:30 and Luke 10:27)
If we believe in God, and believe He created the heavens and the earth, then we can trust the intellect He gave us. In fact, if He gave it to us, does He not expect us to use it?
We go about our days. They seem like a blur. Days turn into weeks. Weeks turn into months. Months turn into years. Life comes at us faster and faster. As we get older, the pace of time seems to pick up. Life seems like a blur.
Time does not speed up of course. We just settle into routines. We keep busy. We move from one thing to another while we are thinking about the next thing and the next thing.
We have little space in our lives, like those endless summer days as children when we would spend an afternoon watching the clouds play across the blue screen of the sky. We race from one moment to the next. We fill our pauses with the white noise. Preoccupation and busyness, television and radio, noise and activity, the moments of life rush at us. They rush past us.
Our minds even race when we lie down to sleep or rise from the anxious edge of sleep in the middle of night, unsettled by waking, unable to fall back to sleep, unable to abide the quiet, unable to rest, unable to quiet our restless minds, unable to be still.
We throw the occasional payer up to God, like tossing candy at a parade. There is no stopping. Life must move on, and we move with it, carried on the current of the momentum of our lives.
Jesus took time out.
God gave us the Sabbath (rest) (Mark 2:27), but do we take it?
As children we are anxious to become adults. As adults, we long for those endless summer days.
Children play hard and sleep well. Adults hardly play and fitfully sleep.
Jesus said, “[U]nless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt. 18:3)
Siloam Tunnel inscription records when workers from the 8th Cent. B.C. met when digging from opposite directions. The inscription is now located in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum
When skeptics claim that Bible believers are biased, they are right. The truth is we all are biased, skeptics included. Some may be more aware of their own bias than others, but we all have our biases.
I am fascinated with stories of people who had one “bias” at one time and changed to the opposite “bias”. It happens both ways: atheist to believer/believer to atheist. Someday I will explore the similarities and the differences in those stories. There are some common threads, but that is a topic for another day. Continue reading “Bias is Revealed in What we Consider and Fail to Consider”→
A number of significant personal “revelations” mark my way in life. Among them is one that occurred in college during a combined history/literature class. It was literally a turning point for me.
Among the books we read in that class were the Pioneers by James Fenimoore Cooper and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. All the books we read explored the line between wilderness and civilization, the tension between man’s indomitable quest to conquer and civilize nature and his longing to be free of modern complexities and problems and return to nature.
Cooper wrote the Pioneers in 1823. It was fiction based on the “western frontier” of his time, with the setting in upstate New York in the finger Lakes area. The main character (the Leatherstocking, Natty Bumpo) was a grizzled old man who was more comfortable with the Indians on the other side of the lake than “his” people. His people were recklessly intent on taming the wilderness. He had more of a kinship with the Indians who respected nature and did not desire to tame it.
Cooper was among the earliest environmentalists. He was concerned about preserving the wilderness. In one of the most memorable segments of the book, he described the wanton abandon with which the pioneers heartily shot the slow Passenger Pigeons for sport, leaving destroying entire flocks at a time. The Passenger Pigeon has since gone extinct due to that kind of behavior.
Bumpo was not comfortable with his own crowd. He yearns to leave “civilization” and live in the wilderness. The book ends with him heading west to find untamed land.
Huckleberry Finn, of course, is the story of a young man cut out of a similar cloth. The time period is 1845, and the setting is much further west – along the Mississippi River. Just twenty something years after the Leatherstocking left upstate New York to find untamed country, Huckleberry Finn is struggling to conform with the “civilized” society of Hannibal, Missouri.
Huck had no more affection for the polite society of Hannibal, Missouri than the Leatherstocking had for his kind in Upstate New York. To Huck’s chagrin, the sliver of wilderness that he knows, the Mississippi River, is increasingly congested with paddleboats, commerce, and the constraints of civilized society. At the end of the book, Huck is last seen “lighting out for the west” just like Natty Bumpo, seeking untamed territory where Huck can live in peace the way he wants to live.
These books stirred a similar longing in me, but I realized that Huck’s westward trail would become a well-beaten path. The pioneers blazed the trail, but wagon trains and the Pony Express followed, then the railroads, then the transcontinental roads, then the highways, and then airports and jetliners. The sadness of having nowhere to run to hit my viscerally, and that visceral reaction led me to a turning point.
The Dead Sea Scrolls on display at the caves of Qumran that located on the edge of the Dead Sea in Israel.
Many people say they “do not believe” the Bible. But, what does that mean? The Bible is an ancient document that has been around in virtually the same form for centuries. For instance, the Dead Sea Scrolls reveal that the Old Testament has changed very little since well before the tie of Jesus. Less than 1% of the substance of the Bible has changed since the time of Jesus.
Some people argue over which writings should be included or not included in the canon that we call the Bible. The writings that are included in the current iterations of the Bible have been established for at least 1600 years. They were largely settled by consensus for at least a couple hundred years before that,
The Bible is an historical record of people and places. Many of those people and places and some events have been cross referenced by other sources, including Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite, Roman, and other sources. Archaeological finds have also verified many of the people and places in the Bible. People may argue whether every person and place referenced in the text is actual, accurate and factual, but few people seriously argue that it has no historical value.
The Bible is also a collection of stories, poems, songs, and sayings (wisdom literature). As literature, it is full of imagery, compelling stories and words of wisdom. It has great literary value.
The Bible is a collection of writings covering a span of about 1600 years by many authors focusing on particular people group in a particular geographical area of the Middle East during a particular time period in history. Some of the writings purport to be relatively contemporaneous accounts, and others seem more like historical accounts when they were written.
The writings that comprise the Bible have been collected and preserved as sacred text. Scribes were carefully trained to copy the manuscripts. Those scribes devoted their lives to the careful transcription of the text from generation to generation.
What is most likely meant when people say they “do not believe the Bible” is that they do not believe the Bible is the “Word of God”. People do not believe it is divinely inspired. People do not believe that the Bible is the revelation of God to people.
When people say the do not believe the Bible, they most likely mean they do not believe the Bible can be taken at face value. At face value, the writings of the Bible purport to a collection of God’s communications with a certain group of people, in a particular region of the world, over a particular time span in history.
Various people have various theories about the Bible. I have even recently heard people say that the Bible was put together by Roman dictators to “control the people” by giving them something to believe in. There is little to no scholarly support for that position by the way, but this theory and other theories abound.
Most scholars agree that the Bible has cultural, sociological, literary, and other value. Though people disagree over the degree to which the Bible has historical value, it does have some historical value as any ancient text does.
Significantly, the evidence suggests that the Old Testament writings pre-date the first Century. The Dead Sea Scrolls, which pre-date the First Century, include manuscripts from every book in the Old Testament except for Esther. Among the manuscripts found in the Qumran caves that we call the Dead Sea Scrolls, was a complete scroll of the Book of Isaiah dating to at least 200 BC that is virtually the same as the “book of Isaiah” we have preserved in modern Bibles.
It is fact that the Bible is by far the most well-preserved and well-attested ancient text in the history of humankind. We have more ancient manuscripts of the Bible, by a large volume, than any other ancient text. The volume of New Testament manuscripts is stunning compared to any other ancient text.
We go about our days. They seem like a blur. Days turn into weeks. Weeks turn into months. Months turn into years. Life comes at us faster and faster. As we get older, the pace of time seems to pick up. Life seems like a blur.
Navigating by Faith 