ABHE Session #4 – J.P. Moreland

Having been in the ministry 40 years, one of his spiritual gifts is the gift of evangelism.

He just wrote a book that could be given to a non-Christian person who would be willing to read about why Christianity is true. The book is called The God Question. This session is a general approach taken in the book.

This isn’t the normal way to talk to individual people, because you should start with their felt needs. But when talking to a group of non-Christians (Lions Clubs, etc.), this is a good approach to structure it.

This is like presenting a case in a jury trial. There are three phases:
1. Interest the audience in the truth issue, not the pragmatic issue. (Appeal to reason instead of emotion)
2. Build the case for a monotheistic God who is the best explanation for the universe.
3. Then move to Christianity above other forms of monotheism like Judaism or Islam.

I. Motivate the thoughtful religious approach to religion.

The “Won Mug” approach to religion is an illustration that is helpful. Won Mug graduated from high school, but was an absolute idiot. He couldn’t do division or multiplication. He went to his local University (Harvard), took a class, and got 3 out of 100 right on his first test. The professor calls a meeting of all the professors on campus. We have a dunce on campus named Won Mug. Let’s make him think he’s the smartest student on campus for four years, then we’ll mock him behind his back, and let him know after 4 years just how dumb he is. The next day, he asks a question that is idiotic, and the professor says it’s the smartest question he’s ever been asked. He starts getting 100/100 on all his tests. He ends up pursuing a PhD in physics. He supervises several doctoral dissertations each year. He’s interviewed by Time and Newsweek. He goes to conferences every year. He’s an absolute joke. Everyone is laughing at him behind his back. Would you want to be Won Mug? Would you want your son or daughter to be him? Remember, his beliefs work. He’s happy. All day long, his mind is filled with the beliefs that he is really sharp and the finest physicist in the US. Won Mug’s beliefs work, but they are false. If you don’t envy him but you pity him, that’s proof that there’s something more important than whether a belief works. It’s whether the belief is true. Most people realize that if you have false beliefs that work for you, you are not to be envied, you are to be pitied.

The “mother” illustration says that since what we want are beliefs that are true, the problem is that all religions can’t be true. True story: Christianity is fine for you and that’s great, but everyone should have their own. Ok, what does my mother look like? I have no idea. Give it a shot. Three people guess what she looks like. They all give good guesses that are different. But his mother can’t be 5-2, 5-4, and 5-7 all at the same time. She can’t be 100, 150, and 200 pounds all at the same time. You could raise money and persuade people that any of those three things are true. But it wouldn’t make a difference because they contradict each other. If my mother isn’t really that size, you are wrong. The different world’s religions contradict each other. There can’t be 330 million gods. Sincerity isn’t enough.
This illustration shows that the world’s religions can’t all be true and that sincerity isn’t enough.

The “smorgasboard” illustration points out that some people are discouraged by the contrary nature of the world’s religions. So they cope by picking and choosing what they like from the different approaches that are out there. But the problem with that is illustrated by going to a smorgasboard for lunch. You get on your plate exactly what you like and leave off your plate exactly what you don’t like. The problem with the smorgasbord approach is you get exactly from God what you go out looking for. If you pick and choose according to what you like and don’t like, you are almost guaranteed falsehood. You will project what you want upon reality and have a fictitious approach to God.

The “Brain surgeon” illustration shows why you don’t want to make a mistake on this question. If a gardener pulls a flower instead of a weed, it’s no big deal. But suppose you have a brain tumor that needs to be removed and you go to a recommended brain surgeon. He says he’ll help and asks to confirm that the brain is somewhere around the navel area. You will go somewhere else. The more important issue, the greater the damage in having a false belief. The best thing you can do is use your mind as carefully as possible and approach the question of God thoughtfully, given all of our limitations.

II. Now, let’s make a case that there is a supreme being who is a personal god. Lay out three pieces of evidence that God exists.

A. The universe began to exist and something supernatural had to cause it. There are some pieces of evidence that this is true.
1. The second law of thermodynamics says that in a closed system, which does not allow energy or matter in from the outside, that the system is using up its fuel. Use the illustration of a car’s gas tank. It’s not a perfect illustration, but it’s close enough. If you go to a car that is still moving, then you know it hasn’t used up all the gasoline in the tank. You probably also know that the car hasn’t been driven constantly for more than 20 years. If the person had been driving for 50 years, the car would have run out of gas about 49.9 years ago. We know for sure that the car hasn’t been driven forever or else it would have run out of gas infinitely long ago. Since the car still has gas in it and is using up its gas, the conclusion is that the car was filled up some finite period of time ago. Probably not too long ago.

The universe is like that gas tank, using up its energy. There will come a day when there is no longer any heat or light, because those are generated by decay of things using up their energy. Since the universe is using up its fuel (light, heat, and motion) and hasn’t done it yet, then it had to come into existence some finite period of time ago when it was wound up from the beginning. Whatever is wound up has to have something that wound it up outside of the universe that gave it energy at the beginning. It has been using that up every since.

2. The impossibility of crossing infinity. Nothing can cross infinity because of the nature of infinity. You die and go to heaven and God says, “You messed up a little bit, so I want you to count the natural numbers forever.” You can count to the number 50 quadrillion zillion and be ahead of the person who has just started. But then you realize that you have gotten no closer to finishing than when you started. It’s like trying to jump out of a pit that’s infinitely tall with no edge. It doesn’t matter how high you could jump. If the universe never had a beginning, then the line to when the universe began goes to infinity. The present moment can only be preceded by a finite number of moments. Going from minus infinity to zero can’t be finished, because you can’t cross infinity. You can’t even get started. How many events would a universe have to cross to get to an infinite number? An infinite amount. Coming to the present from minus infinity is like jumping out of an infinitely tall bottomless pit. Not only can it not be completed, it cannot be begun. There had to be an absolute beginning of time beyond which there was no time. Something outside of time had to bring time into existence. Whatever that thing is, it can’t be physical (because it creates matter), it can’t be in time (because it creates time), and it can’t be natural (because it creates natural). It has to be spiritual, capable of producing change without being changed also. It has to be an unmoved mover. If something had to change inside of it before it began time, that change inside of it would itself be the beginning of time.

3. The existence of biological information. Start with the movie Contact (Jodie Foster). She was a SETI researcher looking for extraterrestrial intelligence. If SETI researchers (a legitimate scientific research project). To look for intelligent life in outer space, they must define when they will find it. So they have drawn a distinction between randomness, order, and information. Use the illustration of alphabet soup, which is random information. There are two characteristics of randomness. What would I tell a computer if you wanted it to generate a random string of symbols. “Select any letter and repeat.” It is not specific, and it is simple. It only requires two instructions for randomness. Contrast that with 50 me’s in a row: mememememememememememememememememememememememememememememememe.

That is specific, simple, and repetitive. This is like ice crystals in the natural world, or polymerization in organic chemistry. That is order and randomness.

Contrast that with “John loves Mary.” First, it is specific. Second, it is complex (15 instructions). Third, it is not repetitive. This third example is what scientists call “information bearing.”

The three choices are randomness, order, and information. Scientists assume that information only comes from an intelligent mind. Jodie Foster knew that there was life in outer space when she heard a signal containing the first 20 prime numbers in a row. That was specific, complex, and not repetitive. The cause of that information had to be a mind.

Look at biological information. Living organisms contain libraries of information in their DNA. If information only comes from a mind, there is no reason to deny that the volumes of information in living things have behind them a mind.

4. The existence of absolute moral law and equal human rights. There are moral principles that are true whether someone believes them or not. If someone says they are a moralist, then find out what they care deeply about, treat it as if it is relative, then find out what happens. Someone says he’s a relativist and loves the environment. So what happens if once a month people pour a drum of acid in a lake and see how many fish they can kill. That will make him very unhappy. It sure looks like you think what my friends are doing is wrong. You are only a relativist in areas you don’t care about, but in things you do care about, you are an absolutist. There are only “selective relativists.”

If there is really an absolute law, where does it come from? It comes from beings with will. They come from legislators. If there is an absolute moral law, there’s a pretty good chance that we have an absolute moral legislator. In the Nuremburg trials, they talked about how there is a Law above the law. Since laws come from beings with a will, there must be an absolute lawgiver.

As for equal human rights, use the illustration of his daughter Ashley. When she was in 6th grade, she saw a flyer that said all human beings should be treated equally. Pretend there is no God for a minute. Why would you believe that we should treat everyone equally? If the house were burning down and you could save only one of two objects, which would you save? The one that is worth more. What if it was between a piece of paper and a dog? Or between a piece of paper and a person? We learn that equals ought to be treated equally and unequals ought to be treated unequally. It is immoral for unequal things to be treated as equals. Now human beings have nothing in common that is equal. No one is inherently equal. The only thing we have is belly buttons. Do people with larger belly buttons have more rights? Could you remove someone’s belly button and use them however we want? If people are going to have equal human rights, there must be something we have in common that is equal. Whatever that thing is, it can’t be trivial and silly like a belly button. It has to be deep and important. Martin Luther King believed we should be treated equally because we all have the image of God. Without that, nothing is important enough to matter.

5. The origin of consciousness. If you start with matter, you can’t get mind from matter. If we have consciousness, there must be an explanation for it. We can’t get something from nothing. The best explanation of how mind can come into existence is if the universe begins with a mind. But if you start with matter, you can’t explain how mind comes from matter.

These things provide sufficient information to believe in the existence of one personal God. That is the most reasonable explanation of these facts compared to any other explanation of them.

At this point, the average person has their jaw on the floor. They have never seen a Christian give any evidence for what they believe. Seeing a Christian clothed and in the right mind is more impressive than they have seen before. Christians don’t do this. They give their testimonies, which isn’t bad. But it isn’t all that we do.

III. Moving from a belief in God to personal Christianity. There are four criteria for choosing a religion.
A. Pick a religion whose depiction of God harmonizes with what we know about God from creation. It ought to be monotheistic. There is something about the creation that points to one monotheistic supreme being. Suggest to people that when they pick up other religious books, they should judge it in light of the book of creation they have been reading all of their lives. You ought to be monotheistic or else you don’t have an adequate explanation for the things above. Don’t suggest people to be monotheists because the Bible teaches that. Instead, because the world suggests it.

B. Pick a religion whose diagnosis of the human condition and solution to the human condition is the best one. My understanding of Jesus is that if you can find a better path than his, he would want you to follow it. He loved people enough that he would want them to be better off. But you won’t find it. Look at things like the problem of shame and guilt, empowerment to live a life I know I ought to live, threefold alienation [from God, from each other and themselves], the need for a tender Abba God with whom I can be intimate and close (this works well with Muslims).

You need a religion that explains these things and gives hope for overcoming them. The hunger for intimacy, to overcome the threefold alienation, empowerment, and the problem of shame and guilt are best explained and addressed in the religion of Jesus.

C. Pick a religion that is best explained by supernatural activity of God. Mohammed goes into a cave and comes out saying that the Koran was revealed to him while he was in the cave. That could have happened, but are there any good reasons to believe it? Not much other than the Koran itself. But with Christianity we have two pieces of evidence that this was supernatural: Messianic prophecy fulfilled and the resurrection. The number of prophecies that are fulfilled are to say the least bizarre, and tremendously effective. The historical evidence that the NT documents are reliable and that Christ rose from the dead. This is where the Case for Christ and other arguments are useful.

D. Pick a religion that has all of Jesus in it instead of a distorted, watered down picture of Jesus. Someone in the audience might say that you pick that criterion just because you’re a Christian. But every religion in the world wants to claim Jesus as one of its own. Everyone wants Jesus. Even the Jews are starting to treat Jesus as a wise and thoughtful rabbi. In Hinduism, he’s an avatar. In Islam, he’s the healer, one of the greatest prophets. Now, since everyone rightly wants a piece of Jesus, the most significant human who ever lived, why not go straight to the source. Use the “hot dog illustration.” Suppose you came across someone with a three day old stale hot dog. He’s chewing on it and loves the meat. So you tell him you are cooking a sirloin steak and you will trade it to him for the hot dog. What you have now learned is that the guy isn’t really a meat lover. He may be a gnarly hot dog lover, but he’s not a meat lover. He would give it up in a heartbeat for a better piece of meat.

If someone says I’m a God seeker and they settle for a religion with a watered down version of Jesus, and they get a chance for the real thing, that proves they are more interested in preserving their cultural connections and traditions rather than God. If they were really interested, they would gladly trade what they have for the real thing.

These are some of the reasons why I am a Christian, and the truth of Christianity has been confirmed in my life through the presence of God and the Holy Spirit since I accepted him years ago. Then you give your testimony.

What’s important is that I started off by emphasizing truth rather than what works. I went from there to monotheism. I went from there to Christianity. Then I went to my personal testimony. This is a helpful approach to apologetics as well.

Questions and Answers:
1. Alienation is one of the things Christianity best addresses. What if someone asks why Christianity hasn’t worked? Christian nations are at war, it doesn’t work.
Answer: there is no such thing as a Christian nation. Also, wherever the teachings of Jesus and his friends have been given half a chance to be practiced, it has worked powerfully. Where these things are only given lip service, they haven’t worked. It isn’t a fair test of Christianity if people give lip service to it. Christians have gone all over the world at their own sacrifice to feed the poor and care for the sick. Not atheists. And 1000 times more than other religions.

2. This is a line for a rigorous mind that can follow logic. But what about those who can’t stay with us through the argument. That’s a different idea if they are a student in a Christian college rather than a regular university student. Take longer to develop these ideas and develop them more slowly. But be the adult and insist that this stuff matters even if they don’t think it matters. If you treat it seriously and slowly, they will latch on to it. If it is an audience of students elsewhere, then you have to make the assumption that they are made in the image of God and part of that image is to be thoughtful about this. A lot of Christians take a more “felt needs” approach. But even 19-20 years are so surprised to hear a Christian standing up and sounding intelligent that it lowers their resistance. Some people it makes angry.

3. Who are the top apologists in the Western world today? William Lane Craig is the top right now in terms of laying out intellectual arguments for Christianity in the public square. Richard Swinburg at Oxford has written a lot of things on apologetics. Gary Habermas of Liberty University is also excellent.

4. Does it work to send an apologist to a state university to have a debate? Someone who has put in time as an “apologetic junkie” can succeed if they will get up and be humble, not arrogant or hostile. Even a lot of university professors have never read anything on the other side. They come into a debate blindsided. If you do your homework, you are probably better prepared than the university person.

5. On yesterday’s presentation, you said there were three positions (not just secular and monotheist). For him, the three worldviews are secularism, monotheism, and Christianity.

He gave a paper about why evangelicals are overcommitted to the Bible and how we should change that. Obviously, you can never be too committed to Scripture for ourselves as a Christian. But you can be so committed to Scripture that you don’t have time for anything else. The Bible is not the only source of information about God and morality. There is creation and natural law as well. If Christians want to engage in politics without creating a theocracy, they need to bring in creation and natural law as well.

6. In today’s secular mindset, what do you think about personal testimony? We say that you can’t argue with a changed life. But that’s not correct. You can’t argue that the life changed, but you can argue what caused it. Changed lives are easy to refute if they are a standalone argument. One reason for a testimony is to explain what happened to me so that people will know. The second reason is to bring testimony as a piece of evidence in an attempt to persuade someone. Mormons and Muslims give testimonies as well. Ours should be more dramatic than theirs, but they must also be within a framework beyond ourselves.

7. How can a physicist or chemist be an atheist if they understand the design? Because of the history of physics since the 17th century. There were two kinds of explanations offered for phenomena in the world: efficient causal explanations (what produced it) and teleological explanations (what is its purpose).

Solomon uses the efficient causal explanations in Ecclesiastes 1:3-6. He uses the final cause (purpose) in Ecclesiastes 1:7ff. Either the water is boiling because it is heated or because we want tea.

The physics in Newton’s time was Aristotelian physics. Their explanations were given purposively. Newton said that we don’t need to appeal to purposes, we can explain it only by forces. Darwin ridded the functional parts of organisms from teleology. Instead, only those who had eyes that enabled them to see survived. Darwin used efficient causes without final causes to explain evolution. Skinner did the same thing to explain people in the 1950s. You didn’t come here for purposes, but drives and motives in your subconscious that determined you to do this. Newton was right to rid motion from teleology. But Darwin and Skinner haven’t been successful at killing teleology. When you are told to start looking for teleology, you assume that you must ignore causal explanations. That history has put blinders on people who should be able to clearly see what is there. But they have been so socialized against final causes that they can’t see.

“Darwin’s dangerous idea” is that humans never do anything for a purpose.

8. What about the argument that polytheism is older? The evidence for that is not clear. That is an application of Marxist concepts of history to the study of religions. Even in polytheistic religions, there is a higher god. Monotheism seems to be more primitive than polytheism.

ABHE Session #3 – Peter Jones

Peter Jones graduated from the University of Wales and Princeton Theological Seminary. (www.truthXchange.com)

The Challenge of Christian Education in an increasingly neo-pagan culture.

There is a greater threat even than secularism from “pagan monistic synthesis.” We will be facing this kind of religious attack against the gospel.

The rise of neo-pagan was predicted by Francis Schaeffer. “The East has come west, pantheism will be pressed as the only answer to ecological problems. The eastern religions will be to Christianity a new dangerous gnosticism.”

The sixties promised it. They sang about the coming of the age of Aquarius. Drop out, turn on. Don’t just do something, sit there. You can order a new age hamburger in New York by saying “Make me one with everything.”

We are drowning in it. According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 70% of Americans believe that religions other than their own lead to eternal life.

This creates problems for us as evangelicals.

A. The problem of Christian uniqueness in an “all is one” culture. The Christian generation you are teaching is steeped in the imperious necessity of co-existence, radical tolerance, all-inclusive oneness. Can’t we all get along?

Charles Colson told about a student who was in a training session for worldview. As she said that Christianity was unique, 7 of the 8 student leaders balked at the idea that only Christianity is true and everything else is false. This rising generation has been bathed in “all is one” and can’t speak about the uniqueness of Christianity.

B. Homosexuality – a question of a threat to the image of God in created human beings or just one sexual expression among many. Evangelicalism is beginning to implode on this subject. The left-wing evangelicals are entertaining the possibility of accepting homosexuality and homosexual marriage. (http://www.truthxchange.com/article/53-homosexuality-the-evangelical-temptation/#header)

The Los Angeles times asked a Baptist minister who said, “Traditionally Baptist churches have not approved. I would have to pray about it.” Many are falling for the gay agenda. The generation we are teaching (75% of 18-30 year olds) believes that homosexuality is a valid lifestyle – going diametrically opposed to the clear statements of Scripture.

C. Our students’ mouths are closed. They have no categories for dealing with the ideologies surrounding them. They cannot articulate their faith in compelling ways in an increasingly hostile culture. To have the courage to stand up and say something in a hostile culture takes confidence. Christian witness is being sentimentalized: Jesus and me, not Jesus Lord of the cosmos. The reason Jesus can be with me is because He is Lord of the cosmos. Jesus condescending to be my Savior and Lord is the only thing that makes me able to be with him. Our generations have lost that.

D. False Solutions are attempted.
Campus ministries, mission organizations, and large sections of the evangelical church are turning silence into a virtue. At the national pastor’s conference in San Diego, sponsored by Zondervan and IVP, they heard nothing about the gospel. Silence of the gospel is turned into a virtue. World Vision showed pastors how to get involved digging ditches in Africa, but nothing was shared about how to free Africans from ancestor worship through the power of the gospel. We hear more and more about “deeds, not creeds.” Avoiding the hot button issues and getting involved in socio-economic and environmental issues. Evangelicals are now doing this! They don’t see the value of blending deeds with creeds.

One of the great fears of the rising generation is giving offense. The book UNChristian describes how our young people are told that Christians are really obnoxious. There is a fear of the unpopular perceptions. We don’t have to be obnoxious, but we have to speak the truth. We are told that speaking the truth is obnoxious.

We face a world of religious synthesis. Look at the popular bumper sticker:

It’s not enough to say that the bible says so, even though it does. Explain why the Bible says things and what the deep underlying reasons for resisting this religious syncretism.
The United Nations is focused on uniting religions. Look at the interviews between Oprah and Eckhart Tolle.

Here are the essential five points of the synthetic worldview. Christianity has to oppose these because of the nature of what we believe.

1. All is one and one is all – This can be represented by a circle. Many pagan religions are symbolized by the circle. Nothing is wrong with the circle, but it is being used as a symbol for the deep meaning of the cosmos. It’s the notion of bringing everything together. The idea is that everything shares the same substance. Everything fits into the circle and holds everything together. This is “Monism,” the theory of oneness. Everything shares in the same basic attribute and has a quality of the divine in it. Buddhists celebrate unity with the “mandala” which in Sansckrit means circle or cosmogram. Beholding a mandala conveys an impression of wholeness bringing peace and meaning. “God is not an external, supernatural being ruling over humanity. God is rather the power of love which flows through each one of us…the source of life, of love, the ground of being, …[but] life has taught us that theism is dead.” – John Shelby Spong

2. All humanity is one – This can be represented by little circles within a big circle. Each human being is a holographic version of the big circle. Each human has a notion of the divine or spark of the divine. Because that is true, we can hope to bring all the peoples of the world together. This has tremendous geopolitical power. Some people now talk about global governance and structures that can be established for making sure the world is one in an economic point of view. It is an incredible moment for a pagan worldview to fit with the reality of our geopolitical world. In the global world, everything is connected. Global interdependence would bring the end of the nation state. This is connected to the view of the human race being capable of bound together by the spark of divinity within us. But this is NOT the gospel. “I am uncreated, as old as God.” – Harold Bloom. More and people are understanding the power of this so-called gospel in their lives. We are producing people who actually believe they are divine. “There is something in the soul that is uncreated and uncreatable.” – so-called Christian mystic, the Dominican Meister Eckhart (1260-1327) But everyone has a birthday. It is false to say that I am uncreated. Be careful to realize how far this new spirituality will take people who buy into it.

3. All religions are one – This can be represented by a big circle that looks like a pepperoni pizza cut into eight slices. All religions lead to God and have a piece of the truth. Putting all the religions together will give us the whole truth. Some evangelicals are happy just being considered one piece of the pie, part of the peoples of faith. This is not new. Back in the 12th century, Ibn Arabi (a Sufi master) wrote “My soul is a Mosque for Muslims, a temple for Hindus, an altar for Zoroastrians, a church for Christians, a synagogue for Jews, and a pasture for gazelles.” This was even a problem in the first century AD. Think about Paul and his visit to Athens. Going past all of those altars, they were not fighting with each other. It was an implicit syncretism. Miletus called himself a priest for all the gods. A spokesman for Buddhism said, “It is in the area of personal religious awakening that transcends specific traditions where some Buddhists find the greatest chance for common ground with other traditions.” The center of the pizza is “spirituality”, the tasty part everybody wants. The crust is the tough part that people don’t eat. That’s how people look at religions, that they all have their crust and they all have their good points.

4. There is one problem – A pagan eschatology is created. Alice Bailey says “The heart of humanity is sound.” Jesus in A course in Miracles said “Man’s only sin is not remembering his own perfect sinless divine nature. The only devil is our illusion that we are separate from and not part of God…the lack you need to correct is the sense of separation from God. The notion of separation and distinctions has to be removed. They think the reason the world isn’t united together is that there are too many jagged divisions between us. A social program is necessary to remove them. Here are some samples distinctions that are eliminated: Theism/Monism, Creator/Creature, God/Man, Animal/Human, Christ/Satan, Life/Death, Heaven/Hell, Truth/Falsehood, Right/Wrong, Good/Evil, Sin/Holiness, Bible/Other Scriptures, monotheism/polytheism, traditional/alternate families, male/female, parents/children, love/pornography, homosexuality/heterosexuality. All of these are distinctions the Bible clearly defines.

But in pagan monistic synthesis, all of these things are simply relative points on the circle, various perspectives held by different people. If we could just eliminate those divisions, we would solve all of mankind’s problems. These distinctions are being blurred and removed. The new liberated gender promotes 14 different gender choices (“Omnigender”). These things are passed on as civil rights. Behind that is the powerful ideology of pagan monism.

5. There is one solution – From a pagan point of view, the solution is to go to the center. The solution is in the middle of the big circle, and that is the small circle that is in the center of you. Mysticism is where the solution is being sought. Finding inner peace in the middle of who we are is a powerful ideology even moving through the Bible belt. Walsch’s God – “Listen to your feelings…words are the least reliable purveyors of truth.” This comes from hinduism and gnosticism. Stop thinking, start feeling. Huston Smith on KPBS, July 9, 2003 described the difference between Buddhist mediation and Christian prayer: “Christian prayer uses words…the mystical view of God uses ‘night vision’ where one sees behind and beyond the God of theism.” The goal of paganism is to stop thinking and get behind the mind of God.

Yoga comes from the Sanskrit word “Yuj” meaning to yoke, join, or unite. yoga thus means “union with God” or “yoked with God.” Swami Sivananda states: “we must consciously destroy the mind…Keep your intellect at a respectable distance when you study mythology…. That which separates you from God is mind.” We believe that the mind is part of the image of God, but paganism is trying to remove that aspect of the image of God. We need to be people of the mind, not to be proud, but to use this amazing gift God has given to us to bring glory to Him. Mantra is a Sanskrit word, made up of two words: man = think and tra = be liberated from. Some of our Christian techniques of worship ought to be careful that we don’t fall into the mystical trap of silencing the mind so that we don’t know the mind of Christ.

The goal of paganism is conjunctio oppositorum = Joining of the opposites. You take those opposites and meet in the middle to empower yourself.

Pagan eschatology, evolution to the rescue, spiritual transformation.

This worldview, it is claimed, will bring an end to human depression and egotism, religious fear and conflict, conflicts between nations, the ecological crisis, and a transformation of humanity.

The Wiccan circles speak of a “Sophianic Millennium,” the era of Goddess blessing and worship when all peoples and faiths will be united around the Divine Feminine.

The new spirituality should not be underestimated. It offers cosmological, monistic claims about sexuality, ecology, geo-politics, social justice, end of war, and future of the planet.

Meanwhile, what is the answer we give as Christians? Jesus loves me, he’s my friend, sentimentalized gospel, no teaching about Jesus, the Lord of the Cosmos.

The many forms of monism all explain the world by the world. You can describe the world as spiritualist or materialist, atheistic or “theistic”, monotheistic or polytheistic, ascetic or libertine, acosmic or procosmic, gnostic or romantic, animistic or rationalistic, secular humanist or neo-pagan.

Synthesis or monism is a smokescreen for univocity. The opposite of synthesis is antithesis. There are two kinds of religion, and we must understand that we are not a religion of oneness, but of twoness.
paganus – alienus
esoteric – exoteric
introspective – extraspective
internalist – externalist
monistic – theistic
all is one – all is two
both/and – either/or
homocosmology – heterocosmology
Ours is alienus, exoteric, extraspective, externalist, theistic, all is two, either/or, heterocosmology.

Romans 1:25 – They exchanged the truth for the lie and worshiped and served the creation rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever, amen. Some religions worship the creation, others worship the Creator. There are two circles, not one. All is two, rather than all is one. His circle is larger than our circle. The glory of the gospel is twoness, rather than oneness.

ABHE Session 2 – Woodrow Kroll

Woodrow Kroll is the president and primary Bible teacher of Back to the Bible, where he has been for the last 19 years. 52% of the world’s population can hear back to the Bible in their primary language. (www.backtothebible.org)

He is a Bible college graduate and former professor. From 1980-1990, he was the president of Davis College in New York. (http://www.backtothebible.org/index.php/About-Woodrow-Kroll.html)

My notes on his message entitled Bible Illiteracy.

He has been a part of ABHE for many years and follows with great interest the work of this organization. We can make mistakes with the information about how fast things are changing. We can hold dear our connection with God’s word and never connect with the society that is changing quickly. Or, we can hold to that society and present a measley message to them. This is the mistake he wants to address tonight.

Human beings cannot find our way without some outside reference point to show us where to go. We call that outside reference point “true north.” A lot of people have been trying to find it over the last few years. With a magnetic compass, you won’t make it to true north. Magnetic north is 600 miles off of true north. Plus, a compass is not all that accurate at certain places on earth. Solar-magnetic activity can affect it, as can your elevation. While the world is trying to find true north with its own compass, they can’t do it. Your internal compass won’t take you to true north, and the external influences will affect what little you have internally.

So we have to take people to true north, and the only way we can do it is connect with them and connect a Message with them. We live in an evangelical world that has made some progress in trying to connect with a culture. Unfortunately, we have prepared for them “Gospel Lite,” “more taste, less filling.”

Listen to the late night theologians: Leno and Letterman. Leno goes to people on the street and asks them questions. We hear the dumbest answers they can find. When he asks Bible questions, the answers are horrible. Barna says the most recognizable verse in the Bible to Americans is “God helps those who help themselves.”
Can you name the gospel writers? No. Can you name the Beatles? Yes, all four of them.
Who was swallowed by a great fish? The answer given is Pinnochio.
The culture around us has a greater effect on the people around us than the Bible does. We need to think about how we can get people to engage God’s word.
The Gallup people have been doing the Gallup Bible Knowledge quiz for 40 years. One question is: what is the first book of the Bible. 49% of the people in America know that it is Genesis, so 51% don’t.
(http://www.centerforbibleengagement.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=15&Itemid=7)

We live in a country where Bible illiteracy is growing and we don’t even see it happen. It’s happening in the church, too. When Dr. Gary Burge, Chairman of the New Testament department tested incoming Freshmen to Wheaton, students from fine Evangelical homes and Christian schools, alarmingly he discovered: one-third of freshmen could not sequence in order Abraham, the OT prophets, the death of Christ, and Pentecost. Half could not sequence Moses in Egypt, Isaac’s birth, Saul’s death, Judah’s exile. One third could not find Paul’s travels in Acts. And one-half didn’t know the Christmas story was in Matthew.

This doesn’t reflect on Wheaton, it reflects on the plague of Bible illiteracy to the children of our churches.

When Kroll was the chairman of the division of religion at Liberty University in 1975, he started a Bible department. His responsibility was to give a Bible comprehensive exam to incoming freshmen. He used the AABC test. Using 75 out of 150 they would consider to be passing. In 1980, they gave it to 1100 incoming freshmen, most from the South and Christian school graduates. Only 45 students out of 1100 made at least a 75.

If we connect to our culture and have nothing to give them, that’s still a mistake. What is Bible illiteracy doing to us? What can we do about it?

Gallup said Bible illiteracy is not only a religious and spiritual problem, but it’s a cultural problem as well. One reason we are not the salt and light in the world we want to be is that we don’t know the Word well enough. Seven dramatic ways in which Bible illiteracy is impacting the evangelical community right now:

1. It has caused moral apathy among Christians today. We don’t know what is moral and what is immoral. We don’t know enough about how God views things to stand up and say it. The evangelical community in Massachusetts was quiet on the issue of gay marriage. We don’t know our position well enough to explain it to the world. The Bible is clear, but you have to know it.

2. It has robbed us of the answers to life’s key questions. We allow every answer to be equally important, equally valid, equally well thought-out. We let Oprah settle questions about the family. We let a rabbi answer questions about evil. In the issues of forgiveness, relationships, sanctity of life, we listen to polls and pundits instead of the Word. The church is oblivious to those answers because we are oblivious to the only book God ever wrote. We don’t have better answers than anyone else unless we give them God’s answers. He gets negative mail every day from people who don’t like him, and the most negative, frequent criticism is this: you speak too authoritatively. But he doesn’t try to say anything that doesn’t come out of God’s book. But if we tell what comes out of God’s book on the basis of the authority of God, we have nothing to be ashamed of.

3. It has hastened the dumbing down of the church. In 1999, Don Jacobson (Multnomah) asked Kroll to write a book on the dumbing down of the church. Kroll didn’t want to do it because he would have to take on the Christian publishing industry. The industry is part of the problem, not part of the solution. You have to wade through rooms of holy hardware before you get to anything that will advance the Christian life. The industry publishes what they publish because the public wants it. Don’t blame the bookstore or the publishers. They only give the customers what they want. He would also have to take on Christian radio, because of what it provides. It used to be that you could turn on Christian radio and learn something. Now it’s an entertainment medium instead of an informative medium. We have met the enemy, and it is us. Albert Mohler says Bible illiteracy is not someone else’s problem. It’s our problem in the church. We have to face it and admit it and do something about it.

4. It has caused a lack of intimacy with God. One of the worst things that can happen to a Christian is become less intimate with God. The less time I spend with God and His word, the less intimate I am with Him. When he started at Back to the Bible, he held up the job description for President and Bible Teacher and said “what do you want me to do.” One person on the board said, “We want you to spend enough time in God’s word every time that when you come to the microphone, you have something to say.” The more time I spend in his book, the more intimate I become with the author of the book. God only wrote one book and he would be pleased to have us spend more time with it. We crave intimacy and we can have it, but we have to get into the book to get it.

5. It has decreased the value of Christianity among other religions. We live in a world where people make up their own religion. That is ok in this world, because they say all religions lead to God. That is the dumbest idea ever. Yet, Bible illiteracy saps our understanding that Christianity has the road that leads to God. We encounter people who know their position better than we know it. We will encounter people who know our position better than we know it.

6. It has diminished the urgency for evangelism. We are far less evangelistic if we aren’t convinced there is a real hell, that there is only one God, only one mediator between God and man. If we don’t truly believe these things, our urgency for evangelism will be back burnered. We will do everything under the sun that is good except take the message of the good news.

7. It has hampered our ability to find true north. The influences that come against us cause us to believe we are on the right road, when we truly are not. We don’t understand how we are being hampered.

All the news isn’t bad, but you can’t understand good news until you understand bad news. You can’t appreciate heaven without knowing about hell. We can’t appreciate how important the bible college movement is until we see what the major problem we face in America is. Bible illiteracy is not a problem in the church. Bible illiteracy is THE problem in the church. Someone on Sunday will know exactly how much money was given. Someone can tell you exactly how much space is in your auditorium. Someone can tell you exactly how many people came to each of your services. But no one can tell you whether the crowd is more mature than they were last week. We have a measuring tool for almost everything in church except the thing that really matters. For 2000 years, we haven’t addressed this issue. Isn’t that odd? Christian radio is concerned about radio stations, donor audiences, and time slots. It’s not enough to bless people. We need to change them. We need to take the only book God ever wrote to people.

The importance of our schools will ultimately depend on how we address the issue of Bible illiteracy among our students. If you talk about charting spiritual maturity and growth, people will get embarrassed. How many ministers would sign up to have the spiritual growth of their people monitored? There are some things that we must do, but we must first be willing to take the blame within the church for this.

George Barna has come to the belief that he has to bypass the church in order to get his message to the people of the church. Most of the information he has had to present in the last few years hasn’t been that positive. It isn’t easy to present non-positive messages. Ask the OT prophets like Joel, Amos, etc. The world likes positivity so much. While we talk about possibility, we get dumber every year about God’s word. You can’t blame your church or the Bible college. By the time they get to Bible college they are so far behind, they will never catch up. Kroll suggested to Barna that the plan is to take the message to 12-14 year olds. Barna says you’re too late. By age 8, a person will learn almost everything they will know about the Bible the rest of their lives. But there are a couple of things you can do.

* Start with yourself: president, dean, faculty, etc. Your students will never grow deeper than you grow. We know that we’re busy. It’s difficult to find that time to spend with the Word. But if you don’t start with yourself, all your plans will look outward and they won’t matter anyway. Transformation is the name of the game. When you read the Bible, read it to be transformed, not just informed. Most of us have read through the Bible several times. When we come to the book, we are often looking for information for the next message. John Wesley wrote about the night when he was “strangely warmed.” He was used to reading the bible and grew up in a Christian home. He came to America as a missionary. Then he went back and discovered he had read the Bible for information, not transformation. For those of us who are professionals, it’s easy to read for information. But every day, we need to be transformed. He reads the Bible every year from a new version. People used to say if we just had a Bible in readable language, we could understand it better. But we have 35 readable versions now! The problem is not with King James, it is with me. My notes are not enough. I need to start with myself and get back into the word.

* Read the word of God in order to metabolize it. Metabolism has to do with how the body processes food. When you metabolize something, it becomes part of you. You don’t just take it and spit it out. It forms what you are. We need to metabolize the word of God, eat the word and let it form who we are. God commanded Ezekiel to eat the book. I can’t give out every day if I’m not eating every day. He knows what dealing with students and papers is like. He doesn’t have to deal with that, but he does have to prepare a study every day that will be heard by millions of people. What you hear on radio is not what he eats. What you hear on radio is what is left over. If you want to make a difference in the lives of your students, you need to learn how to eat and take in a lot more of God’s word than you are. Jeremiah said, “You words were found and I ate them and they became a joy and delight of my heart, for I am called by your name.” It’s easy to find things in the bookstores about blessings. But there’s more to it than that: Rev 10:9-10, “Take and eat it. It will make your stomach bitter, but in your mouth it will be sweet as honey.” If there aren’t some things I am taking in from God’s word that upsets me, then I’m probably missing some important parts. The whole book is God’s word, not just the selected portions that bless you. One of the reasons we aren’t getting ahead is that we read selectively.

Some years ago, he started the Center for Bible Engagement (http://www.centerforbibleengagement.org/). Bible illiteracy is the negative side, Bible engagement is the positive solution side. Everybody always has a story about this. But look at the data. Doing over 40,000 surveys among Christians, they found hurdles and incentives. One of the key hurdles is that people say they don’t have time. Every person has made that same excuse. “Read your Bible one book at a time.” He timed how long it took to read each book of the Bible. You can read the entire Bible in 72 hours. There are 26 books that can be read in less than 30 minutes. Most of those can be read in less than 15 minutes. If you want to lead other people as a Christian, but you don’t have time for God, that’s a problem. You have 1440 minutes in every day. If you tithed your time, that would be 144 minutes a day to give to God. Even if you take off your 8 hours for sleeping and 8 hours for working, you could tithe 480 minutes a day and that would leave you with 48 minutes a day to read God’s word. You could read the Bible 2.5 times in a year. You would have to give up a television show.

You and I have to find a way to tap the new generation with technologies that don’t exist yet and still have something to give to them while we are doing it. Going to church isn’t really an adequate measure of religiosity, so Back to the Bible asked how often a week do you engage the Word. They discovered that if you are a 0-1 time per week engager of God’s word, there is no difference in your lifestyle than from a non-believer. You are just as likely to gamble, abuse drugs and alcohol, be hooked on Internet pornography, or have an affair. You can’t be salt and light. The reason we aren’t making a dent in this world is that we don’t know enough about God’s word to be salt and light and if we never go to God’s word or only once, we don’t know enough. If you are a 2-3 times a week engager, there is a slight decline in the non-Christian behavior. But if you engage God’s word 4 or more times a week, there is a dramatic change in the way you live your life. You are far less likely to get drunk, gamble, and behave in other non-Christian behavior.

Bible illiteracy is a plague. Reading the word is alone is not the answer to the plague, but it’s better than anything else we’ve answered. Check out www.411god.net. Teenagers get a phone call every day with the Word. One minute a day won’t make a spiritual giant out of kids. But kids don’t understand that when you hear the Word of God, God speaks to you. This is using technology to do ministry, but don’t let technology get in the way of ministry. Bible literacy can be stamped out. It starts with you and me. Maybe it starts right here.

ABHE Opening Session – J.P. Moreland

The theme of the conference is “Engaging Culture Through Biblical Thinking.”

J.P. Moreland is distinguished professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.P._Moreland). He debates on a wide range of philosophical and social issues. He has spoken on over 200 college campuses, served with Campus Crusade for Christ. He has 4 degrees in three areas: philosophy, theology, and chemistry.

Following are my notes from his message:

A few years ago in the Seattle airport, he picked up the newspaper and read on the editorial page a page-long editorial which was syndicated to newspapers around the country. The title was “A divided nation.” “We now live in the most divided period in the history of America since the civil war.” The core issue that the author said divides us into two groups (which Moreland disagrees with) is not fundamentally political, racial, or socio-economic. The fundamental division is over worldview. (Joel Kitkin, “A Nation Divided,” The Seattle Times section C, May 9, 2004, p. C1.)

On one side are secularists who believe that God, whoever she is, is not knowable and probably doesn’t even exist. Morality is a social construction and the result of evolution. There is no right way to do family and marriage can be defined however you like.

On the other side are ethical monotheists who see a supreme being as the source of morality and our ethical obligation.

The leading proponents of the secular side are the entertainment industry, the news media, and the universities.

The leading proponents of the ethical monotheists are evangelical churches and their institutions.

The odds are stacked against us if that is true. To think we have any chance at all to fight against Harvard/Stanford, ABC/NBC, and Hollywood/Madison avenue would seem very discouraging. These people are leading us into a secularized society day by day.

It’s not bad enough that we are considered ignorant to believe in these things. What is new is the idea that we are bigoted because of our belief. For the first time in the history of the church, the religion of Jesus is considered to be immoral. To follow the teachings of the New Testament is to embrace an immoral view of the world that is intolerant, bigoted, and racist. What we are fighting is a situation where we are considered both ignorant, immoral, and intolerant.

“Here is how their ignorant bigotry works. They put the fear of God in you if you don’t believe the literal word of the Bible, you will burn in hell. You have to abdicate all critical thinking. . . They make sure you understand that the devil resides in the toils and snares of complex thought so it’s better not to think at all.”

Robert Reich wrote, “The greatest conflict of the 21st century will not be between the West and terrorism. The true battle will be between modern civilization and anti-modernists. Those who believe in the primacy of the individual and those who believe that human beings owe their allegiance to a higher authority. Between those who believe that allegiance is to life in this world and those whose allegiance is beyond the grave. Terrorism will disrupt our life, but religious believers is the greatest danger we face.”

We now live in the most secular period of American history. What is the core of a secular culture? A view of the nature and limits of knowledge.

What is the view of the nature of knowledge? That knowledge can only be gained through the five senses and the hard sciences. Knowledge is limited to only what science can tell us. No other field gives knowledge, just belief and experience. Therefore, no knowledge can come from religion, ethics, and politics. Only personal beliefs.

In an interview on Dateline NBC, Rick Warren said that changing the definition of marriage is a bad idea. The interviewer said, “What if science discovers homosexuality is something we aren’t responsible for?” A good response would have been that since ethics and religion teach that we are responsible for homosexual activity, science will never teach us that.” Science is not a source of truth, but knowledge of truth. The Christian religion is a source of knowledge and faith, the choice to believe something in the absence of any evidence (a modern definition of “faith”).

Science wears the trousers in our culture. Religion and theology are matters of personal belief and blind faith. Time Magazine had a story about how the universe will end, that it will run out of all of its energy. Religion and philosophy amount to nothing but idle speculation. The idea is that if you can prove something in the hard sciences it will pass as objective fact and true knowledge. Outside of that, then we are only trafficking in private feelings, not factual knowledge about reality.

Within the top 4 or 5 things we can do for students is to treat the Bible as a source of knowledge, not just a source of truth. It is a source of knowledge of truth, not just truth. The mindlessness of evangelical Christianity is a crisis. It will no longer be adequate for people to have a set of private beliefs to overcome the secularism of our culture. They need to know what they believe and why they believe it.

We don’t simply increase the intensity level in this area. Advice to Bible colleges: The most important thing you can do is have a professional philosopher on your campus. We got intimidated by philosophy in the forties and fifties and now we haven’t well integrated the study of Scripture with philosophy. Since the eighties, there has been a return to Christianity in the field of philosophy, a revival in the field. The top philosophers are evangelical Christians. These are the people who can engage the culture and help our students develop a biblical worldview.

We don’t only care about the life of the mind because of the urgency of the hour, but because it flows from the nature of our religion. We are people who celebrate the life of the mind. There are a couple of texts that illustrate this.

2 Corinthians 10:3-5 is one of the most important texts concerning spiritual warfare.
“For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.”

What are the fortresses? It is a theory, idea, or speculation. These are “ideational structures,” a pattern of thought and feeling that hang together in some way. We are in a culture with a set of ideas that it is our job to destroy. The devil can’t do much with the power of God, but he can attack the knowledge of God. That is where the battle is being waged. The idea that one can actually know things about God is considered ludicrous in our culture, even among some Christians. They take it we can believe them, but not know them.

It is our job in spiritual warfare to destroy speculations, theories, and ideas that are raised up against the knowledge of God. There are “inhouse” issues with the faith and “outhouse” issues. However much time we spend on inhouse issues, make sure we don’t ignore the external issues that come at us from the culture in which we live. What we have to do is come up with a hit list in our culture that we want to take them out one by one. Examples:
1. The idea that I can only know what I experience.
2. The idea that reality is physical only.
3. The idea that I am my brain and central nervous system. It shocks people to be taught that God doesn’t have a brain. They wonder, “how can God think if he doesn’t have a brain?” But God has a mind, not a brain (physical).
4. The idea that animals and bodies don’t have souls. The soul is what animates animals and humans.

In the seminars where he speaks, he doesn’t want to integrate faith and learning, because those are not two separate areas. Sit down in the area that you are teaching and find a way to resolve those tension points with students before the semester is complete. That is fighting spiritual warfare in the act of teaching. The Christian school is a “war college” that is training soldiers for warfare in the realm of ideas and thought.

This involves the study of biblical teaching, art, literature, history, and other areas.

Colossians 1:19 – Jesus is the fulness of the Godhead bodily. The word pleroma was a pre-Christian gnostic term that reflected the assumption that matter was evil and God couldn’t take on the form of matter. They ranked angels from high to low spiritual, who would communicate down to those of a lower spiritual nature. This ontological mediation between God and the world was called the “fulness” or pleroma.

So Paul says that there is a mediator between God and the world, but it isn’t a series of angels. It is Jesus Christ himself. In order for Paul to make that statement, he had to know pre-Christian gnosticism so he could understand their system of thought and address it. We need to always keep in mind that our faculty are soldiers training other soldiers in the war of ideas. How are people controlled? The best way is to control how they think and feel. When a system of ideas causes people to think and feel certain things (like the word “tolerance” does), then you have controlled them. Tolerance has been associated with certain feelings so that when the word is heard, it brings up positive ideas. We Christians need to be able to defuse the ideological structure associated with it.

Moreland’s argument: Tolerance is immoral because it silences the protest of evil. Thus the principle of tolerance is morally hideous. In 50 words, that whole idea can be addressed. Can our students do that? Are we training them to have these answers to the questions that our world is asking and needing to have answered?

If you go to Duke and major in literature, the literature faculty can’t agree on what a good piece of literature is. The idea that one piece of literature is better than another is racist or prejudice. So the curriculum is fractured. We do it better by integrating literature. We can have a better educational product than they have, because we can do things better than they do. They don’t live in a uni-versity, they live in a plural-versity. Not only does literature have nothing to do with science or math, but there isn’t even an integrated approach to literature. We are trying to unify every thought around Christian thought at the core. What we have is superior to what they offer.

This job of engaging in spiritual warfare is not only at the core of what we do when we teach, but provides us the opportunity to increase the quality of Christian education while the quality of secular education is descending.

Most people believe that Jesus is a sixties kind of hippy dude who dropped one-liners on people who didn’t understand what he was talking about. The idea is that Jesus was a friend to common, ordinary, simple people. That is true, but not the whole truth. He was also the smartest man who ever lived and if he came back today would be very comfortable giving a lecture to the humanities faculty at UC-Berkeley. We have lost the view of Jesus Christ as an intellectual. He was not only that. He was a common person with intellectual capacity. He could go toe to toe with the smartest person of his day.

Matthew 22 is an illustration of how he got in the middle of the intellectual debates of Judaism. They were trying to show that he was stupid, but he demonstrated his ability to summarize knowledge and interact with them. His intellectual ability to summarize 39 books of the OT in 2 sentences is amazing. Included in that is loving God with the mind. That is part of our obligation, not all of it, but an important part.

They gave him a reductio ad absurdum argument, in which “this” is assumed true for the sake of argument. “This” is absurd. Therefore, your position is wrong. Either you believe in adultery or polygamy, if you believe in eternal life. That is their argument. Jesus was able to distinguish the central part of their argument. He found that they had a wrong assumption: there is no marriage in heaven. Their argument was wrong if there is no marriage in heaven. Then he has a question for them: how can God be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob if they are dead? Since it said, “I am” it meant God continued to be their God and they continued to be in existence.

The point is that we need more young people to see the life of scholarship as a calling from God. They need to go into journalism, philosophy, chemistry as Christians. We want them to be Christians who happen to be journalists, not journalists who happen to be Christians. Part of encouraging them in that calling is to remind them that Jesus was the greatest intellectual giant the world has ever seen. His thoughts shaped the world for 2,000 years and have led to some of the greatest scientific discoveries.

We need to insist upon integrative worldview thinking and that Jesus was skilled in dealing with the intellectual leaders of his day.

Marilyn Vos Savant was asked this: I am an adult who likes the religion of my parents, and I refuse to consider the religions of my friends. What do you think of a person who does that? She said, “You are smarter than your friends. Religions can’t be proven true intellectually. They come from the heart, not the mind. In my idea, you have behaved badly.”

If we let our culture believe that areas outside of science can’t provide knowledge, we will be marginalized in a culture that becomes more secular every day.