An Eleventh Quote from The Truth War

Actually, from the appendix, part of which is reprinted from an earlier book, Reckless Faith:

...some people...spurn the use of commentaries and similar resources in their Bible study, as if their own uninformed first impression is just as good as careful study using reference tools. It is becoming more and more common all the time to hear people say, "I don't read commentaries and books about the Bible. I limit my study to the Bible itself." That may sound very pious, but is it? Isn't it actually presumptuous? Are the written legacies of godly men of no value to us? Can someone who ignores study aids understand the Bible just as well as someone who is familiar with the scholarship of other godly teachers and pastors?

One textbook on hermeneutics answers the question this way:

Suppose we select a list of words from Isaiah and ask a man who claims he can bypass the godly learning of Christian scholarship if he can out of his own soul or prayer give their meaning or significance: Tyre, Zidon, Chittim, Sihor, Moab, Mahershalahashbas, Calno, Carchemish, Hamath, Aiath, Migron, Michmash, Geba, Anathoth, Laish, Nob, and Gallim. He will find the only light he can get on these words is from a commentary or a Bible dictionary.

Good answer. It reveals the utter folly of thinking that objective study is unnecessary. The person who is not a diligent student cannot be an accurate interpreter of God's Word.

Personally, I am pretty well convinced that the majority of modern North American Christians have never even seen a commentary, let alone cracked one open. In view of the enormous numbers of commentaries available, this may seem unbelievable, but I am convinced it is true. I have no idea who is buying all those commentaries. It is a certainty that I never hear anyone, save a preacher or an occasional Sunday School teacher, refer to one.

A Tenth Quote from The Truth War

Evangelical churchgoers desperately want their churches to stay on the leading edge of whatever is currently in vogue in the evangelical community. For a while, any church that wanted to be in fashion had to sponsor seminars on how to pray the prayer of Jabez. But woe to the church that was still doing Jabez when The Purpose-Driven Life took center stage. By then, any church that wanted to retain its standing and credibility in the evangelical movement had better be doing "Forty Days of Purpose."

One of my persistent complaints about the modern evangelical church--Southern Baptists by no means excluded--is that they are perpetually vulnerable to the latest fad that promises REAL, GENUINE REVIVAL! RIGHT HERE AND RIGHT NOW!

You tell 'em that Church X has baptized umpteen bajillion people in the last six months using Method Y, and they are by golly willing to jump all over Method Y.

They never bother to look into it enough to find out that Church X doesn't see but a handful of that umpteen bajillion return to church after being baptized.

Drives me nuts to think about it. We spend lots and lots of time on

and hardly any on anything resembling serious doctrinal training.

A Ninth Quote from The Truth War

How many well-known evangelical leaders do we see squander wonderful opportunities to make the truth clear and plain when they are handed a microphone by the secular media? They often balk or simply give the wrong answer when put on the spot by questions about whether Christ is really the only way to heaven.

So do a lot of in-the-pews Christians. And just about every Emergent that I have ever dealt with. Not all. But almost all.

An Eighth Quote from The Truth War

We sometimes tend to think of the early church as pristine, pure, and untroubled by serious error. The truth is, it wasn't that way at all.

The good doctor ain't kiddin'.

I recently engaged in a fairly lengthy discussion with a fellow who repeatedly tried to prove his point from the practice of the early church. My response to that, in part, was that I didn't think the practice of the early church was authoritative. The church, after all, hadn't even seen the canon close before falling into serious error. You can see that just from 1 Corinthians and Revelation. Why on earth anyone would think their practice authoritative for our faith and practice quite escapes me. The one reliable guide is Holy Writ.

I mean, one of the early church authorities he cited had actually castrated himself, thinking that he was following the injunction to cut your hand off if it causes you to sin. That kind of thinking is your guide to faith and practice?

The reality is that the early church rapidly fell into error. The church is always prone to error. But God isn't, and neither is what He has said. It is our task to understand and apply what He has said, not to canonize the practice of fallible, albeit earlier, human beings.

A Seventh Quote from The Truth War

...the Emerging postmodernists have blurred the line between certainty and omniscience. They seem to presume that if we cannot know everything perfectly, we really cannot know anything with any degree of certainty.

[multiple-chapter snip]

Of course, such a denial of all certainty has nothing to do with true humility. It is actually an arrogant form of unbelief, rooted in an impudent refusal to acknowledge that God has been sufficiently clear in His self-revelation to His creatures. It is actually a blasphemous form of arrogance, and when it governs even how someone handles the Word of God, it becomes yet another expression of evil rebellion against Christ's authority.

This has been my experience with most Emergents. Quite a lot of them will not admit that they know anything for sure, at least anything spiritual, and it gradually dawned on me that when they use the word "know," they employ a double standard: when they want to deny that you can, for example, know from Scripture that activity "A" is sinful, "know" means to know as God knows, that is, omnisciently, but when it comes to such things as Do they know how to drive, perfectly ordinary knowing-in-the-ordinary-human-way-of-knowing is just fine. They can read the directions on a box of brownie mix and know how to make brownies, but they cannot read the Bible and know that it says that "A" is sinful. It is an absolutely classic case of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose.

Makes the li'l boogers aggravating as the dickens to deal with.

A Sixth Quote from The Truth War

Doubt and skepticism have been canonized as a form of humility.

Mercy. Have they ever. People tell you, with as close to a straight face as they possess, that they don't really know anything for certain, and they think this means that they're humble.

All too often what it really means is that they're pridefully engaged in a contest to prove that they're humbler-than-thou.

A Fifth Quote from The Truth War

So what is truth?

Here is a simple definition drawn from what the Bible teaches: truth is that which is consistent with the mind, will, character, glory, and being of God. Even more to the point: truth is the self-expression of God. That is the biblical meaning of truth, and it is the definition I employ throughout this book. Because the definition of truth flows from God, truth is theological.

Truth is also ontological--which is a fancy way of saying it is the way things really are. Reality is what it is because God declared it so and made it so. Therefore God is the author, source, determiner, governor, arbiter, ultimate standard, and final judge of all truth.

You would not--I say again, NOT--believe the discussions I've had with people over statements as simple as, "A statement is true if it corresponds with reality." People get livid about that. They want to be able to say that their ideas are true even if they don't actually happen to correspond to reality.

You see this in politics, too. Conservatives--Burkean conservatives, Kirkan conservatives, Buchanan conservatives--refer to people like this as ideologues. They are people so committed to the ideas of--for example--single-payer health-care, free trade (careful; I am not referring to free markets here), a green economy, a controlled economy, nation-building, etc., that the plain fact that these all have terrible track records simply has no impact on their thinking. They want so badly to believe that the idea is okay, it's only proper implementation that has been lacking, that they will believe obvious falsehood and will take great offense at anyone having the temerity to point out that reality does not confirm their opinions.

A Fourth Quote from The Truth War

...historically and collectively, Christians have always been in full agreement that whatever is true--whatever is objectively and ontologically true--is true whether any given individual understands it, likes, it, or receives it as truth. In other words, because reality is created and truth is defined by God, what is really true is true for everyone, regardless of anyone's personal perspective or individual preferences.

I have mentioned before that I have actually encountered an educated man, a doctoral candidate at Princeton (at the time; he may have his Th.D by now) who promoted the idea that truth is defined in community, that is, what is "true" for one community may not be "true" in another. Be careful here: he was not saying that what "works" in one community might not "work" in another; he was striking at the idea of objective truth itself.

Mercy. I have a lot of respect for the genuinely well-educated, but folks like that don't make it easy.

A Third Quote from The Truth War

Scripture says, for example, that the cardinal truths concerning God, His power, His glory, and His righteousness are naturally known to all people through creation and conscience (Romans 1:19-20; 2:14-16). That truth is adequately clear and sufficient to leave the entire human race "without excuse" (Romans 1:20). All those who are condemned in the final judgment will be held responsible for rejecting whatever truth was available to them. The fact that a just and righteous God holds both unbelievers and believers alike responsible for obedience to His revelation is irrefutable proof that He has made the truth sufficiently clear for us. To claim that the Bible is not sufficiently clear is to assault God's own wisdom and integrity.

In short, you can't really claim that God inspired Scripture, that He used men as men use pens, and claim that it's not sufficiently clear without saying that you think God is stupid or a trickster.

A Second Quote from The Truth War

...every attempt to define truth in nonbiblical terms has ultimately failed. That is because God is the source of all that exists (Romans 11:36). He alone defines and delimits what is true. He is also the ultimate revealer of all truth.

[snip]

All truth therefore starts with what is true of God: who He is, what His mind knows, what His holiness entails, what His will approves, and so on. In other words, all truth is determined and properly explained by the being of God. Therefore, every notion of His nonexistence is by definition untrue. That is precisely what the Bible teaches: "The fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God'" (Psalm 14:1; 53:1).

[snip}

...once someone denies God, logical consistency will ultimately force that person to deny all truth. A denial that God exists instantly removes the whole justification for any kind of knowledge.

My oldest son started serious reading when he was fifteen. It was about that time that I warned him that he would never have more opportunity to read than he would have over the next several years. He started off with Institutes of the Christian Religion and over the years, I kid thee not, he has read it all--or at least so much philosophy and theology that it would, I guarantee, make your head spin just to see his bookshelf.

I have no doubt--none--that he's read more philosophy than the majority of people who've majored in that subject.

So, yes, he's read all the major philosophers in considerable depth--and you know what? After all of that, his conclusion is that most of it is:

People are all over the place. They cannot agree on what is and isn't real and if--let alone how--someone can know it. You either begin with God and wind up with a coherent system of thought, or you begin with man, and intellectual anarchy reigns.