Month: June 2004

Epistemic Theology Part 4
(Parts 1, 2, & 3)

In X-Men United, the new X-Men movie out last year, there’s a scene where Storm, our lovely weather-controller, needs to get on the other side of a locked door. She turns to her friend Kurt Wagner, also known as Nightcrawler, who happens to be a teleporter. Nightcrawler happens to be Catholic. Very Catholic. In fact, he spends a great deal of the movie talking about his faith, presumably his faith in Jesus Christ. Nightcrawler has also repeatedly said that he can’t just teleport anywhere. He has to be able to see where he’s going, or he could miss, pop back into the world in the middle of something solid, and die. So when Storm asks him to teleport her to the other side of the door, he tells her he can’t—because he can’t see where he’s going, he could kill them both.

Storm puts a hand on his shoulder and looks deep into his eyes. “I have faith that you can do it,” she says. That changes everything. Nightcrawler nods his head, pulls her close, closes his eyes, and pop! They’re on the other side of the door. Storm rushes in and stops the bad guy and everything is better.

I always felt sorry for poor Kurt Wagner in that scene. I know it was important for them to get to the other side of that door—and it obviously worked—but it just wasn’t fair. I know it would have ruined the movie to suddenly take a break in the action for a deep religious discussion, but Kurt really needed to ask her, “You have faith in what?!”

What was she really saying here? Was she saying “I have faith in God, that he has been directing us since the beginning of this movie, and if he brought us to this place where we need your ability to do this, then he will give you the ability to teleport us to the right place.”? It would be nice, but I really doubt it. What she was probably saying was more like “I have faith in you—you can do it!!” That would have been a nice thing to say, but it really would have had no basis, since he had been undermining that kind of faith since they met him. But I can tell you what the audience was thinking: “Hey, if you can’t jump to the other side of that door, you’re all dead anyway… ooh, faith! that’s nice.” Me? I had faith in the scriptwriter’s love of money, that they wouldn’t make the movie bomb by having a major character die by teleporting into the middle of a steel door.

It really is important to know what the object of your faith is. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen,” literally. If you’re in the jury of a murder trial and a key witness tells you, “he did it,” then the only evidence you have is your faith in that witness. If your witness is a liar, then your faith is unfounded.

So. Who is the witness attesting to the scriptures? Fortunately, the bible tells us, in Romans 10:17, who our witness is: “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”

Epistemic Theology Part 3
(Parts 1 and 2)

Took me long enough to get here, didn’t it?

Lee Strobel, in his book, A Case for Faith, Tells a story of how Billy Graham came to decide that the Bible is the Word of God. I have no idea where he got it, so I’m quoting him, in probable breach of copyright:

The year was 1949. Thirty-year-old Billy Graham was unaware that he was on the brink of being catapulted into worldwide fame and influence. Ironically, as he readied himself for his breakthrough crusade in Los Angeles, he found himself grappling with uncertainty — not over the existence of God or the divinity of Jesus, but over the fundamental issue of whether he could totally trust what his Bible was telling him.

In his autobiography, Graham said he felt as if he were being stretched on a rack. ….

“If I was not exactly doubtful,” Graham would recall, “I was certainly disturbed.” He knew that if he could not trust the Bible, he could not go on. The Los Angeles crusade — the event that would open the door to Graham’s worldwide ministry — was hanging in the balance.

Graham searched the Scriptures for answers, he prayed, he pondered. Finally, in a heavy-hearted walk in the moonlit San Bernardino Mountains, everything came to a climax. Gripping a Bible, Graham dropped to his knees and confessed he couldn’t answer some of the philosophical and psychological questions that Templeton and others were raising.

“I was trying to be on the level with God, but something remained unspoken,” he wrote. “At last the Holy Spirit freed me to say it. ‘Father, I am going to accept this as Thy Word — by faith! I’m going to allow faith to go beyond my intellectual questions and doubts, and I will believe this to be Your inspired Word.’”

It was a powerful experience, I’m sure, but how does it help me? How do you get this faith? If it comes from within yourself, if you just up and decide to believe one day, then your faith is futile. Not because faith is powerless. A firm conviction can lead people to do amazing things. But unless faith has an objective correlation with the truth, then you haven’t determined the truth. You’ve only determined what you’ve decided to believe. So where does faith come from?

I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about this word, partly because we only use it in a religious context these days, so the word automatically takes on these religious overtones. People usually interpret the word to mean “belief,” or better, “really really strong belief.”

But the word “faith” comes from the Latin “fides,” which means something along the lines of “trust” or “adherence,” not just belief. It’s also the root word for “fidelity,” which I think we understand better, thanks to hi-fi electronic equipment (that would be your stereo). The dictionary definition of fidelity is, “Exact correspondence with fact or with a given quality, condition, or event—accuracy,” or, in regard to machines, “the degree to which an electronic system accurately reproduces the sound or image of its input signal.”

What I’m trying to get across is that the word faith carries with it the concept of alignment. To have faith in something is to align yourself with that thing. This is an important concept because it means that you can’t have blind faith. I don’t mean you shouldn’t have blind faith. I mean it’s impossible. It’s as much of an intellectual absurdity as deaf radio.

Consider your stereo. Before the advent of digital media, fidelity was the number one indicator of an instrument’s quality. Everything was recorded in analog format, which is to say, an exact representation of the sound. If you take a cone and attach it to a needle and run that needle along a blank wax record, and then speak into the cone, the needle will vibrate in tune with your voice and the vibration will cut an exact representation of that sound into the record. You could then run that needle back over the record at the same rate, and it would vibrate back at you, making the exact same sound—almost. Fidelity would be the measure of how faithfully the instruments reproduce the original—your voice. With digital media, the record is reduced to a series of numbers, which can then be reproduced exactly, so fidelity is much less an issue.

For your stereo to have blind fidelity, it would have to reproduce a sound with out a record of the original. I think it could be a new wave: Bli-fi: Sound Without Substance!

Faith must always have an object. If I may wax metaphorical, it is the needle of your soul. The record is what your faith is in. You can’t just have faith in the bible, because it requires faith to believe the bible in the first place. There has to be something more foundational, more fundamental than the bible for you to rest your needle on. And the more closely your needle is aligned with this other thing, the more clearly it resonates within you.

So the question for Billy Graham, for you, for me, for my stereo—for everybody—is “faith in what?”

Epistemic Theology Part 2

If the Bible is authoritative, and I am not a schizophrenic, then there can be no disparity between my experience and the scriptures. If there is a difference, the problem must lie in how much thought I have applied to my experience.

Please understand that I’m not saying that we believe the Bible because we understand it. Far from it. Might as well say we believe in God because we understand Him. Rather, if we believe the Bible, and we see a disparity between the bible and our experience, the problem must be in your understanding. If you can’t believe whether an experience you had was real, you’ve got bigger fish to fry than whether you believe the Bible. You’ve got to go back to ole Rene Descartes and decide whether anything exists at all.

If you’ll notice, what I’ve been digging at has been whether or not the scriptures are authoritative, not whether they are true. People often get confused and go off trying to prove that the bible is true, meaning whether it is factually correct. That question is kind of irrelevant.

I have a lot of books in my house that are, to the best of my knowledge, factually correct. I have Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization, one of the most revered history series. I have several biographies – including an autobiography by my grandfather. I even have a translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which I believe to be factual in its representation of what the scrolls say. But I don’t expect any of these books to dictate to me how to live my life. Being factually correct is a very good thing, but it doesn’t necessarily give authority. That authority comes from somewhere else.

Being factual is a good thing. If the books of the bible were historically inaccurate, it would put grave doubts in my mind as to whether it had any authority. But, while being factual is necessary, it isn’t sufficient. The linch-pin is the question of whether or not the Bible is, in fact, the Word of God. So how do I know if a particular collection of words is the word of God?