Exploring Approaches to Apologetics

Transcription

1 Exploring Approaches to Apologetics CA513 LESSON 08 of 24 Gordon Lewis, Ph.D. Experience: Senior Professor of Christian and Historical Theology, Denver Seminary, Colorado. Turn with me to 2 John 9 if you have your New Testament. There the apostle is saying, Watch out that you do not lose what you have worked for, but that you may be rewarded fully. Anyone who runs ahead and does not continue in the teaching of Christ does not have God. Whoever continues in the teaching has both the Father and the Son. This passage emphasizes the importance of doctrine, of the doctrine about Jesus Christ that John had emphasized in the first chapter of his gospel, how that the Eternal Word had become flesh, and the teaching that he emphasized at the end of that gospel, These things are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, and that believing you might have life through His name. Today we are going to study people who think they can have life with God apart from believing that the Eternal Word became flesh and died for our sins and rose again. This passage says, If they do not continue in the doctrine of Christ, they do not have God. Father, make us faithful to your Word. Grant that we may be effective teachers of it, that people who are zealously seeking you might indeed find you. That those who want real spirituality may know that they must believe in Jesus Christ to find it. Thank you for what you re doing for us. In Jesus name. Amen. In this lecture we continue surveying some influential alternative worldviews Christians face in the 20th Century. The inability of liberal theology, naturalistic philosophy, and logical positivism to deal with the most important values and relationships in life has led many again to look beyond the physically verifiable world. Consider the mysticism of pantheists in the East and West. For many years, W. T. Stace taught a naturalistic philosophy at Princeton University, and then he had a change of mind. On the basis of testimonies of mystical experience in the world s religions, he added a whole new dimension to reality. In the preface to his 1 of 11

2 Time and Eternity he said, The fundamental thought which this book seeks to work out in perhaps a slightly new way is that all religious thought and speech are through and through symbolic. So anything he says about God is not to be taken as literal knowledge of what God is really like. If you want literal truth about reality, turn to the scientists, he says. He added, I do not in this book retract naturalism by a jot or tittle. On the contrary, I reaffirm it in total, but I endeavor to add to it that other half of the truth which I think naturalism misses. From selected quotes of different religious writers in the world s religions, Stace concludes that God is best described by negatives and that all particular determinations, whether of a material or spiritual nature are to be denied of Him. He is to be reached by the via negativa, in the Latin, the essence of religion lies then in religious experience and not in any belief at all and also called religious beliefs or doctrines are merely theories about the religious experience. Religious experience he claims is ineffable; that is, indescribable in words. The ineffability of God implies the falsity of any sentence whatever of the form of God is X. God is Green. False. God is Spirit. False. God is love. False. God is holy. False. God is the first unmoved mover, the first cause of finite things. False. God is beyond causality in every other principle. The God of Stace is totally incomprehensible. That means that God is a mystery, Stace says, even to Himself. God s mind does not operate then by means of concepts or logic. A God is apprehended rather by mystical intuition. Augustine s view of rational intuitions maintained you could define eternal truths and you could state them in meaningful sentences, but distinct from these rational intuitions are the mystical intuitions of which Stace speaks. They are a name given to conceptless experiences of ultimate. The infinite is assumed to be unintelligible to the finite. Between God and humans, Stace claims, there is more than a difference of degree, there is a difference of kind. Stace s god is nothing known to his conceptual intellect. His apologetics attempts no justification of even his religious symbolism. Again, the function of religious language is not informative, but evocative. Even the fundamental doctrines of a religion are symbolic only. A translation to literal, cognitive, true, or false language, he claims is not even theoretically possible. Stace has two orders of being totally distinct from each other. The ultimate reality is totally other than the human. God is eternal, unlimited by the sequence of events past or future. 2 of 11

3 Humans are temporal, limited by sequence, the irrecoverability of the past, and the inaccessibility of the future. The ultimate reality mystics experience, he claims, is spiritual, not limited by location, equipment, or need of travel. Humans are spatial, limited by location, technical apparatus, and the need for travel arrangements. God is changeless, has no beginning, maturation, or death. We are changing; we are born, we mature, and die. God is mysterious, not comprehensible. He makes no subject object distinctions, is paradoxical and contradictory. We, Stace thinks, are logical, rational, using subject/object distinctions in logical propositions, and our knowledge is discursive, line upon line. God, furthermore, is ineffable, not describable in any qualities that we know. He s an unknown quantity X, and any attribute ascribed to God is false if interpreted literally. We like effability. We want language adequate to express true propositions about anything we consider real, and so the total difference between time and eternity, the spiritual and the spatial, the changeless and the changing, the mysterious and the logical, the ineffable and the effable. Stace thus has two distinct solutions to every problem the naturalistic solution and the mystical solution. Scientific language is informative, religious language evocative. The divine and human realities in spite of their infinite differences in every respect are interrelated in everything. So in a form of Pantheism, in which God is all and all is God, or at least a Panenthism in which God is in everything and everything is in God, he represents his mysticism. God sleeps, he says, in the inorganic stones. He begins to stir in the organic realm and comes to self-consciousness in human persons. The more adequate symbols are those taken, however, from the highest ranks of existence. Stace has no place for apologetics, for one uses arguments only to prove what one believes to be a fact. He precludes either proof or disproof of religion so none of the Thomistic five arguments are valid, for they all depend on causality and the causal relation is a time relation. It makes God the first finite thing in time. In any theological argument, Stace says, the ultimate premise must be mystical intuition. Intuition and revelation are two words for the same thing in his writing. The great error of the traditional proofs of the existence of God is that they take a symbolic truth for a literal truth of fact and then try to prove that it is fact. A mystical experience, he claims, brings with it an irresistible sense of conviction. The soul stands utterly convinced, not of a proposition or an argument, but of a oneness with the ultimate. God remains a total blink to the logical intellect or the void. And 3 of 11

4 Stace admits that much of his thought is paradoxical, but that is because of the contradictoriness he finds in the ultimate. The philosophical pragmatist, William James, in his famous Varieties of Mystical Experience written in 1902 had earlier studied mystical experience from the testimonies of mystics themselves. Since Stace does not include testimonies, consider these from William James. One person says, I remember the night and almost the very spot on the hilltop where my soul opened out and as it were into the infinite and there was a rushing together of the two worlds the inner and the outer. It was deep calling unto deep, and the deep that my own struggle had opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without reaching beyond the stars. I stood alone with Him who had made me and all the beauty of the world and love and sorrow and even temptation. I did not seek Him, but felt the perfect unison of my spirit with His. The ordinary sense of things around me faded, for the moment nothing but an ineffable joy and exaltation remained. It is impossible fully to describe the experience. It was like the effect of some great orchestra when all the separate notes have melted into one swelling harmony that leaves the listener conscious of nothing say that his soul is being wafted upwards and almost bursting with its own emotion. The perfect stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was not seen. I could not any more had doubted that He was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less real of the two. Notice the ineffability, passivity here that He was taken over by another. The second testimony: My highest faith in God and truest idea of Him were then born in me. I have stood upon the Mount of Vision since and felt the eternal round about me, but never since has there come quite the same stirring of the heart than if ever I believe I stood face-to-face with God and was born anew of His Spirit. There was, as I recall it, no sudden change of thought or of belief, except that my early crude conception had as it were burst into flower. There was no destruction of the old, but a rapid wonderful unfolding. Since that time, no discussion that I have heard of the proofs of God s existence has been able to shake my faith. Having once felt the presence of God s Spirit, I have never lusted again for lost it again for long. My most assuring evidence of His existence is deeply rooted in that hour of vision, in the memory of that supreme experience, and in the conviction, gained from reading and reflection, that something the same has come to all who have found God. I am aware that it may justly be called 4 of 11

5 mystical. Here then are testimonies of immediate experience of God that are independent of knowledge of any evidence or argument or of any biblical statement. William James singles out common characteristics of mystical experiences in the world religions and lists four in his book Varieties of Religious Experience. First, ineffability. The experience defies expression. It is more like a state of feeling, he says, than a state of the intellect. Second, a noetic quality, that s N O E T I C. Although primarily a state of feeling, there are also insights or illuminations that carry with them a remarkable sense of authority. There is then an assurance of having known God. Third, transiency, for mystical experiences cannot be sustained for long, except in rare cases, a half hour or at most an hour or two seems to be the limit. Fourth, passivity. Although the occurrence of mystical experiences may be facilitated by some preliminary preparations, when the experience sets in a person feels as if his or her own will were in abeyance and if grasped and held by a superior power. It is most interesting that a Chicago Sun Times reporter, who was also a serious student of philosophy and theology, talked with key persons in the drug movement out of the 1960s and discovered testimonies with very similar characteristics to those of the mystics in LSD drug experiences. In William Braden s The Private Sea: LSD and the Search for God, he listed the characteristics of those drug-induced experiences. First, the sense of self or person ego is utterly lost. Awareness of individual identity evaporates, or better is expanded to include all that is seen and even not seen. What occurs is simply depersonalization and a subject is somehow united with the impersonal ground of being called bromine in Hinduism. There is the suspension of cause and effect, for there is no distinct self-moving agent to be the efficient cause. Second, time stops or at least ceases to be important. So history in the drug culture and the Eastern religions is unimportant. Third, words lose all meaning. Direct experience of things in themselves need no words or abstract symbols. In this experience a tree is not a source of timber or shade. A tree is to look at and it is not a tree, it is that, there, now, and that s that, for there are no dualities. Sweet and sour, good and evil, for all is one. Five, the subjects feel that they know all the ultimate truth that there is to know. The characteristics of drug-induced experiences are similar to those of mystics in a pantheistic worldview where all is one. 5 of 11

6 Psychedelics may promote a union with nature, a natural mysticism, or a union with some impersonal absolute, energy, or force a monistic mysticism. But drugs cannot produce a theistic experience of God. In Christian Theism, one encounters the transcendent personal God and Father of Jesus Christ. A Christian regards it blasphemous to imagine that you are one with God in ontological continuity, but in Pantheism, it is neither insanity nor heresy to imagine you are God because in, fact, you are God according to that philosophy. How are we to interpret such mystical experiences? There are varied interpretations from naturalistic, pantheistic, and theistic perspectives. First note the naturalistic explanations. You recall that A. J. Ayer, as a logical positivist, said the testimonies of mystics simply supply data for the study of abnormal psychology. Lit-sen Chung, originally a Buddhist in his Zen wrote, I should say now that what Zen offered me was merely a technique of self-intoxication and a sense of false security. Gerta (sp?) regarded the feelings of mystical experience to be the intrusion of feelings, strong and over mastering upon the intellect. Duprell (sp?) attributed them to the intrusion of the subconscious into consciousness voluntarily. Hartman held the same but said that the intrusion of the subconscious was involuntary. As J. B. Pratt sums up, the naturalist interpretations in his religious consciousness, they maintain that imitation, social education, and individual suggestion furnish quite a sufficient explanation for all the phenomena of Mysticism. It, like everything else, is to be accounted for solely by the laws of a scientific psychology and its source is to be sought in the individual mind and society. William Braden reminds the atheist, however, that if all states of mind are caused by some organic condition, then one could as easily argue that the liver determines the position of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist. Second, consider pantheistic interpretations of mystical experience. The Vedanta tradition of Hinduism thinks the individual is absorbed into bromine metaphysically. Buddhists think of it as being lost in the void or emptiness. Being one in being with God does not remove our moral problems, however. Timothy Leary claimed that the experience supports pantheistic interpretations of the world, but that is assuming the thing to be substantiated. Interpretations do not come with the experiential data. The Mystical experience has no tags on it explaining that it is produced merely by drugs or merely by a method of meditation 6 of 11

7 or that it is produced by an impersonal force. Third, consider Christian theistic interpretations of mystical experiences in the world s religions and drug cultures. We may consider an experience of harmony with nature s vastness as a revelation of the existence and power of the Creator, but an awareness of God s handiwork is not necessarily a moral and spiritual reconciliation to God s fellowship. A recognition that God exists, however wonderful, is not a sufficient basis for the forgiveness of all of our sins past, present, and future or for justification as the imputation of Christ s righteousness. From a Christian standpoint, consider these problems with a pantheistic panacea. From within the mystic s own presuppositions, Stace made informative assertions about God to be literally understood. He affirmed that God was eternal, one, and changeless or immutable. Either such statements convey a theory about God or they do not. If not, we may dismiss them as his emotions. They are of no more worth than of his booing at a football game. Mystical experience does not validate furthermore a pantheistic interpretation, for none of the interpretations is self-validating. Interpretations are accepted our rejected by whether they provide a coherent account of all the relevant data. From a Christian standpoint, God furthermore is not totally other than the human intellect, for it was created in the divine image and likeness to think his thoughts after him. Propositional truth about a person in no way rules out experience of a person. Neither does experience rule out an exchange of information. The writers of Scripture who encountered God could write about Him. The experience of God was not fully comprehended, but neither was it totally ineffable. The writers of Scripture did not ascribe physical or evil predicates to God, but they did speak cognitively of God as Spirit with numerous attributes such as justice and love. Not all statements about God are symbolic. Some are univocal or literally intended. God is Spirit. God is just. God is love. A revelation from God did not depersonalize recipients in a Christian perspective, but it renews them. Experience of God involves a person-to-person fellowship with one and in that experience we do not lose our identity. Encounters with God were not totally speechless. The person-to-person experience was based on information and occasionally more information was illumined. God seeks the love our whole being, not just our emotions. The function of religious language is both informative and evocative. Faith is not merely a synonym for a mystical 7 of 11

8 intuition, but involves knowledge of who is believed and why one believes in Him. Then it calls for persuasion and commitment grounded in that knowledge. Religious language as exhibited in Scripture, furthermore, is not contradictory. Many people alleged contradictions in the Bible, but seldom can they illustrate one and seldom do they know how even to define a logical contradiction. Relationship with an unknown God in the Judaic tradition and the Gentiles devotion was regard non-redemptive idolatry. Mysticism is world denying, furthermore, whereas Christianity is problem solving. Classical religious Mysticism has negated time and history. It is a rebellion against the integrity of creation and the Creator. Life on earth is important, but it is not unreal or maya (sp?) as the mystics claim. Enough for our brief treatment of Mysticism; we now consider a very influential worldview in the 20th Century, somewhat closely related. It is. Carl Michalson in as a Mysticism said, While Mysticism moves into the bubbling fountain of the loving God, is always in route. is the penultimate step; Mysticism the ultimate one. We are ever reaching beyond ourselves in the direction of God, but never arriving. Existentialists are always thirsting, always restless. is a candid and disciplined transcript of how dry it is to live in a world without knowing that it is God who put you there. Living without an answer is like living over a void, a terrifying abyss. Soren Kierkegaard, the father of, referred to this as a holy hypochondria. People as philosophers do not have access to the God beyond all philosophical gods, and when they meet Christ they cease being existentialists and become Christians. There is both a non-theistic and a theistic type of. Think first of the non-theistic variety as illustrated in Paul Tillich. Tillich who at first taught theology in Germany with great social concern for his country, but his Christian socialism came to be regarded as heretical by theologians and unacceptable to politicians. He felt that if his ideas had been accepted, Hitler could not have risen to power. When Hitler s strength against the church became impossible, Tillich left Germany to teach at Union Seminary in New York City. 8 of 11

9 Tillich agreed with mystics that there is no objectively known meaning in life. It is not just that we cannot know its meaning, he says, there is none. But he felt his approach differed with that of mystics in several ways. In religious experience, he said, One does not lose self-identity, self-consciousness, rather one s self-image remains and one asserts oneself. Tillich did not want to minimize time in history or consider social problems unreal. Mystical experience lasts only briefly, but we must have the courage to act in faith in lasting way. We need the courage to be, the title of his book in 1952, even though we have no reason for our hope. Doubt could always undercut the evidence observed or inductive arguments based on causality, but religious experience transcends subject/object distinctions, and so we need an absolute faith. What is absolute faith? It is one that is an experience of power, of dependence. It is acceptance of being accepted. The object of faith in Tillich transcends personal categories, but avoids the loss of self by participation in being itself. Being itself is the underlying stuff of the existence of inorganic and organic realms. Absolute faith is based then on no evidence whatsoever. All evidence may, in fact, be to the contrary, but it says, yes, although it sees no concrete evidence. It says yes to forgiveness without any basis, and yes to purpose in life even though there is none. Faith overcomes the basic existential anxieties of life. Fear of meaninglessness, of guilt, and of death. We may appreciate the need for a faith that resolves our psychological problems, but it will only do that if it is rooted in philosophical truth about reality. No amount of affirmation against all evidence will deliver us from the hard facts of existence. The Death of God theologians like William Hamilton and Thomas Altizer considered Paul Tillich their forerunner. Tillich s impersonal Mysticism and was the John the Baptist for saying that there is no meaningful point in affirming the existence of a God who is powerful control of our world. John-Paul Sartre, a French atheistic existentialist, had chosen to decide for Atheism and in his play No Exit he said, Hell is other people. s commitment against evidence can go in evil directions as well as good, that its denial of any absolute distinctions between good and evil or reality and unreality or truth and falsehood, have provided no protection against this. So you have not only believing existentialists, but you have Atheistic for which France is best known. 9 of 11

10 What about Theistic? Soren Kierkegaard was its father and he held, No truth about God can be attained by reason or anything like the five arguments. Why? He thought there was an infinite qualitative distinction between God and man. What does that mean? It means that God is totally other, infinitely different in every quality. If you can say that humans have a mind and reason, you must deny that meaning of mind and reason to God. If we have emotions, God does not. If humans have a will, God does not have a will. God, he said, is totally different in every respect. Therefore, we cannot ascend to God. We cannot by our efforts determine what God is really like. God must descend to us and does so in the person of Jesus Christ alone. Karl Barth from Germany would later speak of Crystal Monism, the belief that there is revelation and salvation in Christ alone. The incarnation of the infinite Kierkegaard maintained, as did Barth, later is an irresolvable paradox. It is the most contradictory notion ever to occur in history. Revelation does not convey supra rational truths, but a person. We first decide and act then in order that understanding may follow. Existence is prior to essence in this existentialist analysis. The experience of God in Theistic is a person-to-person encounter in which the person is not absorbed into an impersonal absolute as in Mysticism, but as in Mysticism, the experience of revelation or salvation is not informative. Kierkegaard s faith was a leap into the dark, a passionate search at great risk, a commitment to an allegedly unknown person. Faith, if it proceeds from anything but a void, is unbelief. That was one of Kierkegaard s earliest assertions in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans in The absurd, he said in his postscript, is the object of faith and the only object that can be believed. Here again is the position that we cannot believe what we know. If we know something, we do not put trust in it. A Barthian existentialist said, Next to the foolishness of denying God, certainly the greatest is that of proving Him. So faith has nothing to do with reason pro or con. Faith must be attained in a flash. It is an immediately given, divinely implanted intuition that in Jesus Christ God has spoken. It is alleged then that this intuition is self-authenticating and needs no evidence. The problem with that is that other people claim self-authenticating experiences with people who deny what Jesus taught and exemplified. We cannot accept the claims of self-authenticating truth for contradictory assertions about the way to God or about experience of God that is allegedly redemptive. Religious language 10 of 11

11 then in existentialist thinking is only evocative of emotions and experiences, or it may be testimonial, but it is not informative. Because God is totally other than humans, all talk about God is necessarily paradoxical or contradictory, and it follows that all reasoning in relation to God is dialectical; that is, there is a thesis and an antithesis, an affirmation and denial, and out of this tension some nonrational experience is supposed to occur. Antinomies are to be expected, consistency or coherence is allegedly a sign of failure to understand the complexities involved. The downward trend of anti-intellectualism continues to this day. If you start on that in the name of devotion and deep religious experience, existential or mystical, can you stop the trend toward total Nihilism and Deconstructionism? As a result of such movements as these, the advertisements today provide no information about beer or other things, they just tell you to try it. Just do it! It s right for you! It s the right one, baby, huh? In Deconstructionism there is no connection between thought, speech, and reality. There are no criteria of truth. All language is just word games, and all commercials are just appeals to emotions with no truth to them. The only consideration is whether it is politically correct or useful. The issue is no longer finding truth about objective facts, rather the purpose is manipulation to get the end you want. Nietzsche and Derrida attack not on this or that truth, but the possibility of any truth. John Lennon sang, Just imagine, no heaven, no hell, no earth, no country, no religion, just the brotherhood of man. Imagination is not enough. Sooner or later we have to face up to reality an objective truth about it. We must either conform to objective truth or suffer the consequences. The deepest problem of America today is the crisis of moral values. The solution can only be found in a solid, reasoned case about our source and the Creator s principles for decency as we drive in traffic and as we walk on the streets. The total existentialists have no answer to the moral crisis in America and neither do the religious mystics as sincere as they seem to be, and these are the outlooks promoted in the New Age Movement which is being taken and bought by people all over our country in the health food stores, literature, and the holistic health approaches, many business seminars, and other influences. Christ-Centered Learning Anytime, Anywhere 11 of 11