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Polemics

What does the Bible mean when it uses the word “faith”?

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From Tektonics.

Here’s a popular view of faith that says that people believe weird things by acts of will:

Consider these three views:

  1. A “faith healer” named Benny Pophagin offers to heal Joe of his lumbago. Benny lays hands on Joe and prays, but the lumbago remains. Benny waves Joe away, saying, “This is your problem. You don’t have enough faith.”
  2. A Christian faces several objections to his beliefs that he cannot answer. He says, “I don’t care what people say, I still have faith.”
  3. The famous skeptic Mark Twain said, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”

Can anyone guess what is wrong with this picture?

The answer is that all of these examples offer an incorrect definition or understanding of what Biblical faith is all about. Twain’s own definition does correctly (with some negative emphasis) embody the way “faith” is understood by far too many today — but it does not match the Biblical definition of that word, and as the first two examples suggest, “faith” is a badly misunderstood concept in the church at large.

Atheists and many Christians seem to agree on that view of faith… but is that view Biblical?

Here’s an excerpt from the article showing the Biblical view of faith:

The Greek word behind “faith” in the NT is pistis. As a noun, pistis is a word that was used as a technical rhetorical term for forensic proof.

Examples of this usage are found in the works of Aristotle and Quintiallian, and in the NT in Acts 17:31:

Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.

If you are used to thinking of “faith” in terms of our first two examples, this will assuredly come as a surprise. The raising of Christ is spoken of here as a proof that God will judge the world. However, if we think about the missionary preaching of the book of Acts, this makes perfect sense and teaches us a certain lesson.

Here is more food for thought: Is there anyplace in the NT where we can find someone giving their “personal testimony”?

The answer is yes — but it is in Phil. 3, where Paul gives his personal testimony about his former life, when writing to fellow Christians. He does not use it in a missionary setting to unbelievers.

Indeed, one will find nowhere in the NT an example of missionaries, or anyone, giving their personal testimony.

This is for good reason. The ancients conceived of personality as static; the way you were born is the way you stayed. Personal change was not a focus, because it was thought impossible. This is why the church remained suspicious of Paul even after his conversion, and until Barnabas (who probably knew Paul previously) testified on his behalf.

But note well: The following is not the sort of thing one will find in the NT:

Acts 2:48-52 And Peter arose and said, Men and brethren, I testify to you that whereas I formerly smoked mustard leaves, drank wine, cursed daily, and smelled moreover of fish, when the Lord Jesus Christ entered my heart I became clean. Now I no longer smoke, I no longer drink, my language is no longer filthy, and I bathe daily. Praise the Lord!

On the contrary.Here is what we do find in the missionary preaching of the NT:

Acts 2:22-36 Ye men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know: Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain: Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was not possible that he should be holden of it. For David speaketh concerning him, I foresaw the Lord always before my face, for he is on my right hand, that I should not be moved…Men and brethren, let me freely speak unto you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his sepulchre is with us unto this day. Therefore being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him, that of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne; He seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in hell, neither his flesh did see corruption. This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses. Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear… Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ.

Peter’s primary appeal here was threefold:

  1. He appealed to the evidence of the wonders and signs performed by Jesus;
  2. he appealed to the empty tomb,
  3. and he appealed to fulfillment of OT prophecy.

In short, his appeals were evidentiary. One of course might wish to dispute the validity of the evidence, but in context this is beside the point. The point is that Peter grounded belief in Christianity on evidence — or, as the definition of pistis in Acts 17:31 would put it, proofs.

If Paul and Peter would around today, Paul would have a Ph.D in Astrophysics (Romans 1) and Peter would have a Ph.D in Ancient History (Acts 2). And they would be using good theistic arguments to defend belief in God, and historical evidence to defend the resurrection. Because Christianity is all about the evidence. Always has been, always will be. We do not offer Christianity to people on the basis of feelings or life enhancement. It is true, and that’s all.

Here is my article on whether the Bible opposes logic and evidence. And one about why some (weird) Christians don’t defend their faith.

UPDATE: Michael sends me this video from Greg Koukl:

And notes that Greg Koukl has a new book coming out soon, called “Faith is Not Wishing”. Greg Koukl formed my views on what faith is, along with R.C. Sproul and J.P. Moreland. For now, you can read this article about faith by Greg Koukl, and it’s FREE.

Commentary

If things go wrong in a relationship, who is to blame?

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I was having a discussion with a Christian woman last night (who can comment, if she likes) about who is to blame in relationships when things go wrong.

My basic contention is that whenever something goes wrong in a relationship, then the person whose expectations are dashed is to blame.

The reason why I think this is because you have to take people as you find them and then vet them as if they were job applicants applying for the job of marriage. The job of marriage has very specific requirements, and these requirements are objective. Someone is going to have to raise the kids, someone is going to have to cook the meals, someone is going to have to earn the bulk of the money, someone is going to have to deal with the beasties that invade the home. The goal of the relationship is not to test the person to see if they are “fun” or whether your friends are envious. The goal of the relationship is to test the person for the role they will play in the marriage.

So consider the case where a man has sex with and then dumps a woman, who expected him to marry her and have children. Who is to blame? On my view, it’s the woman who is to blame. The man was bad before she got there, and you cannot expect a bad man to act good, just because you imagine that he will. Imagination is not the equivalent of passing an interview with the woman’s father, and getting the father’s approval. Imagination is not a 12-year resume with no gaps. Imagination is not a $500,000 investment portfolio. Imagination is not a paid-off home. Imagination is not a handful of reference letters from his former girlfriends. If the woman relied on her imagination, then the woman is to blame for the man’s bad conduct.

Sometimes, what I’ve noticed is that women tend to focus on the bad thing that the men do that is counter to their expectations, because they project a standard of morality onto the man that the man expressly repudiates. In fact, I have actually met atheistic women who think that atheistic men should act based on some standard of morality. But the problem is that neither the atheist woman nor the atheist man accepts any objective standard of morality. If there is no designer to the universe, then the universe is an accident, and there is no way that we OUGHT to be. If there is no way we OUGHT to be, then there is no point in expecting anyone to be any way – it’s just your opinion against their opinion. So you have a woman expecting a man to act according to some standard that she doesn’t think is real by her own worldview!And meanwhile, the good men are passed by because we are “too strict”, “too religious”, “too moral”, “too chaste”, “too sober”, “too predictable” and “there is no chemistry”. (Chemistry = emotional craziness)

What this means is that women end up feeling free to drink as much as they want, have sex with whoever they want on the basis of appearance and popularity, and then expect that sex will cause the man to immediately propose with a diamond ring, a massive expensive wedding in Hawaii, a huge palatial home, and so on. The moral laws that might block a woman from doing bad things are “too strict” for her to follow, but they expect men to follow moral rules that they don’t follow themselves! Women actually believe that drunken hook-up sex will cause really immoral men to drop their hedonistic, atheistic lifestyles and act completely differently than they were before. What causes women to think this? It isn’t reason and evidence, that’s for sure. I think they think that men who are good looking and popular have some store of hidden virtue that is unlocked by having sex with the woman who is their “soul mate”. Somehow, a magical spell will come over a self-centered, muscle-bound lout and he will be filled with thoughts of marriage and babies. Women actually think that! And what happens is that after choosing the wrong man and getting pregnant, etc. with him, they blame the man for the subsequent abortions, affairs, domestic violence, etc. In short, the problem is this: women go to the pet store, pass by all the dogs and cats and bird, and bring home a trendy and attractive alligator, who then promptly bites each of their limbs off. And then the women complain that the alligator is very unfair and immoral. Who is really to blame here? The alligator, who is just doing what comes naturally for alligators, or the woman who passed the good pets by and brought home a monster?

It sounds like I am blaming women, but I’m not – but she wasn’t convinced. So I invented a new example to show how men could be to blame, unlikely though that may be, since men are perfect in every way. This time, I imagined what would happen if a stripper-gram woman showed up at my door. I actually told the woman I was chatting with that I had to go because a stripper-gram HAD shown up. I told the woman how attractive the stripper was, and how I was in love with her, and wanted to marry her. How she undoubtedly was very wealthy, and well educated, and how she would help me to raise little Michele Bachmanns and William Lane Craigs. I waxed eloquently on her B.A. in integrated science with a minor in philosophy of religion, M.A. in economics and her J.D. in defamation law. All of which I had no evidence for, except for the feelings of love aroused by the site of her naked cleavage. Besides, I explained, it would be easier for me to change her to match my boobie-induced delusions of her after we were married. At this point, my debating partner began to see the point. She could see that this imaginary stripper was going to dash my expectations, and probably cheat on me, and spend all my savings on shoes and breast implants. And who would be to blame? ME! Because I am the one who was refusing to court her properly, and instead inventing an entire future life together that the imaginary stripper and I had never discussed, nor was she capable of meeting those requirements.

I actually know a Christian-raised atheist woman who co-habitated with a left-wing, global-warming atheist and then got pregnant and had an abortion, and she blamed the man for this. As if an atheist should be expected to believe in objective moral values and marriage! As if the man had been able to get her to co-habitate and get pregnant without her consent! She accepted no responsibility for her choice of this man whatsoever. And when I told her about the dangers of pre-marital sex and the importance of courting rules, she dismissed them as being too strict, claiming that a good job, chastity, virginity, apologetics, a firmly-grounded Christian faith, a rational basis for morality, sobriety, and so on, were all totally unnecessary for a sensible successful marriage. Still! After all that! Her sole criteria for a man? CHEMISTRY! And the approval of her female peers, who were all penniless, up to their eyeballs in student loans and credit card debt, and had degrees in squishy-headed non-engineering/non-science fields, like English, Women’s Studies, Journalism and Peace Studies. Phooey!

So this kind of thing really happens, and many of the people who should bear the responsibility are oblivious to the fact that they have any duty at all to actually evaluate romantic partners rationally and objectively to see if they are able to meet the demands of marriage and parenting. People act as if drunkenness, partying, promiscuity and selfishness are pre-requisites to a good marriage. And that fathers have no role to play in setting out boundaries for their daughters and making them accountable for their decisions.

For all the men out there, if this sort of crazy irrational avoidance of responsibility strikes a chord with you, I urge you to go out and watch the 2008 movie “Taken” with Liam Neeson. For a more gritty dramatic movie, I recommend the movie “Thirteen”from 2003. Fathers matter. Husbands matter.

I was having a discussion with a Christian woman last night (who can comment, if she likes) about who is to blame in relationships when things go wrong.

My basic contention is that whenever something goes wrong in a relationship, then the person whose expectations are dashed is to blame.

The reason why I think this is because you have to take people as you find them and then vet them as if they were job applicants applying for the job of marriage. The job of marriage has very specific requirements, and these requirements are objective. Someone is going to have to raise the kids, someone is going to have to cook the meals, someone is going to have to earn the bulk of the money, someone is going to have to deal with the beasties that invade the home. The goal of the relationship is not to test the person to see if they are “fun” or whether your friends are envious. The goal of the relationship is to test the person for the role they will play in the marriage.

So consider the case where a man has sex with and then dumps a woman, who expected him to marry her and have children. Who is to blame? On my view, it’s the woman who is to blame. The man was bad before she got there, and you cannot expect a bad man to act good, just because you imagine that he will. Imagination is not the equivalent of passing an interview with the woman’s father, and getting the father’s approval. Imagination is not a 12-year resume with no gaps. Imagination is not a $500,000 investment portfolio. Imagination is not a paid-off home. Imagination is not a handful of reference letters from his former girlfriends. If the woman relied on her imagination, then the woman is to blame for the man’s bad conduct.

At this point, the woman in question started to disagree with me. She thought that all people (especially those evil men) should be expected to act like Christian theists, and that if they didn’t then they were to blame. In other words, people should feel feel free to drink as much as they want, have sex with whoever they want on the basis of appearance and popularity, and then expect that sex will cause the man to immediately propose with a diamond ring, a massive expensive wedding in Hawaii, a huge palatial home, and so on. Women actually belief that drunken hook-up sex will cause really immoral men to drop their hedonistic, atheistic lifestyles and cause men to act completely differently than they were before. What causes women to think this? It isn’t reason and evidence, that’s for sure. I think they think that men who are good looking and popular have some store of hidden virtue that is unlocked by having sex with the woman who is their “soul mate”. Somehow, a magical spell will come over a self-centered, muscle-bound lout and he will be filled with thoughts of marriage and babies. Women actually think that!

Well, she thought I was just blaming women again, which I love to do. So I invented a new example to show how men could be to blame, unlikely though that may be, since men are perfect in every way. This time, I imagined what would happen if a stripper-gram woman showed up at my door. I actually told the woman I was chatting with that I had to go because a stripper-gram HAD shown up. I told the woman who lovely the stripper was, and how I was in love with her, and wanted to marry her. How she undoubtedly was very wealthy, and would help me to raise little Michele Bachmanns and William Lane Craigs. I waxed eloquently on her B.A. in integrated science with a minor in philosophy of religion, M.A. in economics and her J.D. in defamation law. All of which I had no evidence for, except for the feelings of love aroused by the site of her naked cleavage. Besides, I explained, it would be easier for me to change her to match my boobie-induced delusions after we were married. At this point, my debating partner began to see the point. She could see that this imaginary stripper was going to dash my expectations, and probably cheat on me, and spend all my savings on shoes and breast implants. And who would be to blame? ME! Because I am the one who was refusing to court her properly, and instead inventing an entire future life together that the imaginary stripper and I had never discussed, nor was she capable of meeting those requirements.

So now I would like to hear from my commenters what they think about this way of assigning blame so that it is not based on the degree of bad thing that is done. Instead I assign blame to the person who chooses the wrong person for a relationship, for the wrong reasons, and then hopes to change that person later.

I actually know a Christian-raised woman who co-habitated with a left-wing, global-warming atheist and then got pregnant and had an abortion, and she blamed the man for this. As if an atheist should be expected to believe in objective moral values and marriage! As if the man had been able to get her to co-habitate and get pregnant without her consent! She accepted no responsibility for her choice of this man whatsoever. And when I told her about the dangers of pre-marital sex and the importance of courting rules, she dismissed them as being too strict, claiming that a good job, chastity, virginity, apologetics, a firmly-grounded Christian faith, a rational basis for morality, sobriety, and so on, were all totally unnecessary for a sensible successful marriage. Still! After all that! Her sole criteria for a man? CHEMISTRY! And the approval of her female peers, who were all penniless, up to their eyeballs in student loans and credit card debt, and had degrees in squishy-headed non-engineering/non-science fields, like English, Women’s Studies, Journalism and Grievance Mongering Socialist Theory. (That is a real degree at Wellesley College, I am pretty sure) Phooey!

So this kind of thing really happens, and many of the people who I think should bear the responsibility are oblivious to the fact that they have any duty at all to actually evaluate romantic partners rationally and objectively to see if they are able to meet the demands of marriage and parenting. People act as if drunkenness, partying, promiscuity and selfishness are pre-requisites to a good marriage. And that fathers have no role to play in setting out boundaries for their daughters and making them accountable for their decisions.

For all the men out there, if this sort of crazy irrational avoidance of responsibility strikes a chord with you, I urge you to go out and watch the 2008 movie “Taken” with Liam Neeson. For a more gritty dramatic movie, I recommend the movie “Thirteen”from 2003. Fathers matter. Husbands matter.

Commentary

The New York Times explains why the leftist elite supports narcissism and divorce

16 Comments

Here’s a wonderful romantic story endorsed by the New York Times, which represents the worldview of elite leftists. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

WHAT happens when love comes at the wrong time?

Carol Anne Riddell and John Partilla met in 2006 in a pre-kindergarten classroom. They both had children attending the same Upper West Side school. They also both had spouses.

[…]Mrs. Riddell was a reporter and anchor on WNBC television in New York and a mother of two.[…]Mr. Partilla, then a 42-year-old triathlete and a president of media sales at Time Warner, recognized a kindred dynamo. “She’s such a force,” he said. “She rocks back and forth on her feet as if she can’t contain her energy as she’s talking to you.”

The connection was immediate, but platonic. In fact, as they became friends so did their spouses. There were dinners, Christmas parties and even family vacations together.

So Ms. Riddell was surprised to find herself eagerly looking for Mr. Partilla at school events — and missing him when he wasn’t there. “I didn’t admit to anyone how I felt,” she said. “To even think about it was disruptive and disloyal.”

What she didn’t know was that he was experiencing similar emotions. “First I tried to deny it,” Mr. Partilla said. “Then I tried to ignore it.”

But it was hard to ignore their easy rapport. They got each other’s jokes and finished each other’s sentences. They shared a similar rhythm in the way they talked and moved. The very things one hopes to find in another person, but not when you’re married to someone else.

Ms. Riddell said she remembered crying in the shower, asking: “Why am I being punished? Why did someone throw him in my path when I can’t have him?”

[…]As Mr. Partilla saw it, their options were either to act on their feelings and break up their marriages or to deny their feelings and live dishonestly.

[…]“I did a terrible thing as honorably as I could,” said Mr. Partilla, who moved out of his home, reluctantly leaving his three children.

[…]The pain he had predicted pervaded both of their lives as they faced distraught children and devastated spouses, while the grapevine buzzed and neighbors ostracized them.

[…]All they had were their feelings, which Ms. Riddell described as “unconditional and all-encompassing.”

“I came to realize it wasn’t a punishment, it was a gift,” she said. “But I had to earn it. Were we brave enough to hold hands and jump?”

[…]“I didn’t believe in the word soul mate before, but now I do,” said Mr. Partilla.

[…]“My kids are going to look at me and know that I am flawed and not perfect, but also deeply in love,” she said. “We’re going to have a big, noisy, rich life, with more love and more people in it.”

Just FYI, I am using the word “adultery” for this because I consider carrying on an emotional affair while you are married to be adultery.

I think that this view is very popular among liberal elite circles, such as New York city. These elite liberals get very impatient with morality once they have risen to a certain level. They tend to want to elevate the pursuit of happiness (the “right” to be happy) over moral obligations to other family members who depend on them. There is no transcendent purpose for marriage, on their view – it is just another thing that is supposed to make them happy, like cars, vacations and careers. It doesn’t really matter what happens to the children. The leftist elites blunder their way into marriages thinking that marriage is just another accessory added to their exciting glamorous lives, like triathlons and careers in news media. (Or yoga, recycling, animal rights crusading, and vegetarianism in other cases). Then they find a way to weasel out of their marriages so that they can be happier and more fulfilled with more glamorous and exciting partners. But what is the deeper issue underlying this view of marriage? After all, people didn’t use to treat marriage as being about personal fulfillment… what happened?

The root cause

Obviously the people in our story are either functional atheists or outright atheists, since they are unrepentant adulterers. So why do atheists struggle so much with staying married? Let’s see.

You know how I am always talking about how atheism doesn’t rationally ground self-sacrificial moral obligations? Well this instance of adultery is exactly the kind of example that I am talking about. The problems with atheism and morality arises when an atheist is confronted with a desire to be happy that goes against what his society in that time and place considers to be moral. On atheism, right and wrong are relative to an arbitrary time and place in which the atheist was born – they are just like traffic laws and clothing fashions. It’s arbitrary. And no atheist in the world is going to sacrifice a moment of happiness because of arbitrary customs and conventions that change over time and place – as long as they can escape the consequences. The whole point of atheism is to dismiss moral obligations, to look down on those who are moral as stupid, and to pursue selfish happiness in this life. But what happens when atheists face a “moral obligation” (as defined by culture) that goes against their self-interest, i.e. – their feelings?  Well, the moral obligations go out the window – as long as they can avoid the social costs and punishments of their society (which is why the left is always so busy breaking down the Judeo-Christian morality of parents in the secular leftist public schools – they don’t want your kids to judge them for things like adultery and divorce). This is why the left support same-sex marriage – they want to redefine marriage so that it is based on the feelings and needs of selfish adults, not on moral obligations to children. The left doesn’t care about born children any more than they care about unborn children – they care about themselves. And they spin these self-serving “i’m the brave victim of your silly cultural prejudices” stories to minimize their culpability for the damage they cause. They are inventing a new standard of morality – one that glorifies selfishness and the triumph of the strong over the weak (children, born and unborn).

On the Christian worldview, God is real, and he has a design plan for us. Part of that design plan is that we were made to honor our relationship with him. Honoring that relationship with him means treating others a certain way, especially our spouses and children. We have to train our whole lives in order to be able to shoulder the burdens of family relationships – to our spouse and to our children. If a man neglects his education or his employment history or his investment portfolio, then he cannot be a provider. His feelings on those obligations don’t matter. If he wants to marry, he has a God-given obligation to provide. If a woman reads “The Shack” instead of “On Guard”, votes Democrat because she thinks that the Comedy Channel is more reliable than Fox News, and sleeps around a lot in college after freely choosing to make herself drunk, then she has failed to prepare for her role as a mother and wife. Denying yourself happiness as you prepare for moral obligations in a marriage is not rational in a godless universe. If God does not exist, then there is no way you ought to be, and no way marriage ought to be, and no way children ought to be treated. Children are the biggest victims of all – if the leftists aren’t killing them outright through abortion, then they are voting for no-fault divorce, single mother welfare, same-sex marriage, etc. in order to encourage selfish adults to deny children relationships with their two biological parents.

The problem with the left is that they want the prestige of marriage, but they won’t give up their selfish moral relativism. But how can marriage, which is built on the idea of vows and self-sacrificial moral obligations, be entered into by non-theistic self-centered leftists who are guided only by their self-interest and their emotions? It can’t. What they should have done is invented a new relationship, like cohabitation, and entered into that. But what they did, and what same-sex marriage activists are trying to do, is entering into marriage and then changing marriage into cohabitation by law. This is what conservatives mean when we say that no-fault divorce and same-sex marriage change marriage. If one party can dissolve a marriage unilaterally, then marriage has no meaning. If marriage can be had by people in non-exclusive relationships, then marriage has no meaning. They should have invented somethings else – something consistent with a worldview that denies self-sacrifice and moral obligations to children.

Anyway, read the whole disgusting, self-serving New York Times story, and leave me some comments.