Tag Archives: Obligation

Commentary

The problem with the slogan “Christianity is not a religion, it’s a relationship”

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From blogger Allston Dee.

Excerpt:

Most people understand the word religion to mean a set of supposed truth claims about God and life after death; which are united with a way of life informed by those very truth claims. If this is how religion is defined, then Christianity surely is a “religion.”

Think of it this way—without proper doctrine, beliefs and sacraments (visible religious acts to symbolize God’s grace), how could one know they are in right relationship with God in the first place? If there was no religion (as defined above) at all, how does one know they are in relationship with God?

[…]Take for example the Christians and the Jews. An essential doctrine of the Christian faith is that Jesus is God and is the promised Messiah. Conversely, Jews believe that Jesus is not the promised Messiah and that he is not God. The law of non-contradiction (this is the second of the three basic laws of logic) attests that both of these statements cannot be true at the same time and in the same way. Either the Christians are right, or the Jews are right, or they are both wrong.

[…]It’s worth noting that most religions have a sense of a relationship with God. Given that Mormons, Jews, Muslims and Christians all claim to have a relationship with God—and that we know contradicting views on the nature of God cannot be true at the same time and in the same way—there must be something that defines the true nature of God and how we come into relationship with Him.

He writes that you need to know who God is before you can have a relationship with him. I agree.

And Melinda Penner of Stand to Reason also had something interesting to add to this:

First, we don’t know about Christianity by faith.  Everyone knows about the claims of Christianity and the Bible in the same ways other things are known.  Faith isn’t a way of knowing. It’s trusting in what we have come to know to be true.  Faith is laying hold personally of what is true in the Bible.  Knowledge is the first step and it’s no different than coming to know about anything else.  So it can be discussed between those who have faith and those who don’t because they’re both operating in the same way to evaluate truth claims.  Faith comes after knowing.

Second, Christianity isn’t a private topic.  This is a way to subjectivize Christianity – to relativize what Christians believe.  But essential to the what the Bible teaches is that it’s not subjective or relative.  It’s true for all people.  Things happened in history that were witnessed and reported.  And what the Bible teaches is for all people.  So engage in consideration of the truth claims of Christianity, but don’t dismiss them as private, subjective beliefs.

I agree with her, too. My concern with the notion of Christianity as a relationship is that people will cash it out as a subjective thing that they do for fun privately and that it is never the basis of public actions or words. And my fear is that without theology, people just project their own character onto God and discern his character through their feelings and intuitions, instead of through a study of the Bible and theology.

A relationship is not projecting your needs and desires onto the other person. A relationship is when you get to know the other person by studying him, and you start to incorporate his values and goals into your behavior. You re-prioritize to take his needs into account when you act. And when you act on his interests, it may be the case that other people won’t like you, and that might make you feel bad. But when you are the other person’s friend, you do what’s right for them and you just live with the fact that not everyone is going to like that. The Christian life is not about a private relationship and private feelings. It’s about the public actions you take because of your knowledge and convictions about God’s character. It’s not private. It’s not meant to make you feel good. It’s public.

Consider Matthew 10:32-33:

32“Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven.

33But whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven.

And her’s another like it 1 Corinthians 4:1-4:

1So then, men ought to regard us as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the secret things of God.

2Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful.

3I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself.

4My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me.

And 2 Timothy 2:4:

4 No one serving as a soldier gets entangled in civilian affairs, but rather tries to please his commanding officer.

And 2 Corinthians 5:20:

20 We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.

A good ambassador doesn’t represent himself – he doesn’t project his character onto his sovereign. A good ambassador represents his sovereign, and that requires knowing about him, as well as experiencing him. When you have a relationship, you have a responsibility to know who that other person is and to act on their interests – which may be quite different from your interests. And it really doesn’t matter what the people around you, who are not friends with your friend, think about you for doing that.

Polemics

Craig Hazen asks: “can atheists be good without God?”

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Craig Hazen encourages Christians to challenge the New Atheists on their claims of being good without God (and claiming that God is a moral monster, too). How are they helping themselves to objective morality on atheism, so that these statements are more than just their personal opinions?

Hazen writes:

The primary technique the new atheists have adopted for dealing with the issue of the origin or grounding of the moral law is obfuscation. The new atheists are very fond of saying, “We don’t need God to be good.” Indeed, they often say that atheists, agnostics and skeptics often lead more wholesome lives than lifelong professing Christians. Now, theists should not be fooled by this. Our response should be, “Of course you don’t need God to be good — we’ve never claimed that you do.” You see, it is not knowledge (epistemology) of the moral law that is a problem — after all, the Bible teaches that this law is written on every human heart. Rather, the daunting problem for the new atheist is the nature and source (ontology) of the moral law. Here are some questions you can ask Richard Dawkins the next time you sit next to him on a bus:

• If everything ultimately must be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry, help me understand what a moral value is (does it have mass, occupy space, hold a charge, have wavelength)?

• How did matter, energy, time and chance result in a set of objective moral values? Did the big bang really spew forth “love your enemy?” If so, you have to help me understand that.

• What makes your moral standard more than a subjective opinion or personal preference? What makes it truly binding or obligatory? Why can’t I just ignore it? Won’t our end be the same (death and the grave) either way?

The old atheists did not want to have to face questions like these, so they simply denied the reality of objective moral values. The new atheists have thrown the door open. Let’s not make it easy for them. Let’s ask the hard questions in a winsome and engaging way.

Where does the standard that allows atheists to “be good” come from on atheism? And where does the standard that allows them to judge God as evil come from on atheism?

Comedy: atheists making moral demands on atheists

I think that this article on The Other McCain is relevant to Hazen’s essay. The article explains the latest scandal in the atheist blogosphere: A 30-year old divorced atheist feminist tried to impose objective moral obligations on another atheist who hit on her in an elevator.

Excerpt:

There is nothing wrong with “don’t do that” as advice. The guy’s approach was clumsy and creepy. But it seems obvious, to me at least, that he was merely exhibiting a deficiency of social skills, rather than predatory menace.

While we cannot rule out the possibility that the guy is a serial killer with the bodies of 11 victims buried in his backyard, I’m inclined to believe he was just awkward and clueless. It was 4 a.m. and, in the famous words of Mickey Gilley, “The women all get prettier at closing time.” What was this guy’s blood-alcohol content? Was he at the beer-goggles stage where he saw Watson as Ingrid Bergman and thought he was Humphrey Bogart?

Well, as Watson says, “don’t do that.” But it’s a huge leap from “don’t do that” to a very broad and general accusation of misogyny and a complaint about being sexualized.

What set off the big brouhaha amongst atheists and feminists, however, was when Dawkins showed up in the comments of a blog to belittle Watson’s complaint by comparing her unpleasant elevator experience to the sufferings of women in the Islamic world. Once the feminists started screaming for blood, Dawkins’s fellow atheists were only too happy to throw him under the bus. The reaction was as if Dawkins himself had hit on Watson.

This is one of those episodes where the totalitarian impulse of feminism is glaringly apparent. Feminists ferociously suppress dissent and seek to impose a conformity of thought, so that anyone within the movement who expresses doubt about the dogma and the agenda is condemned as a heretic.

But I wanted to address the issue of atheism and morality in my comment to McCain’s post:

It’s hilarious to me that a woman can be an atheist, think the universe is an accident, think that there is no objective moral law based on a design for how humans ought to be, and then prescribe criteria for male behavior as if it is not just her personal opinion, but is a shared, objective standard that men should adhere to.

If the universe is an accident, then whatever is, is right. If matter is all there is, then there is no way that the matter “ought to be”. Matter just is.

Here’s Dawkins himself:
“In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”

Source:
http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~chester/CES/may98/dawkins.html

You can’t derive a prescriptive morality if nature is just about survival of the fitness. Either we are moral agents endowed with consciousness and free will (which requires a non-material soul) OR WE ARE ANIMALS. And animals are not moral agents. The customs and conventions of different social groups in different times and places in history are not objective moral duties. They are just like culinary customs and dress styles. And you can’t accuse anyone of being immoral on that kind of relativistic view. The worst she could say is “I don’t like it” or “that person is acting unfashionably”. She can’t say that anything is WRONG.

And I also thought this comment to McCain’s post was pretty funny:

There’s a possibility here that you’re overlooking, which is that the young lady might just have wanted for people to know–in a shrill, scolding, disapproving, school-marmish kinda way–that somebody was attracted to her. Because otherwise, you know, we would probably assume that nobody is.

Indeed. It makes me laugh when atheists assert that marriage, which is built on self-sacrifice and moral obligations, is somehow compatible with the view that morality is “an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes”, as atheist Michael Ruse says. Atheists reduce morality to personal opinions and cultural conventions that vary by time and place, and then they demand that other people act according to those preferences and conventions. “[They] laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in [their] midst. [They] castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful”, as C.S. Lewis argues in his essay “Men Without Chests”.

Recall the study that showed that Christians who attend church regularly have vastly lower divorce rates than average. Maybe that’s because they are constantly reminded in church that morality is rooted in God’s character, and not a figment of their imaginations that can be vetoed for selfish gain? That might be a helpful bit of knowledge to have in your worldview if you’re considering marriage, you know. Love requires that the idea of self-sacrifice be rationally grounded in some sort of objective design for the universe and us. You can’t get love from selfishness. You can’t get marriage from survival of the fittest. Not rationally, anyway. And when the chips are down, and obligations clash with self-interest, reason has a major part to play in determining how we will act. Either you ground morality or you cave in to selfishness, and marriages don’t last when you have no reason not to be selfish.

By the way, the best article refuting evolutionary explanations of morality is written by Mark D. Linville. It’s in the book “Contending with Christianity’s Critics“.

Hmmn, I wonder where this link goes.

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Mentoring

Do you need to have a special feeling before you can share your faith?

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Here’s a fun commentary from Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason.

First, the setup:

A couple of days ago, someone asked me about how much initiative I took sharing my faith in public. Do I wait for the Holy Spirit to “lead” me–waiting until I feel like God wants me to talk to a particular person–or do I just jump in on my own without a special directive from the Lord?

I’ll tell you the truth. If I waited for the Holy Spirit to “lead” me in that sense, I’d never do anything. I rarely “feel impressed” to do anything God commands, including witnessing.

That’s one of the problems with this approach. It’s a mistake to think that being led by the Spirit is a subjective thing, as if you can feel the tugging of the Holy Spirit grabbing you by the ear or the heart and pulling you along. That isn’t what the leading of the Spirit means in the Scriptures.

And a snarky excerpt:

Here’s how it works out for me. When I get on an airplane, I do not usually want to talk to anybody about the Lord. I want to work on my computer, I want to read, I want to watch the movie, I want to sleep. I don’t want to be bothered with conversation about spiritual things. Maybe that doesn’t sound very admirable, but that’s the way I feel.

Even though I feel that way, though, I know something different. I know, first of all, that I’m a Christian. I hold the information that can transform people’s lives and can secure their eternity. I have something valuable that every person needs. Proverbs says I ought not withhold something good from somebody when it’s within my power to do it (Prov. 3:27).

So when I get on a plane, I don’t feel like sharing my faith, but my attitude is to be obedient to whatever opportunity the Lord gives to me. My goal is to be available. I say, “Lord, I don’t want to talk to anyone today; I want to have an easy, conflict-free flight. That’s my desire. I don’t ‘feel led.’ But Lord, if you give me an opportunity to make a difference for the Kingdom in some way–to plant a seed, to give a word of encouragement, whatever–I’m available.”

Then, I just keep my eyes open. Generally, in the context of a conversation, I try to drop a word or two or a statement, that might open the door to spiritual things. I toss ought some bait and see if I get a nibble. I don’t try to force the situation, but sometimes–to continue the fishing metaphor–I do throw some chum in the water to see if I can trigger a little appetite.

Sometimes I get that opportunity when people ask me what I do for a living. Since I’m a writer, an educator, a student, a seminar speaker, a talk show host, and a CEO, I can say a lot of different things. I try to choose that particular description of my work that I think would offer the best opportunity to introduce spiritual things with the particular person I’m talking to.

So my goal is to be available to the opportunities God sovereignly gives me to be obedient. I look for a chance to plant a seed somewhere. I don’t do it because I feel moved by the Spirit, led by the Spirit, prompted, nudged, pushed or anything like that. I do it because I want to be faithful, to be obedient. My goal as a Christian is not to follow whatever I think my feelings are telling me, but to do those things I ought to be doing, and I don’t need a personalized message for that.

He then goes on to give an example of how he puts this into practice.

One of the things I like about Greg is that he comes across as a tough, non-sense Christian. I think a lot of men would be a lot more interested in Christianity if they realized that they could get into disagreements and take bold stands and be the pilots of their own lives – instead of waiting for the right feelings.

Soldiers don’t wait to feel like fighting when they are on the battlefield. They just do their jobs. There is plenty of time to talk about feelings with other Christians after you you finish the battle. Then you can be as emotional as you want – once the fighting is done.