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Critical of Eternity

11:09 AM - Feb. 8, 2007 - Add to the Wildness

How can a good God allow a man in the prime of his life, with a wife and five kids who need him, to die a horrible death of suffering? Why would God allow a man who was devoted to his faith and influenced people to think about their eternity, to go through this? Is this how God repays His servants?

As I sat at Victor’s funeral, these were not actually the questions going through my mind. Those are questions generally asked (aloud, anyway) by non-Christians. The questions going through my mind were, Is this really the right paradigm? Is my outlook on life accurate? Is heaven real, and is our hope real? What am I supposed to feel and think about this? Why am I so helpless to truly know anything at this moment?

Unlike a lot of people, I lost my taste long ago for emotional reassurance. I’ve learned I can convince myself to feel just about anything. I require substance and evidence in order to actually feel good in any meaningful way.

In the current newsletter from Creation Ministries International, (www.creationontheweb.org) Jeff Chiasson writes about verifiable statements. Some statements can be verified – the example he uses is, “White crows exist.” Only one white crow would be needed to demonstrate this as fact. However, as he points out, a statement like, “All crows are black” could never be verified – somewhere in the world, unobserved, an albino crow may be living happily ever after.

This precept of logic, not some spiritual arrogance, is why the Psalms say, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” (Ps. 10:4, 14:1, 53:1) Somewhere, unobserved, God may be living happily ever after. This really is a foolish statement, unverifiable and un“think”able in the sense that you can’t do anything with it from logic. It is an avoidance of intellect, not a demonstration of it.

The same premise can be applied to hell, heaven, the devil and angels, and the need for salvation. Saying they don’t exist doesn’t make it so. And yet, our culture’s best answer to the Bible’s statement that Christ died for the sins of humanity remains, “There is no need for a Saviour.”

When we ask questions of an abstract nature, in order to investigate them meaningfully, there is a process for tying them to observation and fact. Without that anchor, we’re left wandering in our own imaginings. Anything could be reality, and nothing truly is.

We have to start by phrasing things in a way that’s actually helpful to us. We can’t ask ourselves questions, or make presuppositional statements, that require omniscience on our part. We have to use terms that we can work with.

In matters eternal and unseen, can this be done? Yes, I believe it can.

The problem is that people try to make the leap from observable fact to conclusion without checking on how they get there.

Let me wander back to Hebrews 11:1 for a minute. The translators in the time of King James rendered it so: Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

I believe I’ve already mentioned Oregon apologist Dave Hunt’s observation that in order to be the substance and evidence of anything, faith must first have some substance and evidence of its own.

The Bible I use is the New American Standard Version, translated in the 1940s, and with a feature I happen to like – the sacrifice of some small amount of English grammar for the sake of retaining some of the structure of the original languages. Some would say it “goes clunk.” Having a hobbyist’s interest in linguistics, I would say, good on ya, guys.

Here is the same verse in the NASB, which brings out a different nuance of the original words – and this is why multiple translations are not a sign of Christian equivocation and disharmony, but important to our understanding.

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

This tells me that the original words are much deeper than either one translation alone can be. These words don’t signify just substance and evidence, they also signify the result of substance and evidence: Assurance. Conviction. Being absolutely, concretely convinced beyond all doubt.

Did I lose my faith at Victor’s funeral?

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Critical of Eternity

11:09 AM - Feb. 8, 2007 - Add to the Wildness

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