Living Their Faith

The Detroit Free Press has an article entitled “How a married gay Catholic couple live their faith.”* It tells of a homosexual couple who got married in an Episcopal church because “their Catholic faith is against same-sex marriage.”

Which makes me wonder whose faith it actually is.

Actually, it doesn’t make me wonder at all. I know whose faith it is. It is the faith of the couple, not the faith of the Catholic church. It is not Catholic faith that enables homosexuals to marry. In fact, the Catholic faith (at least as of now) still forbids it.

These two men believe that their homosexuality is acceptable. And therefore they live by that faith. Their church does not believe that, nor does it teach it. That’s why they had to get married somewhere else. So when these two men get “married,” it is in opposition to the faith they claim, but in line with the faith they hold.

But, lest you think I am just beating on Catholics, these two men are just like the rest of us. We all live our faith. We live by what we believe. Even atheists live by their beliefs. They are not, as commonly thought, people without faith. In fact, it takes more faith to be an atheist then it does to be a Christian.

The only question is whether or not what we believe is what we should believe. It is whether our faith lines up with the faith that God commands us to have. It is whether our faith is big enough to account for the world that we live in.

These days, faith has become very personalized. “I believe; you believe; we all believe; good for all of us.” Or “It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you believe something.”
In this, the subjective and personal nature of faith has become confused with truth. It has made it so that people feel good about their own faith whether or not that faith makes any sense at all, or whether or not it is true.

Most would agree that it is neither good nor virtuous to believe something that is not true. In fact, it is dangerous in many cases, and damning in some. If you choose to believe in Santa Claus or the Elf on the Shelf, you will survive. If you choose to believe that God doesn’t exist or that homosexuality is okay, then you won’t survive, at least not for long.

What these two men have done is hijack the Catholic faith for their own purposes. They desire to salve their own consciences by burning the candle at both ends. At the one end, they can fulfill their lusts by continuing and even legitimizing their relationship. On the other end they can fulfill their own lusts by holding to a religion.

Except they aren’t holding to a religion. They have instead created their own.

Let us not mistake faith for truth. Let us not believe that faith has the power to create or, for that matter, the power to condemn. That responsibility belongs to God alone. Our responsibility is to believe what God has already said, not to “lawyer it” to death for our own ends.

Having faith is not necessarily a good thing, though it is a necessary thing. By that I mean you can’t live without faith. Everyone believes something. But not everyone believes the right thing.

And so God has given us his word that we might not simply believe, but that we might rightly believe.

So believe it and then live by that belief.


*Yes, the capitals, or lack thereof, belong to the Freep, not to me.

The Problem with Christianity

We have viewed Christianity individualistically—“am I right with God?” (not that this is unimportant). And in so doing have privatized the faith and  have lost in large measure the larger vision of the redemption not just of individuals but society and the world.

So said M. James Sawyer in response to Michael Spenser’s piece about The Coming Evangelical Collapse.

I see this sentiment often—that our faith is too personal. I think it could not be more misguided. While Sawyer has some interesting, and I think some good, stuff to say, on this particular point, I think Sawyer is wrong.

To bolster his point, Sawyer uses examples such as abortions, business ethic, and marriage.

For instance, he claims that 40% of abortions are performed on evangelical women who would rather “commit what they believe to be murder than to live with the shame and ostracism of the community that was supposed to love them.” (I am not disputing the number.)

He continues “The ethical reputation of evangelicals in business is so notorious as to make the term Evangelical Ethics an oxymoron. Many Christians let alone non-Christians will not do business with those who make public their evangelical commitment.” (I am not disputing the sentiment.)

What’s the problem? The problem is not that faith is too personal, that Christianity is too individualistic.

It is precisely the opposite. It is not personal enough. We are too concerned with what other think (abortion) or with finding success in this world (business ethics). Our faith is not personal enough to cause us to do right in spite of those around us.

Take the abortion example: A woman whose faith in God is extremely personal and individualistic will be more committed to obeying God and less worried about the supposed response of the community around her. But because she is concerned with the community around her, she decides to have an abortion.

The businessman with an extreme personal faith in God will realize that he too has a master in heaven, and will live accordingly. His bad business reputation is because he does not believe strongly enough in God.

What evangelicalism needs is a more personal faith, and a faith less concerned about the response of those outside the faith. 

The problem Sawyer points out is real, but his diagnosis is wrong. We need a more personal faith, not a less personal one.

Everything That Is Not God

1 Peter has an overriding theme of suffering. In both 1 Peter 1:6 and 1 Peter 4:12, Peter refers to suffering in terms of a fire. I imagine that this is a common metaphor in cultures throughout time, all the way was back to OT times.

Just as fire burns away perishable stuff, so testing in our lives strips away everything about our faith that is not God.

When circumstances take our money and we get upset, we find that our satisfaction was not God alone. It was God plus money.

When our physical health declines and we get upset, we learn that God was not enough for us. We believed in God plus physical health.

When our marriages suffer, or our family goes astray, we find that God was not enough. It was God plus …

And when, in the midst of suffering, we turn away from God, we are demonstrating that the gospel we believe is really a prosperity gospel—a gospel that says, “I will trust God because he gives me comfort/money/health/good marriage/insert your own.” We think Jesus died to make us comfortable/rich/healthy/satisfied in marriage.

Thus, suffering is often God’s way of showing us what we really believe. It shows us how much more than God we think we must have.

In the fire of suffering, God is burning up everything that is not God in order to create a more genuine faith that is satisfied in God alone.

The truth is that we can live with a lot less than we have. But we cannot live without God.

So when God takes it, it’s okay, because it wasn’t yours anyway (he gave it to you), and you don’t need it (he is enough for you).

Scholarship, Faith, and the BAR

A man in my church recently gave me some back issues of the Biblical Archaeology Review, which can be found online here. The March/April 2007 issue contains an article entitled "Losing Faith: How Scholarship Affects Scholars" (pp. 50-57).

This interview was participated in by the well-known Bart Erhman, James F. Strange ("a leading archaeologist and Baptist minister"), Lawrence H. Schiffman ("a prominent Dead Sea Scroll scholar and Orthodox Jew"),, and William G. Dever ("one of America's best-known and most widely quoted archaeologists, who had been an evangelical preacher, then lost his faith, then became a Reform Jew, and now says he's a non-believer").

The interview was interesting at parts, and boring at others. But there were some notable exchanges (and an unsurprising unanimous rejection of inerrancy (p. 52)).

Ehrman blames his turning on the problem of theodicy, where he concluded "Finally, because I became dissatisfied with all the conventional answers [though there is no hint of what these answers were nor why he rejected them], I decided that I couldn't believe in a God who was in any way intervening in this world, given the state of things. So that's why I ended up losing my faith."

Ehrman later comments that the implausibility of the resurrection had a "damaging impact on my faith."

Strange says "My faith is based on my own experience--a good old Protestant principle [one with which I am not familiar] ... I love the existentialist philosophers. I love to read them, not because they're giving me any testable facts. It's because it's like reading a really good poet. It does something to you that propositional truth never does."

Strange comments on the suffering of people saying that "Suffering tends to disconfirm the hypothesis [of a loving God that intervenes upon the earth]." (To him I would recommend the recent four message series presented by John Piper at Wheaton College.)

Dever, whose father was a "fire-breathing fundamentalist" was himself an ordained minister at age 17 who went to divinity school at Harvard. There he read George Ernest Wright's God Who Acts, who says "In Biblical faith, everything depends upon whether the original events actually happened." [Editorial note: There is something admirable in an unbeliever who at least recognizes that very fact, as opposed to these professing believers who think they can be a Christian with a "Christ" who didn't actually do what the biblical record says he did.] Dever freely admits that his scholarship destroyed his faith while working as an archaeologist in Israel (p. 54). He says, "That's when I converted to Judaism. [Laughs] I did it precisely because you don't have to be religious to be a Jew. And I'm perfectly comfortable where I am."

Now, I say all this, not to comment individually and refute their statements, which could be ably addressed. I say this rather to make a few short comments.

First, all these men allowed their experience to dictate their approach to God. They all, in essence, assert that "Because God did not act like I thought or think he should, I chose not to believe what God said about himself." However, we must realize that experience follows our exegesis and understanding of Scripture. It must not determine it. We must never allow our experience to dictate our understanding of God through his word. We must instead allow our understanding of God through his word to dictate our experience in God's created world.

Second, these men believe that true scholarship lead them away from the God who is the fountain of knowledge. Such an assertion is absurd on its face. It would be as if understanding that 2+2=4 convinces us that mathematics is a faulty and untrustworthy discipline.

The truth is that true scholarship always leads us to God, not away from him. And true scholarship recognizes the weaknesses of the fallen mind. These men seem not to recognize the truth of Ephesians 4:17-19 which asserts that the unbelievers mind is darkened, ignorant, and hardened against the truth. That is a darkness that only the Holy Spirit can overcome. God reminds us that he "who said, "Light shall shine out of darkness," is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ."

Faith is the the supernatural gift of God that comes from the light that reveals the true glory of Christ. These men have simply never seen it. Perhaps having tasted of the power of God and of the age to come, they have fallen away, as a dog returning to his vomit.

Third, these men, perhaps because of their rejection of inerrancy, fail to recognize the reason because the current state of affairs. The ultimate issue in evil in the world is the sinfulness of humanity. If you reject human sinfulness, then you do wonder why the world is broken, seemingly beyond repair. If you accept human sinfulness, but reject the crucified and risen Messiah, then you find the hopelessness of despair which comes when you realize there is no true remedy. The best you can hope for is to "try harder to do better." Atonement is found in things that bring no true hope.

Fourth, the hope of these men, as with all men whether the most educated and studied, or the least educated and knowledgeable is that the hope of life lies with God alone. One reason I am a Calvinist in my soteriology is because of situations like this. We cannot argue these men "into the kingdom." We are but vessels of weakness, used by God to proclaim forth his glory in the gospel. But ultimately God must open the eyes and bring regeneration and saving faith. And when that happens, true scholarship can take place.

I say again as I have often said, if I believed that I had to convince people to come to Christ for salvation I would put down my Bible, and never preach again. I have not the power of mind or eloquence of speech to convince even the most gullible to come to faith in Christ. Were not the sovereign power of God at work in preaching, my voice would be but a clanging cacophony of noise. Only the Spirit of God, working unilaterally and sovereignly in the hearts of sinful man, can take the preached word and bring spiritual life to the hearer.