But atheism has spread like a wildfire (or, as we say in Australia, a bush fire). It has left a trail of burned-out homes and killed thousands of people who were swept up in its spread. While atheism has a long history, it is the meteoric spread of atheism that needs to be accounted for.  Its scorched earth policy means total annihilation of competing world views.

How did atheism get such a strong foothold that now nothing seems capable of halting it? What has fueled this devastation that simply tramples over anything that stands in its way, leaving a trail of destruction in the lives and homes of so many people?

In searching for explanations sometimes it is necessary to check on what has gone before, not on what has come after. Looking after the fact only explains the outcome. Searching for what comes before, on the other hand, can provide an explanation of the probable cause.

Two Christian pastors, separated by over half a century in time, understood atheism and how it took hold in the minds of those who should have rejected it. The vehicle for this was the government school, so-called “public” education. State education was the vehicle also used to encourage centralization of state authority, an increase in the power of the state over both family and church. Once the compulsory attendance laws populated government schools with reluctant but coerced students, the state was left with no alternative but to add more legislation to the mix. How else could it know what it was that it was compelling?

Various excuses were offered to justify the introduction and eventual standardization of the government school system. In England, the successful introduction of the 1870 Forster Education Act ran on the heels of the government schools simply undercutting the price of education in the parochial schools.^[1] In other words, state schools were subsidized by coercive taxation to drive the private schools out of existence.^[2]

State education is the great educational leveler, just as school uniforms are the great appearance leveling device to hide intellectual and socio-economic differences among the population. It was the tool of Marxism to enforce uniformity of beliefs and practice. It is, in its essence, the vehicle of the idolatry in the modern age. Idolatry is merely the belief that something other than the Christian God is the source of all power and knowledge and therefore the legislator of all morality.

The advocates of government schools had more in sight than just leveling families: it was the idea of centralization that had such enormous appeal. Just as Diocletian and Constantine sought unity in the Empire, so too have many people sought unity in the nation-state. Unity means uniform in every way: economically, socially and religiously. And the vehicle to achieve uniformity was the government school, accompanied by control of the private schools.

Here was a vehicle that would take the young in age and young at heart and train them and equip them for the future. This, of course, was nothing new. Christianity especially had insisted on education as a means to help people expand the kingdom of God.

What was unique in the government schools, however, was the idea that this system of education must be completely secular. That is, secular in the math class, the language class, the science class, the geography class, and especially the lessons in economics, biology, psychology and politics.

Herein lies one of the core beliefs of atheism: That any kind of religious education must be abandoned in order for the secular state to inculcate the virtues of centralism and state control. At the center of these ideas is the concept that man is quite capable of making up rules and regulations that may not solve, but at least ameliorate, the human condition. He needs no outside advice, outside from of the universe, that is. Unaided by any kind of supernatural divinity, mankind will now rule supreme in the quest for heaven on earth.

And the government school is the vehicle that will make disciples, teach, and even baptize — with fire, if necessary — followers into this faith called atheism.

Now it’s not as if we were not warned against the system of government schooling. Writing in 1890, a Presbyterian pastor had this to say:

The tendency is to hold that this system must be altogether secular. The atheistic doctrine is gaining currency, even among professed Christians and some bewildered Christian ministers, that an education provided by the common government for the children of diverse religious parties should be entirely emptied of all religious character.^[3]

Emptied of all religious character? This statement needs to be understood in its context. The author is here identifying that what is being emptied are the core religious beliefs, Christian and otherwise. But these beliefs were being replaced by another belief system, itself intensely religious, but anti-theistic rather than theistic.

A.A. saw where this was heading, and tried his best to warn everyone.

It is self-evident that on this scheme if it is consistently and persistently carried out in all parts of the country, the United States system of national popular education will be the most efficient and wide instrument for the propagation of atheism which the world has ever seen.^[4]

He could have added Australia or Canada or Great Britain to that list, and he would still be correct. Wherever a system of education claims to be secular, there it is a vehicle of atheism, 180 school-days a year, five hours each day, for a minimum of 10 years. Do the math. But its not less than 9,000 hours of education in atheism that a child receives in the government schools, and a lot more if he stays until graduation, closer to 11,000 hours.  That certainly qualifies as a consistent and persistent pursuit of secularism.

And you wonder why we have problems? You wonder why Christianity is on the decline? You’re heart-broken that your kids and your neighbor’s kids spend all their time on drugs, sex, alcohol and X-Box. You see over 60% of kids disappearing from your church, yours among them, by the time they are 15 years of age.^[5] But something stops you admitting that a-theism has replaced theism in the lives of these young people.

Now where do you think they learned that? From their parents? Maybe. How about at the government school? Most certainly so, and the intention for that to happen was deliberate and systematic.

And now you seek a solution. Your culture — your Christian culture — is dwindling in front of you. You sit in church alone with your spouse but no kids, asking yourself what could you have done.

Well, you really only ever had one choice: pull them out of the school of atheism and put them in a school of theism. By theism I mean Christian theism. That would have been a good start.

Instead, however, good Christians and good Christian ministers think that if they get religious instruction an hour a week in the atheistic schools this will turn the tide. Even more so if they can get the government to pay for the religious instruction teachers to go into the school.

Now the government is the very cause of the problem in the first place. And if they pay for religious instruction in the schools, they will make sure that all religions – even the religion of atheism — is given a chance to put its hands into the taxpayer’s pockets.

But another pastor in an Episcopalian church in Houston not only saw the problem, but realized the devastation it was having and would continue to have. In his own way, Rev. T. Robert Ingram was a catalyst for the development of Christian schools following World War II. In his opinion,

There is no course of study in religion that can be designed to overcome the religious teaching inherent in the state controlled school system itself. God teaches there is no such thing as secular learning. He says there is no field of knowledge which is not subject to the judgment of Jesus Christ and teaching is supremely a religious function through which the sovereignty of God is recognized among the people. Yet, the first lesson we teach every child today is that there is a place where God does not count. That place is what we call the school room of so-called secular learning. ^[6]

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, Outliers: The Story of Success, suggests that in order to become extremely competent at say a sport or a musical instrument – anything – it takes about 9,000 hours of practice. And in our mistaken enthusiasm not just for government schooling but also for at least 9,000 hours of instruction, we ensure that our future atheists get the right amount of time to become world best. Not world best at tennis or base ball, but world best at atheism.

And we scratch our heads and wonder why Christian culture has almost disappeared, even among the Christians. That’s because too many are intellectual Christians in the best Greek tradition, while at the same time they are practical atheists.

That is what has been achieved by the anti-theists of this world. And Christian parents support them every time they send their child into a government school. Christian pastors and religious instruction teachers support this vehicle of atheism while they continue to demand religious instruction as a separate lesson, rather than demand that the curriculum itself teach the great truths of Christian faith. Christian politicians support atheism every time they vote for an appropriations bill that requires state-enforced taxing to fund these schools of atheism while never having the audacity to propose legislation to abolish, if not government schools, at least abolish atheism in the government school classroom.

Rev. Ingram, again:

We deny the whole principal of public control by deceiving our children with the idea public control means being committed in advance to the decrees of the government. The religion we are teaching them is to glorify Caesar and to magnify his holy name as the universal arbiter of knowledge. Once you teach children that – it doesn’t much matter what else you teach them. As long as you don’t let them get the idea that it is really God and not Caesar that teacheth man knowledge.^[7]

Do you see his point? It really doesn’t matter much what else the children are taught once they have been taught atheism.

In the early church, the Christians were accused of atheism because they refused to acknowledge that Caesar, not God, was the source of all power and authority. They would not do this because to do so was an act of idolatry — acknowledging a false supreme authority.

Over the centuries the Christian definition of atheism replace the Roman idea. Now atheism means failure to acknowledge the God of creation as the supreme voice of authority.

There are still too many people who believe they can somehow overcome atheism in the government school system, and overcome it at taxpayer’s expense. But the funding issue is itself adding fuel to the flames of atheism, by also providing taxpayer money for additional atheism, while dipping the hand into the fleshpot called centralization. But obtaining government  funding to solve the atheism in the government controlled schools will only happen while the Christians are ineffective in their objectives.  We all know it’s not really government’s money.  It’s your money and your neighbor’s money confiscated by government for their purposes of funding the expansion of atheism.  And no one is objecting very strongly.

The Christian objective, said St Paul, is this: “We demolish arguments and every arrogance that raises itself up against the knowledge of God; we take every thought captive and make it obey the Messiah.”^[8] There can be no misunderstanding of the Scripture here, since the language is very plain. Demolish means, to overthrow, to destroy, to subvert.  And “every arrogance” does not mean just some of the arrogances.  Paul’s objective was comprehensive demolition.

But its meaning includes the desirable outcome: to conquer. The demolishing-conquering practice of the early Christian church refused to participate, support and condone atheism in any form. Thus St. Paul could claim “we are more than conquerors.”^[9]

So what are you doing to demolish, to overthrow, to pull down this virulent engine of unbelief — the government school? Until you are successful at this, atheism will continue its relentless march towards totalitarianism in its attempt to maintain the fantasy of secular education through government schools.

Led by James Connolly, a Catholic who wanted genuine freedom and socialism — neither of which can be had at the same time — a group of 56 Irish men and women, the outlawed Citizen’s Army, obtained arms and ammunition and made their way to the General Post Office, raised a new national flag, and proclaimed a new Irish Republic. On the way, they commandeered a tram at gunpoint, politely obtained 56 tickets for the journey, then prodded the driver with a bayonet to take them to their destination. They eventually teamed up with members of the Irish Volunteers and other groups, a force of about 1,200 men and women. It was April 24, Easter Monday. This was the common man’s revolt to regain independence for Ireland, lost when Pope Adrian IV handed the country to Henry II Plantagenet 800 years earlier. In their haste, however, they omitted to find out just how much support they might have from Catholics and other Irishmen against the British. They were almost alone in the ambitious revolution. While they conducted the battle, the poor looted.

Their plan was made more difficult when British intelligence discovered plans for the Germans to ship arms and ammunition to the Irish rebels. The British mounted a coast guard, and when intercepted, the cargo was scuttled by those on board.

The British, already involved against Germany, provided enough troops to quell the attempted overthrow of His Majesty’s government in Ireland, by the end of the week about 16,000 troops. The British brought in their artillery and after six days of bloody battle, Connolly and his followers surrendered. The GPO, command headquarters, was the only position that the British had taken, thanks to power of the artillery. In other locations around Dublin, the nationals held their positions, inflicting heavy casualties at times on the British troops. Not since the fall of Constantinople in the 15th century was anyone in doubt that at any time in battle those with the cannon were more likely to come out ahead.

The leaders were court martialed, and over several days 15 of them were put before the firing squad. The last victim was Connolly himself. Wounded in the skirmish, he had to be carried to the place of execution, a prison courtyard, and strapped to a chair so he would not fall forward.

The shots that rang out that day might have put out the lights for Connolly. But they lit a bright fire in the minds of the Irish people who now had 15 martyrs for their cause. The outcome was the development of Sinn Fein, and its new leadership under Michael Collins declared a day of reckoning against the British. For every Catholic Irishman killed, they retaliated by killing two British or those sympathetic to Britain, the Protestants.

For five years the British fought a losing battle against intransigent Irish nationals, and in 1921 gave up the battle, letting the Irish Free State have its existence. Six provinces in the north remained loyal to Great Britain. The rest, they say, is history.

But this is not the first time that a relatively harmless crowd of troublemakers who had little support, gained a huge psychological victory when the authorities mismanaged their response. So its a timely reminder that troublesome crowds may appear and disappear, but what keeps fueling them is the blood of the martyrs — if there are any.

George Bernard Shaw wrote this poignant summary of Britain’s mishandling of the outcome of the Irish Easter Rebellion:

Having worked up a harebrained romantic adventure into a heroic episode, the victorious [English] artillerists proceeded to kill their prisoners of war in a drawn-out string of executions. Those who were executed accordingly became not only national heroes, but the martyrs whose blood was the seed of the present Irish Free State. Nothing more blindly savage, stupid, and terror-mad could have been devised by England’s worst enemies. . . .”

And here’s a key question. Which Bible did Jesus use? Now before you rush in and say the Old Testament, think about this. The predominant “Bible” in Jesus’s day was the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Most, if not all, quotations from the Hebrew Bible that are found in the New Testament come from the Septuagint.

But the problem does not stop there. The little book of Jude (vv. 14-15), right at the end of the New Testament has a quotation from the now-called apocryphal book, I Enoch. Does this NT quotation establish Enoch as being Scripture, and therefore should it be included in the canon of Scripture? If not, why not?

Now, if Jude used Enoch as Scripture, and we already know other quotations in the NT cannot be found in the current Old Testament, just which Bible did Jesus use, and what were its contents? Was Enoch a part of Jesus’s Bible? If it were considered Scripture in his day, why isn’t it still considered Scripture? (The truth is there are some Christians who do accept it. Why not all?)

While you’re at this thinking stuff, if the Scriptures of Jesus’s day were some form of the Old Testament, then what liturgical practices did the early Christians use in their worship? And where did they worship? According to Lee McDonald in his book, The Biblical Canon, Christians and Jews worshiped together until their final separation around the period 132-135 A.D. (or CE, as it now often called in academic studies), when the Christians were excluded from the synagogue because they did not support the Bar Kokhba rebellion. While some Christians had split earlier when they moved to the east side of the Jordan, probably in anticipation of the Revelation’s prediction of the looming catastrophe in 70 AD, the closeness of the Jews and Christians is obvious. After all, they shared a common source of authority; they just couldn’t agree on its interpretation concerning the Messiah. But most other things in the Hebrew Bible were not really in dispute, especially the Pentateuch. That part was the “real” Bible!

Now if they were together in the synagogue all those years, whose liturgy did these first century Christians use? You might get an inclination of the answer if you consider Acts 2, the story of Pentecost, and ask yourself, why is this called “Pentecost?” The answer you will find in Lev. 23:15. (Note: I have answered at least one of the questions!) Some of the NT Christians were practicing Old Testament law. A few years after Acts 2, Paul was in a hurry to get to Jerusalem to keep the day of Pentecost (Act 20:16).

Something to think about for the week. The way I see it, we haven’t solved the interpretive framework until such time as we solve the puzzle of where does the New Testament get its authority from, and how is that authority established?

A MUSIC SCHOOL, where students from age three upwards learn various instruments, is a great place to learn about perfection. A significant number of the students in this particular school learn either violin or piano, and for very young students, the violin has some added attraction. For a start, it’s possible to buy an instrument in fractional sizes so that the very young can fit their arms and hands around the instrument. No such ease exists with piano, and young students must simply learn to spread their fingers and extend their hand in order to cope with the physical dimensions of the instrument.

How difficult it is on the hearing of adults as these young students, especially the violinists, struggle to master their instruments. One of the few things more difficult to endure than someone learning the violin is a beginner on the bagpipes.^[1]

An out-of-tune violin is a nightmare to listen to, but one that is in tune yet played off pitch is also difficult to endure for any length of time. The problem, however, is not isolated to the violin. The young pianist, too, must learn to place his hand and fingers in exactly the right spot. While the pianist cannot make the fractional mistakes in intonation that the violinists can make, the piano student is certainly capable of creating a cacophony of sound that is difficult to tolerate as notes are “split” (i.e. two notes next to one another are played at the same time since the finger hits the crack between the notes and not directly on the correct key). How we long for the students to reach perfection in their chosen instrument. We wait patiently for the day when the child (or adult learner, for that matter) moves beyond the student stage to the period when their playing becomes something to enjoy.

But what do we mean by perfection? First, perfection means that the correct notes are played. The student must play the right note, the one that is in tune. For the pianist, this means getting his hand and fingers on the right notes. For the violinist it means getting her fingers in the right position on the fingerboard to ensure the note is played at its correct tonality.

Sound quality, among other things, is most often what sets apart “classical” musicians from their pop or rock counterparts. No pop or rock pianist creates the beautiful lines and full rich sounds produced by the better classical pianists. It’s not that their music does not demand it, which is usually true, but that they are incapable of playing with that level of expertise. They are artists with a limited palette.

Second, it means establishing the quality of the sound made on the instrument. It is one of the distinguishing traits of a good musician that not only are the notes played in tune but that the sound produced by the instrument is of a particular quality. It is the inability to vary the quality of the sound produced that sets apart many musicians, even professionals.

Third, it means that even though the correct notes might be mastered, there is more than just a casual playing of notes. Correct notes played at the same volume become monotonous. Correct notes played without any dynamic shading (loud and soft, and shades in between) are only a part of the idea of playing to perfection because the idea of perfection in music includes how the music is played. And how the music is played becomes a matter of artistic taste, and having the ability to create the desired effects at the time of performance. Creating shape and form in music is not just a matter of composition, but is also a matter to do with performance, that is, with aesthetics. A musician may see that the melodic line in the music can be shaped to rise and fall. His ability to make this line rise and fall in volume depends on his inner judgement and his physical capacity to handle the instrument in such a way that the line rises and falls as a curve rather than a line with sudden jerks up and down.

When the elements of music are put together in such a way that the magnificence of shape and form, combined with the ability to “color” the sound by slightly varying the touch on the instrument (or the way the instrument is blown if it is a wind instrument) we begin to praise not only the composer but also the performer. When the variety in richness and color is presented by the performer, we begin to appreciate the idea of perfection in music.

In this sense, perfection has to do with maturity. Rarely are young performers considered at the peak of their career. The peak of their playing is not only the culmination of years of study but also the accumulation of years of working with music, honing their judgement, refining their control of fingers, hands, arms and whole body to produce exciting and extraordinary performances. In other words, perfection means more than merely playing without error. While this notion exists in the musical world, where we look for performances without error, we also recognize that perfection is more than just the notion of note perfection. It has to do with maturity. The Greek word teleios translated “perfect” in the King James version, has the sense of bringing to an end, to consummate, or to bring to an ultimate goal.

Christian Perfectionism

OUR TEXT FROM Matt 5:48, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect,” causes us to pause and think about what God requires of us in the way of perfection. A superficial reading of the Bible can easily lead to the notion that when we are commanded to be perfect it means we must be totally sinless. While it is certainly true that we should strive to lead lives in perfect obedience to God, the idea of perfection in the Bible is also intimately connected to the idea of maturity. And this is what our text means when it asks us to be perfect.

Maturity means, among other things, making right judgements. For the Christian this means making right judgements about how God wants us to live, that is, by applying God-given principles into a myriad of situations. Take education, for example. When we educate students to play a musical instrument, we try our hardest to get the student to play “with maturity”.

We do not want our children to play Mozart with childish technique or with childish maturity, even though we accept that this will happen in the early years of their tuition. We do our best to encourage children to play with maturity, and with the same judgement as one who has been playing for a lifetime, rather than one who has been playing for just a few short years.

To put this another way, we do our best to encourage music students to be adults in the way they play, and to have the judgement of adults. We do our best to eliminate childish judgement from their thinking as early as we can, because we know that while childish judgement remains, immature performances will be the end result on the concert platform. When they hear immature performances, we tell the student “don’t play the music like that”. And we refer them to mature performances to imitate, not the performances of young and inexperienced musicians.

This, in essence, is a key purpose of all education: To teach the child not to be a child but to be an adult, one who behaves in a mature way, who makes correct conclusions in given situations, and who then exhibits the willingness and tenacity to live up to those judgements. Education not aimed at this purpose, to produce maturity, should be questioned, whether it is education in the home, the school, or the church.

It should come as no surprise, then, to find that often the error in so much music teaching is because there is insufficient understanding of this point. Education becomes childish. Simplistic pieces that are not great compositions in themselves are the tools often used to “educate” the child in music.

But because no amount of trying can make great music out of mediocre compositions, it should not surprise us that most students of musical instruments do not reach more than an elementary level in their field if they are given “immature” pieces to play all the time. While there is a place for a very short period using childish or immature compositions because of their elementary nature, the idea is to get the student away from these compositions into “mature” music as soon as possible. In short, we do our best to ensure that musical childhood is eliminated as soon as possible in the life of the student.

“Bubble” Theology

NEITHER SHOULD IT SURPRISE us that we have immature Christians in this world when we see what takes place in many churches. Children are sent out of the church so they do not participate in “adult” portions of the service. Children even have their own songs, often senseless ditties. Some may contain great and true theological themes, but they are wrapped in immature language or music.

The kingship and lordship of Christ are surely worth more than the senseless repetition of “bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble” supposedly imitating the fish of the sea who teach us of the lordship of God as creator. While this is true, we must ask, what does the child remember about the song, especially when this humorous phrase is the focal point at the end of the song, with the children encouraged to shout at the top of their voices, “bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble”.

Put yourself in the situation of the child in a place where this song is to be sung. The children are brought out to the front of the church, and the minister sets the example of how this song is to be sung. The opening words of how God is creator and king over all creation are sung, but the children are waiting for the part where they can excel, shouting at the top of their voices, “bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble”. Why couldn’t the song have been written so that the children shout at the end “Christ is creator and lord over all, the king over all the earth, and the king who should be the ruler in our lives”?

The difference between these two phrases is the difference between childishness and maturity, the difference between perfectionism on the one hand and an elementary immaturity on the other. We do not do our children a favor in their musical education by having them play childish and elementary music. Neither do we promote maturity in our children by having them remember that the climax of the song is to shout “bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble”. When the adults of the church are encouraged to sing along to such a mindless ditty, we can understand why there is a lack of Christian perfectionism, a shortfall in Christian maturity, a deficit of right judgement, and an inability to apply the Word of God to personal and corporate lives.

We also see evidence of this unwillingness to hurry the child to maturity when children are discouraged from participating in the so-called “adult” section of the worship service, the long intercessory prayer and the sermon. Instead, children are often treated to childish songs and stories before being sent from the worship service. It may be that children might become “perfect”, more quickly if we let them remain in the service and help them understand the language of the Bible and its demands which are, after all, not made in childish terms but in very forthright and clear “adult” language. We need only reread our text for evidence of this.

Methodological Immaturity

UNDERLYING THE ACTIVITIES using such teaching practices for children is a lack of understanding of educational methodology and philosophy, or understanding of how Christianity has influenced Western civilization and its educational methods aimed at producing maturity in young students. Educator John Holt draws attention to this kind of educational madness in his book, How Children Fail. He tells how young children in music class were encouraged to touch their toes every time they heard C played. The way the teacher “told” the children that C was being played was to pause and hold the note. So, when the children heard the paused note, they would stop running and touch their toes. “What does such a practice teach” asks Holt? It does not teach the children to recognize a C in music, since in most compositions C is probably not a long note. It may teach them how to touch their toes, but this could be taught without the musical note C being brought into the study. It certainly teaches them nothing about music, unless it is to recognize the difference between long and short notes. But then the skill of listening to long notes should not be confined to the note C.

Holt comments:

This is typical of schools’ thinking in another respect. Teachers, not understanding that children like to learn things, believing that learning is painful (because it is for them), every so often try to make it “fun” by taking some tiny task, in this case recognizing the sound of the C, and making it the center of some elaborate game. Teachers’ magazines are full of such suggestions. These games take an enormous amount of time to organize and carry out — and so fill up the school day, bringing the class just that much closer to that distant and longed-for closing bell. But they also complicate and confuse the learning situation. In electronics terms, they bury the signal (whatever the teacher is trying to get across) in a lot of noise.

For the children in this particular class, what was the point of this activity? To march around the room? To touch your toes? To listen to music? How could they apply their minds to a task when they hardly knew what it was?

Reconsider the situation in the local church where the children are to shout out “bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble” at the end of the song, after singing that Jesus is Lord of all. What are they to learn from this activity? That the significance of the concept of the lordship of Christ is not to be dwelt upon so that the mindless “bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble” can be shouted with enthusiasm? That in the end, “bubble” theology is the concluding thought of the lordship of Christ? That life is full of opportunities to shout mindless repetitions at the top of the voice? How will the children know what to learn? And what about the adults who are exhorted from the pulpit to indulge in such childish antics?

In Holt’s words, the message has been lost in the noise.

Our text from Matthew 5:48 comes at the middle of the section known as the Sermon on the Mount. It also comes after the section where Jesus talks about loving our neighbors, about how we relate to people, about how we should treat them and deal with them. Jesus goes on to talk about judgement, and the necessity to make right judgements, that is, mature judgements, correct judgements.^[2]

Later in the same Sermon, Jesus says the wise people are those who obey God, who do not practice “lawlessness”, that is, disobedience to the law of God. It is in the context of standards, of rules and — dare we say it, of law — that maturity is possible. Without rules or guidelines, there is no standard of judgement. We may not like to use the word “law” because of our late twentieth century disposition against the notion of being told what to do, but the notion of rules that are mandatory is inseparable from the idea of perfectionism. And both ideas are inseparable from Christianity, as the Sermon on the Mount indicates.

Imagine the difficulty English teachers would have teaching children the difference between good or bad prose and poetry without the existence of grammar rules. Without the rules of composition, it is difficult to teach a child how to write better music.

And without the law of God, it is impossible to obey the command, Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. No amount of philosophic juggling can eliminate the need for rules – and these rules cannot merely be good ideas but standards that ought to be adhered to because they are the right standards. If the rules of music composition are nothing more than good ideas at a point in time, there is no ability to differentiate between good and bad music. If the Ten Commandments are simply God’s “Ten Good Ideas” at a point in time that have no ongoing moral compunction, then we cannot ever hope to reach perfection because we have no standard with which to assess either the goal or our progress towards it.

Hostility to rules and laws may go so far as to deny the validity of the Ten Commandments while at the same time trying to establish a new standard of “love”.  But this is like trying to abandon the rules of composition while insisting that music students write and play “with feeling”. It is an attempt to replace one set of standards with another. Such a process, however, replaces substance with vagueness and, what has been described as “contentless” phrases. To play music with feeling or expression is only possible when students are told how to do it. This requires the establishment of one or more rules which make up the standard.

Similarly, the notion of “love” remains vague and useless unless it is given concrete and specific meaning. The meaning is either the Ten Commandments and all that God said they mean, or else they are some other set of rules.

Perhaps now you can understand why the Bible defines love as keeping the commandments of God (I John 5:3). Rules we shall have. We may not call them rules or laws, but we will have them nonetheless. We may refer to our rules as “law” or as the standard of “love”. In the end, it is the detail of our words “law” and “love” that give substance to the concepts, and this detail will either be the law of God or someone else’s law.

Aspirin Christianity

WE WILL DO GREAT THINGS for the kingdom of God by encouraging Christian perfectionism in adults and children so that they make right judgements and applications of the Word of God. We will do more for the kingdom of God by teaching our children to imitate right judgements than we will by having them sing “bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble”, then sending them out of the service so they don’t get to hear the “boring” part of the worship service. Sending children out of the service, where the Word of God is taught, is a step in aiding the children to remain in childhood or adolescence, thereby escaping the demands to be “perfect”. Jesus did not qualify his comments by saying, “All those over the age of 12 are to be perfect, and those 12 and under can wait until then before they need to follow this teaching”.

The requirement to be perfect, that is to be mature, is an expectation upon all. It is not even something that is only required by God of Christians. If perfectionism is not the requirement of all men, then our good news of salvation becomes nothing more than psychological seduction.

Too often the contemporary Christian message is reduced to concepts such as this: If you have a problem, take Jesus as the universal Pain Reliever; if you cannot get enjoyment in life, then Jesus can become the Great Aphrodisiac, bound to bring pleasure to life if taken in sufficient quantities. If Jesus is offered as the great Heavenly Aspirin rather than the one who deals with sin, then we have an explanation as to why there is so much trouble in the church today. Psychology takes precedence over sin and salvation. In this scheme man’s feelings take priority over certain fundamental facts relating to the Fall, sin, and what God has done to satisfy the legal requirements of the law.

Rather than a restoration of God’s absolute moral values, there is a tendency to substitute “feeling good”, as if “feeling bad” is somehow man’s real problem. Treating symptoms rather than causes is not the way to get sick people better.

It is the lack of maturity in the Christian church that is the cause of the deep-seated malaise not just in the lives of individuals but also in the lives of the people in all the nations of this world. Where Christian principles or laws once governed men in many areas, now anything goes except the laws that God has given us. Where the ability of men and women once existed to take the Word of God and apply it in areas such as education, politics, business, law and philosophy, now such an application does not exist because the Christians are incapable of doing it. In other words, we have immature Christianity and immature Christians.

Promoting Maturity

THE WRITER OF the book of Hebrews makes this comment about Christian perfection. “Therefore, leaving the discussion of the elementary principles of Christ, let us go on to perfection, not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, of the doctrine of baptisms, of laying on of hands, of resurrection of the dead, and of eternal judgment” (Heb. 6:1,2 NKJV). Go on, says the writer, “to perfection.” “Leave the discussion of elementary principles”.

What are these elementary things? The writer tells us.

1. Laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works.
2. Faith toward God.
3. Doctrine of baptisms.
4. Laying on of hands.
5. Resurrection of the dead.
6. Eternal judgment.

These are the “elementary things”. There are “better things”, though, says the writer (verse nine). What are these? These are the “things that accompany salvation”. Not intent on giving vague statements, these “better things” that “accompany salvation” are explained. These are:

1) diligence to the full assurance of hope until the end.
2) imitating those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.

Which promises? Those that were given to Abraham. Now we must turn to the Old Testament and Genesis to find out what these were. But we can summarize them briefly by saying that God promised that Abraham would one day inherit the earth. This is not just the theme of Genesis and the account of God’s dealings with Abraham. The rest of the biblical record lays testimony to the faithfulness of God in His covenant with Abraham, how the whole of the redemption story is an expansion of God’s dealings with Abraham and how Abraham’s heirs would one day inherit the earth under the leadership of a new King. And God’s dealings with Abraham, summed up in Christ, as the writer of Hebrews reminds us, is the establishment of God’s covenant through Jesus Christ, the establishment of the Abrahamic descendants (that’s all those who trust in God for salvation) as the inheritors of the earth.

But this inheritance does not come without sweat and labor on our part. Just as Adam was required to work before the Fall, so we too are required to work after our redemption. To maintain ourselves in discussions about the elementary doctrines of the faith, is to keep ourselves in a state of immaturity.

And herein lies the problem with so many of our Christian communities. They know and understand the message of salvation so well. They can tell us with great clarity how we can never work for our salvation, that Christ has done it all for us, that it is ours by grace, through faith, and that we should be baptized as a sign of our new allegiance. They know this because the common message of the contemporary Christian church boils down to six
points.

• Laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works. How many times have we heard justification explained. This is not say it should not be done, but certainly if we want people to mature we must move on to other topics.
• Faith toward God. Again, a great theme that has its place, but it is not the total message of the Bible.
• Doctrine of baptisms. Some churches like to make a big point of baptisms (plural, and while they have their place, they are considered elementary things by the writer of Hebrews.
• Laying on of hands. Only considered to be important in some churches.
• Resurrection of the dead. Should only be preached in a live church, since it is too late once rigor mortis has set in.
• Eternal judgment. Only if you believe in hell, and this is not a politically correct word at the present time. So it is rarely mentioned in many contemporary churches.

The Missing Link

WHAT IS MISSING in our churches and amongst Christians is maturity, the ability to take the word of God and create a new humanity amongst the morass and decay of civilizations whose end will be brought about by this same God who has saved us to be His people, to be His perfect people. Our pastors and leaders who so clearly explain the nature of Christ and how He has done all for us, somehow cannot bring themselves to tell the politicians in the land what are the limits of their jurisdiction. They cannot be sure whether the bible condemns or condones debt. They are uncertain if the Bible requires a Christian education for children.

They do not know if the judges of the land should put murderers to death, leave them in prison forever, or allow them early parole for good behavior. The pastors and leaders do not know if the courts of the land should incarcerate thieves or make them repay what they stole plus pay compensation to the victims of theft. In short, our Christian leaders are immature. They lack the ability to make judgements, right judgements. They have no goal, no standards, no rules, no laws, so they have no chance of creating a new and exciting civilization where Christ is king. For them, Christ is a king who cannot rule because He is not allowed to have rules, only “love”, as if love somehow negates the idea of rules and laws. This is why so much contemporary Christianity borders on the preposterous.

We will do ourselves a favor as well as those who come after us, by laying up a foundation of perfection, by doing our best to lay down principles from God’s word, laws from God’s word, rules from God’s word, setting up a standard of righteousness based on the character of God and working towards the fulfilment of the blessing promised to Abraham.

In so doing, we will become a blessing to all the nations on the earth as they, too, learn about Christian perfectionism and train themselves and their offspring in godly and holy living.

The “bubble” theologians will rant against such a notion, but they have no alternative. They have no standard. They have slogans which, in the end, mean little, can provide little guidance, and which leave the people they lead in a state of immaturity.

So, while they chant their mindless mantras and teach others to imitate their “bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble”, let us run the race, work out our salvation with fear and trembling, putting aside the elementary things. Let us be perfect, just as our Father in heaven is perfect. Let us take the commandments of God and create a New World Order where justice and righteousness prevail, for this is our destiny. And God has promised to do everything necessary to ensure the success of the mission, for in the end, it is His mission, not ours.

The Scriptures certainly encourage the wise use of money and prudent management. But is this the same as the “profit motive” spoken about in contemporary capitalism?

When an entrepreneur starts a business and he experiences some success, he soon has the excuse to offer an opportunity for someone to share in the business activities. It might be a bookkeeper, a receptionist, or a salesperson.

Step back, for a moment, and consider the scene. God has blessed this individual. God has enabled this person to use use his God-ordained talents to the point where now, in order to take his God-given talents to the next level, he needs help. So he offers employment to someone. But to whom should he offer employment?

He should offer the position to the person who will find, in this employment, the opportunity to develop their own God-ordained gifts and abilities. In which case there is a legitimate question: Is the offer of an employment a money-making exercise or a person-skill-calling opportunity?

What are the mutual duties and obligations that exist in this kind of relationship? Don’t expect capitalism to answer this. Think instead of what the Scriptures might say.

Our culture is so heavily imbued with a non-Biblical view of wealth and money, it has lost sight of people and God. Contemporary capitalism is flawed with its emphasis on “me” and what I can get out of my employees, rather than “what can I do to help my employees fulfill their godly calling?”

The words that we use often don’t help us understand things the way we ought to understand them. We think in terms of employers, employees, rather than adopting the stewardship model of Scripture.

The stewardship model requires precisely that: stewardship. What are my stewardship obligations? There are many, and they cross the boundaries of different areas of life. What are my stewardship obligations to my wife or husband? What are my stewardship obligations to my children? What are my stewardship obligations to those whom I have the opportunity to work with to build a mutually successful enterprise?

It is true that success is counted in financial terms in capitalism. But life is more than money, and secular capitalism struggles to put a human face on the profit motive. It cannot achieve that human touch without addressing man as he is — that is, man as he has been created.

This leads to much deeper questions about time, the management of time, and the flip side of work, rest. Or shabbat, in Hebrew. The capitalist model of maximizing profits confronts the biblical view that profit is not everything. God’s glory, on the other hand, is everything. And the way that glory is presented and portrayed in a fallen world is through Torah — the instructions God has given for the purpose of displaying his holiness.

Secular capitalism’s reliance on property rights has not quite gotten the picture. Property rights provides the basis for disputes about possession; but they do not provide the basis for a utilitarian exploitation of property in the pursuit of profit. That includes exploitation of labor.

So capitalists must enter into the religious discussion about God and man and ask the important questions and seek the right answers in the religious framework of the created order. Only then will capitalism cease to be a flawed model.

This is a complaint. A complaint about teachers. In particular, teachers of musical instruments, especially piano, but more than that.

Here’s the nature of my complaint. But before I give you the basis of the complaint, answer this question:

Which group of teachers has the highest failure rate?

If you answered public school teachers, you’d be close, but not close enough.

If you answered Seminary professors you might also be close, but again, not close enough.

Maybe you thought of college professors in general. And while you might have some basis for this, you would not even be close.

Here’s my answer. Music teachers!

These are the teachers who offer to teach your child an instrument – piano, violin, flute, cello, clarinet, guitar, harp – you name it.

But look at how many students take music lessons then quit as soon as they are teenagers.

Now they would probably quit Math and English classes if they could, too. But music is one subject that mom and dad say is optional.

But the fact that it’s optional is not why the kids quit.

They quit because they can’t play the instrument.

After 5 or 7 or even 10 years of lessons, the child is still struggling to get his hands and fingers around a musical instrument and play a piece of music — any piece — from beginning to end, without faltering.

What an achievement by the music teaching profession! The highlight of the profession is students who fail, and fail miserably. Most kids love to succeed at music, and when they can do it in their primary years (ages 8-12, approx), they delight in their skill levels and have a sense of achievement.

But how many primary students reach this level of ability? If you take all the instrumental teachers in a given location, and find out how many actually have their students achieve this level of competence, you’ll be surprised. The number is not high. How do I know? Because it doesn’t matter whether it’s Brisbane-Australia, Ashland-Ohio, East Lansin-Michigan, or Atlanta-Georgia, I’ve ended up with students who play poorly. And they play poorly because they’ve been taught badly.

Well, I’ve had enough. I’m not taking any more basket cases. It’s too hard on me and too hard on the student to fix the problems. The fixes rarely happen, no matter how “talented” the child is.

Most music students fail. And fail miserably. And it is not their fault. The fault lies directly with the teacher. And here’s why.

My instrument is piano. I’ve struggled over many years to understand music in general — and the physiology necessary for the instrument, so that a piece of music can be played in a particular manner. You can’t have one without the other.

When God planned the human body, he interlaced a number of muscles and tendons to allow certain movements. Misuse of those muscles results in unnecessary tension, sometimes in other parts of the body.

Try this: Hold your arm out in front of you, elbow sitting just near your waist.Now bend your wrist back as fair as it will go, so your hand is pointing upwards, at about 90 degrees to your wrist.

Now, try to move your fingers. The more you pull that hand backwards at the wrist, the hard it will be for you to move your fingers. Simple. Any health care professional will tell you this is the response of stretching the muscles in the upper arm that pull the wrist back. The finger muscles flow along your forearm, so pulling the higher muscles tight affects the ability of the lower muscles to move easily.

Keeping your arm where it is, let your hand flop downwards, and now try to move your fingers. Any difference? There ought to be.

Next time you watch a child struggling at the piano, take a look at how his or her wrist is flexing. If the wrist is below the level of the keys, the wrist will flex backwards, putting pressure on the finger muscles, and preventing freedom of movement.

Piano playing really is not difficult. There are only two things a student has to learn. Music is a series of sounds produced by pressing keys on the piano. Those sounds are of two kinds: some sounds a joined, while other sounds are separated.

The separation of the sounds is a technique composers use just like those who paint pictures. These folk often want to highlight something in their painting, so that it stands out. If you were to pain a green tree on a green hill, the tree will not stand out so much unless you highlight it in some form. This could be different color, making it a darker or lighter green, or highlighting with a darker green or even a different color altogether. It is the mixing of opposites and shading those opposites that make things stand out.

In music, the opposite to sound is silence. Or it could be a softer sound, a louder sounds, or a different color sound, produced by different instrument.

So the student of an instrument cannot produce the sound of another instrument on the one he’s playing, but he can do some things to highlight. He can put silence between notes to create effect.

So the poor piano student just needs guidance on which movement is necessary at this point. Is he to join sounds, or separate them. The latter option requires his hand to come off the keys so that the sound stops. Silence.

This is referred to as staccato — an Italian word, often mistranslated as ‘short’. The French equivalent is détaché — detached. The translation ‘short’ often misleads inexperienced musicians to cut long notes short, when the composer clearly wants silence between the notes. Which means play the notes shorter, not short. ‘Short’ is not the same as ‘shorter’, or ‘not so long’.

Understanding neither the physiology of the philosophy of music and its historic origins and how composition developed to provides “performance instructions” to the performer, leads music teachers astray.

As a result, they screw up the physiology, make piano playing hard work, with the outcome that most pieces of moderate to difficult level cannot be played. The student doesn’t have the ‘technique’ to perform the piece the way it should be played.

Well, kids aren’t stupid. Why would they practice one piece of music for six months and still not have it anywhere near what it should sound like, when they can go and kick a football or play with a basketball. It seems a whole lot easier than trying to struggle with Chopin’s Etudes, or Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos.

All because the piano teacher does not know how to have the student do two simple things: join sounds or separate sounds — the easy way.

A recent visit to our home by friends wanted to display their child’s skill at the piano. What did I think? The teacher has not a clue what he is doing, and that’s why the student was jamming her hand and fingers in the most grotesque position to show me what they could do.

The ignorance of parents allows a situation to continue that wastes parent’s money, the students time, and ends up in discouragement and another adult who always wished they could play but never made it.

If you’re one of those, then stop blaming yourself. And find a teacher who knows what they are doing.

This is a fundamental problem of allowing the inexperienced and unlearned to become teachers. The education system of the day is very quick to make students experts. They become critics of the greatest writers, artists, and poets. They may be asked to write a critique of Shakespeare, or analyze what’s wrong with a Fugue by George Frederick Handel. Not that the students are capable of writing one any better; but they will be asked to be critical. St. Paul recognized a zeal without knowledge. Maybe it’s time we recognized the same problem in our own age. Our teachers and their students too often have zeal without knowledge, and they call it education.

I am reminded of the comment that there no statues of critics — anywhere. Nor are there any statues of the teachers who teach this nonsense.

If you think this is bad, consider this. I had supper last night with my client and his son — architects. They specialize in designing buildings that don’t leak, and the father spends many hours as an expert witness in court case where another architect is getting sued because the building leaked. Over supper, they told me how the college courses do not equip students with design skills. The courses are certainly entertaining as teacher and student explore aesthetics and other esoteric matters. They are taught drawing, but not design. Consequently, the students cannot design a building that will withstand the elements of the weather.

So a poor music educator, or a poor language teacher is one thing. But to have instructors who cannot get our architects to build a building that will protect has serious ramifications. Such as when a bridge collapsed recently in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

And you still think there is no problem with education?

Myth — a person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence. — Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

CONTENTS

1. The Problem Defined
2. Mirror Theology
3. From the Mountain Top
4. The Meaning of Sovereignty
5. Anthropomorphism: Smoke and Mirrors
6. Whatever Happened to Sin?
7. The Myth of Libertarian Free Will
8. Is God Irresponsible?
9. God Overboard
10. Conclusion

When Marcus Tullius Cicero introduced philosophy into the Roman Empire, he helped set the stage for one of the most volatile debates as Christianity spread throughout the Empire. His influence on Renaissance thinkers ensured the clash of ideas that eventuated between Erasmus and Martin Luther. Cicero was a statesman, lawyer, politician, and a gifted orator. But he was more than a famous citizen and politician: he was a philosopher in the Greek tradition, an ardent defender of the freedom of the will, what is called “libertarian free will.”

Libertarian free will is the idea that in order for man to have choice and true contingency it cannot be as Luther argued, and Augustine before him, the free will of a created being, as distinct from the free will of an uncreated being. In order to qualify for the name, some people argue that man’s free will must be identical to God’s free will. They may not phrase it exactly like this, but this is what the demand for libertarian free will requires. What they believe is that in order for man to be “free” he must be beyond the control of God.

The debate has raged for well over two millennia. Can anything new be added? Maybe nothing new, but an improved emphasis on the key issue at stake here is important.

The Problem Defined

Defenders of libertarian free fall into a pattern. They deny God’s infallibility, they renounce the traditional views of his omniscience and his immutability, they assert God is everlasting but he is not timelessly eternal, and, naturally, they disavow any concept of the eternal decrees. Any God who knows the future infallibly destroys human choice, they say. If God knows now (at this moment) that you are going to get run over by an 18-wheeler tomorrow afternoon at 4:45 pm, then there is nothing you can do to prevent that. You cannot choose to take another route and thereby avoid the collision with the trailer.

They reject the idea of the eternal decrees of God, whereby everything that comes to pass occurs because God planned it that way and ensured it would happen. To them, this idea destroys human choice and contingency. Proponents of libertarian free will see a logical incoherency with the idea that somehow God can decree whatsoever comes to pass and yet, at the same time, hold man responsible for his actions. They see God’s eternal decrees as fatalism, destroying human contingency and genuine choice, believing God’s will and man’s will cannot coincide at the same time on the same issue.

In order to defend libertarian free will its proponents must discard what has traditionally been understood about God. How do they do this? What are their reasons for doing it?

Mirror Theology

They arrive at their views by looking into a mirror. There they see a being — a human being. They notice things, make observations, and then draw conclusions such as this: That the person in the mirror is a self-conscious being. Here the person looking in the mirror is aware that there is subjectivity and objectivity to his self-awareness. He (subject) is aware of something else, in this case his reflection in the mirror (object). So far, so good.

Not only do they see a being in the mirror, but they also see a person. To be a person, they suggest, requires things such as “remembering, anticipating, reflecting, deliberating, deciding, intending, and acting intentionally.”^[1] These activities are evident in the temporal person in the mirror before them. Again, so far, so good.

They see in the mirror a self-conscious person but also a person who has choice. The person looking into a mirror can stay looking in the mirror or he can choose to look elsewhere. There is nothing in the mirror that indicates man is a puppet dangling on the strings of the Master Puppeteer. All they see is free choice and contingency. Again, their observation is correct.

But it’s not their observations that are the difficulty; it is the conclusions they make from their observations that are the problem.

They draw conclusions from their observations that are not essential to the observations themselves. Consider these examples. First, there’s a conclusion that consciousness “requires a precondition of temporality.”^[2] A timeless God would have “no contrast between attention and nonattention.” In other words, God cannot exhibit the characteristics of being a person like the one seen in the mirror unless he is a temporal being. It is, however, a rather sweeping assertion to say that all consciousness requires a precondition of temporality. It may be said that all human consciousness requires this precondition. But what evidence is there that the divine consciousness requires temporality in order to be self-conscious? And if there were evidence, what kind of evidence would be necessary to prove such an assertion?

Second, self-awareness “necessarily implies mental transition.” To be self-aware requires “that God must be able to shift his attention from the object of His consciousness to Himself as the subject of that consciousness.” If he cannot do this, he’s not self-conscious. So the traditional view of God is rejected and a changing God who is subject to the conditions of time is substituted. “Any being who is self-conscious must exhibit change. . . . In other words, self-conscious beings logically must be temporal beings.”^[3] As a result, both time and change are now everlasting conditions of the God who is no longer eternal in the traditional sense. Again, however, there is an assumption that uncreated being must be identical to created being in this matter. But how do you investigate and prove such a claim about God? Only by penetrating God exhaustively so that you can determine whether such a claim is true. An exhaustive knowledge of God, however, is not possible. The only knowledge of God you have is what he has revealed about himself in Scripture. So the question arises does Scripture distinguish God as an everlasting temporal being or an everlasting timeless being? And when the Scriptures do speak on this subject, are they telling us about “God as he is” or are the words an anthropomorphism. That’s a way of saying God presents himself in the language of a created being and not the language of an uncreated being.

Third, there’s a similar conclusion that you cannot be a person and exhibit the characteristics of the timeless God. Attributes of personhood as seen in the mirror are determined to be the standard of personhood which applies to both God and man. A person who is timeless has no past and nothing to “remember”. Since free will theists want a God who “remembers” in just the same way the person they see in the mirror remembers, they conclude that the orthodox view of God is the wrong one. But there is an inherent demand for “unity of being” when you demand God should be identical in any respect to the created order. The key word here is “identical;” the Scriptures certainly say man is made in God’s image. But man is an analogue of God, not a replication.

Fourth, the argument gets really interesting when there is consideration of the concept of a tenseless God. If there is no past, present or future for God, he cannot recognize that the Battle of Avarayr took place before the Shimabara Rebellion. For him, everything is timeless and there can be no past, present, or future. In the free will view, it is concluded, only a being that is temporally located can speak of the past and the future as well as the present.

And finally, the point of contention, choice. If God has eternally decreed everything that comes to pass, free will theists suggest there is no genuine choice and human liberty. The conclusion, in their minds is that the eternal decrees mean fatalism. In their desire to avoid fatalism, however, some people turn to another false idea, deism, or a modified deism. This is the belief that God does not intervene in the activities of the natural world, or if he does, it is only ex post facto — after the fact. Libertarian free will requires the god of deism because this appears to be the only way to avoid fatalism.

This understanding of fatalism, however, comes from a flawed view of historic Christianity’s rejection of libertarian free will. By not accepting the historic position, free will theists merely argue against their own representation of the position — a straw man — rather than the ding an sich (German: thing in itself).

In summary, the eternal decrees have been thrown out, so too have omniscience, infallibility, immutability, and everlasting time becomes a substitute for timeless eternity. It is asserted with great gusto and confidence this is what “logic” demands of the “facts” — the facts that appear in the mirror.

It is true that “remembering” is a part of what it means to be a human person. And God certainly uses the phrase “remember” when the writer of Exodus says, “God remembered his covenant.” But a similar question arises to the one asked above. While it is true that created beings remember things from the past, how do they know that God’s remembering is identical to this? No proof is offered for the assertion; it is assumed that God’s remembering is identical to the kind of remembering done by the person in the mirror. Then the conclusion that “in some fundamental way, we shall have to treat God after the model of human personal being.”^[4] In other words, God is made in the image of man, not the other way round.

Is it really a fundamental necessity to treat God after the model of a human personal being? Why not, instead, simply treat him as God, whose uncreated being nowhere matches that of his creatures, other than man is made in his image. Image; not identity. If it is so fundamental, you would think the idea would jump out from the pages of Scripture and be crystal clear. But such “fundamentalism” as this is not readily found in Scripture.

From the Mountain Top

In addressing the ideas of the “openness” of God and the idea of libertarian free will, it is clear that “logic” is going to be held out by those on both sides of the argument. Both sides insist their logic is the only coherent response to the issue of free will. But in amongst all of the talk, one lone voice stands out apart from the rest. That’s the voice that insists — demands — that free will assumptions are put to the test of real logic — presuppositionalism. Among other things, this is a recognition that arbitrariness has no place in the discussion. It’s also the understanding that people arrive at their conclusions because they have already predetermined the truthfulness of their position. This is as true for the traditional theists as it is for the free will theists.

But now comes the real issue: which of the two explanations of God and man is coherent? And what are the criteria for coherency? In other words, what are the rules of logic? Or, what are the preconditions of intelligibility? That is, in order for this to be true, what needs to be in place? In order to respond to these questions, you first need to establish an understanding of God and revelation, and from that a theory of knowledge — epistemology.

The traditional view of God is wrapped up in the via negativa approach in its description of God. Other men have peered in the mirror just like the free will theists, but made opposite conclusions. If what you see in the mirror is created human being, says the traditional theist, then God must be the opposite (negative) of that. If you see a being that is finite, then God is infinite; if you see a being that is changeable, then God is unchangeable; if you see a being who is located in one place in time and space, then God is everywhere, transcendent over both time and space; if you see a being that makes choices, these cannot be the choices of an uncreated human being, but the choices of a created being. For it is a created being that is seen in the mirror.

In that mirror, however, both sides of the free will debate see a human being that is limited. It does not matter how you understand the outworking of those limitations, everyone recognizes in the mirror a person who has not reached his full potential. They see an object where actuality and potentiality are yet to be fully realized. The traditional theists understand that in God — uncreated being — potentiality and actuality are both fully complete. “In God,” as Van Til summarizes it, “there is eternal accomplishment.”^[5]

What does this mean? It means that God is not becoming God; he has never been anything else. He is not becoming anything. He is fully God. He’s not learning new things, gaining new powers or improved understanding, nor has he any unrealized potential. For example, it is suggested that God can do the impossible: perhaps choose not to be God, implying that he has the potential to cause a fundamental change in himself but just hasn’t done it yet. Maybe he’ll get around to it one day.^[6]

What does this do for a theory of knowledge? It means that all knowledge is tied up in the concept of the God as the one who is eternally and fully accomplished. Without this, there is no “true truth,” just random guesswork. Without this, there are no laws of science, no laws of logic that can supply the foundation for a universal statement of any kind. Instead, you end up with Kantian solipsism, for you cannot get law and order out of randomness or chaos — unless you do it with a mystical “leap of faith.” But to do that, you have to go beyond rationality.

There’s an interesting declaration by God in Isa. 45:18: “For thus says ADONAI, who created the heavens, God, who shaped and made the earth, who established and created it not to be chaos, but formed it to be lived in: ‘I am ADONAI; there is no other.’” Here you see the express declaration that God has created order in the universe, not chaos. This is the very foundation of scientific law or even the laws of logic. But this does not deter the free will theist who suggests that God has actually created “the necessary conditions for the existence of the chaotic element in history. . . .”^[7]

If this were true, then the free will theists have created an enormous hurdle to overcome. If the universe is one of chance then no laws can function, including the law of contradiction. How you can get “laws” out of pure contingency, out of what the philosophers call “brute” factuality? These are “facts” that have no necessary relationship to any other fact. Imagine trying to explain an eye as a brute fact. No cheating, now. You cannot use its relationship to anything else to explain it. To you that may not make sense; it’s irrational. And therein lies the inherent incoherency with libertarian free will: it requires a fundamental notion of irrationality in order to present its case.

So every time you hear the catch-phrase “logical possibility” as a grounds for their view, the free will theists have simply undermined their own position. It’s a contradiction. This is the greatest embarrassment, to find your own views contradict themselves. If there is no law of contradiction anything can be stated and there is no basis on which to disagree. Period. Free will theists substitute incoherency for coherency, irrationalism for rationalism, then wonder why orthodox Christian dogma is what it is. The historical view of God and his attributes was driven by the desire to maintain the creator-creature distinction because this was the only “logical” outcome to the evidence in Scripture about God and about man.

While created beings are short of exhaustive knowledge of God, there will remain genuine mystery. So it is not as if there are unanswered questions in the traditional view. You need to ask yourself, however, which set of “problems” you would rather have: the apparent difficulty of the traditional view that holds to both God’s eternal decrees and true liberty and contingency of second causes, or the free will view that creates a self-limiting God who no longer provides an epistemological framework and destroys the possibility of true knowledge in so doing.

If God is completely self-sufficient then he is both absolute rationality and absolute will, otherwise he is only partial rationality and partial will. Among other things this means that since God is fully complete and self-sufficient there is nothing to which God might be held accountable. For example, God is not accountable to some standard called the Good, a Platonic concept. He is the standard. There is nothing by which he can measure himself. He is the “I AM who I AM.” He is not the “I AM” of Plato’s Good; he is not the “I AM” of earth; he is simply “I AM who I AM.”

Ask this question: To whom or what is God accountable? Who is going to delegate to God responsibilities then hold him accountable for how well he carries them out? You might think it’s a dumb question, but it’s at the heart of the free will debate. Here’s why.

Free will theism demands that in order to be responsible, man must have libertarian free will. That means he cannot be unduly influenced by anyone — especially God — in his decision-making. He must be in all respects be like God concerning freedom of choice.

With this in mind you can see why the orthodox view of God became the dominant view. There was no logical alternative. Any concept of human free will as a first cause threw mankind into an intellectual bind. For starting from himself, man cannot climb the ladder of logic and knowledge. In fact, he does not know if he is even on the right ladder, since his presuppositions don’t provide the framework for him to have a valid reference point. It’s like trying to use a GPS system without a satellite.

The Meaning of Sovereignty

The free will theist, thus, confuses uncreated and created being. He attributes to the divinely uncreated being, God, the characteristics of humanity, and thus makes God in the image of man. In so doing, he destroys any concept of a God who is fully complete within himself. And without that, you don’t have God.

Oh no, say the free will theists, we still believe in the sovereignty of God. We still believe in omniscience; we’ve just redefined it. God does know all the potentialities, all the possible choices you might make. He just doesn’t know which one you will make until you make it.

Now if God is not the absolute, self-determined God, he is left discovering the choices of his creatures’ “free” actions. It’s as if God is in a game of cosmic chess with the creatures he has created. He sees on the chessboard of the universe all the possible moves that can be made, but he doesn’t know which piece of the game of life will be moved, or its direction, until someone moves it. At that point, God learns something new. Now he’s no longer anticipating. Now he knows the actual decisions of his creatures. For sure he’s had many counter-moves prepared; he just doesn’t know which one he should use until someone makes a move. He is no longer in a state of uncertainty and indecision, waiting to find out which way you are going to move. Now that you’ve moved, God can respond; but not until he’s discovered what you have done.

Then you ask yourself, how can God provide an accurate and absolutely reliable Scripture if he’s still learning? How can his predictions in Scripture be relied upon? When you read God’s challenge in Isa. 44:7, “Who is like me? . . . let him foretell future signs and events,” their view makes God nothing more than a cosmic poker player who’s calling a bluff over his opponents. Maybe he can tell the future, maybe he can’t. What odds are you willing to give?

“Well,” says the free will theist, “he knows the future for some people completely, but he doesn’t know it for everyone.”^[8] On what basis is this a universal truth about God? How is it known this is even remotely true unless they know which people he knows it for? Again, this statement assumes exhaustive knowledge of the mind of God.

Soon you will get a reply. It is “logical possibility” that drives the free will theist. Free will theists believe that if they can suggest a “logical possibility” then this is proof of their claims. Just as a drunkard might claim that pink elephants are a “logical possibility,” there is no necessity that pink elephants really exist. Similarly, just because free will theists claim the “logical possibility” of time without change is not a proof that there really is any time that has no change whatsoever. When people become intoxicated with their own ability to penetrate the comprehensiveness of God, they too begin to talk about “logical possibilities.” But just because you can conceive of something does not make that conception true. To prove the idea of time without change would at least require proof that aging does not take place, or else proof that aging is not a change. Merely saying there is time without change does not make it a true statement.

Here is the line of separation. On one side are the Christian theists who build on what the Old and the New Testaments teach about God. On the other side of the line are the open theists who insist that God is not self-determinative; that he is at this moment being determined by your choices, my choices, and the choices of billions of people now on earth; that he is not in total control of his creation, since he has abdicated that position. God has apparently renounced his self-determination and handed it to man, of course. God will now become what man, now empowered by his own self-determination, molds by his “libertarian free will.”

Anthropomorphism: Smoke and Mirrors

If God is absolutely self-determinative, however, what does that make man? If man is created — created even in God’s image — then man cannot be self-determinative unless he is created with all the attributes of God. That would, in essence make man divine, a god. But he is not that. Created man, rather, is determined by his environment, the environment in which he finds himself as a created being. He was not created and placed in a vacuum. Rather, he was placed in a universe that has God’s “invisible qualities — both his eternal power and his divine nature — clearly displayed” (Rom. 1:20, CJB, see also Psalm 19.). Further, at creation man was in the Garden, in the presence of God, knew God intimately, and knew that God had laid down an ethical demand. It is this environment that makes man’s choice genuinely moral, not as a first cause, but as a second cause. Adam was created with perfect character and in this environment he and Eve rebelled against their Creator.

It is this environment that is denied by the idea of libertarian free will. In this view Adam had to be away from all “influence”. He had to be “free” to act univocally (lit. one voice) rather than analogically (similarly, or an imitation). He had to have no character, because it was up to him to create character by his libertarian free will choices. Yet it is this very issue of univocal versus analogical action that defines the difference between the self-determinative God and the God-determined creature. For only a self-contained, fully complete and self-determined God can act univocally, from within himself, whereas man must receive his true knowledge from another source and reproduce it. Man cannot create, nor can he recognize, true knowledge starting from himself. The creation account indicates that Adam and Eve needed God’s special revelation, apart from creation, to know there was a tree whose fruit should not be eaten. They could not have figured that out for themselves.

For the same reason that man acts analogically, so too is God’s revelation in its essence anthropomorphic. It cannot be anything else. But free will theists have the view that figurative interpretations fail to represent God “as he is.” Here we are back to the very same issue: can the creature ever know God “as he is”, or only God as he portrays himself to the human condition? You look in the mirror and see a created being. Now you ask yourself whether God is the analogue of what you see, or is what you see the analogue of God. To know God “as he is” would require exhaustive knowledge of God — omniscience — the very attribute that is denied to God. Apparently it’s OK for man to know everything.

Since man thinks and acts analogically all of Scripture is therefore anthropomorphic. The Scriptures are God speaking to man as he is. Does God speak to man as a divine equal, or as a created being? If he speaks to a created being, then he has no choice but to also speak in a manner and mode that created beings understand. This is called anthropomorphism, which is not a description of human interpretation of Scripture but a description of revelation itself. This does not deny there are particular anthropomorphic statements in Scripture; but it broadens the idea of anthropomorphism to another dimension. The mere fact of God speaking to humans is anthropomorphism. As Caneday describes it, “God makes himself known to his creatures in their likeness, as if he wears both their form and qualities, when in fact they wear his likeness.”^[9]

The historic figurative readings of some texts of Scripture have been described as merely “smoke and mirrors.” But this same epithet can be applied to the free will theists who reject historic Christianity’s literal understanding of the words, “For I, the LORD, don’t change,” from which came the idea of the immutability (unchangeableness) of God. Everyone, it seems, is in agreement: there is a place for figurative interpretation. They just cannot agree on which passages this applies to.

Whatever Happened to Sin?

What’s really at stake here is sin. Man cannot act univocally unless he, like God, is self-sufficient. But if man were to be self-determinative, then sin would be an impossibility for him, just as sin is an impossibility for God. In the words of Van Til,

Christians need to become fundamentally conscious of the fact that man cannot think and cannot act truly unless he thinks and acts analogically. The very presupposition of man’s being able to sin is that from the outset God created him a perfect moral character. And the very possibility of sin implies the plan of God as its background. Man cannot sin in the blue. Does this make God responsible for sin instead of man? On the contrary, this is the only way in which man can be considered responsible. Only an analogical act is a responsible act.”

The demand for libertarian free will is a demand for man to be as God. And if this were true there would be no sin for man and no need of a special act of redemption by God.

No wonder you find free will theists talking the language of Cicero. Like their Roman counterpart who followed the bankrupt ideas of the Greek philosophers, the modern day Cicero’s are going to argue that God cannot be what Scripture says he his, that man cannot be what Scripture says he is, and as a consequence, Scripture cannot be what Scripture declares itself to be.^[10]

The Myth of Libertarian Free Will

Libertarian free will creates the idea of a self-limiting God in order to make way for an unlimited free will in man. But you cannot argue this way and maintain genuine human responsibility and accountability. If the very essence of God is his self-determination, then libertarian free will introduces its own incoherency into the debate. Van Til again: “In the first place it would be self-contradictory for God to limit himself. It is of his very essence to be self-determinative. And since he is eternal he cannot be self-determinative at one time and no longer self-determinative at another time. The idea of the self-limitation of God sacrifices the self-sufficiency of God.”

Thus the God of libertarian free will is a self-limiting God who, in turn, is no longer self-sufficient. If he is no longer self-sufficient, then he is no longer absolute will and absolute rationality. He is, instead, fallible, changeable, and perhaps somewhat capricious. Now with that background, how do you expect to be able to solve issues? Such a God cannot even give you a valid starting point, an infallible revelation from and of himself.

How can man find true freedom of the creature if he ‘liberates’ himself from the background of the absolute plan of God? In order to achieve this kind of freedom man “has to start his moral activity in a perfect blank, he has to continue to act as a moral blank and he has to act in the direction of a moral blank,” argues Van Til.

This is an impossibility for man, a nonsense. Yet this is the myth proposed by the proponents of libertarian free will. That somehow, man can escape completely any environment of God and from this perfectly blank position he can bring forth genuine human freedom. But it is not this kind of freedom Scripture indicates, since “true freedom for man consists in self-conscious, analogical activity.” Hence, when Scripture refers to any idea of man’s liberty, it is within the context of God’s law, as man acts the way God designed him to act rather than the way man himself determines he is willing to act.

According to libertarian free will, God is bound by the free decisions that men make. In freeing man, they have merely hog-tied God.

Is God Irresponsible?

When Van Til says that only an analogical act can be a responsible act, the immediate opposite comes to mind. Does it mean that univocal acts are irresponsible acts? If so, does this lead to the “logical possibility” that God’s actions — truly univocal — are irresponsible?

The answer to these questions is tied up in the concept of responsibility and accountability. Accountability means to to be held to an ideal, a standard. God cannot be held to any standard — say, Plato’s Good — any more than he can be held accountable to anyone other than himself. By definition God’s actions are always “responsible” because they cannot be anything else. But to say it like this is to imply that the application of the word “responsible” to God is inappropriate. You can only use the phrase “responsible and accountable” if there is an external standard by which the actions are measured. No such standard exists in relation to God himself. But accountability does find true meaning in the creator-creature distinction because the creature is held accountable to the standards of the creator.

Man, on the other hand, is created being and his origin begins and continues in the environment created for him by God. Therefore man’s actions are “responsible” actions precisely because he is an analogical creature. Not only made in God’s image, but also put into an original moral environment. Do not eat, be fruitful and multiply all indicate a moral environment that is not man-made.

This is why man’s responsibility is only possible because of God and his creation. It is this backdrop that creates true responsibility and accountability — not for man as first cause (univocal) but for man as secondary cause (analogical).

God Overboard

All this, however, is thrown overboard to gain libertarian free will, despite their best protestations. They argue that God is “dynamically omniscient,” or “the description of God as a timeless being is not reconcilable with the logic of the concept of person.” Or they offer the startling conclusion that “since tensed facts can be known only by a temporary being, God must be temporal.”

A timeless God is not reconcilable to which standard? Logic and the concept of person, is one response. There’s the key. Here’s a man-centered view of what it means to be a person, they add to this the finite logic of man, and attempt to make statements of universal proportions about God.^[11]

Did these views come from Scripture? No. They were derived by “logic” and peering in the mirror of humankind. Then these conclusions were taken as the principles by which Scripture would be read. In other words, they start outside the Scriptures, in nature, attempt to read their conclusions back into the Scriptures, and end up with “an alien faith.” They may reject the via negativa but they are willing to embrace ab absurdum in its place.

Here’s where the rubber meets the road: you cannot deny omniscience and infallibility. They are inherent concepts in any statement, especially any statement that claims to be a universal truth. So, for example, if you say infallibility (i.e. without error) is a wrong doctrine, you can only make this claim with the implicit assumption that your statement is itself infallible. Similarly with the idea of omniscience. To make any universal truth claim requires a doctrine of omniscience to undergird it.

The only question, then, is what, or who, are you going to nominate as your source of infallibility and omniscience. Will it be the Triune God who has spoken in Scripture, or some other source?

Conclusion

Once you grasp the central starting point of libertarian free will — created order — you understand that its idea of theism and yours are not even close. This is a rerun of the tempter’s lie in Eden: eat of the fruit, and the created order will henceforth determine what is true or false, right or wrong, good or evil. This is an epistemological framework from below, not from above, and like the devil in the temptation of the Messiah, exhibits a profound misuse and misunderstanding of what Scripture teaches.

If libertarian free will were true it would place man’s actions in a univocal void — away from God, and therefore away from responsibility and accountability. By eliminating God’s eternal decrees as the backdrop to man’s activities, libertarian free will instead places man in the position of God — responsible only to himself. This cannot even be close to the truth, given the language of Scripture in the early chapters of Genesis. Further, if man is ultimately univocal, then his salvation depends on himself. All he has to do is make the right choices. He cannot be so “dead” in sin that he needs the regenerating work of the Spirit of God. That would, in effect, deny his libertarian free will.

It makes you wonder why God went to all the trouble if all it needed was man to make the right “libertarian free will” choices.

Shall we as Christians, facing the wisdom of the world in modern form, dare to do what Paul tells those who are his work in the Lord to do? Shall we dare to be steadfast and unmovable, never doubting the objective truth of the message that we bring, never doubting that the wisdom of the world has again been made foolishness with God? Shall we have full confidence that our labour will not be in vain in the Lord?

ROMANISM

The Roman Catholic cannot answer these questions in the affirmative. He refuses to challenge the ‘wisdom’ of the world in the ‘order of nature.’ ‘Did not God,’ he says,’ create man in His own image?’ ‘And is not man,’ he adds, ‘surrounded with the revelation of God? Why should he not then be able to interpret nature aright? Was not Aristotle right when he concluded from the fact of motion in the world that there must be an Unmoved Mover back of the world?’

The Protestant replies pointedly that the God of Aristotle is not the God of Christianity. The God of Aristotle did not create the world, knows nothing of the world, knows nothing of himself. He’ is not a person, let alone the triune God of Christianity. Aristotle’s God is an It. Yet Aristotle was not inconsistent in his reasoning. On his premises, his highest principle of knowledge and of being could be nothing else than an It. But man cannot worship an It. He must always come back to a person. He must begin and end his system of thought either with himself or with God. An d since Aristotle does not begin with God but with man (that is, with himself), he ends his system with man (that is, with himself). And what Aristotle did has been done over and over again. In modern times it has been done by such men as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel and many others following them.

To be sure, the Protestant continues, the non-Christian thinker has said many things that, in themselves and formally, are true. When Aristotle said that God is pure Act he said verbally the same thing that the soundest of Christian theologians also says. Yet the Christian theologian would be referring to the internally self-complete, triune God, and Aristotle would be referring to an abstract principle of logic or being. No greater difference i n content could be imagined. So also when the Stoics asserted that man is the offspring of God, the Apostle Paul does not hesitate to accept such a statement as formally true. But for the Stoics, man was of a piece with God, while for Paul man was created by God. In content there was the difference of truth and falsity between them. Again, when the pantheist says that he believes in the immanence of God and when the deist says that he believes in the transcendence of God, shall the theist say that he is richer than both because he believes in both the transcendence and the immanence of God? If he did, he would be building the house of his theology as children build their houses of blocks. The immanence of the pantheist spells identity between man and God, while the transcendence of the deist spells separation of man from God. How then can these two concepts of identity and separation be added together and produce the theistic conception of the relation of God to man?^[1] The meaning of words derives from the total system of which they form a part.

Still further, the Protestant adds, non-Christian thinkers in general, and non-Christian scientists in particular, may discover much that is true about the universe that is made by God. Perhaps most of the great discoveries of science have been made by those who are not Christians. But such discoveries could not have been made unless the universe is what the Christian says it is, namely, created and controlled by God. There would be no order in nature and no rationality of relationships to be found anywhere in the universe had not God made them. Therefore the possibility of science itself presupposes the truth of the Christian concept of God. When, then, the non-Christian scientist discovers truth, this is not because of, but in spite of, his own theory of being and of knowledge.

It is not difficult to see what happens if the Christian fails to challenge the wisdom of the world in ‘the order of nature.’ If he keeps quiet, the proverbial elephant is given permission to push his trunk through the window! Soon the order of ‘the supernatural’ is adjusted to the order of nature as interpreted by the natural man. The Roman Catholic starts his philosophy with the idea of ‘being’ in general. Aristotle says that ‘being’ is analogical. Applied to the relation between God and man this idea of ‘ the analogy of being’ implies that man takes his beginning from pure potentiality but ends up with becoming pure actuality. If the idea of the ‘analogy of being in general’ could allow for the meaning of history — which it cannot — then it would involve man’s total separation from God in the past and his total identification with God in the future. Thus the entire Pauline gospel of man’s creation by God, his breaking of the covenant at the beginning of history, and work of Christ in history, and the work of the Holy Spirit in the application to sinners of the work done for them by Christ, would be denied. No sound Christian theology can be attached to the Aristotelian notion of ‘the analogy of being.’

The moral of all this for Protestants should surely be challenge the wisdom of the world in every dimension. If it is not challenged in every dimension, it cannot be effectively challenged in any one dimension. If a tunnel is to built under a river it may be wise to start from both sides of the river at the same time, but it cannot be wise to have two engineers working, each from one side, without agreement on a general plan of construction.^[2]

I had another epiphany. You know, one of those “aha” moments when someone switches on a light.

The light on this occasion was Dr. Greg Bahnsen, and I was listening to the CD set Defending the Christian World View Against All Opposition. It’s a great set. No. It’s a brilliant set.

But what got me thinking was his comment about facts. Facts convince no one. You cannot start with the facts and end up with biblical truth. To attempt to reason that way is to reverse the process.

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov. 9:10).

This is the view that is an offense to the “natural” man, governed by a view that man is the measure of all things. This is Humanism at its core. It is the belief that man can know “something” without the aid of divine revelation. It is the notion that “facts” are apparently available to all without divine revelation, whether that “fact” is a fact of science, or a fact of religion — a fact of any kind.

This is worked out in a discussion recorded in Luke chapter 16. If someone raised from the dead would go and speak to people, they would repent. How could they refuse to recognize the facts: man raised from dead = truth of Scripture.

And what’s the response by Abraham? “But he replied, `If they won’t listen to Moshe and the Prophets, they won’t be convinced even if someone rises from the dead!’”

Facts do not lead to the truth of Scripture. Rather, the truth of Scripture leads to the facts. Scripture provides the “preconditions” for logic, or intelligibility.

Humanism declares it is man who determines truth and error, not God. Therefore, to attempt to begin the debate with the acceptance of the God of the Bible as the necessary condition for knowledge and determination of what is true, is an unacceptable method of argument for those who reject the Bible as the source of all knowledge.

But you know, this same principle applies to the different ways people argue over the meaning of words in Scripture. No amount of quoting the words of James, for example, is going to convince the “faith alone” followers that the only time “faith alone” is used in Scripture is in this text, and then it says “you are not saved by faith alone.” Or, no amount of referring to the Words of Scripture will convince the Jehovah’s Witness that he is wrong on his understanding of John 1:1.

The words of Scripture are the “facts”, just as creation is a “fact” that by itself will never convince the unbeliever. Neither do the words of Scripture convince the liberal of the error of his exegesis. Facts don’t convince anyone.

If the “fear of the Lord” is the necessary condition for determining the meaning of facts and the word images that describe those fact, how then can we discuss with others the great truths of the Bible?

All thought is philosophy, or a system of thought. Everyone has a system, even when they don’t recognize they have a system. To say “this is right, but that is wrong” is to express that system of thought.

The issue is how well you have mastered the art of thinking — of eliminating the internal inconsistencies in your system of thought. And there is only one epistemological foundation that makes rational thought possible.

The world thus needs more systematic theology so that those who express belief can destroy “speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and . . . take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5).

It is the rigor of your systematics that allows you to defend the faith by calling attention to the misinterpretation of the facts — including the “facts” contained within certain word groupings in Scripture.

Your task in defending the faith, or the words of Scripture in other areas, is to show the internal inconsistencies in the logic of others.

I don’t know about you, but it was questions I could not answer, or questions I discovered others could not answer, that caused me to shift my opinions over the years. “Facts” as such did not move me. Internal inconsistencies in what I believed did cause a change.

And that occurs when you maintain a presuppositional basis of defense in all areas of life and thought. Because when your presuppositions can’t handle the “facts” it’s time to change.

God bless you.

See also Oh My Gosh! I Did It Again . . .