The following argument is meant to demonstrate that it is in
principle possible to disconfirm the claims of Christianity, against the claims
of those who hold Christianity to be fundamentally indefeasible. Moreover, it
argues that the process by which Christianity may be disconfirmed is not one
that is “out of bounds” for sincere or committed Christians – that, on the
contrary, it is a process internal to genuine Christianity and therefore
completely unavoidable if one is exercising faith in the appropriate,
biblically-prescribed manner.
1.
God’s purpose in creating man was to fill the earth with his
image[1]
and thereby to establish a kingdom of worshippers. Accomplishing this purpose
involves entering into relationship with mankind, which initiates a process of
redemption through sanctification that ends by restoring in man the divine
image.[2]
It is the expression of this image that yields the distinct culture of the
heavenly kingdom.[3]
2.
God receives glory via the instrument of mankind[4]
through the process of self-revelation and the satisfaction of human desire
(which are just two ways of saying the same thing).[5]
3.
However, man is morally and intellectually separated from God.
The fundamental obstacle to God’s purpose is man’s sin and finite intellect;[6]
or, what is practically equivalent,
God’s transcendence, i.e., his moral perfection and intellectual infinitude.[7]
4.
The ability to understand one another is a necessary
prerequisite of two persons forming a genuine relationship.[8]
This requirement has both moral and intellectual dimensions (as well as
others). For example, man qua moral being cannot be reconciled to something it
perceives as ugly or morally abject;[9]
man qua intellectual being cannot be reconciled to something it perceives as
logically incoherent; etc.[10]
5.
Therefore, God’s purpose can be only accomplished via either
of two strategies: the glorification of
man or the condescension of God.[11]
These strategies enable relationship by making functional equals of fundamental
non-equals.[12]
6.
God makes provision for man’s lack primarily by acts of
condescension, or accommodation, and thereby enables genuine relationship with
him. The Bible tells the story of God’s various attempts to solve the problem
of man’s moral and intellectual separation from God via acts of accommodation.
Examples of such attempts include creating man in a state of innocence,
authoring and freely entering into a series of covenants and contracts,
providing mediation through the priesthood and communicating through the
prophets, sending Jesus into the world as the perfect representation of
himself, and finally through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. By these means as
well as others, God has rendered himself more or less intelligible to mankind
throughout history.[13]
7.
In order to preserve the non-triviality of the doctrine of
God’s transcendence, however, we should understand God’s accommodation of man
to be only partial, even in its most progressive expressions.[14]
That is to say, of the full set of propositions true of God and his purposes,
he has disclosed only a portion of them to mankind.
8.
It is this subset of propositions, which we will call the
canonical set, that provides the exclusive
grounds upon which we can engage God and rightfully expect intelligibility of
interaction.[15] Within
these boundaries, however, we have every right, and indeed are morally
required, to make claims on God based on the content of the canonical
propositions. God, therefore, has definite obligations to mankind, and mankind
to God, which are defined by certain (still unspecified) propositions of
scripture.[16]
Corollary
1: Therefore, to resign a claim on God on
the grounds of his transcendence, or our own moral or intellectual
imperfection, is only legitimate on the grounds that one has stepped
outside the fair boundaries of intelligible
interaction, i.e., is attempting to exercise faith toward objects (e.g., claims
or promises) not included among the canonical set.[17]
Corollary
2: The resignation of claims within these fair boundaries, however, is tantamount to
faithlessness insofar as we have been given no other ground
to justify abandoning our claim. In fact, Christians have a positive obligation
to God to uphold these claims, because it is only by them that Christians are
enabled to further the divine kingdom and thus accomplish the purpose for which
he created us.[18] The claims
and promises of scripture are the primary, if not exclusive, resource for
spiritual development and godly living. By abandoning these claims, therefore,
one is essentially opting out of participation in these projects. As I see it,
it is this opting out, and not the reverse, that requires justification.
9.
God’s obligations to mankind are derivative, i.e., they are a
radical expression of God’s freedom insofar as he can freely choose servitude
as well as kingship.[19]
God is bound to the terms of his contract with man in virtue of immutable facts
about his nature.[20]
10.
Furthermore, God’s obligations come in both explicit and
implicit varieties. God’s explicit obligations derive from the explicit content
of the promises (especially if he himself defines the practical implications of
the promise, as he does, e.g., in Deut. 28-30). God’s implicit obligations
derive primarily from conventional norms of language use, especially
conversational norms (e.g., those maxims that Grice derives from his
Cooperation Principle).[21]
11.
The grounds upon which we
(i.e., those of us living in the present) are invited to engage relationship
with God are stated loosely in 2 Peter 1:3-4. Let us call this the presently
standing offer. This verse states that
there are promises by which man can define his expectations with respect to
God, and that through such interactions, man can participate in the divine
nature and guard himself from evil. It is exclusively within these boundaries
that our exercise of faith is secure (faith always being faith in some particular object, e.g., a claim or promise).
12.
Roughly put, our interaction with God within this domain
consists of various transactions in which we act in precursory belief that a
particular outcome will result (our expectations being defined by the set of
promises God has provided). Through a series of these transactions, we
eventually acquire a general perception of God, either as faithful or
faithless, loving or unloving, good or evil, etc. This perception of God that
we acquire through the experience of seeking to engage him by these terms is
the proper goal of the entire “faith-transaction” enterprise. It fulfills the purpose
of self-revelation, which I ascribed to God in premise (2).
13.
Through our engagement in what I have called the
“faith-transaction enterprise,” we will necessarily, as a matter of due course,
determine whether or not the claims and promises of scripture are reliable and
true. In fact, we are psychologically disposed (though perhaps not determined)
to adapt our faith according to the quality of our experience in attempted
engagement with God. This is because psychological habits, of which moral and
religious habits are species, become reinforced or attenuated as a function of
the associated impulses being rewarded (as by confirming experiences, which
produce pleasure) or frustrated (as by disconfirming experiences, which produce
pain).[22]
14.
Therefore, the exercise of faith has a retroactive potency to
determine the reliability and (probable)[23]
truth of scriptural promises and propositions. Although it is a sin to
willfully “put God to the test,”[24]
there is another sense in which to exercise faith just is to put God to the test.[25]
What I mean by this is that the object of faith is to make divine revelation
possible, i.e., to open oneself up to the possibility of knowing God[26],
and one cannot possibly accomplish this goal without simultaneously
ascertaining some information concerning the accurateness of the testimony one
received of him compared to the perception one has acquired through experience.
15.
Therefore, Christianity is not only defeasible in theory, but
the means to disconfirm it are means available even to sincere and committed
Christians. In other words, the means that I propose make it possible to
disconfirm Christianity are not means that it would be prohibited for the
sincere Christian to employ (e.g., by such passages of scripture as Deut. 6:16)
– on the contrary, it occurs via a process that is internal to sincere
Christian practice itself, and so is completely unavoidable if one is
exercising faith in the appropriate, biblically-prescribed manner.
[1] Gen. 1:27-28.
[2] See Rom. 8:10-11, 22-25; 2 Cor. 1:22; 2 Cor. 5:5; and
1 Pet. 1:3-7.
[3] See Ps. 34:8; Ps. 137; 2 Cor. 5:11-21; and Rom. 8:23.
[4] Is it morally and/or theologically problematic to
cast God as creating mankind, and therefore valuing mankind, only for instrumental purposes? If so, is
there any way around it? Consider, for example, the language of Romans 9:16-24?
Consider also Isaiah 45:9-13 and Jeremiah 18. On the other hand, if we choose
to affirm the contrary of this, i.e., that God values us intrinsically as ends
in ourselves, this would seems to suggest that God has a lack that he needs us
to fulfill. But this equally absurd.
[5] As John Piper writes, “God’s quest to be glorified
and [man’s] quest to be satisfied reach their goal in this one experience:
[man’s] delight in God which overflows in praise” (Desiring God, 53).
[6] “Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in
your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by
Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without
blemish and free from accusation— if you continue in your faith, established
and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel. This is the
gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under
heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant” (Col. 1:21-23). See also
Rom. 5:10.
[7] “‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are
your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘As the heavens are higher than the
earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts”
(Is. 55:8-9).
[8] As James writes, “[T]he only force of appeal to us,
which either a living God or an abstract ideal order can wield, is found in the
‘everlasting ruby vaults’ of our own human hearts, as they happen to beat
responsive and not irresponsive to the claim. So far as they do feel it when
made by a living consciousness, it is life answering to life” (The Will to
Believe, 196; cf. Ps. 42:7). And
also, “For a philosophy to succeed on a universal scale it must define the
future congruously with our spontaneous powers. A philosophy may be
unimpeachable in other respects, but either of two defects will be fatal to its
universal acceptance. First, its ultimate principle must not be one that
essentially baffles and disappoints our dearest desires and most cherished
powers…[A] second and worse defect in a philosophy than that of contradicting
our active propensities is to give them no object whatever to press against…Any
philosophy which annihilates the validity of the reference by explaining away
its object or translating them into terms of no emotional pertinency [sic],
leaves the mind with little to care or act for” (The Will to Believe, 83).
[9] “Love can forbear, and Love can forgive…but Love can
never be reconciled to an unlovely object…He can never therefore be reconciled
to your sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered; but He may be
reconciled to your person, because that may be restored” (Traherne, Centuries
of Meditation, II, 30 quoted in The
Problem of Pain, 28). See also Mill’s
response to the philosophy of Sir William Hamilton in “An Examination of Sir
William Hamilton’s Philosophy” (1865).
[10] That understanding God is not an entirely fantastic
notion is evidenced by several passages of scripture, including Jeremiah
9:23-24, which reads, “This is what the Lord says: ‘Let not the wise boast of
their wisdom or the strong boast of their strength or the rich boast of their
riches, but let the one who boasts boast about this: that they have the understanding
to know me,
that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness, justice and
righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,’ declares the Lord.” See also 1
Cor. 13:9-12.
[11] See John 3:16; Rom. 8:30 (“those he called he also
glorified”); and Ps. 18:32-36 (“He stoops down to make me great”).
[12] Philip Yancey holds that love similarly, and perhaps
in more perfect fashion, accomplishes this same result (see Disappointment
with God, 103-104). Kierkegaard
writes in this vein, “I am satisfied with a left-handed marriage in this life;
faith is humble enough to insist on the right hand, for I do not deny that this
is humility and will never deny it” (Fear and Trembling, 34).
[13] I think that we may apply a model of progressive
revelation to the interpretation of these various events, understanding the
events earlier in the series to be the least perfect and those later in the
series to be the most perfect revelations of God’s nature and purposes. I think
we should resist the temptation, however, to conclude that the incarnation, or
even the subsequent sending of the Holy Spirit, is the most perfect revelation
possible, despite certain passages of scripture that seem to affirm this (see,
e.g., Heb. 1:1-3 and 1 Cor. 2:6-16). Adopting such a stance, however, fails to
accommodate other passages, e.g., 1 Cor. 13:9-12, in which Paul explicitly
states that our present knowledge is less perfect than it will be.
[14] “For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but
when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I
talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I
became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a
reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part;
then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Cor. 13:9-12).
[15] “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven
against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by
their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because
God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s
invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen,
being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse”
(Rom. 1:18-20).
“When I came to you, I
did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the
testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except
Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and
trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words,
but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not
rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power. We do, however, speak a message of
wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of
this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery
that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began.
None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not
have crucified the Lord of glory. However, as it is written: ‘What no eye has
seen, what no ear has heard,
and what no human mind has conceived’ the things
God has prepared for those who love him—these are the things God has revealed
to us by his Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of
God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In
the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we
have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God,
so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak,
not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit,
explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. The person without the
Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but
considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are
discerned only through the Spirit. The person with the Spirit makes judgments
about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments,
for, ‘Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him? But we have the
mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:1-16).
[16] As Mill writes, “When a person, either by express
promise or by conduct, has encouraged another to rely on his continuing to act
in a certain way – to build expectations and calculations, and stake any part
of his plan of life upon that supposition – a new series of moral obligations
arises on his part towards that person, which may possibly be overruled, but
cannot be ignored” (Mill 1859, 104; quoted in The Moral Animal, 360).
[17] I think Kierkegaard’s phrase “reckoning without a
host” is apt to describe this type of behavior (see Training in Christianity, 172). An example of this behavior is found in
Numbers 14 in which the Israelites are described as scorning God’s delimitation
of the actions he will support by leading an attack on the inhabitants of the
Promised Land, an attack in which they suffered a disastrous defeat.
[18] E.g., “I have posted watchmen on your walls,
Jerusalem; they will never be silent day or night. You who call on the Lord,
give yourselves no rest, and give him no rest till he establishes Jerusalem
and makes her the praise of the earth”
(Is. 62:6-7; italics mine). See also Luke 18:1-8 and Matt 15:21-28.
[19] “[W]hoever wants to become great among you
must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— just as
the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as
a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:27-28; cf. Mark 10:43-44). See also John 13:1-17.
Kierkegaard comments on these texts, “[S]urely Christ’s humiliation was not
something which merely happened to Him (even though it was the sin of that
generation that they crucified Him), something which happened to Him and
perhaps would not have happened to Him in a better age. Christ Himself willed
to be the humiliated and lowly one. Humiliation (the fact that it pleased God,
to be the lowly man) is therefore something He Himself has joined together, something
He wills to have knit together, a dialectical knot which no one shall presume
to untie, which indeed no one can unite before He Himself has united it by
coming again in glory…history must not incommode itself to do Him justice, nor
must we with impious heedlessness fancy presumptuously that we know as a matter
of course who He was…Woe to the generation that dared to say, Let now all the
injustice He suffered by forgotten, history has now made manifest who He was
and reinstated Him in His rights. By assuming that history is capable of doing
this we put Christ’s humiliation in an accidental relation to Him….But if such
is His royal will, and if only at His return will He show Himself in glory, and
if He has not yet returned; and if no generation can contemplate without the
compunction of repentance what that generation did to Him, with a sense of
guilty participation - then woe to him who presumes to take His lowliness from
Him, or to let it be forgot what injustice He suffered, decking Him fabulously in
the human glory of the historical consequences, which is neither one thing nor
the other.” (Training in Christianity,
29-30)
[20] “When God made his promise to Abraham, since there
was no one greater for him to swear by, he swore by himself, saying, ‘I will
surely bless you and give you many descendants.’ And so after waiting
patiently, Abraham received what was promised. People swear by someone greater
than themselves, and the oath confirms what is said and puts an end to all
argument. Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very
clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath. God did
this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to
lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope set before us may be greatly
encouraged. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It
enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, where our forerunner, Jesus, has
entered on our behalf. He has become a high priest forever, in the order of
Melchizedek” (Heb. 6:13-20).
[21] See H. P. Grice’s “Logic and Conversation” and Kent
Bach’s “Conventional Implicature.” As Paul Ricouer of the University of Paris
explains, “How can I speak of a lie without contrasting it with a true
statement? And what about reality? How can I speak of an illusion without
starting out from that? That means you have to start out from the basis of a
true statement - make sure people can rely on your words. I think Derrida
somewhere calls it the religious act par excellence: believing someone else’s word. And that’s the basis
of all interaction. It’s the basis of a promise. Because a promise is not just
any old act; it’s a fundamental act, because it’s based on three things: first,
I am bound with respect to myself; second, I am bound with respect to the other
person who is relying on me to keep my promise; and third, I am protecting the
language as an institution and using it honestly. There are three partners in
the promise: there’s me, there’s the other person, and there’s the language
itself. So that, I would say, is the basis for trust” (quote taken from The
Examined Life Introduction to
Philosophy DVD Series).
An example of this principle
in practice: Jesus can say amongst his disciples (assuming they are all in good
health), “I am the great physician” without implicating anything about his
present intentions to heal any of them (see John 11:21-27). However, if he were
to speak the very same message in a room full of invalids (and especially if
rumors of his healing powers preceded him), these words would necessarily imply
that he had present intentions to heal, i.e., as a function of the needs and
occurrent psychological biases of the audience, which determine their
interpretation of his words. That audience would be justified in forming
expectations of impending miracles (and therefore God would be genuinely
obliged to perform them) in virtue of his responsibility to adhere to our
conversational norms (see 2 Kings 4:8-37).
[22] Psychologist John Atkinson (1982) describes the mechanism
at work here in the following manner: “If a certain kind of activity has been
intrinsically satisfying or rewarded… , there will be an instigating force (F) for that activity. This will cause a more or less
rapid increase in the strength of an inclination to engage in that activity, an
action tendency (T), depending on
the magnitude of the force. If a certain kind of activity has been frustrated
or punished in the past, there will be an inhibitory force (I) and a more or less rapid growth in the strength
of a disinclination to act or negaction tendency (N). This is a tendency not to do it. The duration of exposure to these
forces…will determine how strong the action or negaction tendency becomes. The
latter, the tendency not to do something, will produce resistance to the activity. It opposes, blocks, dampens, the
action tendency. That is, it subtracts from the action tendency to determine
the resultant action tendency… .
The resultant action tendency competes with resultant action tendencies for other
incompatible activities. The strongest of them is expressed in behavior”
(quoted in Mele 1998, 26-27).
This principle also
finds support in scripture (see, e.g., John 6:53-58, John 15:1-6) and is a
necessary presupposition if we are to make tenable the claim that man can learn
to discriminate truth about God from falsehood (cf. Matt. 13:11-12). To deny
this premise is to affirm the claim that man can sustain genuine faith (faith,
moreover that is spiritually and practically effectual) both in the complete
absence of God (as in the case of God’s non-existence) as well as in the
absence of God’s sustained provision (as in the case of God’s inactivity). If
these are the only two options, I would argue that the burden of truth lies
with those who deny this premise.
[23] It is true that no amount of experience is sufficient
to guarantee the conclusion that
scripture is true. The only kind of argument supported by empirical evidence –
e.g., this present argument, which relies on our personal experience in
attempted engagement with God by the terms defined in scripture – are inductive
arguments. The conclusions they deliver, therefore, are at best probably
true.
[24] See Deut. 6:16, Ps. 78:18, Matt. 4:7, etc.
[25] That these two claims are not necessarily
incompatible is supported by such passages as Malachi 3:10-11 in which God
tells the Israelites with regard to the practice of tithing, “Test me in this…and
see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much
blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.”
[26] It does this by providing markers to guide in the
interpretation of one’s experiences, such that one can discriminate those
genuine experiences of God from the “noise” of merely natural processes. This
principle underlies the chronos/kairos distinction recognized by early Christians (as well
as Christ, himself), chronos
referring to the merely mechanical passage of time, kairos referring to providential events.
