I was listening to this short video of Khaldoun Sweis on the philosophical issues of truth, a great primer on some introductory epistemological issues well worth Christians thinking about. He makes the statement all Christians are familiar with, that Jesus claimed to be “The Truth.” The full statement in John 14:6 was Jesus’ reply to Thomas (that one given to doubt) when he told the disciples that they knew the way to the place where he was going. Thomas said they had no idea where Jesus was going, so how could they know the way. Jesus replied, ” “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Given that I’m sort of obsessed with defending the truth of Christianity, the first thought that struck me was, What kind of person says something like that! No one in all of recorded history has said anything like that, or many other things Jesus was recorded as saying. Unless they were stark raving mad. Jesus of Nazareth most certainly was not. (more…)
There is something that the vast majority of people in the world take for granted: the modern world. Not only the most obvious things like science, medicine, and technology, or the infinite number of conveniences and blessings we enjoy every day, but things like universal education, universities, hospitals, human rights, equality, caring for the weak and the poor, in other words, all the things that make the modern world, well, modern! It seems that very few people bother to stop and wonder where all these things come from, and why they exist. This doesn’t surprise us because we live in the most ahistorical generation ever to have lived. The modern obsession with progress, itself a Christian concept, leaves little room for the critical importance of learning about the past. But the modern world is a miracle that itself only exists because of another miracle, a man 2000 years ago who died on a Roman cross, was buried three days, and rose from the dead, Jesus of Nazareth. The most consequential figure in all of history, his life, death, and resurrection, in a typically modern cliche, changed everything. Why and how did it do that? (more…)
The news that the basketball great Kobe Bryant, his 13 year-old daughter, and seven others died Sunday in a helicopter crash is a shocking reminder of what should not be shocking: Momento Mori, Latin for, “remember that you must die.” I wrote of this just last week about the death in 1956 of a young missionary, Jim Elliot, and four companions who died trying to bring the gospel to Indians in the jungles of Ecuador. One of the things I appreciate about death, even as I hate and despise it, is that it relativizes all human achievement. What does all human striving and achievement mean if in the end we are just worm food? If that is all we are, if there is no life after death, it means absolutely nothing. A mist we are, and poof! We’re gone, forever. (more…)
I’ve taught my kids all their lives that truth isn’t personal. In other words, what is true has nothing to do with me! Whether something is true or not is not determined by what I think about it. Of course we live in a postmodern relativistic (secular) age where people actually believe something can be true for them, and at the same time not true for somebody else. I know, I am tempted to laugh too, but I’ve encountered people who sincerely believe this, and get mad when you challenge their lack of logic. They take it . . . . personally. The beauty of historic, orthodox Christianity is that it rests on events that either happened or didn’t, the evidence for which we either trust or we don’t. Critical scholars and skeptics of every sort have been trying very hard to discredit the Bible for several hundred years(!), and yet it stands stronger and more credible than ever. But if compelling evidence at some point does arise that the Bible is, as it’s critics insist, myths and fairy tales, so be it. I couldn’t get mad at those who uncovered that evidence because it has nothing to do with me. I might be sad, but I have no interest in believing lies.
I recently wrote about a wonderfully nostalgic (for me) documentary about John Lennon and the making of his album Imagine. For some reason ever since, I haven’t been able to get out of my mind his somewhat quirky song, “Gimmie Some Truth.” It’s typical hard-edged Lennon speaking “truth to power,” or something like that. It’s almost quaint looking back at it from our 21st century “post-truth” age. That term is politically loaded, so not as helpful as understanding the philosophical assumptions of postmodernism that got us here. In case you’re not familiar with it, the term came from a response to modernism, an Enlightenment concept that objective truth exists, and is accessible to reason. On the surface that doesn’t seem particularly controversial, but reason ended up becoming rationalism, the idea that reason was the only way to know truth. Every other means of knowing was discounted as invalid. But paraphrasing Jesus, man shall not live on reason alone.
Since it is Easter weekend I thought I might bring up an uncomfortable question for those who are not followers of Jesus Christ: what if it is true after all? I’ve been struck reading and writing my way through the gospels, and now in John, that Jesus confronts people with unequivocally exclusive claims. There is zero beating around the bush with Jesus. When you carefully examine the claims he makes, they are stark, and mutually exclusive. With Jesus it’s pretty much either/or, my way or the highway. Yet every religion, even those who espouse no religion at all, wants a piece of Jesus. You will notice that those who do this, Muslims, Mormons, Hindus, Buddhists, secularists, all pick and choose what Jesus says or does to server their own ends. None of them takes the texts of the gospels in their entirety because if they did, that Jesus would blow their cover! Why does what Jesus says or does have historical authenticity or authority when it fits their purposes, and not when it doesn’t? Good rhetorical question!
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