His
Your Mind at War With God?[1]
BY LARRY CHRISTENSON
|
|
|
The Charismatic experience
in the Church – A pastor in a Lutheran congregation that had begun to experience some
charismatic phenomena announced an information meeting for members who had
expressed misgivings about these things.
Ø The pastor presented a brief Bible study showing that healing,
speaking in tongues, and prophecy were common to the experience of the
early Church. Some members had recently come into charismatic experiences
shared their testimonies.
As the questioning and discussion got under way, one of the members who had been upset by these
goings-on said, “Pastor, it’s supernatural and that's what scares
us!”
It would be hard to overestimate the significance of this simple statement from a disturbed church
member.
è
In seven words she put
her finger on perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the charismatic renewal:
è
It challenges the reigning
world view of our culture, naturalism.
Naturalism, according to the
dictionary definition, is
è
"the philosophical doctrine denying that anything in
reality has a supernatural significance; specifically, the doctrine that scientific
laws account for all phenomena.
è
In theology
it is the denial of the miraculous and supernatural in religion, and the
rejection of revelation s a means of attaining truth." [2]
Forty-nine
percent of the New Testament is "contaminated" with happenings that do not fit into naturalism's world
view.
The Influence of NATURALISM
The influence
of naturalism is so widespread in modern Western culture that it
scarcely requires documentation. Its effect upon the Church has been
enormous.
Rudolt
Hultmann, probably
the most influential Lutheran theologian of this generation, wrote:
"The forces and laws of nature have been discovered, and
therefore
we can't believe in ‘spirits’. . . whether good or evil."[3]
He saw with great clarity that the issue
at stake was that of our world view:
Modern
man acknowledges as reality only such phenomena
or events comprehensible within the framework of the rational order
of the universe.
He does not acknowledge miracles because they do not fit into this lawful order. When a strange or marvelous accident occurs, he does not rest
until he has found a rational cause.
The contrast between the ancient worldview of the Bible and the modern
world-view is the contrast between two ways
of thinking, the mythological and the
scientific. . . .
the world view of the Scripture is mythological and is therefore unacceptable to modem man
whose thinking has been shaped by science and is therefore no longer
mythological. . . . Nobody reckons with direct
intervention of transcendent powers.[4]
The BIBLICAL World-View
In the pages of the Bible, as biblical scholar Ben
Johnson has ably shown, we encounter quite
another world view:
That biblical world view holds that the universe
has been created by God by an act of will, that Jesus Christ is His
pre-existent Son,
Øthat the universe
consists of both visible and invisible creatures, among them angels, demons, principalities, and powers.
ØIt believes that God
is present in His creation in a variety of ways, among them through His
holy angels, through His Spirit by which He inspires people to
prophesy,
Øthat He reveals
Himself to people in dreams and visions, as well as through natural means
(clouds, fire, etc.).
ØIt believes that He
acts through signs and wonders, that he intends the perfection of the
world and His people, and that He will finally come again in power to set
things right.
Specifically concerning His Son Jesus Christ, it believes that He was born of a virgin,
taught with authority, did miracles and exorcisms, raised the dead,
walked on water, and was Himself raised from the dead after an atoning
death. [5]
No one can set this
summary of the biblical world-view alongside a
definition of naturalism without seeing at once an irreconcilable conflict.
Ø
To accept the presuppositions of naturalism is to deny the presuppositions of the Bible,
and vice versa.
Ø
Any talk of biblical authority must begin by
recognizing that the mind of modern Western
man is has at war with God, and the battlefield is the adequacy of the biblical world-view.
Two World Views in Conflict
Many people, and not a few theologians, have shied away from the starkness of this confrontation.
Ø Some
Christians have dealt with the conflict by surrendering
the question of world view to naturalism without
a struggle and
Ø reducing
the sphere of biblical authority simply to a belief system regarding salvation.
But the gospel cannot be reduced to a belief system, though unfortunately that is what it has
become for many, and thereby
Ø a living faith has become a lifeless doctrine.
The gospel is pre-eminently history - the record
of what God has done and is doing in the world and among the people whom He
has created. And therefore it is impossible to speak meaningfully about
"the gospel" without becoming involved in questions of world
view.
Consider
a few things recorded in Scripture.
Jesus spent time teaching moral and spiritual truths, and people who operate within a
naturalistic framework handle that quite well.
Ø
But
Jesus also spent time healing the sick by non-medical means, casting demons out of
people, and performing a variety of miraculous acts, such as turning
water into wine, walking on water, and raising the dead.
Ø
And
these kinds of things were not limited to the
ministry of Jesus: His disciples also healed,
cast out demons, and performed miracles.
The New Testament has
7,957 verses, of which
Ø
3,874 (49 percent) are "contaminated" with
happenings that do not fit into naturalism's world view.
Ø
When two world views that are opposed to one another come into conflict something has to give.
The Issue: Epistemology
The issue we must come to
grips with in regard to a world view is
that of epistemology. Epistemology has to do with acquiring and validating
knowledge.
Ø
In other words, "How do I come into possession of
valid knowledge?" More simply,
"How do I know what I know?"
The naturalistic
mind-set of Western culture has
its roots in the epistemology of Aristotle. Aristotle taught that man receives direct knowledge only through sense
experience and reason.
è
This epistemology was
imported into the Church through the
prodigious theological work of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century –
è
and has remained the
reigning epistemology of Western culture
to the present day.
è
Aquinas steered a careful
detour around the idea that man could
have direct contact with spiritual realities, and W
è
Western culture has
largely followed his lead.
Although Western culture gradually broke with the Church's understanding of the universe after the Copernican
revolution, it maintained the same epistemological framework.
Ø It dismissed any knowing except what comes through sense experience and reason.
Ø The parade of thinkers inside and outside the
Church who helped shape the modern Western mind varied their
content and field of interest
Ø but were astonishingly unified in clinging to the old
epistemology - Descartes, Hobbes, Hume,
Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Barth,
Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, Tillich.
To a man they were sceptical of the possibility of any direct encounter with non physical (spiritual)
reality such as we read about in the New Testament.
Ø The impact of Aristotle-Aquinas philosophy upon Western culture has been enormous.
Naturalism in a Nutshell
Descartes, "the father of
modern thought," said that
è
only those ideas that
could be proven true by reason could he accepted.
This is naturalism in a nutshell.
Charles Darwin came up with
è
the theory that life
evolved upon the earth over millions of years by a process of "natural selection."
Across the spectrum of
Western culture this has become a widely believed "scientific account"
of the way in which all forms of life on the earth came into being, an account that requires no reference to God.
We can't understand the New
Testament
Church unless we break
out
of the straight jacket of naturalism
and
take seriously the dynamic
manifestations of the Holy Spirit.
For our purposes it is
particularly helpful to observe the
epistemology of naturalism in relation to Darwinian evolution
Ø
because it illustrates how tenaciously a world view is
clung to even in the face of contrary evidence.
Ø
The progress of modern science has been brutally unkind to Darwin's world view. Thoroughgoing
evolutionists have a difficult time of it today even within the scientific
community.
Even Julian Huxley, himself an evolutionist, reckoned that the odds
against a higher organism such as man coming into being through the
process that Darwin suggested
Ø
are an improbability of the same order of
magnitude as that of a monkey with a typewriter
producing the works of Shakespeare.
Ø
Yet the basic presuppositions of naturalism remain intact,
illustrating the fact that an entrenched worldview will not be readily set
aside.
Naturalism came on the scene offering a reasoned explanation for life.
It is not likely to quit the stage without a struggle.
God is not a God of caprice who changes His world or
His own way of working in it to conform to our latest philosophical or theological fad.
Breaking Out of Naturalism
Emil Brunner, in his book The Misunderstandings
of the Church, recognized that
è
we cannot rightly
understand the Church of the New Testament unless we break out of the straight jacket of naturalism
and take seriously the dynamic manifestations of the Holy
Spirit. [6]
Episcopalian theologian Morton Kelsey
makes a similar point.
“Man
is not only in touch with the space-time or material world which he
perceives with his physical senses. . . he
is also in touch with a non-space-time or spiritual world,
which. is independent of the individual."
According to Kelsey,
è
the only large group of
Christians who take seriously the idea of a
direct encounter are the Pentecostals and the Charismatics, "and they have come in for derision from every
side.”[7]
While
naturalism rules out the
possibility of God's intervention in the world,
calling attention to divine intervention forces us to part company with
naturalism and relate to the living God in a realistic,
objective way.
Ø In a culture dominated by naturalism, the supernatural aspects of the biblical
revelation remind us that God is a living, intervening God;
it is not an idea about God but God Himself with whom
we have to do.
A Renewal of Faith
Biblical faith is more
than my subjective response to a doctrine or an idea about God.
Ø
Faith involves a joining of my life to the life of God
in Jesus Christ, through the working of the Holy Spirit.
Ø
The present-day charismatic renewal is precisely a renewal of faith in God
who intervenes in our everyday life.
Ø
While some theologies call for accommodating
the biblical revelation to the naturalistic presuppositions of modern man,
Ø
the charismatic renewal is saying that the Church must abandon its efforts to tailor God
to fit the presuppositions of a world view that dismisses out of hand things
that Scripture presents with the
greatest seriousness.
The
charismatic renewal is challenging the Church
to proclaim to this generation a Lord who is the same yesterday and today and
forever (see Hebrews 13:8).
è He
is not a God of caprice who changes His world
or His own way of working in it to conform to our latest philosophical or
theological fad.
è He
is the God who has revealed Himself in Scripture,
the God who intervenes and encounters people in the real and everyday world,
in ways and by means that He Himself determines, and to which Scripture bears
faithful and accurate testimony.
This is the great challenge that the charismatic renewal presents to our generation. It is, at the same time, the one great hope of the Church and the world!