Ordinarily, Kyle Williams, the precocious conservative columnist for World Net Daily, manages to string together a pretty decent set of subjects and predicates into coherent paragraphs. But he swings and misses in his recent column entitled "Christian's false god of knowledge."
After giving us the lowdown on the Babylonian pantheon from his Bible dictionary, Mr. Williams proceeds to equate Nebo, the Babylonian god of wisdom, with Christian apologetics and current trends in "worldview education." Oops. If this were Logical Fallacy Friday, we'd be talking about false analogies and other category fallacies.
I'm going to cut Mr. Williams a boat load of slack. He's a very bright, home-schooled 16 year-old whose writing is far better than most college term papers I've read. Yeah for home schooling! I'm also going to assume that Mom Williams hasn't yet acquainted her son with the writings of John Warwick Montgomery, such as "History, Law, and Christianity" or "Faith Founded on Fact." Note to Mom: It isn't too late to put Craig Parton's "The Defense Never Rests" on Kyle's summer reading list. I notice that he dropped the title of Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ." I wonder if he's read it.
Mr. Williams makes an all too common error among naive Christians who rely on their hearts more than their heads. He considers "reason" to be something opposite to "faith." Quoting Luther's observation that reason is "the devil's prostitute," Mr. Williams concludes that Christian doctrine is inherently "unreasonable" and that the reason for our hope "isn't the vast array of enlightened Christian thought, but the supernatural peace and hope of glory in Christ." Try that on those Mormons that come knocking at your door.
OK. First of all, Luther never meant that you had to shut down your brains and take a lemming leap of faith to be a faithful Christian. Reason was the "devil's prostitute" when it was the tail that wagged the dog, like when reason says that bread can't possibly be the Body of Christ or that Baptism can[t be the Spirit's washing of rebirth and renewal. Luther advocated a "ministerial use" of reason - reason in service of the Word - as Jesus Himself did when He said, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind" (Mt 22:37). The "foolishness" St. Paul was speaking of was the foolishness that a world of sinners should be saved by one bloody death on a cross.
Second, reason is not some kind of boogey man to faith, nor can reason be equated with the Babylonian idol Nebo. Reason is a gift of God, together with all of our senses. Christ is the Wisdom of God incarnate. When Luther took his stand at Worms, he was willing to be convinced "by the testimony of Scripture or by sound reason." Doesn't sound unreasonable to me.
Let's be fair. Mr. Williams hasn't cut the umbilical cord yet. If he's like most home-schoolers, he'll soon be hanging out at the local junior college, if he isn't already. There he will encounter skeptics, atheists, and agnostics, not to mention every religion and heresy man has ever invented. He will meet scientists who think they've proven God doesn't exist. He will encounter a postmodern philosophy that says words mean nothing, history is politics, and truth is as pliable as jello on a hot day. And that little existential joy, joy, joy, joy down in the heart isn't going to have much to say in response. When they ask you how you know Jesus lives, the answer "He lives within my heart" won't go very far on Mars Hill.
It's tempting to retreat into the shelter of mysticism, pietism, existentialism, subjectivism, or some other sort of -ism when your sacred cows are being torpedoed by an evolutionist biology professor or the atheist teaching Introduction to World Religions. Being a Christian in today's world demands the street smarts of St. Paul who knew more than a thing or two about Greek philosophy and "world view." I'll agree with Mr. Williams on this: programmatic band aids are no substitute for a lifetime of learning and critical thinking. Someone should invite Kyle Williams to the next Higher Things conference in Colorado Springs so he can see how faith and reason go together in something a bit more engaging than some "Worldview Weekend" boot camp.
Does apologetics try to reason people into faith? Do we think we're saved because we can defend a Christian "worldview"? We know better than all that. We cannot by our own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ or come to Him. We know that faith is worked by the Word through the Holy Spirit through preaching and Baptism. Apologetics gives a reason for faith. It topples the Marduks, the Bels, and the Nebos of this world and shows them not only to be idols, but dumb idols. It exposes how unreasonable and illogical people can be when it comes to their spiritual lives. It makes the case that Christianity really is the only reasonable faith, a faith based on the hard, historic facts of Jesus' bloody atoning death on a cross and His bodily resurrection from the dead.
As he grows up, I hope that Mr. Williams will be adequately armed to engage this dangerous world and defend the faith once delivered to the saints. I would recommend that he expand his reading list to the weightier works of the early Christian apologists like Irenaeus and Athanasius, and contemporary thinkers like J.W. Montgomery. I would hate to see that intellect of his go to waste.
Posted On: August 31st, 2005 at 10:46pm by john pawlitz
I think this gets into a badly understood subject among us (i.e. LC-MS theologians/students) The kingdom of the left and the kingdom of the right. True, we might well learn from Luther's wisdom that reason does not play a role in the kingdom of the right. It doesn't, but I daresay faith does not in the kingdom of the left, unless by faith one means reasonability. Yet God "plays a role"--as if lordship were a role and not the main--in both. In the left we know know God by reason and in the right, by faith. In the left we see but darkly, and in the right we do not see, yet do know. We live by the right, but we pass time no less and die (ars morienda) by the left.
I wish instead of jumping on the Luther bandwagons--as Reformed Protestants once did--people would take issues seriously, not just theologizing them to the kingdom of the right. The conclusion that Christian doctrine cannot apply to rational things is just the corrollary to the conclusion that Christian doctrine only considers the "kingdom of the right." It is true that Lutheran theology pre-eminently considers the kingdom of the right as free from the left, unlike the papacy. But it also tends to fall into the general Protestant hodge-podge of believing the left is enslaved to the right. There is nothing original about his conclusion, and he fails to address the real issue. But it is "well-written" though we do well to lose all "faith" in well-writtedness, as it belongs to the left not right.
After all, as much as we can hate Deism, it probably has the best theology of the left of any recent Western branch.
Posted On: August 31st, 2005 at 11:27pm by revcwirla
Categories can be hazardous to theology when they become rigid boxes into which everything must be fitted. The key is to distinguish for the sake of discussion, but never to divide. Law/Gospel, left/right hand kingdoms, etc. Lots of distinctions, often paradoxical, but never divisions. Leave the thing whole at the end of the day.
I wouldn't exclude reason from the right hand, as though it were exclusively a left-handed tool. Reason, sanctified by the Spirit in the regenerate man, in its ministerial (not magisterial use) is an ambidextrous tool.
"I will pray with the spirit and I will pray with the mind also; I will sing with the spirit and I will sing with the mind also." (1 Cor. 14:15)
I might also make this distinction: coram Deo / coram hominibus. Before God, we best go dumb and hearken to His Word, as our Confessions amply state. Before men, we ought to emply every tool in our God-given tool box, including reason, as the apostle Paul did.
Mr. Williams fails to see that apologetics is chiefly an exercise of the Law (though never entirely to the exclusion of the Gospel). The use of reason in apologetics is to expose the unreasonableness of idolatry, as the prophets did. It is still the Spirit working through the Gospel that produces faith in the heart.
Posted On: September 01st, 2005 at 1:12am by john pawlitz
Both sides of such a (dicotomous) category may be important and/or necessary. The danger in passionate preference of one over the other ought to be made clear, as well as the danger of emblazened avowal of the distinction merely to show that passionate preference. (I hope I am not emphasizing the distinction merely to distort it.)
But I also think there is a point at which the "necessity of both" might become a crutch of sorts. Because if one is bound to pay attention both ways, then it leaves the necessity (but hopefully, not the will) to cease one, in order to maintain a quasi-oriental (whether orthodox or Chinese) sense of balance.
I realize this is approaching a long-standing feud over the 3rd Use of the Law, but on a different ground. I have no inclination to punish myself or anyone else by reiterating all the wrongs (and rights) on both sides of such discussions about pietism, morality, anti-nomianism, etc.
Unless they apply to...
I guess my biggest question: Is maintaining the balance a hazardous ambition in and of itself? The curious side effect of: "all things in moderation, even moderation." But I suppose you would probably agree to this, I just wish something could be done to make people see the necessity more urgently and less intellectually or spiritually.
Posted On: September 01st, 2005 at 1:17am by john pawlitz
Allow me to refine my bad statement at the end there...intellectually and spiritually are fine, but sometimes it seems like nostalgia and sentimentality, and I don't know how to get rid of that without seeming abusive or rude?--a real puzzle?
Posted On: September 01st, 2005 at 1:49am by revcwirla
I suppose a quote from one of my favorite professors is in order here: Hypertrophy in one thing leads to atrophy in another. It was true of the great Christological controversies of the first 4 centuries of the church, and of the Law/Gospel polarities of the Reformation. "Balance" really doesn't describe it adequately for me; nor does "moderation." Moderation is a kind of Eutychian hybrid of one thing and its counterpart, as in the confusion of Law/Gospel or the two kingdoms. This is the counterreaction to the Nestorian option, the radical division of what should be held in paradoxical tension.
At the heart of this discussion is whether Faith and Reason are distinct counterparts. I do not believe this is the case. Faith holds Reason captive to Christ and His Word. Faith is not to Reason as Gospel to Law or Right Hand to Left.
"Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect." Rom 12:2
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