I've Been Here Before: The Manuscript Argument

This theme/series is something I first started in September of last year, with this introductory article. My idea is simply to transparently show what articles I distinctly remember having a powerful influence on me in my process of investigating truth claims beginning in 2010. Each of these articles will be presented in chronological fashion.

So far, I pointed out the "articles we should not use" link from AiG (at the above blog post) as the first epiphany I encountered, which immediately demonstrated the intellectual honesty of Answers in Genesis. Subsequent to that, I looked at their Statement of Faith. Keep in mind that I wasn't doctrinally reformed at this point. But I could tell they weren't complete crazies, so I decided to tentatively trust their claims, but be ready to question the more extreme assertions. And so I did.

For the next week or two, I spent dozens of hours poring over 'the creationist view' of nearly every secular scientific dogma I'd been exposed to since I was old enough to read. What impressed me most was that I wasn't, largely, told "new information." Instead, the articles used what I already knew, and appealed to my common sense to explain it better. The more I kept reading, the more persuasive it all became. But something began to nag me, and that was that though the point of view was internally consistent, one thing was totally taken for granted in every article: the inerrancy and authority of the Bible. Each article made copious reference to Scripture, but within-article, the interpretation and reliance on those Scriptures was never defended. The implicit argument seemed to be, "IF you believe the Bible is true, and the Word of God, THEN you will logically come to believe what we present in our articles." It was a challenge. I was prepared to believe the Bible is God's Word and inerrant, but now I had to go make sure, and find out for myself.

First, was there enough evidence that the Bible was written when it is said that it was written, and that the original texts say what the modern copies/translations say?

The answer to this comes by way of the Manuscript Argument

That link is dated later than I would have read it, but I recognize the content as something similar/identical to what I actually read in Marc/April 2010.
 Simply put, if we take seriously that other historical documents about other historical figures are truthful in that the events they describe really took place when they say they took place (Herodotus, Caesar, Pliny, Josephus, Aristotle and Plato, etc), then by the same standard of assessment, there is no logical reason to question whether the Bible was actually written at the time period which the Bible's writers indicate that their respective books were written.

And as to whether we can be sure that what the Bible we have now says what the Bible of 70 AD said, if we can believe that what is attributed to Aristotle was written by Aristotle, then we can believe that what is attributed to Paul was written by Paul -- since there are 100 times as many New Testament copies as there are copies of Aristotle's works.

The principle of applying an equal standard of historical scrutiny leads to the confident conclusion that what the Bible says is what the Bible has always said, and that the attributed writers really are the ones who wrote the book, meaning that they were indeed eyewitnesses to their claims.

After demonstrating the historical authenticity of the texts, the next logical question is: does what the texts say, logically contradict, or is it coherent? I dove in headfirst. I went looking for alleged contradictions, making sure to leave no stone unturned. There had to at least be a plausible explanation to resolve each one, in order for inerrancy to be a valid conclusion. And the careful scrutiny of these claims is what I will summarize in the next IBHB article. An address of the many alleged Biblical contradictions.

Stay tuned.

~ Rak Chazak

"What About the Innocent People Who Have Never Heard the Gospel?"

"What about the innocent man in Africa who's never heard the Gospel?"

If you don't want to watch the video, *spoiler alert*, the answer's after the jump:

I've Been Here Before...Pivotal Moments in My Journey

This will serve as the hub and first entry for a new series, where anyone who wishes can follow along and encounter the major moments that impacted the way I think about reality, and what is true.

My Testimony: Era of Uncertainty

I took a philosophy class in 2009 and chose to do some independent reading in the book I had had to buy for it, covering two chapters that were not focused on in the course. These concerned Neuroscience and Determinism. Determinism is simply the view that everything that happens is directly attributable to the immediately preceding state of the universe, and so on and so on. Reality is a complex machine that runs on physical laws and that's it. Technically, that's materialistic determinism. Determinism that allows for a supernatural aspect to the universe would hold that spiritual beings control your destiny and so whereas it's not all mechanically produced, you nevertheless do not have much of a choice in how your future unfolds. And neuroscience, from an atheist perspective, is often presented as a scientific argument against the soul, i.e. that all of your thoughts, emotions, desires, will, decisions etc are produced by neurochemical electrical interactions between the cells of your brain.

Take these two thoughts together, and what do you get? The idea that I couldn't trust my thoughts to be accurate, because my beliefs might just be deterministic phenomena, artifacts of physical processes in the brain, with nothing to connect them to truth or to give them meaningful significance. What if I only believed what I did because I was organically predisposed to believe it, and chance life experiences influenced my thoughts to produce that result? That there was no choice involved, and no transcendent truth.

Once the thought was comprehended, I couldn't ignore it. I had to deal with it.

Becoming a Christian Takes Work. ( Criticism of "Intellectual" Atheists and Others)

Staying atheist is certainly the more convenient option, if you are lazy. And let's face the facts, most people who live in the West and don't have faith in Christ are definitively lazy.

You have access to more knowledge in a day, without leaving the chair you're sitting at right now, than most people prior to the printing press had access to in their entire lives. A daily newspaper nowadays would be a month's worth of word-of-mouth overheard from travelers as they passed through your town.

The amount of time it took to copy a book just once was the amount of time it took for a person to gather together enough blank pages, ink, not to mention also a copy of the book, and then for him to rewrite every word on the blank pages, before binding the book and starting anew. Knowledge spread very slowly in a horizontal fashion (from one person to contemporaries, people alive at the same time), and knowledge spread through tradition, from parents to children (vertically) was much more effective. Consequently, a person's ideas could take a century or more to catch on, and they'd never live to see the effect of their work. But now history has come to a remarkable place.

We can access anything that anyone anywhere has found out about the past or found written in the past, so long as it has been transcribed or photocopied onto the Internet -- which is to say, any computer or database connected to the Internet information highway, so that anyone else can access the information as long as they are also connected.

And despite all this, the vast majority of people REFUSE to use the Internet to learn anything important!

You there, o atheist. You who have the knowledge of all the world's history at your fingertips, day in and day out, do you go looking for information that confirms and points to the Bible being true and its admonitions having the force of an ultimate Lawgiver behind them? Do you try to prove the Bible and do you go looking for evidence to utterly convince you that Jesus Christ is God, you are a man of sin, you need to repent, and you deserve His judgment but are utterly at the mercy of His unmerited favor in order to escape?

You can't make this claim. And I know from experience (the other benefit of the Internet is that it allows you to sample large amounts of people at a time to see how they think and consider their personal testimonies) that most people who are atheists are not so from being scholarly, studious and disciplined. They took the first lame reason to reject faith they could find, and clung to it, and now they're monstrously irrational and as a consequence of choosing not to think, CAN NOT think.

Sarcastic Apologetic Response of the Day

One of the characters that I met through my university forum had an excellent response to a few aggressive feminists and postmodern pro-"transgender" debaters on a discussion thread a while back. I think it was succinct and powerful enough to be worth sharing here.

If I may demand of society how it perceives me in one way, then why not in another way? What limits that principle to gender?
Why can't I demand to be perceived as a different species? So my DNA says I'm human. Who cares? Species is a social construct, just like gender. Species is genetic, while species expression is external. I choose to live as a T-Rex.

…

[omitted for conciseness]

…

[OPPONENT], if I or my ancestors make money and I become wealthy, then I am wealthy according to the natural order. If I run for office and get elected President, then I am President according to the natural order. If I am born genetically human, then I am human according to the natural order. And so on. If I am born with XY sex chromosomes, then I am a man by the natural order.

I'm a middle class male human being. Economic and genetic reality dictate those facts beyond any doubt. So if I were to declare right now that "I am a millionaire" or "I am a T-Rex" or "I am a woman", why would the first two statements be nonsense while the third wouldn't?

~ Rak Chazak

Journal Entry: A Theology of Evangelizing Discussion Forums

The following is a letter I sent out to some fellow Christians at my university who have gotten to know me subsequent to my becoming infamous because of the character assassination employed against me because of standing up for my beliefs against the jeers of my "peers" at my university.

It's essentially a theology of how best to evangelize on discussion forums. Feel free to take this "game plan" and apply it as you see it being useful.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

[context: I had just copied a conversation with a belligerent person to show how depraved his behavior had become] 

Why did I post this here? Not primarily to complain, but I admit I’m hoping to generate some understanding empathy on the part of the reader. I’m posting this here so that you can see what it is that I’m referring to when I make reference to the [university] forum. This is a “typical” heated fight. These sorts of things, while not as long and drawn-out every time (though sometimes much more so!), are standard fare, and happen on a recurring basis. Because there are so many “critics” on the forum, there is no shortage of supply of belligerent arguers to enter into a thread and begin making the discussion miserable for most of the rest of us. Some of these people thrive on instigating this kind of stuff. And I recognize that there were a few places above, where my words could have been less emotional and I could have avoided letting myself get drawn into the fight. It’s hard. 

You’re often stuck between choosing whether to be gentle or whether to engage in challenge riposte. And this was something I came to recognize early on (years ago, when I started being on the forum)—that you can’t go it alone. You can, but you can’t fulfill all the roles when you’re just one person. To be specific, you can’t be the whole body of Christ when you are only one part. You need, ideally, one person to exposit Scripture, one person to handle apologia to deal with those who question the exegesis of Scripture, one person to engage in challenge riposte with those who refuse to be rational when faced with apologia, one person preach judgment and accuse those who have rejected challenge riposte of being intentionally self-deceived and dangerous false teachers, one person to avoid the back-and-forth and pipe in here and there and constantly draw everything back to the Gospel; one person to be the Lover—the one who couches everything in terms of God’s love and mercy toward us—this takes the wind out of the sails of those who would come belligerently accusing the preachers of Scripture to be sowing hatred and worshiping an angry, mean or evil God. You can add more people on to this, such as a dedicated politician, one who will perpetually present Biblically-based political positions, for example. 

But as you can see, in order to accomplish all the things that need to be accomplished, at once, including 1) preaching the Gospel, 2) teaching Scripture, 3) defending the Faith, 4) rebuking scoffers, 5) preaching judgment and repentance, an 6) preaching Love, Mercy and Grace,  you can’t successfully accomplish this with one person. I would try presenting Biblical positions, this would lead to scoffers and mockers coming out of the woodworks. Presenting apologetics distracted me from the teaching of Scripture, and then when the apologetical answers were utterly rejected, I retreated to calling out the perpetual mockers and referencing the vast history of their rebelliousness as reason (which is nonetheless valid to do) to not bother explaining Scripture to them since they would reject it anyway (throwing what is holy to dogs, is what it is). Then it just devolves into bickering from that point on. 

If you get sucked in, you’ve successfully been distracted away from preaching the Gospel. And in all this, it’s hard to explain to people in any credible way how everything you’ve said is a result of God’s Love for us. In internet forums, where your words are permanent, it’s hard to be harsh toward the scoffers and fools, and then turn and try to be gentle toward the meek, or people who seem otherwise receptive to what you have to say. Two reasons: 1, they can get discouraged by how they’ve seen you talk toward the scoffers (not that you did anything wrong in rebuking them), and 2, the mockers can attempt to interrupt your conversation, since it’s public, and try to disengage both of you from talking to each other. They’ll try to distract you again as explained above, and they’ll try to convince the other person not to listen to you because you’re hateful, ignorant, wrong, etc etc etc. These are unique problems to internet forums (and to famous Christian figures, with whom the dynamic is similar, with an “all-eyes-on” sort of situation). I’ve tried to give a bit of an explanation of how I think it works. To summarize:

                        My theoretical “ideal” Christ-force Gospel-League Saint-Squadron:

1.         The Gospel Preacher. Their job is to preach the Gospel clearly in every thread they can, and to intervene & derail bickering subthreads by turning everything back to the Gospel.

2.         The Bible Teacher. Their job is as simple as can be defined. Speak only the words of Scripture. Give Biblical justifications for everything. This will confound the scoffers.

3.         The Apologist. Their job is to intervene when the Bible Teacher is attacked, and “take the fire” by engaging the critic and proving him wrong and showing him the truth.

4.         The Riposte Challenger. Their job is to intervene when the Apologist has run his course with a recalcitrant sinner, and to play “no more Mr. Nice Guy”

5.         The Judgment Preacher. Their job is to handle the refuse of the Riposte Challenger and to assist the Gospel Preacher by emphasizing God’s righteous judgment on sin.

6.         The Love Preacher. Their job is to intervene when meek unbelievers express distress at the Judgment/Gospel preachers, and explain God’s Mercy, Love and Grace to them.

7.         The Politician. Their job is to provide Biblical applications for everything in human experience that isn’t a creedal position.

8.         The Logician. Their job is to, while coming from a Christian worldview, not explicitly use Biblical references, but reason with people on a “common sense” level, and when they’ve gotten them to a certain level of understanding, to redirect them to the Gospel Preacher, Bible Teacher or Apologist for further instruction. (Dialectical Approach?)

9.         The Sympathizer. There can be many different kinds of these, but their job is to connect with people who have undergone similar experiences, to “be all things to all people.”

10.       The Scientist. Their job is to assist the Apologist by producing ‘random’ factoids and articles that provide evidence to confirm Biblical Christian positions, to confound scoffers.

11.       The Voice of the Martyrs. Their job is to assist the Politician and educate the audience as to the reality of persecution against Christians.

12.       The Eschatologist. Their job is to provide coverage of current events relevant to the Lord’s Return, including Israel, the Beast, the Great Apostasy, etc etc and assist the Politician.

13.       The Fundamentalist. Their job is to assist the Bible Teacher and Gospel Preacher by showing how the Bible is one unit, and if the foundational doctrines fall, the rest will also.

Notice how none of these positions concern a distinct “Evangelist” position or “Prayer Leader” position. This is because Evangelism is the call of ALL believers, and is what all of the above Saints should be preoccupied with, working together to yield a better harvest. And Prayer is the preoccupation of every Christian. Here is a quote from Spurgeon I believe I’ve referenced before: “You are no Christian if you do not pray. A prayerless soul is a Christless soul. You have no inheritance among the people of God if you have never struggled with that Covenant Angel and come off the conqueror. Prayer is the indispensable mark of the true child of God.” And so, ALL of the above should be praying and evangelizing. 

The separate roles I have invented here are not set in stone, they are simply ideas for how to perform better as the Body of Christ by being united in purpose, but distinguished in service according to ability and the direction of the Holy Spirit. This is, I believe, a part of why I have met with trouble in attempting to preach on-line. In part it’s because of my own sinfulness and failure to be the best, because simply, without God, and without the Holy Spirit infusing my every action with His power, I am worthless and my efforts are futile and even counterproductive and destructive. And in part it’s because the Gospel simply causes evil to bubble to the surface. Demonic opposition may be involved, although it may just as well, in some or many cases, be the sinfulness of man’s heart alone, which even without the temptation of demons is inclined to rebel against God, and to hate His Word and His Children. I think that one of the reasons we are told to be in fellowship—to attend Church--is for this reason. It is to give us accountability, yes, but it’s also to enable us to recharge, and to bear our burdens collectively, making it easier for each to bear individually. One of the foremost goals of a church, being composed of believers, is the preaching of the Gospel, and so, being in a church setting naturally provides you with the potential to select a “merry band of Bereans” to join forces with and to go out and to move as one Body, being more effective as a unified whole than as one part alone.

~ Rak Chazak