Month: December 2015

Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty? It is higher than heaven — what can you do? Deeper than Sheol — what can you know? (Job 11:7-8)

 But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine. (Titus 2:1)

We have spent a number of blogs telling the Christian story. The discussion has been necessary because everything else about Christianity flows out of that story. The story is the foundation. Now we can start building. We will begin building by talking about Christian beliefs — also called Christian theology. These discussions will be basic. I want to describe God, Jesus, human nature, this world, the church, the afterlife, faith, and much more, and I want to do this in simple terms.

That’s a challenge when you think about it. I mean, how do you describe God in simple terms? In fact, how do you describe God at all? He is incomprehensible. Paul wrote, “How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! ‘For who has known the mind of the Lord …’” (Rm 11:33-34a). It is true. I can’t capture God with my pen. And you can’t fit Him into your brain. He is God! That is a truth we must never forget.

But truth, like a good tool, must be used properly, and many people abuse the concept of the mystery of God. I have heard some theologians say that God is so mysterious that no one can possibly know anything about Him. People who claim that all religions point to the same reality often emphasize the transcendent incomprehensibility of God. To them, the mystery of God is necessary, for if we truly can know specifics about God, then not all religions are equal. Some will reflect what we can know better than others.

When people conclude that we cannot know God because he is so mysterious, they encounter a problem. You see, if we truly cannot know God, then how ever did we discover the fact? Theologians who talk this way do not believe their own theology. If they really believed what they said, they would quickly be out of a job; for if they are correct, we no longer need their services to teach us and write books for us. They would better serve humanity by being plumbers.

In addition, if it is true that we cannot possibly know anything about God, then how can anyone claim that all religions point to him? That claim itself assumes a type of knowledge about God. If you do not know the destination, you cannot know that every map points you in the right direction. We are, thus, stuck with this sense not only of a god but also of specifics. I don’t mean everyone agrees on the specifics. I mean merely that everyone agrees that there are specifics.

Anyone who worships God assumes something about him. We may have different forms and styles, different theologies and faiths, different religions all worshipping a god of some kind. Obviously, all these different worshippers cannot be correct, and they will disagree about issues of no little import, and some will certainly not be worshipping God. Yet every person who attempts to worship assumes that he knows something about God — namely, that He is worthy of worship. And once you begin to look at the various worship practices and traditions, you find that nearly every one of them makes significant knowledge claims about God: He is good, He is powerful, He is personal, He loves us, He is just, etc.

When the average person prays, he assumes knowledge of God, for he assumes God can actually do something, that God is greater than we are, that God listens, that God can be spoken to, that God still works in history. All these statements indicate to us that theists of all stripes believe that we can know something about God. They may disagree about the extent, but even the deists taught that God created the universe. That is a knowledge claim about God and says something significant about his power and provision.

“Ok, Ok,” you say, “all people who believe in a god believe something can be known of him. But that’s not saying much, and it certainly doesn’t help me understand God any better.”

Perhaps. But it is a start. At least it enables us to see through the sort of talk that says we cannot know anything about God but which then proceeds to tell us about him. This beginning may not point us to the right path, but it does eliminate one wrong path. It lets us know that the bridge is washed out on the path that opposes the mystery of God with the doctrines of God. In that sense it is helpful, for that path is well worn. Many moral people travel it, but if we push God’s mysterious character too far, we cut off the legs on which we stand.

God may be a mystery, but you can still know Him.

Sometimes people talk as if the Christian story ends in the first century. It does not. In fact, if you read what Jesus said, you quickly discover that He often spoke of His future return. So then, the Resurrection is not the end of the story.   Indeed, the end of the story has yet to occur. Christianity is a religion that is in the middle of its story. As far as time on Earth is concerned, the Bible talks as if we are now in the last days. Peter spoke this way at Pentecost (Acts 2:16ff). So if history were a book, perhaps we are now in chapter 38 of 40 (or something like that), but God is not finished with the Earth.

“Heaven and Earth shall pass away,” Jesus said (Mt 24:35). In church, I have been preaching on the book of Revelation, which gives us a series of visions of the future of Earth. The book certainly has its share of passages that are difficult to interpret, but it also has many major themes that are clear. One of those themes deals with the destruction of this Earth. No matter how you interpret Revelation, it is rather plain that God speaks as if this Earth comes to an end. And Revelation is not the only place in the Bible that talks this way.

Thus, Christians see Earth as something like the Titanic. It is big. It is proud. It has its own sort of glory. But it is going to the bottom of the sea. People run around on it trying to get the best cabins or even to become captain, but if they build their life around the Titanic, they will go down when the ship goes down. And they will have no hope.

The idea that this Earth is mortal is, in many ways, common sense. It fits what we see everywhere else. Everything physical wears out and falls apart. Your bodies wear out. Your car wears out. Your pants wear out. Your computer dies. Your home falls apart. Even the rocks on a canyon wall wear away. Why do we somehow think that Earth is different? Nothing physical lasts. And this Earth will die. This fact is part of the Christian story. The Bible predicts it.

Now if you remember back to the beginning of the story, you will recall that sin entered the world and corrupted everything. The man was cursed. The woman was cursed. The land was cursed. Yes, that’s right. The land was cursed. The beautiful world that God had made was corrupted, and God insists on His beautiful world again. But this world is not that world. This world is so corrupted that God cannot merely tweak a few things and voila — Eden. No. This world is so corrupted that for God to get the world He wants, He must actually destroy this one and remake a new one. And He will. But in the meantime, in between the first Eden and the future Eden, God wants to save people from the Titanic. This is why He waits. This is also why He focuses so much on sin, for sin is why everything is corrupted in the first place.

So God, through Christ, makes His people new and clean and changes their lives so that they no longer live for the luxuries and the culture of the Titanic. But sadly, many people will not listen to God. They think that the Titanic is where they will be happy, so they chase their own happiness apart from God. Unfortunately, they will receive the very thing they choose. But they will not like it. They were made for God, not Earth.

After God destroys this world, Scripture says that He makes a new heaven and a new Earth. This place is holy, clean, bright, beautiful, glorious. It has no tears or pain or sorrow, and it is the place where God dwells and where we see Him face to face. It is the place God originally intended you and me to dwell in. But for you and me to dwell there, we must be different from what we are now, for our current bodies are corrupted with sin. Our current bodies could not handle glory. Thus, God must remake our bodies in order for them to fit this new world. This, too, is common sense. Just as a creature on Earth must fit its environment or it will suffer, so must we fit this new environment or we will suffer. So God gives us new bodies.

We must understand that people who do not accept the cleansing and power of Christ are turning down the ability to live in glory. If they were to experience this future, glorious world in their current state, they would not like it. That is correct. Most people would not like heaven if they found themselves there. They would be like polar bears forever confined to the tropics. The light of glory would penetrate their insides and they would forever be begging for mercy. We must understand that there is a real sense in which hell is merciful.

And when this heaven and earth have passed away, and God has created a new heaven and earth, and He has buried all of our sin and transformed our current bodies into glorious ones, then, and only then has the Christian story on this Earth ended.

But when that happens, we shall begin a new story in the presence of God, an everlasting story where each moment is grander and more wondrous than the best wedding celebration you could imagine. And that everlasting story is the whole point of the law and the prophets and the Cross and the Resurrection and the rest of the Christian story we have described.   You see, this story of Christ that we think takes up so much history is just a brief preface. The real book is yet to come.

In the days of the Roman Empire, during the reign of Augustus Caesar, when King Herod was tetrarch in Judea, a child was born to peasant parents in the town of Bethlehem.  They were Jews.  The mother’s name was Mariam.  God had told Mariam that He was giving her a child even though she had slept with no man.  God had said that the boy she was carrying would be great and would be called Son of the Most High, that this boy would sit on the throne of his father David and would “reign over the house of Jacob forever, [that] his kingdom would never end.”  Mariam surely knew the meaning of these words, though she did not fully understand what was to happen.  She gave birth and named the boy Yeshua, which in English translates to Jesus.  The boy then grew up in a Jewish family in the town of Nazareth.  He read the Law and the Prophets; he celebrated the Passover; he learned his father’s trade and became a carpenter.  In many respects, he was an ordinary boy.

Except he wasn’t really an ordinary boy.  About thirty years after his birth, during the reign of Tiberius Caesar, God called Jesus to proclaim the kingdom of God to the people and to verify his message by doing wonders.  Jesus became an itinerant preacher in the region of Galilee and began to draw large crowds because of His teaching and miracles.

He taught people to love God above all things and to love their neighbors as themselves.  He told people that they had to become like children in order to see God and that God demanded of them everything.  He said not to worry about food or clothing – that God would provide what we needed – but instead to seek first His kingdom.  He taught of a God who had mercy on sinners who repent but who had no mercy on those who think themselves OK.  He called the people to a faith that was deeper than the status quo; he called them to give away their lives.

He healed the blind and the lame and cast out evil spirits from those oppressed by them.  He was the rage of Galilee at the time, for people talked about him as people today might talk of a famous actor or a rising politician.  Could he be the Messiah the prophecies spoke about?  They would debate amongst themselves this question.

The large following he attracted did not go unnoticed.  Along with his admirers, he also gathered enemies.  Many leaders feared losing their influence, and, to them, Jesus was getting too influential.  Some feared what Rome might do.  If Rome caught wind that large crowds were flocking to hear a preacher whom many called Messiah, Rome might not be happy.  And Rome could be brutal.  Some were outraged at the things Jesus said.  He certainly did not mince words.  He called many of the Jewish leaders hypocrites, whitewashed tombs full of dead men’s bones, and he said that their father was the father of lies.  He told parables against many leaders, and he did these things with crowds of people standing in front of him.

In addition, he taught and practiced things that seemed to violate the law.  He forgave sins as if he was God Himself.  He healed on the Sabbath and even called himself “Lord of the Sabbath.”  He said, “I and the Father are one … if you have seen me you have seen the Father … no one comes to the Father except through me.”  He claimed authority for himself, and yet to many, he was just a carpenter’s son.  He challenged the status quo, and the status quo fought back.

Many Jewish leaders wanted Jesus out of the way.  They tried to trap him in his words and debated how to be rid of this troublesome preacher.  Finally, in the spring during the biggest Jewish festival of the year – the Passover – they saw an opportunity.  Crowds had flocked to Jerusalem for the festival, and Jesus had come to town as well.  After the Passover meal, at night, while the city slept, the Jewish leaders arrested him in a garden just outside town.  One of his disciples led them to the place.

Time was of the essence.  The Jewish Council (the Sanhedrin) met in a hasty midnight session to proclaim official charges against him.  They found him guilty.  The charge – blasphemy.  This man claimed to be God.  They then hurried him off to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, for only Rome had the authority to execute.  They had a difficult time persuading Pilate to condemn Jesus, but they finally did so by whipping up the crowd that had showed up early in the morning.

Pilate had Jesus scourged with whips and then executed for being “King of the Jews.”  The soldiers in charge spread his arms out wide across a thick wooden beam and then drove nails through his wrists.  They pounded nails through his feet and into another beam, the two beams forming a cross.  They then raised the cross and hung him there, battered and bleeding for all to see.  Jesus died that afternoon.

Some of his followers took his body and began to prepare it for burial according to their custom.  They used various spices and wrapped the body in linen with a separate piece for the head.  Because the Sabbath was approaching, they could not finish the job, so they put the body into a tomb that was like a small cave and then rolled a great stone in front of it.

After the Sabbath, on the first day of the week, early in the morning, just before sunrise, many women, including Mariam of Magdala came to the tomb to finish their burial customs.  They wondered how they would move the stone.  When they reached the tomb, however, they found that the stone had already been moved and that the tomb was empty.  Jesus appeared to Mariam and the women, and they ran and told his disciples.

Over the next forty days, Jesus appeared to his disciples in various locations.  Two were walking along the road to Emmaus.  A group was sitting in an upper room in Jerusalem.  Some were fishing in Galilee, and he called them to the shore.  A crowd of more than 500 all saw him at once.  He taught and prepared his disciples for his going away, for he was to pass on to them his authority and mission.  In the end, he returned to his Father from whom he had first come, but he gave a promise that he would return in like manner.

By late May or early June, the disciples were standing in the temple courts in Jerusalem and proclaiming that this “Jesus, whom you killed, God has raised from the dead.  And we are witnesses of the fact.”  Everywhere they went, the disciples proclaimed that the body of Jesus was resurrected from the dead.  They were beaten for saying it.  They were imprisoned for saying it.  They were threatened and ordered to cease this message.  Yet they insisted.  “No.  God has raised Jesus from the dead, and we saw it.”  Some were stoned, some were whipped, some were hung on crosses themselves, but the message stayed the same.

The followers of Jesus multiplied, and they began to see the story.  They saw the wreckage that sin had brought on the human race going all the way back to the garden.  They saw the ancient prophecies of a king who would free his people from their bondage.  They saw the ancient sacrificial system and the power of the shed blood to remove sin, and they understood.  Messiah did not come to deliver us from the bondage of Rome.  He did something much deeper and much grander.  He delivered us from the bondage of ourselves.  He took our sin and threw it into the sea.  He rose and conquered it.  He made it possible for the human race to fulfill its purpose once again.  Now, in Christ, we can know God, not because we have kept a moral code or certain rituals, but because He has opened the door.

That is the story of Jesus.  Remove it, and Christianity ceases to exist.  The fundamental premise of the Christian faith is that God’s work and God’s revelation in history provide the foundation for any change in a person’s heart or life.  Jesus today frees people from their sins because He really died under Pontius Pilate to free people from their sins. Jesus today has the power to change the darkest life because He really rose on the third day.  Jesus today brings peace beyond understanding and joy abundantly because He really was the Son of God born in Bethlehem to a Galilean peasant girl during the reign of Augustus Caesar.  The story is the substance of the faith.  Jesus does not call people to be moral.  He calls them to Himself.  He calls them to jump into the story.  He says to people, “Let my story change yours.”

At the University of Texas, the main tower has these words inscribed on it:  “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”  Most people at the university probably do not know that those words came from Jesus and that He was talking about living in His word and following Him as a disciple (see John 8:31-2).  Today when people see those words at a university, they likely think more about the pursuit of truth in different disciplines like science or philosophy.  But even here, scholars in different fields often see truth in different ways.  And for good reason.  Let’s talk.

Times have changed.  We live in a world that often does not think scientifically or rationally.  We live in a postmodern world.  In this world, people frequently think more subjectively than objectively.  They do not want to know what is true.  They are more interested in the context for what is true.  They want to know your story.  To them truth depends upon perspective, and often such people talk as if actual truth statements are naive.  Postmodern people can be quite skeptical of anyone who claims to know an absolute truth.  Instead, they would rather be good than right.    All this and more is part of the postmodern milieu, and that milieu has entered churches of all traditions, for ultimately, the church is composed of people who live in the real world.  There is no getting around that.

The postmodern and scientific mindsets disagree on many points, but at the heart of the disagreement lies the issue of how we view truth.   The scientific view emphasizes the “knowability” of truth.  It highlights the fact that truth is there, that it is orderly, and that we can perceive it.  In the church, this worldview stresses the importance of the central Christian doctrines.  The postmodern view, however, emphasizes the “unknowability” of truth.  It highlights the fact that the realities of God, humanity, and life are all bigger and more mysterious than any statements can capture.  It also stresses the idea that truth is ultimately experienced through the subjective filter of our own culture and personal biases.  Thus, to the postmodern, the idea of a systematic understanding of Christianity is suspect.

Perhaps this disagreement is understandable, for truth is an oddball.  We generally like to think of it as a precise beast.  And in one sense, it is.  Truth, by nature, must say that some things are and some things are not.  It is orderly and organized.  Science and math are based on that assumption.  Even reading and literature are based on that assumption, for you do not think my words mean that giant pimentos are invading earth from another planet.   Indeed, most everything you do assumes the order in truth.  The fact that you brushed your teeth, made coffee, stopped at red lights, drank water, fixed your sink, helped your neighbor, or corrected your kids all show that you assume a truth in each activity and that you think that truth to be orderly.  If you wish to raise objections to what I am saying, those objections themselves must assume an orderly truth, for objections without order are not objections.

Perhaps we would not be so wrong to think of truth being as regimented as a marine boot camp, as neat and orderly as a Japanese garden.  Two plus two really does equal four.  Words cannot mean anything we wish.  Logic requires certain things to be true, and overrules other things from being true.  Some events really happened, and others did not.  Truth is not something we can simply make up.  It is what it is, it is not random, and somehow we can understand it.

But for all the order in the world, there is something a little more to truth. It is not always so precise as we may wish.  In combat the regimented marine unit may scatter and find itself in a free-for-all; and that orderly Japanese garden, upon closer look, contains worlds of ants and beetles that do not fit the manicured image.  There is a sort of real life sloppiness to truth.  Truth has enough order to it for us to be able to use logic, yet there are times when logic cannot quite do the job.  Let me give some examples.

We like to think mathematics to be one of the most precise disciplines.  In mathematics we are able to explain that there is a relationship between the number π and a circle, so that we can use π to calculate the area or circumference of a circle.  But what exactly is π?  We cannot precisely pin it down, for it goes on, it seems, without pattern, forever.  Logic has helped us discover the number, but it has not helped us understand the number.  Somehow, out of an infinite range of numbers, this strange number is tied up with the properties of a circle.  We don’t know exactly why, and we really don’t even understand the number itself.  But there it is.

Or again, in math one can logically prove that the repeating decimal  .9999…  is equal to 1, for if 1/3  = .3333… , and if 2/3 = .6666…, then 1/3 + 2/3  =  .9999…., yet 3/3 does not repeat.

Or consider the common boy/girl paradox of probability theory.  A family with two children has at least one boy.  What is the probability that it has a girl?  Common sense says 1/2.  But probability theory says 2/3.  Or consider the Banach-Tarski paradox, which states that one ball can be cut up into many nonmeasurable pieces and reassembled to form two balls the same size and shape as the first. 

There is a sort of wildness in the ordinary facts of mathematics.  Basic, simple things like circles and the number one have mysteries and paradoxes to them.  But the phenomenon is not limited to mathematics, for the same sort of thing occurs in the atom, in light, and in the behavior of nations. In life, perhaps you have encountered the mystery of a mother-in-law yourself.  In reading and literature ambiguities abound, and often they are intentional.  It makes me suspect that if humans can intentionally put ambiguity and mystery into their creations, then God all the more can certainly cram them into His.  This is how truth is.  It is simple and complex all at once.  It is precise, predictable, and knowable, but it is also full of mystery and is as wild as the wind. It is logical, but it is not quite logical.  Or maybe it is just a shade more than logic, but it is not pure logic.  There is something else to it.  Truth contains a reality that transcends simple reason without at all destroying the legitimacy of that reason.  Indeed, reason helps discover the paradox and dig up the mystery.  It discovers that there is something beyond itself.

It is as if logic and order can take us on a road to the sea but not on a boat out beyond the land where the infinite horizon beckons.  Yet had we never walked the road, we would not have even known the sea was there.  Reason takes us to where we can smell the crusty salt air of paradox and hear the constant pounding of mystery and then leaves us there.

Thus, truth has a definite predictability; but it also has a wild side.  We can grasp it in propositional ways, but it is also beyond our understanding.  Sometimes we do not like that.

Now it is precisely here that I wish to address the impact of postmodern thinking on the church.  In one sense I have to say that the postmodern thinking is correct to talk of the unknowability of truth.  God is more real and complex and mysterious than any doctrines of Him, just as your own mother is more real and complex and mysterious than any statements about her.  He is grander and wilder and far more beautiful than you can ever imagine, and you can spend an eternity enjoying Him and still not reach the bottom.  That is a message the church needs to hear.  God is bigger than our doctrines.

And yet, the more rational approach is also correct.  The fact that Christian doctrine will never fully capture God does not mean that it is somehow suspect.  Indeed, it is the doctrines that show us the mysteries.  We would not see any mysteries at all in π if we did not first understand some basic doctrines about the properties of numbers.  Mystery does not exist all by itself.  Doctrines lead us to it.  Remove the doctrines and you remove the mystery.  The basic doctrines of the Deity and humanity of Christ together form the mystery of the Incarnation.  The central doctrine of the Atonement points us to a love unfathomable.  The foundational doctrines of God’s justice and mercy together show us a God incomprehensible.  The Trinity confounds us.  Predestination and free will, however you understand them, are still bigger than your mind.  The Christian loses his life to gain it, marriage is a picture of Christ and the Church, the husband is the head of the wife, yet they are joint heirs together, we are dead to sin but we must die daily.  On we could go.  The fact of the matter is that if we want to experience the highest mysteries, complexities, and realities of God, we must travel the doctrines to get there.

The postmodern emphasis is a good reminder that it is God and not the doctrines that is ultimate, but many postmoderns are too eager to conclude that, therefore, the doctrines are unimportant.  In doing so, they undercut the very thing they desire.  They want the mystery of God but then question the very things that take them to it.  They want something real, but deny themselves the ability to get at anything real.  They want to experience God and not just know facts about Him but forget that there can be no true experiencing without first knowing something.  They want to connect with the “ancient church” but don’t want the doctrines or the doctrinal emphasis of the ancient church.  They are, thus, left with nothing meaningful to connect with.  They want the wild side of truth but not the orderly side.  But the orderly side is what ultimately will lead them to the wild side. They deny themselves the very thing they want.

On the other hand, many people in various churches today have the orderly side down, but they stop there.  It is as if they know the map but not the land.  They have no experience with the wildness of God.  Their doctrine has sterilized God, though it was intended to glorify Him.  To these people, many of whom fear what postmodernism brings, I would say this:  the postmodern emphasis on mystery and on a real experience of God is nothing new.  You’ll find it in the psalms, Isaiah and Paul.  You’ll find it in the mystics.  You’ll find it in Clement, Chrysostom, Augustine, Anselm, Thomas a Kempis, Luther, Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, Spurgeon, Moody, Chesterton, Tozer, C.S. Lewis, and on.  And never will you find that one of these Christians somehow traded away doctrine to get it.  Rather, they found the wildness by traveling the doctrines.  They simply allowed the doctrines to touch their hearts.

That is the key.  It has always been the key, and while times may change, that is one thing that will not change. 

The purpose of these blogs is to help you live for Christ.  In the last blog I explained that you need both a right heart and right beliefs in order to live for Christ. God wants a holistic faith, not just a superficial one.  It is now time to talk a little bit about Christian beliefs, but before we delve into specific doctrines, I ought to take a couple blogs to discuss some broad issues related to truth and doctrine.

Doctrine is a foul word to some people.  To them, it represents silly arguments that people have fought and died over.  Of course, sometimes this portrayal has been true, but we should not throw away the meat with the bones.  Healthy doctrine is central to a healthy faith.  The things we believe actually impact us, and our ability to be effective in any field depends on what we believe within that field.  If you want to be a good doctor, you must know good medical doctrine. If you want to be a good lawyer, you must know good legal doctrine. Being a good follower of Christ is no different.  You must know good Christian doctrine.

Christian doctrine does get at the intellect, but it is not solely about the intellect. Paul tells Timothy to stay in Ephesus so that he might “command certain men not to teach false doctrines.”  Paul then says, “The goal of this command is love which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.” (I Tim 1:3-5)  In other words, good doctrine is necessary for real love, a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith.  If anyone wants these things, he should seek right doctrine.  Love and doctrine are friends.  Sometimes people say silly things like, “I would rather love my brother than believe the right things about God.”  They do not understand that they cannot love their brother as God wants them to until they first believe right things about God.

C.S. Lewis likened doctrine to a spiritual map.  Of course, any map is merely a picture and not the real thing.  And ultimately we want the real God and not the map, but it is the map that shows us what that real God is like.  We are fools if we engage in this lifelong journey without a good map.  The map is merely a tool, not the end, but if it is a good map, it helps us get to the end.  A hiker in the Alaskan wilderness knows the benefits of a good map.  If someone offered him one, he would not reply, “No thank you.  I am not interested in knowing how to get anywhere.  I’m interested in enjoying the beauty of this wilderness.”  We see the ridiculousness of such talk, but many people talk that same way about Scriptural doctrine.  They somehow pretend that doctrinal knowledge and enjoyment contradict each other when in reality just the opposite is true.

Good doctrine will not answer every question we have. In this respect it is like those maps of America that were made in the 1500s.  You can see the rough outlines of the Atlantic Coast.  Here’s New England, the Canadian Maritime provinces, Chesapeake Bay, Long Island, Florida.  You can make out a lot of things, but if you go inland any short distance, the map quickly dissolves into emptiness.  If someone from that time had looked at one of those maps and had asked, “What’s beyond these mountains?” no one could answer him.

Good Christian doctrine comes from the Bible. The Scriptures are the raw data, so to speak.  Where the Scriptures are clear, good doctrine needs to be clear.  Where the Scriptures are fuzzy, honest Christians may disagree. That Jesus has bodily risen from the dead is clear in Scripture.  To deny this is to cease to be a Christian.  What the end times will look like is fuzzy in Scripture.  Honest Christians may have differing opinions on this subject.

Some doctrines are more central to following Jesus than others.  That God fixes broken people through faith in Jesus is central.  That Jesus wipes away sin through the sacrifice of the Cross is central. That Jesus is our king, that you and I are sinful, that God is holy, that we must love our neighbor, that God calls us to righteousness, that people must repent, all of these things are central to the faith. They all get at the essence of what the Christian journey is about.

Some things, however, do not quite get at the essence.  Does communion represent Christ’s death or recreate Christ’s death? Should church governments be hierarchical or democratic?  Two people can be honest followers of Jesus and adhere to all of the central things above and yet disagree on the answers to these questions.  This does not mean that the answers are unimportant; it simply means that the answers are not part of what defines a follower of Jesus.  If a woman does not love, however, she does not follow God.  That is I John.  If a man does not think his sin to be that bad, he does not know God.  That is Romans 1.  If a woman lives in sexual immorality, she does not know God.  That is I Cor 6.  I suppose we could say there is a sense in which not all doctrines are equal, and this makes perfect sense, for not all parts of a map are equally crucial to your journey.

The heart is a wonderful thing.  I would not want to be married to Leanne if my heart did not love her, but my heart must be informed by the facts.  I want to be in love with the real Leanne and not with a creation of my own desires.  I also want Leanne to be in love with me and not with some image she has fashioned in her mind. I want my heart affections for my wife to be based on the truth, for they are richer when they are built on reality.

We have spent half a year in these blogs discussing heart issues.  Such issues are central to faith in Jesus, for without a right heart, no one will know God.  This is basic. God wants us to love Him as I love my wife.  And yet, the heart, by itself, is incomplete.  Jesus said we are to love God with “heart, soul, mind, and strength.”   Therefore, we must talk about more than heart issues if we are to talk about following Jesus.  Now is the time to transition to a different category.  It is time for us to begin discussing issues of the head, for we are called to love God with all our mind.

God made the mind, and He likes it.  He wants us to use it.  He does not want a heart divorced from the intellect.  He wants an intellect driven by a pure heart. When Brian “falls in love” with Courtney, his heart can prevent him from seeing clearly, but great will be his pain if Courtney has significant problems that he simply ignores.  If she is a flirt or has great consumer debt, and he ignores those things, he will pay later.  His heart may blind him to these facts or convince him that she will change.  He may push his head aside, but if he does, he will pay later.  Indeed, his heart will pay later.  If I buy a home solely because it is a pretty home that I would enjoy living in, but I pay no attention to the fact that I cannot afford it and that it is built on a flood plain, I am a fool.

In these situations, the mind is crucial.  When people ignore facts and plain reason, the heart suffers in the end. It is true that hearts must be right, but facts and reason must inform those hearts.  A right heart listens to reason.  If people wish to know God, God will insist they use their heads.

This relationship between the heart and the head is complex. Each influences the other, and the road that navigates this relationship is fraught with pitfalls and misunderstandings.  Here are two.

Many scientists and rationalists define reason in such a way as to exclude faith altogether.  These people would have you think that listening to reason would require you to reject faith.  The irony is that the force of their argument is not itself rational.  They simply declare faith out of bounds by definition.  If you were to examine their arguments, you would find them quite unable to show in a logical way that faith and reason are mutually exclusive.  Of course, once you think about it, their claim is a bit impossible to demonstrate. These “rationalists,” therefore, must bring in something besides reason to get to their conclusion. They exalt reason as the pinnacle of knowledge but to do so, they place it atop the shoulders of their assumptions.  And their assumptions sit squarely on the shoulders of their hearts.  This idea cannot stand on its own legs.

On the other side, however, reason has taken somewhat of a beating.  It used to be that truth was an objective fact that people needed to grasp; but with the postmodern shifts in philosophy and literary criticism, truth has come to be more a matter of personal perception.  Each thinker creates his own truth.  This idea has spilled over into theology, and many now believe that what you think about God doesn’t much matter, for one perception is as valid as another, and, after all, God is so grand and mysterious that no one can really know Him anyway.  To these people, it is more important to be sincere than right, and the concept of religious doctrine is a great turnoff.  This latter error is much more popular than the former, but intellectual fads come and go like the styles of clothing, and, no doubt, in a hundred years or so, the pendulum will swing back, and objective truth will become a trophy again.

These two extremes illustrate misunderstandings of the relationship between the heart and the mind. The rationalist attempts to use the intellect to squash out the heart, while the postmodern person attempts to use subjective hearts to squash out objective truth. Neither position is Biblical.  The mind does not, cannot, and should not stamp out the knowledge that the heart gives us.  Nor should the heart create facts willy-nilly.  Rather, heart and mind work together to complement each other.

A right heart is humble and open to reason, and true reason is perceptive enough to see that it is itself greatly influenced by the bend of the heart.  A right heart listens to reason, and true reason is clearer when it stems from a pure heart.  These are aspects of a Biblical relationship between the heart and mind, and they help explain why the Bible so strongly condemns hypocrisy in the heart and false teaching, and why it so adamantly calls God’s people to purity of heart and of doctrine.

These books will focus you in some way upon having a right heart before God.  Some will sing to your heart.  Some will explain the heart.  Some will challenge it.

a Kempis, Thomas.  The Imitation of Christ. 

My favorite devotional book.  This book warms the heart for God.

Brother Lawrence.  The Practice of the Presence of God. 

Lawrence was a 17^th century monk who wrote about continual prayer with God.  A series of conversations and letters.

Carmichael, Amy.  Toward Jerusalem. 

This book is a collection of Carmichael’s poetry.  If you are not good at reading poetry, you will find this a tough read.  If you like poetry, try it.  She writes poems about God.

Edwards, Jonathan.  Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections. 

This book is a harder read.  Edwards was writing in the 1700s, but this is thorough, insightful, and extremely influential on later Christian thought concerning the heart.

Piper, John.  Desiring God.    

This has become a contemporary classic.  Very readable.

Tozer, A.W.  “Worship:  The Missing Jewel.”

A pamphlet that puts worship front and center, where it is supposed to be.

Tozer, A.W.  The Pursuit of God. 

Tozer constantly points the heart to its God.  Read everything you can by Tozer.

Over the past months, we have discussed different aspects of a right heart:  peace, joy, humility, submission to authority, confidence in God, the fear of God, simplicity, and  more.  Because each discussion focuses on only one characteristic, we might think that these characteristics are somehow separated from each other as the stripes on a zebra are.  Such thinking would be a mistake.  The heart is a holistic thing. Its attitudes are the sounds of a symphony. They do not exist in isolation but interact together to create a concerto of the soul. Consequently, one of the best ways to tell a genuine heart is to listen to the whole symphony and not just to the cellos.

Satan can counterfeit godly attitudes. He can give false humility, false passion, false joy, false peace. Jonathan Edwards spoke of these counterfeits and said that one of the best ways to tell a godly affection from a phony affection is to see if it has a healthy balance with respect to the other affections.

False confidence often has little humility. Stu’s confidence in God becomes cockiness, and Stu has no brokenness over his own sin. He is too “confident” to be broken. Amanda has a great fear of God but little hope. Her fear dominates and squashes out other godly attitudes. Stacy, on the other hand, has great feelings of hope but no real fear of God or sorrow for her sin. She has grabbed the attitude she likes and conveniently left the more difficult ones aside. Dan has strong feelings of “love” for God, but he has little submission to the authority of Scripture. He does not understand that we show our love through our obedience (Jn 14:15). The confidence, fear, hope, and love expressed in these people is likely false.

In all of these cases, we see the genuineness of a heart attitude by looking at the other attitudes. When God grabs hold of a heart, He grabs the whole thing. He will mix confidence with humility in the same person. He will give hope and fear together. He will give a passion for purity and a love for Himself simultaneously. Satan is not capable of so thorough a counterfeit.

Having said all this, we must, however, leave room for sin. A right heart is holistic, but it still represents a fallen human being. An honest follower of Jesus still struggles with many of these attitudes. He does not always enjoy God. She still worries about her kids. He wrestles with his pride. She sometimes seems narrow minded. All of these failures are real life, and a right heart need not play perfect music.

In addition, the follower of Jesus develops as he matures, much as the faces on Mount Rushmore or the paintings on the Sistine Chapel slowly took shape. God takes decades to chisel away our pride and add the touches of joy.

The right heart is always on a journey to something higher. When you encounter a hiker in the mountains, you can tell whether she is going up or down by the direction she is walking in. You may find her at 2,000 feet or at 12,000 feet, but her intention is revealed not by her elevation but by her direction. You may find that she has tripped and fallen over a log or that she has scuffed up her knees against the rocks, but if she has gotten back up and is walking to higher ground, you know something about her.

Now the fact of the matter is that people with counterfeit attitudes are not generally interested in walking to higher ground. They cannot see past the attitude that dominates their lives and are often stuck in a dangerous gulch.