Category Archives: Truth Matters

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Why Does God Seem So Hidden?

Why isn’t God more obvious? Or as a student once said to me, “If God wants people to know he exists, then why doesn’t he just show up or write his name in the sky or something?” This is just one of the issues related to the hiddenness of God. We all struggle with making sense of why God seems present and active at certain times but painfully distant and uninvolved at others.

Well, to the student’s question, I think there are two things we could say. (1) Because God is good and all-loving and because of the kind of relationship He desires to have with those He created, humans have been given enough evidence to either accept or reject Him. We can suppress this evidence (Rom. 1:18-20) or turn from idols to the true and living God (1 Thess. 1:9). God gives us all the freedom to love Him or reject Him.

If God just “showed up” one day in all his power and glory, people would be compelled to believe. They would have no choice in the matter, but this would destroy the significant freedom necessary for a loving relationship to exist. (2) In addition, God doesn’t want people to merely believe intellectually that He exists (even demons believe in God cf. James 2:19). What God wants is relationship. He wants people to become part of His family.

So what are we to make of all the verses that talk about God hiding from His followers? Isaiah 45:15 says, “Truly you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior” (cf. Ps. 10:1; 44:23-24). But why does God hide?

First we know that God’s desire from the beginning was to be present with humanity in a life-giving relationship. But when Adam and Eve turned their backs on God and His ways, we see God seeking them out while they are the ones hiding (Gen.3:9-10). We also need to remember that the world is not as it ought to be—sin, pain, and death were not God’s original design for creation. It is within this context that God is working out His plan of redemption and restoration. God has His reasons for seeking and hiding.

Sometimes God hides because people are disobedient or indifferent toward him and this is a form of judgment (cf. Isaiah 59:2; Micah 3:4). Other times God hides for a season so that we will seek Him more earnestly. Unfortunately, this is part of how He teaches us to live dependent and grateful lives.

Then there are those moments of pain and loss where it is a mystery why God seems so far away. With the Psalmist we cry out, where are you God? (cf. Ps. 88:13-14). Jesus experienced the excruciating silence of God while on the cross (Mark 15:34). Ultimately, Jesus is our example for trusting God when the silence is deafening.

We can learn to trust completely without complete understanding. And we can rest in the promise that God has given, “You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart” (29:13 cf. James 4:8).
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Science Based Morality?

Here is a good post over at Breakpoint:

Each of us believes that certain things are wrong, not because we believe they are wrong, but because they really are wrong. And that applies to the moral relativist as well.

If you want to see a relativist sink into a sophistic seizure, ask him about the “virtues” of cruelty, rape, cheating, bigotry, or exploitation. Even the most liberally minded among us believe such things are wrong, even if they don’t know why.

Take the University of Maryland professor who recently engaged a member of the Genocide Awareness Project. In a ten-minute exchange on moral ethics, the professor exhibited great difficulty with the concept of morality, including the terms of the debate: human essence, value, and rights. Nevertheless, she had no difficulty calling her interlocutor’s reference to “mankind” offensive and “wrong.”

On the question of abortion the professor was more measured: “I think it is actually morally impermissible to kill fetuses.” She quickly added that she didn’t know why it (or, for that matter, genocide or lynching) was wrong, and went on, at some length, to suggest that neither does anyone else. It is something we need to think more deeply about, was how she left it. This, from a professor of philosophy.

Help on its way

For people like the befuddled prof who haven’t a clue why, for instance, the Holocaust was immoral, Sam Harris aims to help. Make no mistake: Harris is a rationalist and trenchant atheist who is highly critical of religion and religious folk. But he is also a moral realist who believes in objective moral truths — truths, he is confident, that can be grounded in science to form a system of shared moral values.

His argument goes something like this: The natural world operates according to natural laws discoverable through science; morality is a part of the natural world; therefore, morality follows natural laws discoverable through science.

Logically, his argument is flawless. Practically, it suffers from several serious weaknesses.

Yes, but…

Christians would agree that morality has the features of law, in that it predicts certain outcomes from certain actions. But while the moral law is predictive, it is not deterministic like the laws of gravity or electromagnetism. If it were, mankind would be reduced to automata slavishly following its moral program.

C.S. Lewis once pointed out that the moral law is not about what humans do; it is about what theyought to do. As such, the moral law is not discernible, scientifically or otherwise, from actual human behavior.

Harris would be quick to say that morality is about behaviors that enhance human and animal flourishing, and we know, scientifically, what many of those are: the provision of proper medical care, education, sanitation, clean water.

Indeed, applied science is responsible for doubling human life expectancy over the last 150 years and for cleaner air and water than at any time since the Industrial Revolution. Then again, the early 20th century programs for eugenics, forced sterilization, and selective breeding were morally justified on scientific grounds, as are the arguments today for human cloning and embryo-destructive research.

And that brings up another weakness in Harris’ argument: While science can help us toward a desired outcome, it cannot tell us what outcome we ought to desire. Science has no moral voice; it is only a tool for moral agents who assign values to things.

For example, medical technology enables us to harvest stem cells from an embryo, but it doesn’t tell us whether killing a human being at the earliest stage of life is right or wrong. As to the bigger question, is it right to sacrifice the few for the well-being of the many, science can only shrug.

With no transcendent criteria, the calculus of every moral dilemma is left to the privileged class of beings deemed “persons” and whose only touchstone is the whim of their collective preferences. And that leads to a third problem with Harris’ schema.

Who is my neighbor?

You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would deny the moral probity of the Golden Rule. Treating our neighbor as we would want to be treated has been recognized as a universal good in nearly every world religion and civilization since (MORE)

The bottom line for science is that is can only describe what is not prescribe what should be. You cannot move from an “is” to an “ought.”
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How Do We Know the Bible Includes the Right Books?

Were the books of the New Testament selected by Emperor Constantine for social and political reasons in the 4th century (cf. The Da Vinci Code) or were the books included in the New Testament Canon because they fit with the authoritative teaching that can be traced back to Jesus himself? Was this simply a power play? Another example of history being written by the winners?

I think the best way to come at this is by asking which of these documents tells us the truth about the faith that was preached and received in the early church (cf. Jude 3). This is a theological question—what did the early church believe and preach from the very beginning?
New Testament scholar Darrell Bock points to three kinds of texts contained in the New Testament writings that show us what the earliest Christians believed.

  1. Schooling—We find doctrinal summaries Christians would memorize and read alongside Old Testament texts when they would gather together for worship in house churches (e.g., Rom. 1:2-4; 1 Cor. 8:6; 15:1-5).
  2. Singing—they would sing their theology in hymns and show their devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ (e.g., Col. 1:15-20 & Phil. 2:5-11).
  3. Sacraments—Baptisms and the Lord’s Supper were practiced on a regular basis and pictured the basic elements of the salvation story as core theology (e.g., Matt. 28:19-20; 1 Cor. 11:23-26; Eph. 4:4-6).

These creeds, hymns, and practices predated the writing of the New Testament documents (remember that this was an oral culture and most people could not read). Think of these as “oral texts” the earliest Christian community read and practiced before there was a completed Bible. These foundational beliefs are sometimes called the “Rule of Faith.”

With that in mind, how were the books chosen? There were three criteria used to decide which books were received as authoritative—as canon. First, was a book written by an apostle or an associate of an apostle (apostolicity)? Mark was accepted because he was an associate of Peter and Luke was accepted because of his relationship to Paul. Or to put it another way, if the book was not from the 1st century it was not Scripture because it could not be traced back to the apostles who were taught and commissioned by Jesus (who was crucified in A.D. 30-33).

Secondly, did this book conform to the teachings / theology of other books known by the apostles (orthodoxy)? Recall the points made about the schooling, singing, and sacraments in the life and worship of the early church. Hebrews would be an example of this.

Finally, was the book accepted early on in the life of the church and by the majority of churches across the region (catholicity)? It was important that a book wasn’t just accepted in one location, but that lots of Christians in different cities and regions accepted it.

Early Christians recognized the authority contained in these writings already; they did not arbitrarily pick which ones would become authoritative for the Church. The early Christians were very careful and thoughtful about which books would get the label ‘Scripture’ alongside the Old Testament. It is simply a fact of history that by the end of the 2nd century (before Constantine), the four Gospels, Acts, and the letters of Paul are already recognized as authoritative and being used that way in house churches. Now some discussion about a handful of books continued on through the centuries between the Eastern and Western churches. But, while there was no universal declaration concerning the final list, it is safe to say that the canon was effectively closed by the time of the Council of Carthage in 397 A.D.