The Unseen World - Part 2: A Falsely-Seeded Imagination

This is the second of a multi-part series. Click here for the first entry.

“Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?' A man may do both,' said Aragorn. 'For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!” - J.R.R.Tolkien (from The Two Towers)

1. The Reality of the Unseen World

You live in a world which includes the supernatural. Watching a sunrise in the mountains, or dressing up for a wedding, or playing games on your cellphone while you wait to get a flu shot, there is an unseen component to your surroundings, another aspect to reality which eludes your observation. We have trouble visualizing this, precisely because it is unseen. Each of the scenarios above (sunrise, party, flu shot) can be clearly pictured in your mind, perhaps you even imagined them as you read that sentence. Take a moment and do it now if you haven't. The unseen world, by contrast, cannot be imagined with any realistic help to the mind's eye, as you (99% of you, at least) have no realistic points of reference for it, and your attempts to do so will probably only render it less credible by all being based on fictional/fanciful depictions.

Yet I chose those three scenarios above for a reason: all three are considered liminal occasions in many cultures. The term "liminal" comes from the Latin for "threshold," and refers to a sort of boundary phase, where you are passing from one place or state to another. You are probably more familiar with a related word, subliminal. Subliminal describes something which does not reach the threshold of sensory awareness, like the old idea of subliminal messaging, with images flashed onto the screen during a film too fast for you to notice, but perhaps unconsciously persuading you that you wanted to drink a coke or buy more popcorn. (Which seemingly doesn't work; the original claimed success of increased sales is a hoax, though still floating around the internet)

A great example of liminality in story-telling would be in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Prior to Lucy actually going into the wardrobe (a liminal object which is the threshold between Narnia and our world), there are a whole series of liminal moments. First the long trip into the countryside, leaving behind London and arriving at a mysterious old house. Then the adventure to explore the old house itself, and all the various rooms and series of passages that draw them deeper into the house, past various symbolic objects (suits of armor, harps, huge old books) that take us, with the children, away from the normal world outside and deep into some other kind of realm, the realm which, while still in our world, can have something like a magical wardrobe in it.

A door between worlds.

While we must turn back from that pleasant analogy (I haven't read Narnia in too long, Christmas is the perfect time to start the series again... in order of writing, of course, as is the only proper way, beginning with LWW), hopefully it serves to illustrate the point. There is an invisible passage, a liminal boundary, and once you cross it, things are different on the other side.

Sunrises, weddings, and the administration of medicine are all occasions where an invisible boundary is being crossed; in the case of sunrise, night is turning to day, in the case of a wedding, a mysterious and sacred bond between a man and a woman is being pronounced, and for the case of medical care, in traditional or folk cultures the healing arts are very often considered to cross over the boundary of the purely natural world into the supernatural.

That is our focus for this post and more or less for this whole series of posts: Most people throughout history have always believed in this supernatural threshold which can be crossed in manifold situations. The Bible does not teach us that that other side of reality does not exist (it assumes it, rather), but that God above invaded this corrupted world by not only entering it but crossing the threshold of the supernatural and actually being born in the flesh as a historical person.

Jesus literally crosses the threshold, pun respectfully intended, by his own death on the cross. He is the Door. (Aslan is the Wardrobe!) He is the reverse siege tower from heaven down to earth that mercifully allows travel back up and out from the walls of our exile. Condemned by the visible authorities of His day in order to triumph over the invisible ones, He was the God no one has seen, seen by many witnesses; the perfect completion of love and suffering to reconcile the irreconcilable perpendiculars of immaculate justice and endless mercy.

Even centuries after He returned past the liminal threshold to prepare for our arrival and the final Divine invasion which will overthrow the kingdom of darkness forever, we see and remember Him in the sacrament of holy communion, and observe that the Christian faith has been a topic of conversation between the world's most powerful leaders, from Ancient Rome* to 2017 Russia**.

(*- An interesting letter exchange between Pliny the Younger and Emperor Trajan regarding what to do with Christians, who refused to worship Caesar's image) (**- An investigation of Putin's friendly but nuanced relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church). 

In the Christian faith there is a continual play of seen/unseen going on, then, a dance with an invisible partner, a tension of evidence and faith, impressively answered and distressingly unanswered prayers, which reflects the seen/unseen nature of all reality. So we will understand our faith better, and the Bible will seem more urgent and relevant to us as it should, when we recognize that the world we live in does include this supernatural aspect, whether we see much evidence of it in our daily life or not. You can in Taiwan, if you live here long term or spend much time in certain locales, and Aragorn's answer to Eomer in the opening quote can be a sort of answer to us as well. We do live in a scientific world, but that does not preclude the fact of there being more going on than merely that.

This is because scientific inquiry, an extremely valuable and useful tool when pursued correctly (such an effective one that it's being discarded as a means of antagonizing Christianity because in the end all the evidence is turning out to be on our side), does not describe the entirety of what lies below heaven, merely the material bits.

To be sure, one prevalent modern belief system, what we might call scientism, insists that anything that science cannot explain yet is merely something it will figure out later. This is what I call the science-of-the-gaps defense, the exact analogy of the argument mistakenly used by many Christians in the past and some still today, claiming that the inexplicable is evidence for God. But we do not find our evidence for God hiding in the inexplicable, but clearly seen from what has been made, because we haven't based our observations on the premise that there is no God.

In folk cultural worldviews, on the other hand, we have the opposite problem, where most areas of life are considered to be affected by the supernatural but traditions regarding this are rarely if ever examined critically. (Indeed, people don't even bother artificially reconciling mutually exclusive superstitions with each other).

As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, Europe was the same way before Christianity and modernity combined forces to condemn the unseen world as spiritually opposed to God, and to disbelieve in it entirely, replacing it with a solely material universe to be measured, explained, and mastered by science. That stance became the default worldview of anyone growing up in the West, and various Western-influenced subcultures around the world, so that now even sincere Christians in Western countries may need a lot of faith to believe in things like angels or demons, or even the miracles of Jesus, because their worldview has no place for what the Bible describes in a relatively straightforward manner.

2. When Art is Unreliable

(Note: as I begin this section I am proud to say that I have multiple Christian friends who use their gifting in art to serve God, and I have been blessed, intrigued, and edified by many of their works. So when I speak of unreliable Christian or Bible-referencing art, I know there are exceptions. Lord willing, there will be many more exceptions in the years to come, and Christian art will rise to glorify its Creator, like "living hymns of stone and light," and not be primarily mass-produced to meet a large niche industry demand)

If you grew up in that kind of rationalist-influenced culture which still describes most of the postmodern West, the moment you try to envision life being lived in the context of a supernatural world unsupervised by science, immediately your imagination may begin to supply imagery of the supernatural from sources with which we have been inundated since childhood. That is often more harmful than helpful for Christians, since such imagery is nearly always misleading.

Much Christian imagery reveals no attempt at scriptural accuracy, relying more on Renaissance-era art or other influences than on what brief depictions we have in the Bible of the world beyond our ken. So whenever you see images of Satan lounging arrogantly on the throne of hell, or cute little chubby baby angels (putti), you can thank whomever it was that began misapplying the work of Milton or Raphael, since the Bible describes Satan as cast from heaven to earth and roaming around the planet, and heaven's angels as intimidating enough that their first words are typically "do not fear." And those are just the ambassador angels with roughly humanish form, not the four-fold keruvim (cherubim, but people confuse the putti with cherubs now, "keruvim" is more like the Hebrew pronunciation), or the mighty six winged seraphim, "the burning ones".

Not to get too far afield, by the way, but the Hebrew word saraph is transliterated (not translated, but given an English spelling) into Seraph/Seraphim in Isaiah 6 when it's talking about angels in the throne room of God, but refers to a "fiery" flying serpent in other Old Testament passages and period literature. (See the entries here) Translating Isaiah 6:2 consistently, then, you'd get "above Him were fiery serpents, each with six wings..." Since prophets describing their visions did the best they could using the knowledge and language they had, we can't say whether the angelic beings simply reminded Isaiah of whatever were the "fiery," snake-like creatures which God sent into the Israelite camp to punish them in the desert further out from Edom, or looked exactly like them, but it seems clear that neither the "shiny person, except with six cool wings," or the more esoteric "pretty much just six conjoined wings" images are what Isaiah was seeing and describing. (And if Satan is a fallen angel, and some angels look like fiery serpents/dragons, it makes sense that he shows up as a snake in the garden and a dragon in revelation. This suggests the possibility that Satan is a fallen seraph, though we will pause with that interesting thought and not stray from scripture into apocryphal speculation. For now we're sticking with this Hebrew note.) 

Not angels. Possibly deciding on where to eat lunch.

But angels are heavenly servants and depictions of heaven are in fact given to us in scripture, so our imagination has some authorized help in that case, even if people choose not to make use of it. How are we to envision ourselves, on the other hand, living on earth, but in the midst of the supernatural? I don't know if we can do it helpfully. The unseen world is precisely that, "unseen". The more you try to visualize it, the more your mind will conjure up Hollywood special effects or folk tale illustrations,
and that will seem fictional and unlike your daily experience of life, and you will doubt reality on the basis of a false characterization, or believe what is not reality, like those people who fall for every
"child goes to heaven" tale which somehow always manage to stray from anything like a scriptural depiction at some point.

As an example of the power of visual suggestion to compete with written information: I am a devoted fan of the Lord of the Rings series and all things Tolkien (as is obvious to anyone not new to my blog), and so I am quite glad that I read the books before I watched the Peter Jackson films. Because that means Frodo, and Sam, and Aragorn, and Gandalf, and all the others, as envisioned in my imagination, will always have the first spot, and the images of the actors who played them are only overlaid on top of this, influential though they be.

But for people who have only ever seen the films, or saw them first before later reading the books, their mental image of Frodo will be more or less synonymous with that of Elijah Wood and his interpretation of the character in the films. Because most people's imagination of a literary character is at least somewhat limited in detail, the image of an actor fills in all the details first, and their imagination, even supplied with details from a book that may slightly go against the film version, can't compete with all the powerful visual information of a modern film. (Feel free to comment if you are an exception to this, and watched the films first yet envision Frodo and/or other characters as looking different)

It would be nice to know exactly how Tolkien envisioned Frodo in his mind, if only for comparison purposes, but it's not a pressing issue because it's a fictional tale. It does not describe our world as it is, nor is it meant to, though it was surely intended to incline us toward those true and beautiful things in this world. But this same problem exists for believers in a more urgent sense. Our imaginations have been "pre-seeded" with the inaccurate Renaissance Art and Hollywood renditions of Biblical and/or spiritual realities, and that's what sticks in the mind, even when it clashes with scripture.

"Not my Frodo.." (but Wood did a good job, all considering)

So if you find things like heaven and hell and angels and demons a bit difficult to swallow, and believe in their factual existence only because scripture assumes and demands that you do, I want to argue that it's much more of a challenge because the depictions of these things you've seen previously are typically fanciful and frequently unscriptural. It's might not be that your faith is weak, it's that your imagination has been supplied with images that are not accurate depictions of spiritual realities, and there is a cognitive dissonance there that is in fact legitimate.

Again from Lewis:

"The fact that “devils” are predominantly comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you." (C.S.Lewis, from The Screwtape Letters) 

Lewis was writing in the decades when England was in its modernist rebellion against the faith, something which reportedly began after the horrors of World War I began undermining people's faith in the Church's authority and handle on truth (worth a look in some future post to see if that's really the case or not) and continued in the decades after "winning" World War II at a very high cost, when England spun off influential pop icons on its way down into domestic cultural malaise.

Thus he writes of "devils" (we'd use the term demons now) as being comic figures, and you can perhaps imagine that being the case in an old British comedy, something played for laughs, leaping about in red pajamas, as he mentions. Nowadays, with interest in the supernatural having risen and remained high, and modernism in the rear-view mirror as we head into a new Western era of spiritual darkness (borrowing also from the Eastern spiritual darkness which was never much interrupted by Christendom), they're more of a gothic and sinister or horror/possession film topic. So not so much of a laughing matter, but the principle remains the same: If you ask people to believe in something they saw a version of interpreted in CGI (perhaps poorly), it's going to be easy for their skepticism to creep in, even though what the Bible talks about is not at all like the Hollywood portrayal in the vast majority of cases.

This is true for believers with regards to other matters of faith beyond angels and demons. I have, at times in my life, even caught myself struggling with doubts about the reality of heaven itself, only to realize that I wasn't doubting heaven at all. What I was struggling with was the idea of it being "like" some picture or illustration of it that I'd seen, which seemed nice but very far from an eternal abode with the Creator of all things.

No effort of imagination is sufficient to conceive of that, of course, and Paul references Isaiah 64 in 1 Corinthians 2 in passing as he says that “what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” - it is something the Spirit reveals, yet what is revealed is wisdom of God and spiritual truths, not specifics about the accommodations of infinite life, which must necessarily be of a quality that we cannot imagine in our finite, time-bound consciousness. (One reason I don't worry if I can't entirely conceive of the biblical description either--my earth-bound conceptions could never come close)

3. Delete the Spam in your Spiritual Visual Cache

If the prophets were staggered, then, and struggled to use the most beautiful things they could think of on earth to describe the images God showed them of spiritual realities, then at least we can seed our imagination with what they wrote, and not blatantly unbiblical or confused, apocryphal images from pop culture.

So my first suggestion is to clear your spiritual imagination cache a little. Start erasing.

Erase Saint Peter with a quill pen at a little desk in front of baroque gold gates and boring white clouds. Erase a red-caped Satan with a Poseidon trident enthroned over what looks like an interesting Super Mario lava world. Erase the dark images used by Hollywood to depict the evil and demonic, and the often even darker ones used in Asian horror films. Erase the medieval inn Mary and Joseph did not get turned away from in Bethlehem (There were no Prancing Pony style medieval inns in those days, with an apologetic Barliman sticking his head out to inform them that all the rooms are full, even the Hobbit-styled ones. The story may be compelling, but a realistic and not anachronistic understanding of the story will certainly be more compelling). Erase the chubby little putti (or confine them to their rightful place as a feature of art history), and also erase the idea that we will float around like taskless angels with standard-issue harps. We will not be like angels; we are adopted sons and daughters of God--we will judge them.

Then, having erased all the erroneous and contradictory images you picked up along the way, go read scripture. You may notice an interesting contrast... In popular media, the powers of good in any supernatural sense are often portrayed as less compelling, "good because they're good, not because they're impressive," or get less screen time altogether, while the bad guys are cool and powerful and command everyone's attention.
However the Bible does the opposite: you will find fascinatingly detailed descriptions of angels, with eyes and wings and wheels, but little to nothing about what demons look like; detailed yet tough-to-envision descriptions of the celestial city, with its foundations of precious stones and gates that are not described as "pearly" but in fact as being like huge pearls, and beautifully staggering attempts to describe the throne room of God, but only a little about the lake of fire prepared as an eternal punishment for unrepentant rebels against God's authority, and precious little indeed about the "place of the dead," where the unsaved await the final judgment.

It seems that God wanted scripture filled with images of the most transcendent beauty imaginable, contrasted to the stark, sinful reality of the violent ancient world, with as little space given to the dark spiritual side of fallen earth as possible. (What superstitious/folk religions primarily concern themselves with, with frightening tales and intimidating idols.)

In Closing

In the aesthetic sense of scripture, Good is strong and beautiful and compelling, certainly not boring, and Evil is a corrupted parody of or absence of it. Demons are described not as "dark angels" but as "unclean spirits," and they cause disease, self-harm, and disfigurement. The place of the dead (those not in Christ) is described not as Dante's macabre but interesting Inferno, nor as a sort of burning lava world, but as a dark, watery pit, away from light and life.

So don't let your spiritual imagination be populated by unreliable at best (and often outright deceptive, as we'll bring up in the next part of the series) images and conceptions, false lighthouses that guide your ship of faith nearer to the rocks of cognitive dissonance. If the Bible is silent on something, don't fill in the space with human imagination and call that what the Bible asks you to believe. And if the Bible describes unseen realities, let its own words speak louder than the media we are bombarded with in modern life.

If that takes a lot of mental effort... well, most worthwhile things do.

3 Things I Wish Christians would Stop Doing

In this post I want to talk about 3 things I've noticed a lot of Christians doing (and of which I've certainly been guilty at times as well) which I submit aren't doing us any favors. I believe noticing them and trying to reign them in would strengthen the Church and our witness.

1. Being Careless with the Truth in our "Edifying Anecdotes"

Many of you have doubtless heard the story about the church in a persecuted part of the world where one day masked men broke in brandishing guns and demanded that anyone who wasn't a true believer and ready to meet their God should leave. Once a large portion of the worshippers had fled in panic, the leader removed his mask and said to the preacher something along the lines of "Ok, all the fakers are gone, you can keep going," and he and his team of not-actual-terrorists then joined the worship service.

This very well may be based on an original true story. (If you know the source, feel free to share) The problem is that I've heard it told as a true story many times, and the location seems to wander around. Africa, China, Russia, etc. Did anyone bother to verify the origins of the story before sharing it as true? "Oh, don't be such a stickler," you might think. "the important thing is that it's making a point."
But the same thing happens with miraculous stories...

Recently it has been in the news that a boy who told an amazing story about a trip to heaven while in a coma, having grown up a bit, recanted the story and chided Christians for believing his account which does not adhere to scripture. Lifeway has since pulled the book from its shelves. But these "trip to heaven," "trip to hell" stories which so many people marvel over and find edifying can usually be dismissed offhand early on, not because heaven or hell aren't real places, but because the stories in question describe a creative take on the pop culture version of heaven or hell. That's usually quite different from what we find in scripture, which is that upon dying one goes either into the presence of God or away from His presence to Sheol (Hebrew, "the grave"), and that the fiery place of torment of Matt 25 and pearl-gated golden city of Rev 21 are both descriptions of post-final-judgment destinations, not the immediate destinations of the departed.

(Another common mistake: while we don't know much about Sheol -the waiting place until judgment for those who die without Christ- from scripture, we do know the lake of fire was created for the punishment of satan and his fallen angelic allies (Matt 25:41), and they will suffer there too. Satan is not the ruler of hell, hell was created as his punishment. According to the book of Job, he is not enthroned in some fiery realm like Surt in the Muspelheim of Norse mythology, but apparently roams around the earth itself, which I find in some ways to be a more unnerving image.)

And speaking of angels, fallen or otherwise, there are innumerable stories about angels out there. Some are doubtless true. I've seen a weird thing or two myself. But note that the Bible is not very talkative about angels, at least not in the systematic way that would satisfy our curiosity (and lead to idolatry...). Angels are not the point- God is, and they are God's messengers. Scripture also describes angels as guarding us, though not to the extent that the "guardian angel" idea has been developed in popular thinking. (Psalm 91:11 is very general, Matt 18:10 is very interesting statement by Jesus but leaves us with more questions than answers, and it is unclear whether Hebrews 13:2's "some" is talking about people among his readership or referring to Old Testament accounts like Lot's angelic guests) 

How angels feel when you share questionable anecdotes about them...
("DespondentAngelMetCemHead" by Infrogmation -
Own work. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.)

I like the story about the guy in the jungle being protected by angels from the people who were going to attack him, who said he was surrounded by armed guards (who were invisible to him), but it turns out that may not be true either.


I say "may not" because the writers at Snopes dot com (urban legend debunking site) are quite obviously antagonistic towards Christianity (even for faith-inspired stories they had to verify as true due to factual evidence, they feel necessary to interject that they don't think anything supernatural occurred). At the bottom of that article, for example, they include stories of missionaries receiving help just as someone far away felt led to pray for them as supposedly obvious fabrications. I don't know about those particular incidents, but I happen to know that does sometimes happen, because it's happened to me before. On the other hand, they raise some reasonable doubts about the details of the story as presented in print, based on multiple printed versions. My guess would be that the earlier Billy Graham book account is closer to whatever true event inspired the story. Of course it's possible the story is entirely made up, but these things definitely do happen on the mission field, and my guess would be it was in someone's prayer letter and unfortunately things proceeded loosely from there.

However, just because "these things happen" doesn't mean that particular story is true, or should be repeated as a true story, details being altered as time goes on. The snopes article itself ends like this:

Moreover, it's sadly ironic that so many tales contrived to display a particular belief system as The One True Way include fabrications tossed in to better carry the message.

While their sarcasm is unwarranted, there is an important point we can take from it- our willingness to accept and pass along any story because we live in a world where supernatural events can occur is not a good witness, making faith seem like mere credulity. And it's dangerous for us too, a little like building our faith not on the solid rock of God's faithfulness and work in our lives but on the shifting sand of anecdotes that "seem likely."

So should we be finding inspiration in unverifiable stories just because the content is beautiful or motivational? Should we be scared to share any story at all? At least, let's treat them as just that: inspirational but unverifiable stories, and be very, very careful what we pass along as "true." Truth should hold special value to those who believe in the Truth of God's word.

Supernatural events do occur in this world (I have fun stories), and we have real evidence for what we take on faith, but assuming every story, whether miracles, angels, trips to heaven, etc., you hear is true (or not bothering to consider whether it is or not) and passing it along, slowly but surely weakens our habit of testing what we hear. We have to be neither cynical nor naive, like the Bereans who were praised by Paul for not taking his words for granted, but searching the scriptures before accepting them.

2. Confusing Apologetics with Evangelism

(Yes, I know apologetics can be used in an evangelistic way, first hear me out:)

A. Evangelism is not arguing until the other side admits you're right

I think we all know this already, and I'm reminding myself as much as any of you reading this, but we can't debate anyone into the kingdom. So as a method of evangelism, a good debate, beloved by so many educated believers in the Western tradition (me too), serves at best either as a transition for sharing the gospel directly/sharing one's testimony, or to remove the false facades which people claim prevent them from believing, which are really smokescreens and excuses. Having removed those, someone will typically say something like "well I still just don't think God exists." Now they're being honest- all that other stuff was not the basis for their unbelief, it was the other way around. The assumption is "no God," and all the other stuff proceeds from that assumption. Which is why...

B. It is typically not helpful to argue with scientists about evolution

It pains me to say that, having been raised in the proud homeschooled evangelical tradition of "creationism vs. evolution" debates, and have years of experience doing so online and occasionally in person. Sometimes I've "won" the discussion and sometimes I've "lost" (at least, I did my best to learn from each discussion, so they were profitable in that sense), but what I would say is that unless you have a pretty good grasp of the scientific principles involved and some basic understanding of what the modern set of theories collectively described as evolution are in 2015, you may actually do more harm than good in trying to jump into the fray. One thing you have to realize is that the average non-believing scientist (or worse, 'science groupie') considers questioning evolution to be about as viable as proposing the earth really is flat. It doesn't matter if that's an unfair comparison, that's what it's going to sound like to them.

You may quickly discover you are at a home field disadvantage, because for decades most scientists have taken evolution as a given and worked from that basis. So if you do something like claim there is no evidence for evolution, they can just laugh and bury you under decades of scientific papers that all assume evolution. No one not coming from a religious background is going to question evolution at this point except real experts in those fields where it becomes obvious that evolution lacks some basic mechanisms to explain very specific phenomena they are qualified to speak up about.

In short, if you really can't help yourself, realize that you're going both against popular trends and against more or less the entire scientific community. Also recognize this is typically someone who has "there is no God" as their premise. You'd better have a pretty airtight logical case, be familiar with the normal counterarguments (the Socratic method of asking more and more difficult questions is a good way to learn these, and doesn't put you in the position of being the antagonist) and be prepared to explain exactly why you feel you can challenge the underlying theoretical assumptions of entire fields of research. And hopefully, you are praying for them and that the conversation will be edifying, not a triumph of your finely honed reasoning skills. As an INTP I face a frequent temptation to bring the logical smackdown on those who are clearly out of their league, forgetting that we are called first to be evangelists of Christ, not knights of reason.

Most actual arguments for evolution go like this: [In the chart above, let's say that "Some birds can't fly" = "God did it." Therefore, since "that's crazy" or "highly unlikely" (claims entirely outside the realm of science) all birds -must- be able to fly. Therefore, since Science can demonstrate with total confidence that penguins are birds, penguins -must- be able to fly, and you are just another naive believer in outdated superstitions who doesn't understand logic.] Ignoring the insults and countering this valid structure but invalid premise means you have to show them that their underlying assumption of "no God" is baseless. Therefore the rigorous science which demonstrates that penguins are birds is great and no problem for us either, but it has no bearing on the assumption that there are no birds that can't fly. But we believe, and have quite a bit of evidence that points to the fact that there are birds that can't fly. (That "God did it")
The argument then rests on whether you can demonstrate that convincingly.

Note: You can challenge their premises, with the method I outlined in the picture caption there. But I pick that kind of battle carefully these days. Only a few will be fruitful, and a good conversation about the gospel is so much better than lots of arguing which half the time ends up being over how you're using the same word in two different ways. I usually try to get the discussion over to my testimony, if I can.

A sad excuse for preparation:

(I rarely rant on this blog, so please excuse me while I do so for just a moment.) Back when I was in high school, we were taught as Christian students to challenge future college professors with "unanswerable questions" that would stump them. Personally I studied engineering which didn't require biology at my school, so topics like evolution only came up once or twice in chemistry class, and I didn't have any of those antagonistic sort of professors I read about.

But I submit that part of the reason so many students raised in the church get disillusioned and their faith shaken while in college is that some people are doing them the disservice of sending them into college thinking a) they will encounter Richard Dawkins-like antagonists who rant against God and use logical-fallacy-riddled arguments to promote evolution and other anti-scriptural ideas, and b) that their duty was to publicly call out these educated, experienced authority figures who could wipe the floor with them rhetorically, with the idea that this is "defending the faith" and their responsibility.

Instead they find that a) often their professors are of the shrugging agnostic or "I grew up in church but decided religion wasn't for me" variety, are sometimes even charismatic and dignified, and can make a student feel not that the gospel is false, but simply that they've lived their entire life in a broom closet, and the gospel might apply in there, but this is the big, wide world, and they're being invited to grow up and join it. Or, b) they do run into one of those antagonistic atheist professors, and trying to be a good witness, stand up to him/her in class, are then subjected to a good drubbing and public humiliation by the professor who has years of education and life experience to his advantage, and has perhaps polished his craft on the few unfortunate students who do this from time to time. At that point a crisis in confidence is almost certain, and without the right support a student will start to question what seemed so certain and straightforward "back in church."

And that "back in church" is where a lot of the trouble starts anyway. Getting plugged in both to a good local church and to a Christian fellowship at school can go very far to mitigate both of these dangers. Far from being bowled over and questioning their faith, students can come out of college strengthened in their faith and with some valuable ministry experience if they are active in a (good) Christian campus fellowship of some kind. (Be aware that there are one or two cult-ish groups that operate under this disguise)


So hopefully we can avoid the problem of setting students up for possible failure by making sure they'll have good spiritual fellowship and growth opportunities during their time at school, and not teaching them a vastly oversimplified version of what they're likely to encounter out in the world. Which leads me to my third plea, which is to please stop...

3. Simplistically Stereotyping other Belief Systems

I sometimes wondered, as a young Christian, how anyone could not be a Christian. It made so much sense, and none of the other religions I'd heard of seemed to make any sense at all. How could those people keep believing something so weird and nonsensical and obviously false?

But I found, around the time I started doing mission trips, that the beliefs of people I encountered overseas seemed fully developed too. Of course, many adherents of Chinese religion here in Taiwan don't even claim to believe the various major and minor gods to be real in the way we believe God to be real (more like "they might be out there, and if so it's better to be on their good side"), but developed in the sense that they had a worldview which explained things around them to a degree they found to be satisfactory. If a gap does occur, if a time comes when their religious system becomes unsatisfactory to them or their worldview can no longer adequately explain the reality they live in, then there is an increasing openness to new worldviews and metanarratives (which are something I'll discuss in my next post), and often a special spiritual hunger and the potential for gospel movements as well, like what happened in China during the turbulent years of communism when it was closed to outside missionaries and is happening in some other places as we speak.

But when reading about those other religions, in non-academic Christian materials, I have often found a strictly polemic attitude. That is to say, the main purpose was not to explain what other people believe, but to demonstrate the flaws and weaknesses in those belief systems, and perhaps reassure readers/listeners that only our own faith makes any sense at all. On the other hand, some explanations are not antagonistic but are simply such a watered-down, simplified version of those beliefs that one is left wondering how any adult could really believe that. Yes, some localized religions have degraded to more or less that point, and any contact with outside religions results in the locals hastening to drop their "old ways" and embrace what is clearly a more impressive belief system. But any major world religion has survived long enough that it's got to have some qualities which people find attractive, especially if it's spreading, like Buddhism or Islam. Prior to encountering the Perspectives course materials and then attending seminary with some great books on the required reading lists, the resources regarding other religions never mentioned what those might be.

Let me be blunt. That's bowling with the lane guards up. If we truly have faith, and if we are grown-ups, or even teenagers bumping into classmates with other belief systems, we need to recognize that people have reasons for what they believe, and if they're going to stop believing that and accept Christ, they're going to need reasons for doing that. That could be as simple as someone having grown up in a non-religious family and being curious about what you believe and asking you to explain, or as challenging as a need for deliverance from demonic oppression which only the power of Christ can effect through the prayer and fasting of His saints. But either way, if we're afraid that merely reading or hearing accurate depictions of earthly religions is going to tempt us away from the Living God, the effects of whose Incarnation changed not only our lives and the destiny of our souls but all of modern world history, then the problem lies not in those descriptions but in our own lack of faith.

Now obviously, I'm not suggesting you send a bunch of grade schoolers to Buddhist summer camp. And in the States, when teaching younger students about world religions I have always pointed out the differences between those and God's revelation to us. Anyone who feels their faith is weakened by exposure to other beliefs should pray for their faith to be strengthened, and take heart from the evidence that abounds, showing that though not seeing, we have believed, yet our faith is not blind.
But students who are mature enough, and certainly adults who are mature in their faith, should have a basic understanding of what other people in this world believe, especially if they intend to witness to them.

 For example: Paul was upset by all the idols in Athens, but he observed them carefully and when sharing the gospel before the Areopagus he used the example of one idol dedicated to an unknown god, and also quoted a Greek poet. He was not respectful of their beliefs (he got very quickly to attacking the idea of idolatry itself), but he made careful observations and tried to share the gospel in a way that had some connections to their worldview. He wanted to share the gospel in a way that would make sense, and used what he knew about Greek culture and had observed about their religion to do so.

A Taiwanese altar to an unknown god

Why does it matter?

It matters not only because if you don't understand what someone else believes, you will have more difficult sharing the gospel with them, but because when we are always surrounded by other believers it's easy to fall into the idea that the gospel is inherently reasonable or self-evidently true. Don't forget what Paul said:

For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Corinthians 1:22-24)

The gospel is not going to sound inherently reasonable either to people of other religions, or to people who think that a modern education puts them above "organized religion." But understanding that following another religion or belief system doesn't make them stupid or naive, but merely in need of the gospel that will sound a little strange to them, we can speak God's truth into their own context in an effective way. Some will never accept it, but "to those who are called," of all nations, tribes, peoples, and languages, it will be the saving message of Christ, the power and wisdom of God.

That's it for today. I hope by understanding these issues a little better, we can be a stronger Church and more effective disciples of Christ.