The Day of Rest
Biblical Teaching About Time
—An online book about rest and worship—
By Dr. Al Franzmeier
Chapter 2
A World Of Uncertainty
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(In the first part of chapter two we looked at the many advances and changes of the twentieth century that led to the current world of uncertainty and confusion. . . )
Even the Bible is in doubt
The same holds true for spiritual questions. Once Christians thought the Bible was God’s Word, the final, inspired, objective, unchanging authority in things spiritual. We still have a hangover of that idea in the tradition of asking court witnesses to put their hand on the Bible and swear to tell the truth, but that also is changing. Professors and pastors in many major Christian denominations now tell us that the Bible is a book filled with errors, the human result of conflicting ideas and memories passed on across hundreds of years, finally evolving into its present form. The academic community has waged an assault on the Old Testament since the latter part of the nineteenth century. Guided by rationalist thinking, these skeptics began to raise numerous doubts about the reliability of the surviving Biblical texts.
To do this they set up a number of criteria. Strongly influenced by materialist philosophies and ideas, they assumed there could be nothing more supernatural about Biblical texts than any other ancient writings. They told us we must assume Old Testament stories are nothing more than man-made myths, legends handed down from generation to generation, created by poets and prophets to help the uneducated make sense out of things they didn’t understand. Tales of Abraham, Moses, Noah and David are only old stories passed on to celebrate mythical national heroes. They are certainly not revelations from God.
They also taught that in an enlightened, modern world we must get beyond confusing ideas about the supernatural. The world of spirits simply does not exist. Moreover, the idea that a Supreme Being, if there even is such a being, intervening in the affairs of men, is outmoded. In their view, such ideas are but the products of primitive societies attempting to deal with mysteries beyond them at the time. Modern men use the methods of modern scholarship and science to learn the real truth.
What is this real truth? These scholars claim to know it. Look how words are used, they say. See how they change in different contexts and cultures. See how one group of people influences another. We must assume the Biblical texts we have today all reflect such influences. These texts have surely gone through many hands, many changes and many corruptions. After all, primitive people had no books. They mainly passed stories on by word of mouth. The few things that survive continue because they were pressed into clay or chipped into stones. Only much later did writing and the preserving of manuscripts come along.
Why all the assumptions? Because of philosophy—the wisdom of men. Use your mind, they said. Think. You can—and must—figure it out. After all, the modern era—that time at the end of the nineteenth and on into the twentieth century—was the great time of discovery and adventure, the beginnings of science and technology as we know it today. It was a very exciting time. So many things happened, so many new discoveries were made. Using the assumptions and arguments from that era and trusting in the power of human reason, modern Biblical scholars produced thousands of learned tomes that led intelligent and informed people to conclude that the Old Testament is merely another accumulation of loosely related texts preserved by Hebrews. As a book it’s full of many historical and scientific inaccuracies and myths.
Scholars treated the New Testament the same way. Obviously the time for writing the New Testament was much shorter, only a century or so. Nevertheless, using similar presuppositions, scholars concluded those texts were also corrupted by the early church or later editors. For New Testament writings we have copies closer in date to the originals than any other ancient document. For example, modern scholars said the original authors and later editors most likely fabricated their own fictitious views of Jesus, based on their expectations of who they wanted their Messiah to be and what he was to do. Study the existing texts. There are hundreds of thousands of variants, lending various perspectives. A variant may be a change of tense in a verb or the addition of a phrase, any number of things like that.
The Apostle Paul is often lifted up as a prime example. He embellished the Christian message, they claim. They invite us to consider his views of salvation through Jesus Christ. In their view, Paul personally invented most of his teachings about Christ to suit the spiritual needs of the early church. Later church councils removed the actual teachings of Christ for purposes of political expediency or theological bias.
Can they prove it? In our day there is a loose assembly of New Testament scholars from around the world called the Jesus Seminar. These scholars believe they have discovered a Jesus quite different from the Jesus portrayed in New Testament writings. They widely employ what they call the "dissimilarity principle," supposedly to determine who Jesus actually was and what he actually said. With them, a text or saying is reliable only when it contrasts with the thinking of early Christians. Odd or unusual sayings are unlikely to have been invented by the Gospel writers and probably are authentic.
The fact is that all these scholars have are theories, theories resting upon intuition. Intuition is knowledge gained without having to reason it through. If I intuit something, I know it because I know it. That’s all there is to it. Many of these biblical scholars reach conclusions based upon their intuitions. They cover up their ideas with high-sounding words, but all they have are their intuitions. Many claim to be able to pass judgment upon the style and contents of a book of the Bible, to decide when it was written, by whom it could not have been written, and even to divide it up into various portions, assigning each to a different "source," based upon intuitive perceptions. Intuitive experiences are new age talk for:
*listening to an inner voice,
* being aware of a gut feeling,
* seeing a sign,
* having a vision,
* following your heart, or
* being guided by an inner light.
All such perceptions are extremely man-centered. Consequently, the New Testament has lost its divine authority. They judge it to be merely another accumulation of man-made, ancient myths, legends and sayings, useful to a point, but certainly not the infallible, supernatural and inspired Word of God. Once again, no one can speak with authority, saying, “Thus says the Lord.” These are postmodern times.
Many of us aren’t ready to go along with such presuppositions and so-called intuitions. When you take the Bible seriously, as we have received it for over two millennia from the faith community, created by the living presence of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit, things look different. For instance, in the light of the Dead Sea Scrolls we see that the Old Testament as we have it today is essentially the same as it was in Jesus’ day. Jesus took that same Old Testament very seriously, declaring it his Father’s Word, pointing to him, the promised Messiah (John 8). That was what the teachers of his day missed. He spoke strong words to them who rejected him and the work his Father had given him to finish. To the unbelieving scholars of his day, he said, “You have never heard the Father’s voice nor seen his form, nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one he sent. You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life” (John 5:37-40).
Many religious scholars, preachers and churches have lost confidence in the Bible and with that they lost faith in Jesus as Savior and source of life. Focusing upon grammar, word endings and human reason, they have nothing left but platitudes and confusion. The Bible is about the God who loves us and through his Son rescues us and gives to us eternal life. When you have that faith and trust in Jesus, everything opens up. You have life and that in abundance. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).
No Master Narrative
I have one more major point left to make about postmodern times. With the loss of the Bible, our nation has also lost its master narrative. By ‘master narrative,’ I refer to the loss of an over-arching story that serves as the basis for interpreting our history. Take the early Pilgrim settlers for instance. These devout Christians came to the new world for religious freedom, to establish God’s kingdom in the new world and to bring the Gospel to the heathen. Like ancient Israel, they crossed the water to what they prayed would be the Promised Land.
All through American history these Bible themes guided us as a nation. Today those stories of a slave people set free to journey to a new land are no longer the dominant way by which we understand ourselves. We no longer have a master narrative. Instead we have multiple narratives often used against one another.
Jane Clayson interviewed Anne Graham Lotz, Billy Graham’s daughter, on CBS’s “Early Show” on the Thursday morning after 9/11. Lotz is a Christian who still believes in the authority of the Bible,. Clayson asked her “How could God let something like this happen?”
Ms. Lotz gave an extremely profound and insightful response. She said, "I say God is also angry when he sees something like this. I would say also for several years now Americans in a sense have shaken their fist at God and said, God, we want you out of our schools, our government, our business, we want you out of our marketplace. And God, who is a gentleman, has just quietly backed out of our national and political life, our public life. Removing his hand of blessing and protection. We need to turn to God first of all and say, God, we're sorry we have treated you this way and we invite you now to come into our national life. We put our trust in you. We have our trust in God on our coins, we need to practice it."
This goodbye-to-God procession marched through the last half of the twentieth century. Champion atheist
Madeline Murray O’Hare led the fight against prayer in our public schools, and we finally said okay. We are a pluralistic nation and we must keep church and state affairs completely separate.
The American Civil Liberties Union insisted we not read the Bible in public schools, nor teach the Ten Commandments, forbidding adultery, killing, stealing and telling lies, and we said okay. It is against our constitution to promote religion of any kind in our public schools.
Then someone said it is a woman’s right to do whatever she wants with her own body, including the aborting of an unborn fetus. Having no firm objective standards by which to judge, the Supreme Court decided we could not forbid that either.
Next some of our top elected officials said it doesn’t matter what we do in private as long as we do our jobs. Agreeing with them, many said it doesn’t matter what anyone, including the President of the United States, does in private as long as the economy is good. Attempts to impeach the president were thwarted.
Pornography is now a freedom of speech matter. People still get very angry about child pornography, but the entertainment industry is basically free to make TV shows, movies and video games promoting and portraying sex in every other possible manner, together with profanity and blasphemy. Recorded music and videos encourage rape, drugs, murder, suicide, and satanic themes, because everyone has a right to be entertained and ultimately entertainment has no adverse effect on those being entertained anyway. Few take it seriously.Meanwhile, news stories continue about high school and college students who take guns to school to kill other students and teachers. These are postmodern times.
Now what? Let’s try to summarize where we are. Maybe then we can get some idea of where to go next.
1. We are having a very difficult time figuring out what is real and what isn’t. Instead of ancient principles to guide us, we rely on images captured on digital cameras and spread around the world by satellite and the Internet, images of two airplanes crashing into twin towers in New York City or piles of corpses in unmarked graves in Bosnia or a flag being handed to the grieving mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan. The whole problem with images is that everyone interprets them in a different manner. So that doesn’t seem to help.
2. We live in multiple worlds with conflicting rules about right and wrong. Each family has its own set of standards. ‘As long as you live in my house, you go by my rules,’ shouts dad to his son caught smoking pot in the bathroom. However, the same teen goes to school with his friends who encourage him to move to new levels of drug use, new highs, and new experiences. And at work his dad regularly covers up profits to avoid paying income taxes. However, at home he gets furious when his little daughter is caught stealing an ice cream bar from a local fast food store.
3. We are reminded that many people around us have different ways of making sense out of the world than we do. For instance, my worldview might tell me to take a trip to Belize to help the poor of that country get better medical and dental care. However, when I get there, I run into government red tape, because certain officials have decided to sell the shipped supplies for their own personal gain. They conveniently lost any of the paper work tracking the shipment. According to them, nothing ever arrived. So their agenda overwhelms mine and I can do nothing about it.
4. One could get discouraged about daily events like this. As Woody Allen has said, one might even conclude that the problem lies with me. I am the failure. I’ve always been a failure. I don’t have the mental capacity to comprehend what’s going on. I am inadequate. So many voices. So many ideas of right and wrong. Everything is relative—and corrupt. Why not simply give up and drop out?
But do not despair. There’s more going on than all this dismal stuff we’ve talked about. Our heavenly Father has not abandoned us. Let’s press on. We’ll find better answers as we listen carefully to God’s Word. He is still with us to give courage and hope. We'll pursue these next.
