Of Fruits in Feuds, or: Discernment in Discourse

In this post, I attempt several distinct and, perhaps, disparate, things, all to encourage you, dear Christian reader, to read history and theology and philosophy, and to recognize the bounds of orthodoxy when engaging with other people. Here are two situations I found myself in the middle of, in two separate comment threads on a recent short video on miracles that Alisa Childers posted. In the video, Alisa is interviewing Shane Rosenthal on the question of why we don't see as many miracles these days as occurred recorded in Acts. Rosenthal is a Jewish convert to (Reformed) Christianity. All comments quoted here are unedited.

Situation #1: Literally Confused

The original comment thread attempted a reply to the question posed in the video title:

"Because it’s not literal! It’s spiritual! To raise the dead is to raise the consciousness of someone ! To heal the blind is to help people see truth! Heal their perception! To heal the sick is to help the weak minded, who don’t walk in truth, who are sick in their minds! It’s all thought that manifests."

Several people had already taken this person to task by questioning the truthfulness of the assertion. Despite the New Age-type alarm bells going off, I decided to elicit this person's viewpoints in a more obvious fashion by asking what they thought of the resurrection of Jesus, the central miracle of the Christian faith. My question did the trick:

"have you heard of anyone else raising from the dead literally? Because Gods salvation raises from the dead spiritually ( us). Pick up your cross does not mean carry a literal cross! Follow him does not literally mean go and physically die! 😂 wake up from religion the spirit isn’t there! It’s organised to deceive the masses"

At this point, I followed the unwritten rule of not engaging further because (1) online interaction has little to no nuance and (2) the likelihood of actually dismantling this person's intellectual objections to the faith was about as probable as the amount of nuance. If I had kept going long enough, I could eventually have won the argument, but that is not the central goal of apologetics.

While this person is not incorrect in that God's act of salvation does indeed raise us spiritually from the death in which we walked in our sins (Ephesians 2:1ff), the global application involved the incorrect assumption that spiritual-salvation implies spiritual-every-happening-in-the-Christian-life. I'm reading through N. T. Wright's Surprised by Hope, and he describes this confusion which is shockingly common to many Christians--over-spiritualizing our interpretation of Scripture leads to Gnosticism.

Husband also noted that this commenter's thought comes across as British (spelling), strongly influenced by German biblical scholarship. Wright, being a past bishop in the Church of England, argues against this type of thinking in many of his (80+) books, by going straight to what the text means by considering the cultural thought and behavior systems at the time of authorship, and presenting a cogent argument for that case.

Update 10/13/23: John Walton put words to the attitude I was detecting from the commenter (p. 16 of The Lost World of the Torah):

"Scholars have a role in the body of Christ just like everyone else does. One cannot object that it is somehow elitist for scholars to think they have a contribution to make that not just anyone can make. Not everyone is an eye, an ear, or a hand. Everyone else is gifted to do what they do, and academics are no exception--and no one should begrudge that. No person alone is the whole body of Christ; we all depend on the gifts of others. If the Bible needs to be translated--an important emphasis of the Reformation still acknowledged today--then somebody needs to translate it. Cultural brokerage, like lexical semantics, is part of the translation process and is a necessary function of a competent translator."

It's also worth noting that denial of the regenerative efficacy of Holy Baptism entails thinking that enables a very short jump to denying the bodily resurrection of Jesus and, later, all believers. In our household, baptismal regeneration, and the thought processes of those who deny it, has been a hot topic lately (i.e., the last 2 years). I know that plenty have written for and against it online, so there's no need to link a bunch of posts or articles on either side. Here's our take on it, briefly (based on key sources including Joachim Jeremias):

• In Judaism around the time of Jesus, it was common to baptize proselytes of all ages, and infants. Circumcision (noted in Paul's letters as what was replaced by baptism) was done for infants born to Jewish parents on the 8th day of life. Importantly, baptism/circumcision marked the person as part of the community of faith.
• Paul and others who baptized converts to Christianity baptized households. Infants were not excluded. Sometimes baptism followed extensive instruction and belief (normal for adults); sometimes baptism preceded it (infants/young children who were then brought up as members of the Christian family of faith. Think of adoption as a very biblical--and still applicable--analogy.)
• In the writings of Scripture as well as the church fathers (first generations of Christians who had a chain of personal acquaintance linking them back to the apostles of Jesus), issues that were generally agreed upon were not discussed in depth. Similar to today, one doesn't rehash the agreed-upon things every time one writes a letter to someone else. Baptism fell into this category, hence few references in Scripture and slightly more in the church fathers.
• Taking these things together, this indicates that baptism of infants (spoken of as regenerating, providing new spiritual birth, raising us to spiritual life with Christ while living our lives in this present creation as in Romans 6) was the norm for centuries.
• Saving faith, as I've mentioned elsewhere, doesn't require verbal expression, but trust. Babies have the ability to trust their parents in this way from birth.
• The supposition that "baptism is an individual decision and requires verbal expression of trust, babies aren't rational or verbal so they can't verbally express trust, therefore we shouldn't baptize babies" is not biblical and not early Christian. It came about centuries later.

Now that I've reopened that can of worms, let's see what else happened in the comments section . . .

Situation #2: Bart Ehrman's Doppelganger

The original comment probably came from a Christian and exemplified a thought that's been around at least since the time of C. S. Lewis: 

"Because people back then didn’t know a lot about how things work and called things they couldn’t explain “miracles”. We still do it today, but less so because we know more about how things work."

I replied:

"C. S. Lewis answered this assumption in his book "Miracles," actually. New Testament scholar N. T. Wright seems to have read a lot of Lewis. I'm reading through his book "Surprised by Hope" which addresses the meaning of the resurrection for Christians, and one point he made was that the Jews in the first century A. D. understood very well that individual resurrection went against the "laws of nature" and was, frankly, something they did not expect God to do for the Messiah."

Here's where things got more interesting. An atheist (likely a deconverted Christian, as we shall see) hopped on to my reply:

"Yes, they knew most people did not come back from the dead. But why no more miracles today? Could it be it was a story all along and you have been deceived? Do you want to see what you belief causes to your behavior?"

I repeated what I had said earlier, in spite of plenty of experience indicating that people don't listen, and frequently they don't trust anyone besides themselves:

" to your comment…Lewis and Wright (and [Craig] Keener, for that matter) answer your questions as well.️"

Now the true mindset was revealed.

"I notice you did not and I highly doubt they would. What they would say would lead to more questions and trust me, you ALL run and avoid my questions. I have a set of questions 97% of you just wont even answer. I have some new ones I have been using lately. Atheists and agnostics are almost 100%, they have no problems. Christians are less then 40% right now and muslims are at 0%. God is not part of these questions at all, these are simple moral questions. Now these questions have implications that might tie to god, and that often leads to non answers as the person starts to make a straw man to beat on. Try and avoid this and just answer the questions that are asked directly and honestly. 

#1 You see a child drowning in a shallow pool and notice a person just watching that is able to save the child with no risk to themselves but is not, is that person moral?

#2 You ask them why they are not doing anything and they tell you they heard the reasoning is beyond human comprehension, but this will bring about a greater good, do you accept his claim and sit and watch or do you reject it and save the child?

#3 Is it just to punish innocent people for the crimes of others?

#4 If you were able to stop it and knew a person was about to grape [sic] a child would you stop it?

#5 Would you consider someone who laid a minefield knowing people were going to stop on the mines and how much damage would be done and who would die, and then forced their children to go an play in it a good parent?"

At this point, Husband and I discussed the argument being presented here. This person exhibits the mindset of many former Christians whose intellectual questions were not answered by people from their congregation or larger faith community, despite scholars and philosophers having answered these questions already. Nobody pointed them to the sources, so they assumed that Christianity was not intellectually robust enough to handle serious questions . . . leading to a deconstructed faith, atheism, or agnosticism. I refer you back to the recent 90-minute video featuring apologetics and philosophy greats (one of whom I know personally) on styles of apologetics in today's world, for your education and edification, because apologetics must precede or accompany evangelism for this person.

Specifically, this individual assumes a "cosmic nanny" view of God. He(?) grants that there is a moral imperative outside of naturalistic consciousness, but doesn't want to grant the ontological (nature of being/reality) consequences of that. An atheist who knew his scholarship might respond to these questions that "there's no such thing as moral evil--i.e., nihilism is true."

The best Christian response to that would be along the lines of: "So, there's nothing wrong with an axe murderer killing 50 children for fun, because nothing is wrong?" To be logically consistent, the atheist must grant that. That's where the Christian should ask, "So, why would that be a problem for Christianity?" One cannot critique Christianity from the standpoint of moral evil unless one grants the premises in reality rather than hypothetically--and almost all atheists will try to only grant them hypothetically.

If you've followed the last few paragraphs, you probably realize that the atheist commenter does not have a true logical problem with God and the problem of evil. Rather, the commenter has an emotional problem with the conundrum. Philosopher Alvin Plantiga shows, via a book-length argument, that this is the case, in God, Freedom, and Evil. N. T. Wright addresses the emotional inconsistency in Evil and the Justice of God.

Boiled down to a very short form that does not do it justice, Plantiga's starting point is

1. There is a God.
2. Therefore (#1), there is moral good.
3. We observe moral evil.
4. We suppose that this (#3) is inconsistent with moral good (#2) from a moral God.
5. Therefore (#4), a moral God cannot exist.

Through the rest of the book, Plantiga shows that this is not a true contradiction, although it certainly feels like one! Many atheists who read his book don't understand where he's going, so they will turn to probabilistic or emotion-based arguments. However, the problem with probabilistic arguments is that one's chosen probabilistic factors don't reflect the spectrum of all real data available (actuarial science?), but rather reflect one's personal feelings and biases. God either exists or He does not.