Questions from Capernwray

Hi! Here are some written answers to the 22 questions submitted for Thursday's question time. We won't get through 22 in one lecture, so I'm just scribbling a quick answer in case yours is the one that gets missed! Please understand these are instant reactions, rather than considered and carefully-pondered statements, but I hope they'll be useful anyhow. If not, feel free to get back to me at any time.

You drew the conclusion that Scripture's inspiration is "verbal". Does that mean that God was dictating to the writers, or that they have a conversation based on which the writer would understand what he has to write?

No, I don't think so. There are places where people, writing under inspiration, "spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit" (1 Peter 1:21), and so the prophets were able to look forward to fulfilments they couldn't see clearly, and of which they didn't understand the implications. But I don't see any evidence that it was ever dictation; the normal style and approach of the writer always seems to be present; and I'm not sure God had many helpful conversations with inspired writers first, before they wrote (Daniel might be an exception, with his frequent conversations with angels!).

Rather I think that God prepared the writer's heart, mind and imagination in such a way that what was written represented exactly what God wanted to be said - whether it was through the direct inspiration of a prophet, or the more roundabout inspiration of somebody like the Chronicler or Luke, historians who had obviously done lots of homework before they started writing.

God does that sort of thing, doesn't he? Sometimes people give me a gift because they feel God wants them to do it. Occasionally they decide on the spot, and get their wallet out on impulse. (Like a prophet writing without really knowing why.) In other cases they think and plan their monthly giving, and decide after weighing it all up to send me some money. (Like Luke patiently doing his research.) But in both cases, I've often found that their unexpected gifts have been absolutely timely and very strategic. Although human beings were the agents, you couldn't deny that God had done it; the gift represents God's provision for me, coming through other Christians. And however they arrive at the result, whatever process God sees fit to use, the outcome is the same for me: I get what God wants me to have. The same is true of God's gift of his inspired Word.

How did you know in your heart that the Bible and your faith was true?

Well, I'm a sceptical Scot, so I'm very wary of coming to conclusions about anything on the basis of heart feelings or emotional promptings. I think that when I became a Christian, the reality of it came home to me in three ways.

Straight away there were changes inside me: a new peace and joy, a new power over sin, a new desire to do the right things, a new love for other Christians, etc., etc. This all seemed real enough, but there's always the possibility that I've worked all of this stuff up psychologically within my head (I believe it's going to happen, therefore I convince myself that it has happened). How can I know objectively that this isn't just a fantasy inside my brain?

The answer: there were soon changes outside me too. I could see God answering prayer, organizing "coincidences", shaping and stretching my life in ways I wouldn't have done for myself, which nonetheless opened the door into new adventures and experiences I'd never have had otherwise. And this wasn't inside my imagination: it involved real events in the real world, over which I had no control.

But your brain is still a devious piece of equipment. It can weave facts together into convincing stories so that you fool yourself into believing things that aren't true. And if I were the only one who had experiences like this, I would just think I was going mad. But when I see God at work in other people, I can no longer think it's just fanciful. When I go to cultures completely different from mine, and talk to Christians there, I find they've had exactly the same experience of God that I've had; it's a bit like discussing a mutual friend. If their experience was purely imaginary, it wouldn't match mine. It would be shaped by their culture and background, just as mine would be, and I'd expect significant differences.

So these three areas of experience together convinced me that I had stumbled into something absolutely true and real.

Can you say more about when the Bible was fully complete? When was that?

Well, if you remember, one of the criteria used for deciding whether a book was canonical (or not) was: Was it written by an apostle or a close associate of the apostles? By the end of the first century, most of those people had died. So there was no expectation that fiurther Scripture would be written after that point. And one of the instant criticisms that Christians levelled against the apocryphal gospels, and the fake Gnostic ones, was that they weren't written in apostolic times, but far too late. Remeber the Muratorian Fragment (from around AD 170)? This was its reason for denying canonicity to the Shepherd of Hermas:

But Hermas wrote the Shepherd  very recently, in our times, in the city of Rome, while bishop Pius, his brother, was occupying the [episcopal] chair of the church of the city of Rome. And therefore it ought indeed to be read; but it cannot be read publicly to the people in church either among  the Prophets, whose number is complete, or among (80) the Apostles, for it is after [their] time.

What do you think about the Qu'ran?

You'll be unsurprised to hear that I don't think it was inspired by God. And I don't believe Muhammad's story that it was dictated to him by the angel (although it's possible he may have believed that himself). I think it reflects the ideas and opinions of someone growing up in Arabia in those days, whose mind has been shaped by the questions and burning issues of his own culture, but who has a curiosity about "the people of the Book" and who feels that both Christianity and Judaism have something to offer to the traditional desert religion which has shaped him but now has come to feel inadequate. I think it also reflects the poor understanding of Christian faith which Muhammad was given by the semi-Christians he met and talked with: the notion that the Trinity includes Mary, that Jesus did not die on the cross, etc.

I also think it's a remarkable production which has brought peace and unity to warring tribes, and then taught a strong morality to millions of others across the globe (though at a cost: I think the Qu'ran's approval of violence and jihad leads more directly into terrorism than even a mistaken reading of the Bible does). Finally, I think it's been changed, and has evolved through the years, in ways that Muslims refuse to recognize. You could read this article or this one if you're interested.

In Scripture verses can be read and interpreted in different ways leaving room for centuries-long debates about its meaning, and different denominations form depending on which view a group sides with. Why does God allow his church to split apart like this?

Well, God allows his church to do all sorts of silly things. When you become a Christian, you don't turn into a robot. Instead there's a war between the old nature, of indwelling sin, and the new nature which is created after God. And we still need "teaching, reproof, correction and training in righteousness" (2 Tim 3:16-17 - remember this morning?!).

So it's always possible for Christians to find things to fight about. The problem isn't the Bible, it's us. We can start an argument about anything - look at the ladder which has been left on the porch roof outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem since 1750, because nobody can decide which group of Christians have the right to move it! And we do that just a few feet away from the (supposed) site of the resurrection!!

David Lloyd-George (Prime Minister of the UK) once said, "My church and another Welsh denomination believe exactly the same things, except for one point of doctrine. One church believes strongly that we are baptised in the name of Christ, the other believes we are baptised into the name of Christ. Now I feel most strongly about this. I believe it is an important distinction. I would die to defend it.  The only problem is, I can never remember which of the two views my church actually holds..."

God has not made the Scriptures as clear as we might like; there is lots there that we can disagree about. But that was always going to be the case, since the Bible tells us what we need to know rather than what we want to know. So things like the exact sequence of events at the Second Coming, the interface of free will and election, the question of whether you should baptise infants or believers, the possibility of a second crisis experience after conversion - all of these are things we don't need to know about in order to be disciples. We will form our own convictions about some of them, but we have to recognize that other Christians have a right to differ. In this way, God has provided more chance for us to show grace and charity, to love one another in challenging circumstances, to learn from very different points of view... or to fight, loathe and hate one another. No prizes for guessing which response he wants us to show; but our sinful nature will always prompt us in the other direction.

How do you explain that the earth is biblically about 6000 years old, and geologically proven to be about 4.5 billion years old. And how about dinosaurs.

There are several possible answers, and here are three of them. My one would be (3).

(1) Science is just wrong. The earth is young, and scientists are ignoring the evidence because Darwin has had such an impact on modern thinking that you'd have to be very brave to deny what people claim we know for certain. But 5% of Americans with a professional science degree were "young earth creationists" when polled in 1997, and the number appears to be rising. If you want to read more about this point of view, there's a good Wikipedia article on "young earth creationism"; or check out Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research - including Jayme Durant's article on "Dinosaur Mysteries  Uncovered".

(2) Science is right - on that point anyway. "Old earth creationism" accepts that the earth is very old, but insists that there are ways of reading Genesis which allow a long age for the earth, and still preserves the belief that God made everything just as the creation story tells it. So dinosaurs are no problem: Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe says that they were wiped out 65 million years ago, well before the arrival of humans.

(3) The creation story in Genesis 1-3 is just that: a story, not a scientific account. It isn't intended to teach how God created everything, but that he did. Out of this very simple story, which is accessible to all human beings - whether they're in a scientific culture, a primitive one, or whatever - come all sorts of important truths: about God and his feelings about what he created; about us and where we fit in his design; about sin and how it spoiled everything. It's truly marvellous how a simple, elegant story like this can carry the freight of so much important truth.

So the Bible is not in conflict with science. We can accept the findings of scienists about the age of the earth and the existence of dinosaurs without threatening our faith in anyway. To check out this point of view, have a look at BioLogos, whose website says: "BioLogos invites the church and the world
to see the harmony between science and biblical faith as we present an evolutionary understanding of God's creation." BioLogos was started by one of the truly great scientists of our day - Francis Collins who led the Human Genome Project - and includes many articles which try to show the ways in which a Christian faith and a belief in the findings of science fit together.

By the way: don't assume that the Bible does teach a 6000-year earth. This is based on lots of assumptions (e.g.: what an average human lifespan would have been several thousand years ago; that there are no generations missed out in the Bible's lists of ancestors; etc.). The old calculation of Bishop Ussher, that the world started at nightfall on October 22nd 4004 BC, is wildly wrong because of these factors!

Why do you think people always want to find proofs or evidence which deny that the Bible tells the truth (for example "new" gospels)? Devil act? Marketing?

Well, the devil's usually involved at some level in anything that drives people further away from God, at some level or other. And clearly "marketing" is a factor: Dan Brown has made a lot of money from his books; National Geographic have marketed the Gospel of Judas quite significantly. But I think there are other, very human, motivations too.

People in our culture are always keen to suspect the Bible is wrong; there's a general perception that Christians have ruled the roost for centuries in Europe and America, and it's time they were debunked and disempowered. But people also have a bit of a fear that the Christians might just be right, so anything that confirms them in the view that "it's all a load of old rubbish" is likely to be attractive. And we all like discovering a "you-won't-believe-this-but", "strange-but-true", kind of story: so something that makes you feel you now know the real truth about things people have believed for centuries, makes you feel smug and superior and generally safe in your opinions.

Why did God create the "tree of life" (Gen 3:24) if death didn't exist at this time? What's the difference between the "tree of life" and the "tree of good and evil"?

Clever point. But if the Genesis creation story is just a story, as I've argued in another answer, maybe we shouldn't look for too much consistency in the details. (For example:  there's "light", "day" and "night" on the first day of creation, but no sun or moon until day four - which can't have been healthy for the photosynthesis of the plants introduced on day three.) And so you can't press the details of the story too closely. (Here's another example: how can God say, "You can eat of any tree in the garden except one" (2:16) when actually there are two trees they're not allowed to touch? If you try to take it all too literally, you end up with all sorts of puzzles like this.)

So we're talking about symbols here. The "tree of life" clearly stands for something only God himself has access to (3:22) - if Adam and Eve ate its fruit they would live forever - whereas "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" simply gives them a new, guilty understandg of things that they never had before, and results in  their spiritual death (2:17). It seems to me that this story has such a haunting, powerful effect on us because it puts into picture form something that we know from out own experience. We all know what it's like to lose our innocence - to sin in such a way that we now have a new, direct knowledge of something that's "off limits" to us, but which we now know from personal experience because we've rebelled and broken the rules. And although this new knowledge extends our experience of life, it also means that we "die" to something valuable inside us, which we've betrayed and sold cheaply. That's "the knowledge of good and evil".

One thing that happens to us as we rebel, and make ourselves the centre of our universe, is that we're increasingly tempted to take charge of everything for ourselves, and simply push God out. That's "the tree of life": grabbing the universe for ourselves.

God would have given the privilege of "living forever" to Adam and Eve had they not sinned. Death was never part of his intention for creation. But once they had rebelled, it was necessary to shut them out from the full enjoyment of God's creation, unlimited by death and decay, which God had designed them for; if they could have eaten from the "tree of life" they'd have lived forever. And so the human race is shut out of the fulness and permanence in earthly experience for which God designed us originally. That's why C S Lewis writes about the Sehnsucht, “the inconsolable longing in the heart for we know not what", which is present even in our greatest moments of satisfaction and fulfilment. Only the fusion of heaven and earth (Rev 22) will satisfy the longing we've endured since the moment our race took a wrong turning.

More questions and answers