Season 2 Premiere- Is There Even a Such Thing As Real Christianity?

Enjoy the show;

Anchor Audio Link = https://anchor.fm/skeptics-and-seekers/episodes/Season-2-Premiere–Is-There-a-Real-Christianity-e5cjf9

 

CLAIMS, STATEMENTS OF BELIEF/OPINION & PRESUPPOSITIONS:

Claims- David (the skeptic) is claiming there is no orthodoxy.  Dale is making no claims

Statements of Belief/Opinion– Nothing specific.

Presuppositions- Dale presumes that the Bible is “sufficiently attached” to Christianity

David’s Blog:

One of my themes this season will be an examination of what Christians mean by Christianity. One of my many frustrations is talking about a doctrine or faith claim with which I disagree, only to have the Christian on the other end accuse me of straw man tactics. They say that the view I am inveighing against is not real Christianity. The problem, of course, is there seems to be no agreement among Christians on what real Christianity is.

Take prayer as an example: No two Christians seem to agree on how it is supposed to work. Even if I intentionally tried to straw man prayer, my parody would be some Christian’s perfect understanding of how it works. One person’s straw man is another person’s faith. This is true with regard to a number of Christian faith positions.

When it comes to understanding real Christianity, the target is constantly moving. Talk to one person long enough and the definitions change from one thing to another. Does this mean that every Christian is wrong about Christianity, or that only one Christian is right? Which one? I tend to think it means that from a practical perspective, there is no such thing as real Christianity. Here is a bit more of what I mean:

There are no doctrines or establishments of worship from Jesus

If the bible ended with the gospel of John, there would be no church as we know it today. Jesus left no such instructions for the creation of any such institution. Arguably, the rest of the New Testament doesn’t help much in that regard either. We have cobbled together bits and pieces. But there is very little by way of theological training in the bible. We can look at what they did and try to copy it. But there is almost nothing expressly telling us what to do in worship and what doctrines are important to believe.

Jesus once said that upon this rock I will build my church. But he wasn’t speaking of a geological formation, or an institutional framework. If he was trying to establish some type of club, he left us precious few instructions about who’s in and who’s out. There is even ambiguity about who the reliable officers were. At the time Jesus said what he did, Judas was one of the 12. And Paul wasn’t even a part of the picture.

On some of the more divisive issues of our time, Jesus had little or nothing to say. He didn’t speak clearly about things such as the trinity, homosexuality, or slavery, which was still a going concern in his time. He gave us no creed, catechism, nor liturgy. We have no particular confession of faith save for what men produced centuries later. If Jesus was trying to produce a religion, he did an unconvincing job of it.

There is no official definition of scripture, especially New Testament scripture

In the first century, there was a somewhat loose understanding what what constituted scripture. But it was not unanimous. Some only accepted the Pentateuch as scripture. While others accepted all of the law and the prophets. It is not clear if the histories and the books of poetry were always considered sacred scripture or just important and influential writings. I know some Christians who reference C. S. Lewis more than anything in the bible. But they do not consider Lewis to be a producer of sacred scripture. Where do we draw the line?

The problem is there is no official instruction for identifying sacred scripture that was produced by the inspiration of god. There is no table of contents in Genesis telling us what all is included in the canon. We determine scripture mostly based on what others accepted as scripture who came before us. We make the faulty assumption that earlier people had a better idea of what was scripture than us. But that is just a question-begging assumption.

The New Testament is worse. We can say that apostolic writings were scripture. But that doesn’t really cut it. After all, we know there were apostolic writings that didn’t survive. There were writings of Paul he seems to reference that we don’t actually have. Christians deal with this by saying that the writings that survived must have done so because those are the writings we are supposed to have. Determining what scripture is by what survived weeks like shaky grounds for determining scripture.

There is also the matter of the apocrypha. Sacred scriptures or not? I have no idea and no way to judge. The people mostly responsible for our canon say it is. But most of us disagree. On what basis? And why are books like Job and Hebrews in the bible? No one knows who wrote them. We only have speculation. Bible-based Christianity is almost oxymoronic because we aren’t entirely clear on what is supposed to constitute the bible.

Paul seemed to be flat out wrong about some things. Yet his ramblings and opinions are the basis for a lot of Christian doctrine. It seems that if his written opinions would be sacred scripture, someone would have said so at the beginning of his ministry. How would Paul’s letters have been received had he labeled them as the newest chapter of sacred scripture? We have the writings of many influential church planters. But no one regards those writings as scripture. Did they really think of Paul’s writings that way. The one place in the bible that suggests it is itself, hotly disputed as illegitimate.
We couldn’t have America without a clear constitution. And you can’t have a religion without clearly defined scripture. Yet there seems to have been little pains taken to provide one.

There is no way to settle disputes and know who is right

The first two points lead us to the inevitable mess we are in today. There is simply no way to settle disputes and know who is right on any given issue. A few weeks ago, I was listening to a debate between two Christians on what seemed to be a very important issue to them. They were vehement about their position. And there was a matter of clear dispute. However, they both agreed that is was not an essential doctrine. So they could maintain fellowship despite their disagreement.

In the online discussion about that debate, one of the first comments from a Christian was that the matter was most certainly an essential doctrine, and that those on the wrong side of it were not true Christians. As an outsider, it was like watching a game of tennis with no official. All the players rush the net to argue over whether it was a fair ball or not. Each of them have their own perspective, and none more privileged than the other.

I have no way of judging the dispute. I can give my opinion. But at least one of them will dismiss me. I believe all Christians grossly underestimate the damage their disunity does. The more they disagree among themselves, the less chance they have of convincing us of anything. They believe they can make a distinction between major and minor doctrines. But outsiders can’t. We have no way of knowing what is or isn’t important, especially since there is no universal agreement even on that point.

Even when Christians agree that their disagreements are minor, it still rings hollow because we can look at where they end up on Sunday. They still don’t worship together. So they can talk about how minor their disagreements are all day long. But at 11:00 on Sunday, they are just as segregated as a 1950’s school. Their disagreements are significant enough to keep them from sharing communion together. And that seems pretty major to me.

Conclusion: The Orthodox Delusion

I believe that Christianity suffers from an orthodox delusion. That is the idea that they have some kind of solid and well defined center encompassing acceptable doctrine, faith, and practices. I contend that as things get bigger and older, they get a lot harder to define, if not impossible. Christianity is simply too big and too old to have a clear definition. Part of the problem is that no one keeps it pruned and pristine.

In the early days, someone might have said that these are the rules that all must follow. But that did not happen. More people were allowed into the club who had different ideas. And those ideas were allowed to stand. So those new ideas also became orthodox. For every new idea allowed to stand, orthodoxy expands. It has now done so to the point where it has no practical meaning at all.
Another thing a group needs in order to claim orthodoxy is outsider recognition. Those on the outside have to be able to recognize the group and its rules. An outsider should be able to quote the rules back to an insider and hold the insider accountable. But that is not the case with Christianity. We can never know what we are talking about no matter how well we know the Christian rule book.

At this point, Christianity is something being made up on the spot as we go. Christians cannot agree on the real Christianity because there is no real Christianity. Or perhaps, it’s all real Christianity, which amounts to the same thing.

And that’s the view from the skeptic.

David Johnson

 

Is There Even a Such Thing As Christianity (Proper)? (Christian/Seeker’s View)

For our Season 2 Premiere, the Skeptic appears to have thrown down the gauntlet in claiming that there is no such thing as “orthodox” Christianity (what I call “Christianity proper”); quite the claim to adopt a burden of proof on.  On the face of it, it seems to me that the Skeptic has failed to pay attention in Sunday school class; is he really not aware of the many early Christian Church Fathers who opposed heresies during the late first and early second centuries of the Christian era!  Does he not know the basic origin of the word “orthodox” which comes from the Greek meaning “straight-thinking” (or “straight/right opinion” and was used to distinguish “true Christians” from heretical ones like the Marcionites and the so-called Gnostics at that time (indeed I believe it was Maricon who had the honour of occasioning the first use of the word “heretic”).

Yet the skeptic boldly and confidently claims; “In the early days, someone might have said that these are the rules that all must follow. But that did not happen. More people were allowed into the club who had different ideas. And those ideas were allowed to stand. So those new ideas also became orthodox. For every new idea allowed to stand, orthodoxy expands. It has now done so to the point where it has no practical meaning at all”.

Complete hogwash let me tell you, no historian or scholar in the world would agree with such an unmitigated statement!

Perhaps, I’m being too harsh on the skeptic here, maybe he is referring to an even earlier period, such as say during the “real” early time of Church history (the first couple decades or so).  Well, does his claim fare much better at this early time? – No, for both Paul’s writings and the NT as a whole are filled with scorn for various fake Christians (Galatians 1:7-9, 2 Cor 11:4, 2 Peter 2:1 and 2 John 1:10 for example).  It seems even these earliest of 1^st generation Christians had at least some limits on what it meant to be a “real” Christian and quite obviously, it was practically sufficient for the main purpose of the Christian movement to save as many souls as possible at the time and allow for any future discoveries of knowledge based on Scriptural nuggets of wisdom; the divinely-appointed Apostles and their disciples certainly could tell the difference and distinguished the real Christians from the fake all the time.

So how on Earth could the Skeptic make such a radical claim to know that there simply was no “Orthodox” or “true” meaning of what it meant to be a Christian?

Failed Skeptical Attempt #1- There are no doctrines or establishments of worship from Jesus:

The Skeptic would have us believe that Jesus (as reported at face value in the Gospels) didn’t provide Christians with any theological doctrines; but this completely untrue as any cursory reading of the 4 Gospels will quickly prove.

Here are some quick examples of such;

1. a) The sower(Matthew 13:3–9; Mark 4:3–9; Luke 8:5–8): Here Jesus teaches us the profound theological doctrine that though God sows the seed of His Word abundantly, some of it falls on the path, where it is consumed by birds. Other seed falls among thorns, which choke it off. Still other seed falls on rocky soil and withers due to the lack of roots. This is a dramatic warning to those who harden their hearts to God’s Word or who allow the soil of their heart to be thinned or choked off by the world. The warning is this: you will not bear the necessary fruit. Some seed, however, doesfall on rich soil and it yields an abundant harvest. There is a dramatic difference in the results and it is rooted in the disposition of our hearts. This provides the theological doctrine of the effectiveness of God’s Word relative to the individual state of one’s heart and their open-mindedness to God’s truth (aka being a “real seeker”).
2. b) The barren fig tree parable(Luke 13:6–9): This is a parable about patience. In it, extra time is given to an unfruitful fig tree, but the day of judgment is set. If fruit is not found on the tree on that day, it will be cut down. This is the drama of our life: if we do not manifest the fruit of righteousness we will be removed from the Lord’s field. This gives the doctrine of the necessity of bearing fruit so as to not be rejected on the Day of Judgement- quite the essential doctrine there.
3. c) Jesus Teaches His Death & Resurrection (Matthew 20:17-19): 17 Now Jesus was going up to Jerusalem. On the way, he took the Twelve aside and said to them, 18 “We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death 19 and will hand him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. On the third day he will be raised to life!” Wow, quite the essential doctrine Jesus taught there.
4. d) Jesus Teaches He is God Incarnate (John 8:56–59): 56 Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.” 57 So the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” 58 Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” 59 So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple. Jesus taught he was Yahweh in the flesh- quite the essential doctrine there.

Of course, Jesus didn’t explicitly state every single theological doctrine contained in the New Testament, He didn’t need to, He set up followers as inspired Apostles to set that in motion (John 16:13- The Holy Spirit will guide you into all truth).  This allowed them the flexibility not to get hung up on trivial secondary and non-essential issues like church government or institutional concerns like where one ought to worship (house church, a separate building with PowerPoint slides or out in a field); it would have been foolish for Jesus to muddy the waters by trying to restrict the Gospel’s ability to adapt to other cultural contexts- He was an absolute genius in not giving detailed instructions of how to do church to His followers; and quite frankly it’s one of the reasons why Christianity is the biggest religion today.   So long as one believed the essential doctrines of “Christianity proper”, then the other matters were up to us to work out after He left and on that front He gave us the Holy Spirit to help guide us.

Failed Skeptical Objection #2- There is no official definition of scripture, especially New Testament scripture

The question of how Christians might go about distinguishing which are the essential (non-negotiable) doctrines of “real” Christianity and which are merely secondary or tertiary ones comes down to my biblical notion of letting God’s Word tell us.  Any and all doctrines or practices that the Bible itself tells us, either explicitly or implicitly, are essential to achieving our salvation are the ones deemed to be essential (nothing more, nothing less).

By way of illustration as to how this would work, one can see an explicit essential doctrine via looking at 2 John 1:7 saying, “For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist”.  Thus, we know explicitly, denying Jesus Christ came in the flesh (i.e. His Incarnation) will lead to us going to Hell in the spirit of the antichrist.  In an implicit way, Hebrews 5:9 – Jesus is the author of eternal salvation to all who obey Him.  Thus, we know that one’s repenting of their sins and being willing to obey God/Jesus’s commands are essential to salvation.  As such, we know implicitly that we must obey Jesus’ commands to be baptized and take part in Communion and try to follow the moral commandments of God implicitly.

This method quite obviously presumes that one can know what is and is not, “God’s Word” and this is where the issue of canonicity comes in to play as per the Skeptic’s unfounded complaints.

First, with regard to the Old Testament, the Skeptic appeals to the totally irrelevant historical fact that not all Jews living prior to the Council of Jamnia in 90 A.D. agreed as to which books were “inspired Scripture” or not.  The Sadducees for example only accepted the Pentateuch as being inspired whereas others accepted the entirety of Scripture as we have it today.  Who cares what a bunch of ill-informed, uninspired, non-Christians thought about the status of the OT Scripture, all that matters is what Jesus and the earliest Christians counted as “Scripture” and on that front we have universal agreement that the Hebrew Bible as we have it today (i.e. the entire Tanakh, an acronym for Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim, meaning Law, Prophets, and Writings, respectively), was indeed the inspired Word of God; no scholar in the world denies this!

As to any additional OT books that Catholics or Orthodox Christian might want to include, well barring any proof for the truth and/or endorsement by God for the truth of these specific sects of Christianity, such writings rule themselves out because they themselves all admit that the prophets had ceased since the Achaemenid Persian Empire days in the 400’s B.C. and thus no inspired books could possibly have been written during the time these additional writing were made (so that’s why no other books added to the Jewish canon and why Protestants are better off for being on the same page with Jews on their own Bible).

In relation to New Testament canonicity, we know that the Apostles and their writings were claimed to be “inspired” by the first Christians (1 Thessalonians 2:9-13- Paul says he gave them the Word of God orally in the Gospel message, Gal 1:11-12, 1 Cor 14:36-37- his written command was inspired in the letter, 2 Peter 3:15-16).  The earliest Church Fathers immediately recognized and quoted from Scripture differentiating them from other non-inspired writings (1 Clement, Ignatius of Antioch, etc.).  Now, it is true that there were some minor disagreements on a few NT books, the vast majority were never questioned including the 4 Gospels and Acts (never questioned once by anyone, see = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon#New_Testament ).  However, all of this is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

I personally like James White’s theological approach which contrasts with the typical pure historical approach to studying canonicity.  White says that we have to realize that “canonicity” is an artefact of revelation not an object of revelation (this is what I think confuses a lot of Catholics in their disagreements with Protestants on Canonicity); in other words, the canon is not a 28^th inspired book of the NT (we don’t need another inspired source to tell us which books are inspired).  The canon existed as soon as God inspired the specific books that now occupy our Bible but man’s knowledge of the canon was passive and not active.  As such, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit we passively received knowledge of the canon over time where God providentially allowed us to have a sufficient understanding of divine Scripture to be saved until the canon was firmly established and collected together into one book.  Thus, such disputes about how Man’s knowledge of the canon came about and what criteria they used to adjudicate upon them, do nothing to destroy the existence of the canon known actively by God and eventually revealed fully to us in a way that is now in hindsight undisputable.  We have the canon now and no mainstream Christians deny the 27 books of the NT, we can trust in God’s Molinistic providence that if these are the books that we have, then they are exactly the inspired books that have been sufficient for God’s purposes for “real Christians” over the millennia and will continue to be such in the future.  This theological approach to studying the issue completely bypasses any skeptical concerns about how we got the canon on a human level; the fact remains that however we got there, we are there now and we can know that we have exactly the inspired books that God intended for us otherwise we would have a completely different canon with different writing in it.

As the Skeptic has adopted the burden of proof this week, can he prove that this isn’t the case and that God hasn’t providentially arranged to give us the correct inspired writings sufficient for His salvific purposes (i.e. the ones that exist in our Bible’s presently)?

Conclusion: A Case of Skeptical Seclusion

As we have seen God has provided Christians with His inspired Word and the Holy Spirit to help them in understanding God’s teachings and discerning the essential Christian doctrines.  The Skeptic claims that talking to Christians yields only confusion on his part as to what those essential doctrines might be.  However, in light of the above, I think it’s rather clear that his confusion here is more a matter of his seclusion than based on what actual Christians have to say on this front.

Virtually no “real” Christians living since the time of the Apostles deny the existence of the God of the Israel, or Jesus death and Resurrection for our sins, or Jesus’ Divine Nature and Incarnation, or that one must repent of their sins and place their faith in God/Jesus.  These uncontroversial essential doctrines that every real Christian affirms is clearly sufficient to constitute a “Real Christianity”; they are undeniable amoung Christians and the use of God’s Word along with other God-ordained mechanisms (Holy Spirit guidance, prayer, peer-consultation, Bible study resources online, etc.) provides more than enough means to separate the wheat from the chaff in most cases.

To end skeptical confusion, end skeptical seclusion, I say.  One must get out from one’s skeptical echo chamber and really listen and take seriously what the real Christians are telling you.  Stop looking for a problem in the non-essential and controversial issues all the while ignoring the clear and unambiguous solution via giving credence to the essential doctrines as explicitly and/or implicitly identified in the Bible.  Start listening to the uncontroversial and universally agreed upon Gospel message that the “real Christians” have been unanimously sharing for the past 2000 years; “For God loved the world in this way: He gave His One and Only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send His Son into the world that He might condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him” (John 3:16-17).

Recommended Sources (for further study):

a) Dale C. Allison teaches us about the Historical Jesus (includes his acceptance of the Hebrew Bible as we have today plus other things he taught doctrinally) = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s1TV2FJhlo (Part 1) & Part 2 = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw-H8sjxS-k

 

b) Canonicity Issues:

Dr. James White 1-hour presentation on Scripture = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqcwcxoxoUo

William Lane Craig 30 min presentation on Canonicity = https://www.reasonablefaith.org/podcasts/defenders-podcast-series-3/s3-doctrine-of-revelation/doctrine-of-revelation-part-10/  OR YOUTUBE = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hz2SOvr_b0

Tables of the various books (OT & NT) accepted by various Christian groups and Early Church Fathers all saying what was inspired vs. not inspired literature = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon#New_Testament   & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_the_New_Testament_canon#Clement_of_Rome 

Christian listener Joyce Bergen provided this excellent 26 min video by Dr. Dan B. Wallace = https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1388&v=wcWbV3QUfIg

 

 

 

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