Category Archives: Apologetics

Continuing my discussion from my last post (months ago).

Tongues as supernatural fluency in an unknown language.

This is not clearly evident anywhere in the the Bible, and so far as I know, no one claims it today. I don’t think it bears further discussion.

Speaking in a language not directly intelligible to men but given by the Holy Spirit.

The circumcised believers who had accompanied Peter were astounded that the gift of the holy Spirit should have been poured out on the Gentiles also, for they could hear them speaking in tongues and glorifying God. Then Peter responded, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people, who have received the holy Spirit even as we have?” Acts 10:45-47 New American Bible (Revised Edition)

When they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. And when Paul laid [his] hands on them, the holy Spirit came upon them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied. Acts 19:5-6

These are crucial passages for one reason: it was a direct sign from God that the Gospel was for the Gentiles as well as the Jews. The sign was the reception of the Holy Spirit, the outward evidence of which was speaking in tongues. So much of Acts and of Paul’s writings deal with Jesus’ role as Redeemer of all mankind, not solely the Jewish messiah.

A great deal of importance is placed on these verses in Pentecostal churches. Being filled with the Spirit is crucial, but it is assumed that there must be some evidence of having received the Holy Spirit. So a spirit-filled believer is expected to speak in tongues. The verses don’t imply one way or the other if speaking in tongues is to become persistent evidence or only initial evidence.

The problem for me is that nothing in Scripture supports the idea that speaking in tongues is normative. Quite the opposite.

Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all have gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret?  – 1 Corinthians 12:29-30 NIV

This is Paul’s discourse on the gifts (charisms) of the Spirit. It’s pretty evident to me that there are a variety of gifts given to a variety of believers, and that no one gift is shared by all. It’s a rhetorical way of stating the opposite. For instance, if I say “Does everyone own a Ford?” I am really saying that not everyone does. When this was written, it appears that those who spoke in tongues did so for the edification of the Church since their utterances needed to be interpreted. 1 Corinthians 14 (I will not quote it all here) makes it very clear that prophecy is more greatly valued than tongues, and they only insofar as they are interpreted. The superiority of teaching over tongues is driven home repeatedly in this chapter.

What then? Are tongues useless? Certainly not, especially if a believer feels that God has graced them with that gift. But I am convinced that they are in no way normative. This brings me to my real criticism.

Pentecostal churches generally use the term “full Gospel” or “Spirit-filled” to differentiate themselves from non-Pentecostal churches. It is a not-so-subtle way of saying that those who do not embrace speaking in tongues have less than a full Gospel. How is that possible? Consider that Jesus never once spoke on the subject. Nowhere is He described as speaking in tongues. He did not even promise the disciples that they would speak in tongues, only that the Spirit would be given to them and that they would be witnesses throughout the world. I am of the firm conviction that Pentecostalism can in fact be a roadblock to salvation for someone put off by this insistence on one and only one “proof” of being Spirit-filled. If you believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God made flesh, that He suffered and died to procure your salvation, and that the gifts of the Spirit are the birthright of all believers, then you are filled with his Spirit and you need not prove that to anyone.

At times it seems as though the door between Catholicism and Evangelicalism is a revolving one. When I was an Evangelical I saw many (poorly catechized?) Catholics filling the pews.  And now, having “swum the Tiber” I see many former Evangelicals. The difference is that those headed to Rome have the advantage of the solid biblical teaching of the Evangelical church, even when the doctrines don’t line up.

So here is an interesting article that sheds some light on the phenom. Enjoy.

My early religious upbringing took place in the strange overlap of Baptists and Pentecostals.

I have a very early memory of my mother being baptized at the Highland Park Baptist Church. She hadn’t been raised in a particularly religious home, but I think exposure to (or maybe the expectations of) my father’s very religious mother drove her in that direction. It’s important to note that she didn’t actually adopt the religion in which my father had been raised, but it awakened a spiritual need that she tried to satisfy in many different ways before she died.

So I was shuffled off to Redeemer Baptist Church every Sunday where we were taught how nice Jesus is. And that was the core of their Baptist mind-set: they were nice.  Salvation was a given because, after all, you were a Baptist. But that left very little else to do while we were waiting for the bus to Heaven, or “The Rapture” as they called it. So we were supposed to be nice while we were waiting. However, “nice” did not describe me very well. I found “nice” to be very “boring.”

Now, the reason my mother did not adopt the religion of my Dad’s mother was that my grandmother was Pentecostal and, yes, Pentecostals were also nice but they were also very scary! I can’t say how old I was when I got my first exposure to a “Holy Ghost” revival meeting, but it made quite an impression. The preacher would get pretty wound up and then, smack dab in the middle of making sense, he would go into some kind of convulsion and start jabbering incoherently, quite unlike anything that my young Baptist ears where accustomed to. Sometimes even people in the congregation would jump up right in the middle of the preaching and start doing the same thing. What was that? And as if that weren’t enough, then came the strangest altar call I had ever seen.

We had altar calls in the Baptist church. I was used to them. “Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling…” Every head bowed, every eye closed. But these Pentecostal altar calls were another breed altogether. Almost everyone would queue up. They were obviously not all unsaved, so why go up? Well, I soon found out. They would go up, and the preacher would lays his hands on their head and pray then, bam!, down they would go, flat on their backs. They must have been expecting that because they had people lined up behind to catch them. This was just too strange to let it slide. It took a while, but I finally got up the courage to go up there. The preacher laid his hands on my head, gave me a little shove and… no bam! There I stood wondering what I had done wrong. Whatever was going on, it wasn’t happening to me. I guess I was too Baptist by then.

My grandmother explained it all to me: the speaking in tongues, the interpretations, being “slain in the spirit,” being healed. She had plenty of biblical warrant for it (well, most of it), but I was having less and less of it. I am relating all this from a much more mature perspective today, but at the time I was just overwhelmed by it. In time, this Pentecostal weirdness actually became a catalyst for my now-accelerating adoption of atheism. All these people believed that this was real, and it gave me the self-justification I needed to reject their entire set of beliefs.

By the time I was in my thirties, the life I had chosen to live apart from God finally collapsed under its unsustainable consequences. So one day, in a solitary act of repentance for the life I had lead, I asked for God’s forgiveness. As I prayed I suddenly sensed that someone was in the room. Not wanting to be embarrassed I turned to see who was there and, of course, there was no on to see. I had for the first time in my life known the real presence of God. It transformed me and the reality of that experience continues to shape me to this day.

But as glorious as that experience had been, it was insufficient to bring me back to the religion(s) of my youth. Instead, I began to pursue the “Mere Christianity” of C. S. Lewis because I now needed a solid understanding of what had happened to me. I read and read and read. And the more I read, the less connected to that original experience I became. In time, I came to believe that Christian faith came from being part of a body of believers. But which body? I was Protestant. That I knew. But what kind? I couldn’t imagine being a Baptist because they seemed so far removed from that ecstatic experience I craved. And I was still very leery of Pentecostals. So I wandered the endless halls of sectarian Protestantism, trying on churches the way one would try on shoes. And nothing fit.

Eventually, in time and in ways that were inescapably part of God’s plan for me, I ended up in a Pentecostal church, Zion Evangelistic Temple, mostly because a lot of the people I knew in AA were going there. Here was a place where people seemed to be having the kinds of intimate encounters with God that I was craving. I wanted what they had in that sense, but I didn’t want the way they did it. I believed in the doctrine of the “baptism in the Holy Spirit.” Not all Protestants felt that way, but I saw no problem with it. But theological loner that I was, I wanted it on my terms and in accordance with my still-developing beliefs.

Jesus taught that “you have not because you ask not.” So I prayed for the Baptism in the Holy Spirit. I figured that if God didn’t want me to have it on my terms, then nothing would happen. I was wrong, spectacularly wrong. As soon as I had said my prayer, I was engulfed in what can only be described as pure ecstatic reverie. It lasted for some time and I had to believe that this is what Jesus had talked about, the second baptism. And I asked for it the next night and…nothing. Looking back, this makes a lot of sense. You don’t get baptized in order to stay wet the rest of your life. I had asked to filled with the Holy Spirit, I was and that was that.

But as I watched people queuing up week after week to be “slain in the Spirit” I thought that perhaps that was the path to an ongoing ecstatic encounter. So up I went, the preacher laid his hands on me, gave me a little shove and…nothing. It was very disconcerting. Why did this not happen to me? Okay, maybe I should be speaking in tongues. So I asked around about how this happened and the answer was cockeyed. You just did it. God would give you you “heavenly language” when you stepped out in faith and did it. Well, I could “do it.” I had heard it enough and could make the right sounds, but that hardly seemed to be what the prophecy was referring to.

And this brings me to the whole point of the next post.

BioLogos Guided Tours #1: Ancient Cosmology and the Bible

I have invited Malibu Bob from christiannews.net to join us here. Among his posts Bob said the following:

Christianity is so unbelievable and so contrary to everyday observation on its surface, that the only way in which people can maintain such an untenable set of beliefs is by constant reinforcement.

That’s a pretty big challenge and one that I feel would be better addressed by breaking it into it a set of questions that can be approached more succinctly. So here’s how I think it should go. Bob may feel differently.

1. The supernatural: Is there a “reality” not readily accessible to human perception? Or at the very least, is it even possible to prove that one way or the other?
2. If such a thing may exist, then does God exist or is it even possible to prove that as well?
3. If God exists, what is his/her/its relationship to the natural world and to us human beings?
4. What is the nature of man and how does it relate to God’s nature?
5. If man is imperfect, in what ways have we sought to achieve perfection?
6. Finally, if God exists and it is not in our power to achieve perfection, what means have we been given to do so?

So to kick things off, let’s talk about that which is contrary to everyday observation, namely question one. What does Bob have to say about the possibility of the supernatural?

My friend from christiannews.net, Reason2012, crafted a very thorough and carefully reasoned response to one of my posts. Much of it concerns what Jesus Himself believed about Creation since, as the Bible clearly states, He was present at the creation of the world. And he makes a very valid point that we shouldn’t distort Scripture because it makes us uncomfortable by not comporting with our scientific point of view. Given the absolute sovereignty of God, there is every reason to assume that He may create His universe in whatever form He pleases and I can’t refute that. Omnipotence pretty much trumps everything.

However, I want to lay out some additional thoughts in relation to his response that clarifies my point of view. He begins by quoting part of my response.

“And what we know for certain about light makes it impossible for the universe to be much less than 13 BILLION years old.”
No, all we “know” on this topic are assumptions
– we ASSUME light traveled the same speed since light first existed
– we ASSUME God cannot change that speed
– we ASSUME God cannot create other things, heavenly bodies, in mature form where we assume they went through other processes before their current state when God could have easily created them in mature form skipping previous ‘states’ as well.

Following that logic, it would also be possible to say that God created the entire universe ten seconds ago with you having a memory of your entire life even though it didn’t “really” happen. That is PROBABLY absurd. (And not exactly Scriptural) But it leaves us with a quandary.

We know from Scripture that God’s nature is clearly evident in His creation.

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. – Romans 1:20 NIV [emphasis mine]

The crux of the problem is this: when what we can “clearly see” does not jibe with what we understand from God’s Word, it seems as if we have to make a choice. Do we believe the Bible or do we believe the evidence of our senses (science)? Since both reflect the truth of God’s nature they can’t disagree. Do we distort the Word to make it conform to science, or do we distort science to make it conform to the Word? Or is it possible that we can believe that both are true but the reconciliation of the two exceeds our present understanding?

Before I delve into this, let’s first consider for a moment language in the context of culture. As I mentioned before, I was at one time an anthropology major concentrating in linguistics. The study of contemporary cultures from a socio-linguistic context shows that language and culture are so inextricably intertwined that it may be said that they are each an expression of the same thing. And language operates at multiple levels. At the lowest levels, it exists as unarticulated concepts. The process of translating from one language to another is, at its root, the reduction of one language to its conceptual level and the re-articulation of these concepts back into the target language. And since language and culture are so intertwined, a culture that lacks a particular concept will not have the means of expressing it. We see this in modern day translation when one language “borrows” from another because it is better expressed that way. For example, there is a word in German, schadenfreude that expresses the idea of deriving  pleasure from another’s misfortune. There is no succinct way of expressing that concept in English so it was borrowed and is now a legitimate English word.There are many words borrowed from English that appear in other languages albeit in their phonology. For example, the word “steak” (or beef steak) appears in French as biftec, in Spanish as bistec, in Japanese as suteki.

In observing language development in children, we see that their use of language reflects their level of conceptual ability. If a five-year-old asks his father “what makes the car go,” he will probably be able to grasp the concept that the big thing under the hood “eats” gas and pushes the car. Dad will probably not get into the details of the internal combustion engine. And it is much the same with cultures. Human beings can only understand language in the context of their existing categories. And while they are certainly capable of learning new concepts, attempting to convey information information radically beyond their understanding is not likely to be fruitful.

So now let us now consider the Holy Spirit inspiring the writer of Genesis. There’s a pretty good chance that the Biblical story of creation existed in oral form long before it was written down, but for the sake of argument let’s assume that Moses sat down with pen and papyrus and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit began to recount the story of creation.  Keep in mind that this is God the Holy Spirit who knows all of nature down to the tiniest details. And again for the sake of argument, let us assume that the universe was created 13 billion years ago, that the stars are distributed in three-dimensional space and not attached to the inside of a solid sphere (or “firmament”), and that the Earth is not its center, that matter is not composed of uniform substances but is composed of indescribably tiny particles. How could this information be conveyed in a true sense but still be comprehensible to Moses? In my opinion it was God’s intended purpose to convey the parts of the message that were essential for the spiritual life of the Jews in categories that were comprehensible in their culture. Did God lie? Is the withholding of unnecessary details dishonest or is it expedient?

So when Jesus spoke to His disciples, he spoke to them as the first-century Palestinians they were. Did he lie because He omitted the details of the Higgs boson? He had a very few years in which to convey the vitally important details of God’s plan of salvation. (Even then they didn’t understand Him a lot of the time). So he used terms with which they were already familiar. In their minds the world was the center of the universe and was recent in origin. Would it have served any purpose for Him to expound on the fact that when he said “from the beginning” he was referring to a time less than 13 billion years ago but more than several thousand?

In the intervening two thousand years we have learned a lot more about God’s creation and it continues to astound us how infinitely beautiful, complex and massive it really is. If Jesus were speaking to us today, would it make sense for Him to speak to us as first-century Palestininans, or would He have the ability to offer us even deeper understandings of the creation? (I picture him at CERN explaining to the particle physicists how to improve their experiments.) Why, then, do we insist on reading the Bible as if we were Palestinian fisherman?

By approaching it this way there is no need to distort Scripture, nor to reject our scientific understanding of the universe. Why, after all, did God give us such powerful brains? As our understanding increases we usually find that it conforms to the Scriptures in a way we could never have imagined. Who would have thought that the discovery of the background microwave radiation would settle the dispute among astronomers and cosmologists as to whether the universe had a beginning or had always existed. When the truth was finally determined, it turns out that Genesis was right, that everything that exists was brought into being all at once out of nothing.

We will not always be able to harmonize what we can discover through our senses with what the Holy Spirit teaches us, but when there are apparent conflicts we can say that we’re still very young and continue to learn at the feet of our Father.