In our last two issues of Solid Ground, instead of focusing on one large topic, I looked at a number of smaller ones, offering you short vignettes providing insight on common challenges you might face as a Christian ambassador. I continue that pattern here with more short treatments on a variety of topics.
“How can God hear everyone’s prayers all at once?”
Easy. God doesn’t have to “listen” to requests the way we do.
We pay careful attention to the details of a person’s appeal so we can understand it accurately and not miss something significant. Then we decide how we’re going to respond.
God doesn’t need to listen in that way, though, since when we pray to God he never learns anything he didn’t already know before we asked. Put another way, there never was a time when God didn’t know what we were going to pray. Since God is omniscient—he’s always known all things—he’s always known what we would ask for, and he’s always known how he would respond.
That insight raises another question, of course. If God already knew what we were going to pray before we asked, then what’s the point of asking in the first place? Philosophers describe it this way: Even though God’s knowledge is temporally prior to our prayers, our prayers are logically prior to his knowledge and, thus, his response.
Simply put, even though God’s knowledge of our prayer comes before the prayer is prayed (temporally prior), his knowledge in the past is dependent upon what we choose to ask in the present. If we didn’t pray now, there wouldn’t be anything for God to have known in eternity past to respond to in the present moment. In other words, our prayers make a difference.
Plus, God’s omniscience provides a hidden benefit. Since he knows what we’ll ask before we ask it, he can put his answer into motion, when necessary, even before we pray. Imagine a poor family asking God to provide food at dinnertime. At the close of their prayer, they hear a knock on the door and discover a bag of groceries delivered by an anonymous donor waiting for them on the porch. Clearly, the food had to be on its way before the request was offered. God acted in advance because he knew the petition was going to be made.
“Euthanasia is good since it puts suffering people out of their misery.”
Once, I participated in a debate on California’s Initiative 161 legalizing physician-assisted suicide. My opponents charged that I was forcing my religious views on others. They didn’t realize that their position entailed religious assumptions of its own.
When people claim that suicide will end a person’s suffering, they’re assuming a religious view about the nature of life after death. They’re counting on the fact that there’s no conscious existence beyond the grave, or that what greets those who pass on will be a pleasant improvement on the misery of their lives on earth.
If their presumption about the afterlife is wrong, though, and Hell awaits those who deserve it, then for some people, euthanasia will not end their misery but compound it. The person suffering here on earth is not transported from a place of anguish to a place of peace and rest but rather to a place of significantly greater suffering in Hell.
It is theoretically possible, then, that so-called “mercy” killing would actually be cruel, not merciful. By living longer on this earth, a sick person who is not euthanized will either delay more intense suffering that follows or—if they receive God’s mercy in the interim—escape it altogether. Consequently, accelerating death through doctor-assisted suicide would be an act of cruelty, and delaying death an act of kindness. Everything depends on which religious view is correct.
Ultimately, then, it’s impossible to avoid the intrusion of spiritual convictions on either side of this issue. It’s not a matter of one party forcing its religious views on another. It’s a matter of two religious views competing with each other.
“We can’t trust our New Testament reconstruction from ancient manuscripts since they have more variations in the copies than there are words in the original.”
This challenge is a fair one since the claim is true, as far as it goes. There are roughly 138,000 words in the New Testament, yet the surviving handwritten copies reveal an estimated 750,000 disagreements in the wording, though that number is probably much larger.[1] In fact, New Testament critic Bart Ehrman points out that the manuscripts “differ from one another in so many places that we don’t even know how many differences there are.”[2]
Though Bible critics like Ehrman are correct on this point, the fact is misleading since the number of variants itself—any deviation from the standard text that’s found in the existing copies[3]—is ultimately irrelevant to our ability to recapture the original wording of the New Testament. Here’s why.
For one, any difference, no matter how slight or irrelevant, is added to the total count. Yet the vast majority of the total differences between the texts is completely inconsequential—spelling differences,[4] insignificant variations of word order (e.g., “Christ Jesus” vs. “Jesus Christ”), obvious omissions, use of synonyms, clear transpositions of words, nonsense readings, and “singular readings,”[5] among others. None of these trivial differences affect accurate translation in any way and thus have no bearing on our ability to reconstruct the original.
Second, there’s a reason we have lots of variants: We have lots of manuscripts. This is a strength, not a weakness, since there is safety in numbers. Thousands of extant New Testament manuscripts amounting to millions of pages of ancient text provide the best opportunity for comparison and correction, even though the number of variants increases with each new fragment discovered.
Third, the mere comparison of original words to manuscript variants, even though accurate, is profoundly misleading. Note Hixon and Gurry:
The problem is that the comparison itself is meaningless. It makes a little sense to compare the number of supposed variants in all our Greek manuscripts to the number of words in only one manuscript or printed edition. [Emphasis in the original.][6]
It would make more sense to compare the total number of variants to the total number of words in the total number of manuscripts. That exercise, however, would not serve the critics’ interests since the statistic, though accurate, would be completely inconsequential.
So, the number of differences itself is irrelevant. A closer examination of the nature of the variants is what matters, not the raw number. When that work is done by the legion of textual specialists deciphering the variants, even critics like Bart Ehrman have been able to reconstruct the New Testament with an unprecedented degree of virtually word-for-word accuracy.
“Why does God make death the deadline for salvation? It seems arbitrary and even unfair to those who may die on their way to a church service where they intended to become a Christian.”
I’m including this rather unusual question because it offers a handful of different elements that are important to consider when responding to challenges.
The first concern above has to do with the apparent arbitrary nature of God’s salvation “cutoff” point. The author of Hebrews writes, “It is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment” (Heb. 9:27). But why then? Why not sometime later? Why any cutoff point at all? It makes little sense to some critics.
The second concern is more weighty. What if someone gets killed on his way to church where he intended to respond to an altar call to become a Christian? Since death is the point of no return for salvation, then a circumstance this person had no control over deprived him of eternal life. Worse, what if murder was the cause of the death that interrupted the trip? Wouldn’t it be odd if a felon’s crime were the reason his victim was damned to Hell forever?
Implicit in this challenge is a subtle insinuation. Christianity is just too strange, bizarre, or unfair to be taken seriously.
Is Christianity significantly undermined by an inability to divine God’s reasons for a salvation cutoff point? The answer is no for a number of reasons—the death-on-the-way-to-the-altar-call concern notwithstanding.
First, I have no reason to think God is arbitrary about anything. Why assume he’s arbitrary just because in some cases we don’t know why he does what he does? It suggests a defect in the Divine when there’s no good reason to think so.
I’ve often pointed out that questions starting with the phrases like “Why did God…” or “Why didn’t God…” are frequently impossible to answer for good reason: God hasn’t told us. If God is mute on some issues, then we’re simply in the dark. Unless God gives us his reasons, we can speculate all we want. Some of those speculations may have merit, but they will have no authority. Speculations remain speculative.
Second, what if I simply responded, “I don’t know why God set death as the deadline”? What harm would befall the case for Christianity then? None, as far as I can tell. All the evidence in favor of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection would still be intact as well as all the various lines of evidence for God’s existence.
Here’s the basic principle: Our inability to answer hypothetical questions about God’s intentions has no bearing on the truth of the Christian worldview. Full stop. Lack of concrete answers to these kinds of queries signifies nothing.
Third, it’s not clear that any answer to the first question would satisfy a critic. If God had decided on a different “point of no return” for salvation, would that make any difference to the challenger? No matter where God drew the line, it seems, the same question could always be raised, so suggesting alternate cutoff criteria gets you nowhere.
Fourth, some speculations may be useful—though not definitive—if they suggest reasonable possibilities. For example, it makes sense to me that death ends any opportunity for forgiveness because when a person dies, it ends the lifetime of sin for which he will be judged. A criminal’s life of crime comes to an end when he’s caught. If he had eluded capture, he might have changed course and possibly eluded justice as well. When he’s brought before the judge, though, it’s too late. His career of crime is over and “after this comes judgment.” Nothing odd about that.
What about the darker concern, though, that circumstances outside the control of a would-be penitent might seal his fate forever? My answer is twofold.
First—in my view at least—anyone planning to become a Christian at the next church altar call is probably already a believer simply waiting for an opportunity to formalize his faith publicly. Interrupting his trip to church changes nothing about his eternal destiny.
Second, any critique of Christianity must take the whole of Christian doctrine into account, or the critic will be tilting at windmills.[7] Human freedom has its limits, otherwise God would not be God—not the Christian God, at least, and that’s the God in question. Even a murderer’s free will doesn’t ultimately determine the course of the universe. God has his purposes, too, and he accomplishes them in spite of the sinful choices of evil people. Any hypothetical circumstance that presumes human actions alone decisively determine human destiny ignores a cardinal principle of the Christian creed: God is sovereign.
When all is said and done, keep in mind that there are imponderables in every worldview. We shouldn’t be surprised if some turn up in ours.
“What’s a quick biblical argument to show that Jesus is the same as the God of the Old Testament?”
Suppose two Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on your door, and you invite them in for a chat. What passages can you show them, even in their own New World Translation (NWT), that will challenge their conviction that Jesus is not the God of the Hebrew Scriptures?
Here’s an approach that might get them thinking—which is usually the best you can hope for in an initial conversation with anyone, especially a Jehovah’s Witness. Use Old Testament texts that identify unique characteristics of Jehovah God, then turn to the New Testament and show them that the very same characteristics are applied to Jesus by his own disciples.
For example, in the NWT, Isaiah 45:23 says, “By myself I have sworn; the word has gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and it will not return: To me every knee will bend, every tongue will swear loyalty.” Yet in Philippians 2:9–11, Paul cites the very same passage and says:
For this very reason, God exalted him to a superior position and kindly gave him the name that is above every other name, so that in the name of Jesus every knee should bend—of those in heaven and those on earth and those under the ground—and every tongue should openly acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
The scriptural parallels abound. Both Jehovah in the Old Testament and Jesus in the New Testament are called the Creator (Gen. 1:1; cf. John 1:3; Heb. 1:8a, 10), the Light (Ps. 27:1; cf. John 8:12), the Good Shepherd (Ps. 23:1; cf. John 10:11), the only Rock (Isa. 44:8; cf. 1 Cor. 10:4), the Judge of all the earth (Gen. 18:25; cf. 2 Tim. 4:1; Acts 17:31), the first and the last (Isa. 44:6; cf. Rev 1:17–18), and the Savior (Isa. 43:11; cf. Luke 2:11; John 4:42; Acts 4:12; Titus 2:13; 2 Pet. 1:1).
Conclusion? Jesus is the Creator of all things, the Light of the world, the Good Shepherd, the only Rock, the Judge of all the earth, the first and the last, and the world’s only Savior—the same as Jehovah in the Old Testament.
“People of other faiths are just as confident they’re right about their religious views as the Christian is of his. Obviously, then, culture is the biggest influence on a person’s beliefs.”
American atheist Michael Shermer raised a version of this issue with me in a three-hour national radio debate I had with him a number of years ago.
Of course, Shermer is right, as far as it goes. Everyone who believes anything is convinced his views are true, otherwise he wouldn’t believe them. Multitudes have what might be called “psychological confidence” in their own beliefs, a confidence which, in most cases, is a result of cultural influences in their lives. No argument there.
The problem with this observation is that it doesn’t take us very far. This challenge is another one where a legitimate response could be, “You’re probably right. So what?” Most people feel they are right in their views, true enough—some even invincibly so. Obviously, though, everyone can’t be correct when their views conflict with others’ views. Some may be right, but that means the others are mistaken. Now what?
Consider two men, one a pediatrician in New York and another an indigenous tribesman deep in the Amazon jungle. Each attributes disease to different causes. The pediatrician faults germs; the tribesman faults spirits. The doctor invokes medicine for healing; the tribesman invokes magic. Each is fully convinced of his view precisely because this is what his culture has taught him to believe.
Here is my question: Which one is correct, the doctor or the tribesman?
You will never know the answer to that question by weighing relative amounts of psychological confidence, or by reflecting on the influence of the culture each was raised in, or by pointing to the emotional influences that formed their beliefs.
The psychological, cultural, or emotional reasons people believe anything may tell you about their psychology, or their culture, or their emotional states. They will tell you nothing, though, about whether germs or demons cause disease. They will also tell you nothing about whether Christianity—or any other religion, for that matter—is true or false. To get to the answer to those questions, you have to look elsewhere.
Critics raising this issue have their cart before their horse. They think they can discredit a religious view by citing a host of cultural or psychological influences that shaped the belief. However, they must first discredit the views on their individual merits before it becomes meaningful to ask why anyone would believe something the critic may consider foolish.
In order to get to the truth of anything, including religion, they’re going to have to look at the reasons supporting the view itself. To quote C.S. Lewis, “You can only find out the rights and wrongs by reasoning—never by being rude about your opponent’s psychology.”[8] And, I might add, never by making observations about emotional confidence or the influence of one’s culture on his religious convictions.
Examining the motives (or cultural or historical influences) of one’s view may tell you interesting things about psychology or about history, but it can never tell you anything about the legitimacy of the view itself.
To answer those questions, one needs more than internal psychological confidence. He needs external evidence. That’s why careful Christians don’t just have “faith.” They have convictions anchored to objective evidence because they know the dangers of putting too much stock in their subjective psychological confidence.
In our next Solid Ground, I’ll respond to another batch of “rapid-fire” challenges.
[1] Elijah Hixon and Peter J. Gurry, Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019), 8–9.
[2] Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus—The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, first paperback edition (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007), 10.
[3] To be more precise, according to manuscript expert Daniel Wallace, “A textual variant is any place among the MSS [manuscripts] in which there is variation in wording, including word order, omission or edition of words, even spelling differences. The most trivial changes count, and even when all the manuscripts except one say one thing, that lone MS’s reading counts as a textual variant” (Emphasis in the original.), Daniel B. Wallace, Ed., Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2011), 26.
[4] There were no universally agreed upon spelling conventions in ancient times.
[5] A singular reading is a variant found in only one Greek manuscript and is therefore not considered authentic, obviously.
[6] Hixon and Gurry, Myths and Mistakes, 10.
[7] Failure to do this is called a “straw man” fallacy.
[8] Clive Staples Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 274.