Taking Every Thought Captive

In May, I will be posting a three part series by Pastor Chris Strevel on the certainty of the Christian worldview.  In this first part, Pastor Strevel discusses unbelieving thought and its consequences.  He then begins to build a foundation for his apologetic by discussing the Christian view of certainty.  Part 2 of this article describes the Biblical foundations for certainty.

Pastor Strevel is the pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Buford, GA.

Why Should Anyone Believe Anything at All?  Part 1

The Certainty of the Christian Worldview

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The Defense of the Gospel in Conflict

The Crisis of our Times

Statism in governmental theory and practice, logical positivism in the courts, hedonistic materialism among the masses, and a return to pre-Christian forms of pagan thought forms and rituals are like the seven demons in Jesus’ parable that have rushed into to fill the void left by the self-conscious abandonment of faith in God, his enthroned Son, and his all-sufficient Word. We are living in the twilight of American culture, intellectually, politically, and spiritually. To the present collapse the church has been both a contributing factor and a blind follower. Sustained criticism of the Bible has completely undermined the authority of the canon, confidence in the Christian Scriptures, and the practical authority of the Bible. Even in generally evangelical churches, considered by many to be the last bastion of the older Christianity, it is not uncommon to hear church leaders endorse theological positions, social agendas, and spiritual paradigms that radically depart from the traditional positions of the Christian church as expressed in its creeds, confessions, and catechisms. If statistical surveys and personal experience are correct, the average professing believer has embraced the skepticism and relativism of his unbelieving counterpart. Our departure from a generally Christian past, while gleefully heralded by many as ushering in a new era of individual freedom, social equality, and scientific advancement, has created enormous tension in virtually every area of society. The family has never been weaker. The illusory strength of our economy is subject to constant regulation and manipulation by the ubiquitous federal government. Education has become indoctrination in the tenets of the reigning political agenda of secularists, pluralists, and social engineers. Moral absolutes are non-existent, unless one considers the oxymoronic “principled pragmatism” an acceptable foundation. Scientifically, new discoveries abound, but many of them are pursued without the slightest regard for their moral implications. Entertainment enslaves the masses, who choose political candidates, educational paradigms, and religious authority based upon the contrived facades of attractiveness and success. Sexually, there are no more taboos. Skepticism, individualism, and hedonism are the dominant worldviews of a culture that has become trite, irreverent, and narcissistic. It is not that we do not recognize our problems. We no longer possess, however, a unified, coherent worldview that provides moral authority to address them.

Whether men realize it or not, there is one inescapable question that lies at the foundation of these problems and their symptoms: by what authority? The inability to locate a meaningful answer to that question is the crisis of our times. Is there an absolute standard by which political decisions should be made? Is there an authority higher than science by which science can be regulated and directed? What is the difference between pornography and art? Should homosexual unions be granted a legal status and included in the definition of “marriage?” Should morality be more than an enlightened pragmatism, in which each individual must find a workable standard of behavior that enables him to function in his environment? If there is such an authority, what is its nature? Is it religious? Philosophical? Scientific? Political? Individual? Communal? Some men say one thing and others say another. How can I know for sure? When philosophy has largely abandoned the quest for truth and certainty, politics is concerned supremely with the acquisition and retention of power, and science is concerned merely with what works, how can I be sure that what I believe is true? This question is further compounded by the current dominance of postmodernism, a paradigm that embraces uncertainty, doubt, and diversity, and above all insists upon the right of individuals and groups to develop their own worldview, which in turn is right for them and above the criticism of other groups that are not operating within in their specific context. The necessity of finding an answer to the question, “Why should anyone believe anything at all?” has become a life and death necessity for the segment of our culture that cannot find solace in language games, banal celebrityism, and religious hucksterism.

Facing the Consequences of Principled Uncertainty

For others, these developments are warmly embraced. Unbelieving man desires to avoid the implications of a self-existent God, who created this world by his power, upholds it by his providence, and directs it by his word. Paul is clear that this man constantly suppresses the truth in unrighteousness. He deceives himself into believing that he does not believe in the existence of God, that he owes his life to him, and that his word is objectively true and certain. Accordingly, many elements in our culture welcome the supposed openness of modern western society, for it provides a context to pursue personal priorities and agendas with a spirit of autonomy. What must be pointed out, however, is that issues of certainty and moral authority cannot be dismissed with such a cavalier attitude. Their claims may be denied for a while, but they inevitably surface with an irresistible force that demands resolution. For example, if marriage is to be defined purely in terms of love and commitment, then it is unjustified to place any limitations upon the participants in a “marriage.” Fathers and daughters may marry. Polygamy is just as acceptable as monogamy. If there are no moral absolutes, then one cannot posit that murder is wrong, for that is evidence of arrogant, unjustifiable dogmatism that some cultures have chosen to disregard. One cannot find condemn pedophilia or bestiality. One may not prefer them, but preference is not the same thing as moral imperative. If God does not exist, human freedom is illusory. We live in an ultimately unknowable universe, in which man is the product of eons of time and blind chance, absolutely determined by his environment, over which he may seek to exercise control, but in which he is as much a part of the “muck” of existence as frogs, rocks, and bacteria. Dostoyevsky was correct. If God does not exist, anything is possible. We might equally affirm that nothing is possible, including moral absolutes, personal unity, and scientific explanation. This is not to say that men who embrace the reigning dogma do not continue to operate as if moral absolutes, scientific laws, and objective truth exist, but they cannot provide a rational explanation for them. This is unacceptable. It is not how the real world operates. Chance cannot produce order; time cannot produce truth. Scientists operate with the belief that their conclusions explain the “real world.” Engineers assume the existence of physical laws that are not the products of time and chance. Judges, even the most radical, operate on the assumption that moral absolutes exist. Even postmodernists, who vociferously deny the objectivity of language, do not generally welcome a scenario in which their comments are taken out of context or intentionally twisted. Men everywhere operate on a foundation of certainty, rationality, and coherence that the entrenched worldview of our culture denies. Accordingly, the Christian is in the position in this culture of calling it out of its juvenile, wishful thinking that ideas do not have consequences, that the denial of absolute truth bears no evil fruit, and that science can consistently operate on the foundation of evolutionary hypotheses. In a culture committed to radical relativism, it is our high and challenging calling to posit afresh an answer to the question, “Why should anyone believe anything at all?” Faithfulness to the Lordship of Jesus Christ over area of human life, submission to the inspired Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, and obedience to the Great Commission demand an answer. By God’s grace, they also provide the answer.

The Implicit Skepticism of Popular Apologetics

It would seem that in such a cultural milieu, the message of the church would remain relatively unchanged. “Thus says the Lord” is absolutely true and certain, not simply because the Christian faith works intellectually, satisfies emotional needs, and provides a basis for communion with likeminded individuals in an otherwise impersonal society, but because God and his word have an objective existence, authority, and certainty independent of man’s acceptance of them. Hence, we may even in this culture present the truth with conviction and courage, believing that the Lord’s word provides the only legitimate basis for certain knowledge, human experience, and the scientific disciplines, will expose the foolishness of unbelief, and ultimately result in the discipling of the nations to Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, this sort of presentation is not typically provided. Postmodern ways of thinking have increasingly infiltrated the church, paradigms for thinking and defending the faith that start from a position of uncertainty, or that deny that certainty is available for anyone. Others, thinking to salvage Christianity while doing justice to logic and philosophy, have adopted the postmodern paradigm that Christianity is true for us, and that if you will become one of us, the faith become your truth as well.

In his popular book Why Should Anyone Believe Anything at All, James W. Sire demonstrates this sort of reasoning. Because he uncritically accepts the canons of autonomous logic and philosophy as providing the necessary criteria for truth, he denies the very faith he is seeking to proclaim, or at best, reduces it to a private, meaningful experience, that provides him with needed answers, psychological fulfillment, etc. He writes, “But – and this may be hard for firm Christian believers to accept – we could be wrong. Our experience as such does not full justify our belief” (58). According to Sire, why should we accept Christianity? “In the final analysis, Christianity gives the best explanation of all the tough issues of life” (179). In his concluding chapter, “The Challenge of Belief,” he writes, “The task before each of us is awesome. We human beings face the world without the perfect mental equipment to know and discern with philosophic certitude just who we are, what our role in life should be, whether there is a God, if so which God and how we might find him/her/it” (209). His comments throughout the book demonstrate confusion over the nature of certainty. Accordingly, though he purports to answer the interrogative title of his book, he largely fails because he never issues a direct challenge to unbelief to repent of its autonomous foundations, does not demonstrate a consistently Christian approach to the subject, and allows for the possibility that Christianity is wrong.
 Apologetic methods that allow for the possibility that Christianity is false or that it is not certain, cave in to methods of unbelieving philosophy and logic, blunt the claims of the gospel, and compromise the theology of the Bible. They fail to posit the absolute truth of the Christian-theistic position, fail to give a compelling reason for men to repent of their sins and turn to the Lord in faith and repentance, and inevitably reduce biblical Christianity to just another competing voice on the already crowded smorgasbord of available worldviews. If biblical Christianity is to remain viable and distinctive in our age, and more importantly, if God is to be glorified by yielding to his Word the authority and certain conviction that it demands, the believer must understand that certainty is not only possible, but it is also demanded. It can only be attained, however, as man recognizes his creatureliness, submits to the authority of God in his Word, and engaged in an all out battle against the forces of skepticism that are aligned against the church and the gospel.

Toward a Christian Definition of Certainty

At the outset, it is important to define what we mean and do not mean by certainty. By certainty is not meant an indubitable proof for God’s existence, the deity of Christ, and the truth of Scripture that compels acceptance through man’s autonomous use of reason, experience, or scientific observation. This definition of certainty fails to remember that man is a creature, that there are some things he will never know or understand, and many things that he will always know imperfectly or incompletely. The Christian view of certainty must take into account that man is a creature, and that as such, his knowledge is always limited and fallible. This definition of certainty also fails to consider man’s fallen condition. The Achilles heel of all unbelieving forms of thought is the failure to distinguish man’s original intellectual and moral integrity with which he was originally endowed by God from his present spiritual deadness in sin. All unbelieving thought assumes that man is now as he always been, albeit perhaps on a higher level of the evolutionary chain; it denies that there is a radical moral and intellectual discontinuity between pre- and post-fall man. These two caveats do not consign man to skepticism or relativism. What is necessary for man to know for life and salvation may be known as man the creature submit to God’s the Creator’s revelation of himself in nature, Scripture, and ultimately, Jesus Christ. While his interpretation of the Creator’s word is subject to his sinfulness and finiteness, this revelation is nonetheless objectively true and certain. We might say that the Christian view of certainty attributes absolute certainty and knowledge to the Creator alone, while allotting to man objectivity and certainty to the degree that he yields himself consistently to God’s word and interpretation of reality.