I must say, I am honored that my blog was interesting enough to anybody that they felt the need to write in opposition. Indeed, fellow religion major Kirk Norris has written a response to my blog where he addresses the questions I am asking about God and man (his blog can be found at http://eklektostheou.blogspot.com under March 13). He is correct in his thought that I enjoy his foiling (it's so much more fun when we disagree), and I am pleased that he is expanding the world of internet thought by expressing his disagreement with my ideas. Although it did make me smile to see that he hopes that I take up "the challenge of confronting a truthful response" to my heresies ("heresy" being my word not his).
Kirk first states (correctly) my belief that the Bible is man's understanding of God, and not God's revelation to man, and therefore we can't simply read the Bible and hope for definitive pictures of God. He then claims that if the Bible is not "God's fully true revelation of himself to us, then no one will ever come to salvation." My first question would be for Kirk to define "salvation." I would assume that Kirk sees Jesus as the answer to salvation, and since the Bible is the most trustworthy source on the life (and afterlife) of Jesus, without it we would have no trustworthy information, and nobody could be saved (because we wouldn't have the record of God's revelation in the incarnation). I might respond that Jesus never expresses concern with people knowing their Bibles, but with how we treat other people, and so to claim that we can't know God without the Bible (more specifically the New Testament) is a fallacy. I will not develop this argument at this time, but I will put it out there. I feel like Christians often elevate the Bible to an uncomfortably high standard (when you take into the fact that neither Jesus nor any of his disciples had any knowledge of the NT during his ministry). Kirk then states that without the Bible we would be "left to our own reason and experiences to tell us who God is." This is exactly what we have done anyway! Everybody (even Kirk) has a view of God that has been shaped by his own reason and experience. He believes that the Bible is God's revelation, and so he reasons from this belief and then either shapes his experience to support it, or at the very least looks upon his own existence in light of the logic following from this assumption. I don't believe that Kirk would believe what he did if it didn't make sense to his Reason. Granted, there are things that we both do not understand, but I believe there is a difference between not understanding something and believing something that is contrary to one's own Reason. He is left with his subjective view on God, as I am to mine. Of course, he allows the Bible to be the authority on his view, but it remains his interpretation of the Bible (which is subjective) that is shaped by his experience (which he interprets subjectively). I believe Kirk to be correct in his claim to a higher level of agnosticism than I by defining it as what we can know about God outside of the Bible, but I would simply want to put a check on how objective a reading is possible by anyone (including Kirk) on this document.
Kirk then states if "even parts of the Bible are untrue," we have to decide for ourselves what is and isn't true or culturally conditioned. He claims that if we are left to our own reason, then since we are corrupted and sinful we will lead ourselves into untruth. I enjoy poking fun at his Calvinism, and this represents the T of the TULIP, Total depravity (just for the record, I don't think Kirk is a Calvinist, but he has Reformed tendencies). I think Kirk's theology (and perhaps most Christians') is too heavily influenced by his view of man's corruption. I am actually quite Pelagian in this aspect. I think that Christian tradition pressures us to think about ourselves way too negatively. I don't believe in original sin, I don't believe that we inherit some type of corruption that prevents us from getting to God. I think we have our own struggles against selfishness that we must overcome, but I think that's what it is, selfishness, not necessarily "sin." For Kirk, his view that we are sinfully corrupted does not allow him to trust his own reason to approach the Good (God). I, on the other hand, believe that all reason that we possess comes from the Good, and therefore we can follow it back to the source (Neoplatonism anyone?). I don't think our sin is corrupting our ability to reason, I believe it is corrupting our ability to love others. I believe that the "evil" caused by man is really our egocentricity. We can only overcome our "corruptness" when we think of others before ourselves. I don't think it is possible to do that (I don't believe that altruism exists), but I don't believe this is "sin" that separates us from God. I am digressing, but suffice it to say that I do not find anything wrong in relying on our God-given (in my opinion) reason over an interpretation of the Bible that our parents tell us because their parents told them (etc).
On a shorter note, I have some problems with Kirk's statement that "God's Word and His Spirit are never separate from one another." I'm not sure how he meant it (obviously not in way that implied biblical divinity), but I would question the need for God to rely on man's written word. No matter how high you view the Bible, it remains man's written word. I don't think the infinite God of being is reliant on a book in the way it seems Kirk thinks he is.
For the most part, I have answered Kirk's question already of where I believe my knowledge comes from, but I think it's the same place as Kirk; we just call it different things (although I do not expect him to agree with me). He states that he believes his knowledge comes from God giving it to him "through the coordinated work of His Spirit and His Word" (again, it seems like he is elevating the Bible to a divine status I am uncomfortable with). I am going to assume that Kirk means that he gets his knowledge of God from God, and not all knowledge in general. Kirk knows that the current President of the United States is George W. Bush. I do not believe that he thinks God gave him this information. He has this knowledge because he keeps up with current events through news, conversation, reading; basically, his experience. So it seems as if he has drawn a line dividing what he can know through experience and what he can know from divine revelation. I don't want to expound too much on this as it regards to Kirk, because I do not know how far I could go before he objects and corrects my understanding of his beliefs, but I would like to continue my reasoning impersonally, and allow Kirk the freedom to place himself wherever he may or may not be in my situation. Continuing, then, where is this line drawn? Can one only know theological truths from revelation, but all other truths are from experience? This does not sit well with me. I believe that all truth is God's truth, and he wouldn't set us up so that we can trust our experiences for everything except himself, and then send down this book from his graces to fill the gap in our knowledge. I believe that Kirk's knowledge is from experience, not from God, but he interprets his experience in a way that compartmentalizes his knowledge into divine and non-divine categories, the former of which he can only realize from revelation. He was raised a Christian, therefore he remains one. He was raised to believe the Bible had divine authority, and he believes this. Is this a coincidence? Is it just a random coincidence that he just so happens to believe the faith that his parents taught him?
Allow me to introduce a possible corrective. If Kirk was not actually raised in a conservative background (whether it be parents or other influential authority figures of his past), then I stand mistaken. Furthermore, if he turns the argument on me, and claims that since I was raised in a conservative Christian world and turned out like this there can be no trustworthy correlation, then I suppose the only answer I can offer is that we are different people. I was conservative for the majority of my aware life, but I allowed my own reason and experience (and academic study) to shape my current beliefs. I do not understand people like Kirk, who can be exposed to the same ideas as me and yet do not accept them because it contradicts what they had believed prior, but I am not them.
Not to get too bogged down for the moment, Kirk expresses concern about this statement of mine: "What we can say is that God cannot possibly experience anything like what we experience in our finite mortal bodies. Whether or not he knows what it would feel like if he could, the fact remains that in his infinite state he does not feel like we do." Kirk's response, of course, is the incarnation. Quite appropriately, he quotes Hebrews: "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin." I am glad he exposed this, for it will allow me to divulge a little in what was behind the statement (which I apologize, I probably did not make as clear as it should have been). I suppose I must ask Kirk a few questions concerning the nature of the incarnation. First, was Jesus omniscient? Could he read the thoughts of other men? Did he know the intent and destiny of men even before they knew it themselves (Peter's denial)? If the answer to these questions is "Yes" (and I believe Kirk's answer would be), then my next question would be "What human possesses these abilities?" Can Jesus sympathize with the stress I'm under concerning my unawareness of the future? I am worried sick about my life right now because I thought I had next year figured out, and there is good possibility now that I'm going to have to change everything about my life and it may affect me for years. Can God relate to that? If Jesus was never in any doubt about his future or his destiny, then that is one aspect in which he cannot relate to any human, because no human possesses that knowledge. If Jesus could read other's thoughts, then he cannot relate to the stress I have in social relationships, never knowing if I'm accidentally offending someone, never knowing if somebody is interested in my speech, etc. Can Jesus relate to this? What about when Jesus supposedly saw Nathanael under the fig tree before Philip called him to meet Jesus? Did Jesus possess the ability to see with his mind any occurrence on earth (in a sense, omniscience)? If he did, then he cannot possibly relate to the finiteness of humanity. The frailty and fear of being kept in the dark, of not knowing our future or the future of our friends, not knowing what we should do with our life is lost on God. Now what about sin? I would ask Kirk if he feels guilty about his sin. Could God relate to this? Could Jesus relate to the self-degradation, guilt, and low self-esteem that humanity feels? If Jesus was perfect and without sin, how can we say that he knows how we feel when we sin? Can God even fathom what it would mean to feel sinful? Kirk seems to think that sinful is all we are. We are totally corrupted in everything we do. How then has Jesus experienced anything close to this if he was perfect and sinless? That is what I meant by my statement. Jesus may know physical pain and emotional pain (from the rejection of his friends), but does he know guilt and self-loathing? Does he know the fear of uncertainty? I have made the argument before that Jesus did not in fact know the future based on his prayer in the garden preceding his crucifixion, but I am not asking myself these questions, I am asking Kirk (and those that believe as he does).
Kirk concludes that we can know who God is, and once we accept that we need his revelation we can "come to the Scriptures with a readiness to know the God who came to us and speaks to us." I have a problem with this. It seems that if the only way to see God revealing himself in the Bible is to come to the Bible with that very expectation then we are being set up to see what we make ourselves see. It seems that Kirk makes the assumption first, and then goes to the Bible and finds support for his assumption (I am not talking about proof-texting, I mean an honest interpretation). I think that no matter how much Kirk thinks that God didn't leave us "to our own devices, to seek him and find him as we are able," even Kirk himself is doing just that. He believes human knowledge outside the Bible is inferior, so he is going to the best that he can figure, and finding God just as I am: just as we are able.
