Why Apologetics?

Apologetics is defense.  The word may be used more generally, but it also carries the specific connotation of defending the faith.   There is such a thing as Christian apologetics.

Why does Christian apologetics exist?  The text most often cited to defend the defense of the faith is 1 Peter 3:15.  But in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect...

This particular text written by Peter came into existence, not in the midst of deep and tiring academic debates, but rather in the context of an emerging Christianity that was quite bloody.  Just as Jesus was crucified, so his early followers often suffered, especially under the Roman emperor Nero.  Peter was eventually crucified for following Jesus; it is believed that he asked to be crucified upside down because he considered himself unworthy to be crucified the same way as his Lord.  Christians were being called on to give an account, by both Jews and gentiles, for the hope that they had, and often their very lives were at stake. 

It is an entirely reasonable question to ask someone, "Why do you believe what you believe?"  That is also an entirely reasonable question to ask yourself.  For the Christian, I believe that 1 Peter 3:15 means that our answer should not simply be, "just cause I do."  Or, "cause my parents did."  If someone asks you why you have hope, don't give them just a blank stare.  For the occasional person who is truly seeking and wondering if there is anything to this faith beyond some nice metaphors and a social club, we owe it to them to have a better answer.  When the difficulties of life would bring us doubts, we owe it to ourselves to really examine things, instead of ignoring the difficult questions by drowning them out with chatter and noise.

To have doubts without dealing with them, acknowledging them, looking them in the face is like having a relative die, ignoring it, and stuffing her in the closet.  Without a proper burial (or without a resurrection), grandma is going to start smelling, and febreeze ain't gonna cut it.  To ignore the stench is denial, but for many people it is just business as usual.  "Don't make me think too hard or bother with whether this stuff is actually true.  Just give me some good singing on Sunday and I'm happy." 

There is a danger for the Christian when his faith becomes completely divorced from knowledge.  Let me take a detour to explain what I mean... 

I dare you to believe in unicorns. 

You can't do it.  You can't just manufacture a belief for which you perceive no good reasons to adopt that belief.  It is impossible. 

Every new possible belief must come and find its place in the world of your prior beliefs.  If the new candidate is at odds with a lot of deeply held prior beliefs, it is going to have a harder time finding a spot.  Therefore, the burden of proof is going to be understandably higher.  Allowing it a spot may require some struggle and the unseating of older cherished beliefs. 

For many new beliefs, we have substantially no problem letting them in.  For instance, if in conversation I were to tell you, "It was a beautiful sunny day in Fayetteville today," you would probably accept that.  You have no good reason, I suppose, for thinking that I would want to lie about that.  You probably have no prior beliefs there to challenge this.

Kids are generally more accepting than adults.  (If they are inquisitive, they will believe you but ask "why" a lot.)  They do not yet have an extensive set of prior beliefs.  That is why they more often than not simply accept what their parents or teachers tell them.  In a sense they are sort of like blank slates.  (This is a humbling responsibility for parents and educators.)

If you tell a two-year-old that unicorns are real, they are far more likely to accept that than you have been.  But if they accept that, have they just manufactured a belief out of thin air?  Have they accepted something that they have no good reason to believe?  Their reason lies in the fact that they trust you, just like you presumably would trust me about the weather.  They do not yet have good reason to believe that unicorns aren't real, and unless you have just stolen their lollipop, they will probably trust you when you tell them something. 

 But you are not a kid, and we are bound to move this analogy into deeper waters...  If you are old enough and patient enough to read and follow all this, you are old enough to have some deeply held prior beliefs, whatever they may be, and it is through those beliefs that you will filter all that I am saying.

Some beliefs come in meekly and take their place quietly in a corner.  Other beliefs, by their very nature, come in like a bull in a china shop.  They leave no stone unturned.  These sorts of beliefs are the ones that turn our lives and our way of thinking upside down because they touch nearly everything else.  We are not settled until the bull either leaves or finds its place. 

Some of the following types of questions seem to invite responses that look rather bull-like:

Who am I?  Where do I come from?  Where am I going?  Why am I here?
What is the good life?  How do I go about living it?  What really matters in life?
Is there such a thing is truth?  How do I find it? 
What is wrong with the world?  Why is there suffering?  Why is there evil?
How should we go about fixing the world?
How should I go about understanding my world?  Who can I really trust?  Is it possible for me to reliably know anything?
What happens when I die?  Anything?
How should I relate to my fellow man?  Do I have any obligation to my fellow man?
Has this world always existed?  Did it come into existence?  Why does the world exist?
Could things have been different?  Do I have freedom, or is my freedom an illusion?
Is right and wrong a real thing, or did we just make it up?
Is God real?  What is he like?  Can he be known?  Should I try to know him? 

It is certain that any given person will have more or less detailed answers to these questions.  Their answers to these questions may sometimes be contradictory.  Different people will have given variable amounts of time to thinking through these things, and different people will have differing levels of justification for their answers. Some people will even think these questions are not even important or that the answers are unknowable... which are also ways of answering them.

I would contend that truly gaining or truly losing faith will be like one of those bull-in-a-china-shop experiences for someone who is earnest and has their eyes open, for someone who is self-aware and searching.  (And the bull may cause its fuss in an instant or over the course of years.)  For the child, gaining faith - or not - generally happens more easily with less fuss and struggle.  These questions, for them, receive relatively uncontested answers.  But the older you get, a reversal on any one of these major questions is going to have ramifications for the things you already believe and the things that you will come to believe in the future. 

This is what it means to have a worldview.  Everyone has one.  It is simply a lens through which you see the world and filter new experiences.  One way of saying this is that all new information or knowledge is interpreted; there is no such thing as raw knowledge.  No one is truly neutral.  (I would add that, while this humbles us and causes us to examine ourselves, it does not logically follow that no one can know truth.  All knowledge is interpreted knowledge, but this does not mean that there is not true knowledge.  Tongue-twister!  Or at least mind-twister.)

I stated that the experience of losing faith can be like the bull-in-a-china-shop experience if the person is earnest and self-aware and generally awake to what they really believe.  But losing faith is not like that for everyone.  For some it is a slow fade, and instead of a bull, doubts can come in like a silent assassin and begin poisoning and quietly taking out unsuspecting prior beliefs.  This is what I meant by the dead-granny-in-the-closet-slowly-decomposing analogy.  You wake up one day and realize that you no longer believe.  This happens to a lot of church kids who wake up one day in college and realize that they don't really believe it all anymore.  It is now a nice childhood memory like Santa Claus. Why?

And the answer brings me to close the lengthy loop that I opened up a while back.  I stated that there is a danger for the Christian when his faith becomes completely divorced from knowledge.  And I think that's what happens to too many people.  There are many people who profess Christianity and have made a commitment to it who do not really believe it... or who no longer believe it.

The former-Christian-now-something-else originally picked up answers to all the worldview questions quickly (and sometimes without giving it much thought), and perhaps they really believed and had reasons for believing their answers.  But life sends suffering their way that is not easily explained, or it sends friends who don't fit neatly into their pre-existing categories, or it sends professors who give new intellectual challenges.  And this person - the one who doesn't have the bull-in-a-china-shop experience - just sort of ignores the cognitive dissonance and the battle that needs to happen.  But the foundations for those prior beliefs are now shaky and maybe gone. 

Perhaps this person does eventually become openly atheistic or agnostic.  I know some who have.  But maybe they don't.  Perhaps for purposes of social conformity or peace of mind or whatever, staying committed to the faith remains an attractive option.  The problem is, this person is now operating like he is trying to believe unicorns are true when he really doesn't believe it.  He is trying to manufacture something out of thin air against what he really now believes.  He is pulling the wool over his own eyes.  Faith has become divorced from knowledge, and when he tries to obey, it is now his will-power that is the driving force, not any sort of knowledge. 

"No problem," says most of the world. "Isn't faith basically belief without evidence?  If I have evidence for something, then I don't need faith."  By this definition, the person who does not see any reason to believe in God but chooses to believe anyway exercises greater faith than the one who is strongly convinced on the basis of reasons.  And some would praise the former, and that praise would tend to demotivate that person from finding or having a reason for the hope that is in him.  So much for Peter's original exhortation. 

Outside of Peter's call to be ready to give a defense, what view do the other biblical writers take of faith?   Paul writes the following in 1 Corinthians 15:17 - And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.  Paul is saying that it really does matter whether what they believe is true.  What is useless faith?  Faith based on a lie.  In other words, there is no good reason to practice Christianity if it isn't true.  And Paul goes on to say that if Christianity only gives us hope for this life, Christians are most to be pitied.  Paul doesn't say, "Just believe."  Just prior in the same chapter, he gives a list of resurrection appearances of Jesus.  And he says that most of these eyewitnesses are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.  In other words, "I am not just making this up.  Don't just take my word for it.  There are still eyewitness of this walking around.  Go find some of them and ask them."  For the skeptic who would doubt Jesus' resurrection, Paul gives reasons.  When Thomas doubted, Jesus did not banish him, but he acquiesced and invited Thomas to examine his wounds to see that it was really him.  I mention these things to show that if you attempt to look at Christianity in the way that it actually presents itself, we do not see a Christianity that wants us to turn our minds off in order to swallow dogma, even if the Church sometimes acts like it.

Consider the apostles.  It is sometimes suggested that Christianity is a hoax made up by the apostles, that they hid Jesus' body to perpetuate the hoax.  Suppose that's the case.  They could have made up some nice-sounding sayings and good moral teachings.  They could have built up some stories surrounding Jesus.  They could say he rose again to give some authority to what they were saying.  But in the end they would have known it wasn't true.  Eleven out the twelve apostles went to martyr's deaths, and all it would have taken for them to live would have been to admit the falsity of their claims.  No one dies knowingly for a lie, much less eleven out of twelve.  The only way you die for something is if you really believe it is true (even if you are mistaken).  Did the apostles die martyr's deaths because Christianity held some nice moral teachings?  No.  They died because they refused to renounce the Lord that they truly believed was risen.  And they believed because they had seen him.  Knowledge was crucial to their faith.

Why apologetics? 

1.  Others may ask why you believe.  They may be sincere in asking.  Peter tells us we should be ready to tell them why.

2.  We are supposed to tell others of Christ.  It is understandable that the world would be opposed to Jesus' last command - it goes against our world's current understanding of tolerance - but Jesus gives his people the Great Commission to make disciples of the nations, to teach them all that he commanded, to baptize them.  If this Commission is to sound like anything other than, "believe in unicorns," to its hearers, we should be willing to address the questions and help to provide an intellectual environment in which the Christian claims are at least intellectually plausible.  Conversion to Christ is one of those bull-in-a-china-shop things, and how Christ connects to everything else, all those prior beliefs, is something we should be sensitive to, even as we realize we will never have all the answers. 

3.  Apologetics exists to strengthen believers.  Apologetics exists so that believers don't have to close their eyes, grit their teeth, and just obey, even when Christianity doesn't appear plausible.  Apologetics does not exist to explain every difficult bit, but there are certainly places where it helps. 

I want to address two more things before I finish this post.  First, what about those who become Christians and it isn't like the bull-in-the-china-shop?  Second, are there other factors that apologists have to keep in mind?


To address the first question, I think there are some people who come to Christianity, but when the Christian idea enters, it comes in like the meek little guy, doesn't say a word or ruffle any feathers, and it settles for a quiet corner in the person's mind and heart.  It doesn't bother to unseat any prior beliefs.  What is going on here? 

I think this person has separated faith from knowledge.  I think this person is not bothering with whether Christianity is true and is instead worrying about some other concern.  For example, is it fashionable?  Does it match with the pants I'm wearing?  Or does it clash?  This is what I would call Christianity without teeth.  You commit to it in some sense, but you don't really believe it, and so there is no inconsistency between holding it and plenty of other beliefs that would seem to contradict it.  The world is very comfortable with Christians of this sort, but then again, this is the sort of Christian who would never bother to tell them that they are wrong about anything.  I think that the churches of the world are flooded with Christians like this.  Low-maintenance, inoffensive, comfortable Christianity.

I don't believe there is such a thing as dabbling in Christianity.  Jesus is clear that we must repent and believe the gospel.  This means believing that he died and rose and is who he says he is.  We must die to ourselves.  I don't think there is a casual half-hearted way to do this.  We don't try on Jesus like we try on a pair of jeans.  Thought experiment: suppose God is real.  How belittling is it to him for us to hold him up and nonchalantly critique him like some pretty rock we picked up on the side of the road.  If he is real, we will look back and think it tragically ironic how often we put him in the dock to grill and judge him when our very sense of justice was given to us by him as a gift - a stream trying to rise above its source... I digress.

This leads me into my final considerations.  I believe, looking back on what I have written, that this makes Christianity seem like a very intellectual, mechanical sort of exercise.  But I would be remiss if I did not say something about the relationship of the head and the heart.  Ultimately, I believe that God is after our hearts.  I believe the mind is meant to work with the heart, and it is a fool who thinks the two can be easily separated or who believes himself above the workings of the human heart.  The heart and the mind influence each other.

The Bible teaches, history confirms, and my own experience shows that the human race is fallen, and my heart is dark.  I do not even live up to the standards that I hold other people to, and my conscience condemns me.  I know that I have a darkened heart that needs healing help of some sort.  Honesty will compel any reader, I am sure, to admit that he is in a similar situation. 

Coming to Christ will likely involve intellectual challenge, but it also is more deeply about a heart change, where the will and emotions are also converted.  The apologist and the evangelist must be sensitive to this.  Peter tells us to give our defense with gentleness and respect.  There is more going on underneath the surface in any encounter with these worldview-type questions than we realize at first. 

I do believe in God, and ultimately I do not think he is looking for a bunch of people to merely acknowledge his existence.  He wants at least that, but he wants more.  He wants people to fall in love with him and worship him.

It has been my goal with this post, not exactly to argue that Christianity is true, but to argue that such an argument is worth having.  Worship provides the most compelling picture for me of why apologetics is worth doing.  Let me explain:  Everyone worships.  Worship is simply the act of ascribing worth to something.  Worship is praising something that we delight in, like, love, or enjoy.  Worship happens all the time at sporting events.  For me worship happens at good steakhouses.  Fogo de Chao!  Check it out.  When I find something I love, it is entirely natural for me to say so.  And I don't want merely to tell others about it - I want them to experience it themselves.  My enjoyment of a thing is increased as I am able to bring others into that enjoyment.  I don't merely want to say, "That was good."  I want to be able to say, "That was good, wasn't it?!"  My faith in Christ is like that.  I believe I have found the most valuable, delightful, wholly good thing in the universe, and I want to share that with others.  And when I share with them the Good News, I want it to be able to hit them with greater force than, "Believe in unicorns.  Maybe we can get a t-shirt made about it!" 

Is it prideful or arrogant to share your beliefs with someone?  Is it prideful or arrogant to believe that you are right and others are wrong?  No.  Everyone does this.  Certainly some people need to check their attitudes, but it seems to me that when you are presented with a potential belief your first question should be, "Is this true?" It should not be, "Is the person presenting this arrogant?"  That is such a distracting consideration, although an understandable one.  I think that every single person, no matter how they fall on whatever spectrum, should not allow prior beliefs to stop them from listening and talking with others.  Really listening.  If you do not know why you believe what you believe, find out.  Worry about the truth before you worry about how believing that truth will make you look in this world.  It was a wise man - and I would say the wisest - who said that the truth will set us free. 

In the end, if God means to have a person, he will get them.  The Holy Spirit blows where he will.  I am thankful that God overcomes objections and dead hearts.  I am thankful for my relationship with him.  Though I have not seen him, I know him.  I pray you will, too.  May this post serve as a dire warning of my long-winded-ness, yet I hope that if you are questioning or thinking that you would see me as a worthy conversation partner.  I promise I can listen as well as talk.

francis chan

Per requests to put more visual stimuli upon my blog...
(I couldn't bring myself to put up a picture.)

Thinking: The Relationship of the Head and the Heart - #2

                Our aim with this class is to glorify God by loving him with all our minds, seeing Christ as preeminent in all things, especially mathematics.  In order to do this, I want to continually bring you back to the big picture, whether that is the big picture of math or the big picture of God’s world in general.  To begin this process, I am giving an apologetic, or argument, for the importance of thinking in general.  Later I will talk more about God’s greater purposes in the world and how math specifically fits into that.  But for now, thinking in general…

                You as a human being consist of many parts, but they all interact and are woven together to make up you.  First, you have a heart or spirit, which is that deep part of you that wills to do things and originates plans and pursues what it treasures.  As Jesus tells us, where our treasure is, there is our heart.  The heart or spirit is where we primarily experience emotion.  It is from the heart that we really love and it is also from the heart that we sin.  That is the point of so much of what Jesus is saying in the Sermon on the Mount.  Our body is merely the instrument our heart uses to pursue different things, and true righteousness is spiritual, internal, a matter of the heart and not just about external conformity to some standard.  God wants our love from the deepest and central part of us, our heart.

                Another part of you as a created human being is your mind, your ability to think.  You were created as a rational being.  Your mind was created to discover truths.  Your mind was created to comprehend and piece things together about the world and learn.  As a human, you have the creative ability to bring before your mind for examination a diversity of things past, present, and future, far away or near.  The created world has an order and intelligibility that reflect God’s own internal consistency and character.  As humans created to see and glory in God’s creation, we were made in his image, also rational, to comprehend such an orderly and intelligible place as this.  Our minds are uniquely suited to explore something like the depths of mathematics.  God has thoughts; he is a thinker.  In this way we are like him, and this is not diminished by the additional truth that all our thoughts are derivative of his thoughts and comparatively like a drop in the ocean of his knowledge. 

                A third part of you is your body.  Your body is immensely important because it is the only place you can be, and it is with your body that you serve or disobey.  For good or bad, the body is the instrument of the heart and mind.  You can be healthy or sick.  Your body can become accustomed to good godly patterns or unhelpful sinful patterns.  Your existence is nothing other than an embodied existence.  Some groups within Christianity have so latched onto Greek notions about the soul and the sinfulness of the flesh that they take a too low view of the material body that we have been given as a gift, and they look forward to escaping it.  But it was material creation that God declared good.  And though we look forward to heaven, we see primarily in Paul a hope for a resurrection body like Christ’s, so this physical embodied existence is really a preparation for the next physical embodied existence. 

                There is also a social dimension to you.  You were created for relationship with God.  You were created with relationship with others.  Think about it.  Much of your self-concept is rooted socially in what your family, friends, and others think about you and what you do.  For how much of your action do you feel influence from others?  And isn’t it true that your identity, who you are, was not simply formed in a vacuum.  For good or ill, we necessarily depend upon and are connected to other people.  And ultimately who we are is determined by who God says we are, not who we say we are, or who others say we are. 

                Finally, you have an eternal soul that is a mysterious and integrating part of you that brings all the other parts into relationship and a sort of unity to finally make up who you are.  So what do you consist of?  You have a heart, a mind, a body, a social context, and a soul to integrate all of these parts. 

                With this in mind, I want to pose the question, “What was the effect of the Fall on the whole person, and what importance does that have for the concept of thinking in general?”  It is my contention that nothing was left untouched by the entrance of sin.  Our hearts became selfish and idolatrous, and with our will we declared independence from God to pursue our own ends.  Our minds became clouded, which we will discuss more in a moment.  Our body became subject to the physical death and decay that now mark our groaning creation which is detailed in Romans 8, and it became the instrument and playground of our heart’s sinful movements.  Our social context became ripped apart because we can no longer trust our fellow sinners and be with them unafraid of exposure.  We blame and despise.  Worse than our broken relationship with other people is our now broken relationship with our Maker, and it is from this brokenness and rebellion that all the rest flows.  We would not be amiss to also note that there is a sense in which we are not merely alienated from God and other people, but we are now alienated from our own selves, surprised by our own ugly tendencies, unable to see to the murky depths of our heart, ashamed of who we are and scared of what we will find down there.  Finally, our soul feels the Fall as it is pressed with the choice of eternity.  That which was created for fellowship with God – the human soul - may now, if not rescued, experience eternal separation and damnation.  Indeed, it is obvious that the whole human person, created in God’s image, has been run over by a car, dropped off a bridge, and wacked right out of shape. 

                So how do thinking and the heart relate?  Romans 1 reads as follows… For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.  For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.  For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.  So they are without excuse.  For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.  Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. 

                From this passage we see a suppression of truth.  Specifically the suppression of the truth is “by their unrighteousness”.  It is from our will flowing from our heart that we sin, so the heart is the place that has been darkened by this unrighteousness.  I take this connection to mean that my hearts wants things that it shouldn’t want, and it has enlisted the mind in service to its goals.  In other words, the heart puts blinders on the mind so that it gets its way.  My heart wants me to walk a particular path, and instructs my mind to ignore truths about God like his existence or his holiness or his having to do anything with me. 

God also makes it plain in this passage that he has made himself plainly known in creation so that no one can say they didn’t know about him.  We do know God, but we reject him.  Again, For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.  In our dishonoring of God, in our withholding proper thanks to God, we run our minds into a dead end.  Our thinking is futile.  It leads nowhere good. 

It is like this.  A young boy sitting on his father’s lap slaps his father in the face.  It is only from his resting on the father, supported underneath, that he is even able to perpetrate this injustice and slap his father’s face.  So it is with us.  It is with the breath that God has given us that we declare him to not exist or not matter.  It is with the reasoning capacities he has given us that we reason him out of the picture.  As our minds deny God in the service of our darkened hearts, we are like a man sitting on a tree limb sawing off that very tree limb, blissfully unaware of our imminent fall. 

The conclusion of this talk then is for the necessity of recognizing all our knowledge in light of God as Creator.  Our knowledge is a subset of his knowledge and it is of a fundamentally different nature.  Take math as an example.  It is not simply that God knows more math than us, or that he knows it all before us, but his knowing of math is a prior knowing, a creative knowing, an ultimate knowing.  It is not simply that God knows 2+2=4, but it is that his knowing that 2+2=4 is what makes it so.  Never will we know anything that way, and God knows all things that way.  Our pursuit of knowledge must be done with humility taking this Creator/creature distinction in mind.  Our pursuit of knowledge must be done with humility realizing that our minds are fragile and easily pulled away from truth so that our hearts can pursue unrighteousness.  Prayerful, humble, and thankful.  That is what we must be if we are to truly think and truly know in a way that honors and glorifies God, which is our ultimate goal.

Think: Why We Should Be Thinking About Thinking - #1

Because God is God, he should be the ultimate end in everything that we do.  Because God is God, he is infinitely worthy of every part of our lives.  He is infinitely worthy of my heart and all its affections, motives, and emotions.  He is infinitely worthy of my obedience.  He is infinitely worthy of my love.  He is infinitely worthy of my energy, my time, and the full strength of my body to do his will.  God is worthy.  The creatures in heaven cry out Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.  God is worthy, infinitely worthy simply because of who he is.

            Paul writes in Romans 12:1-2, I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.  Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.  On the basis of this passage I want to make some observations.

1.      Paul does give us something to do.  He tells us how to live.  He tells us how to respond.  There is action that is required on our parts… We are to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is our spiritual worship.  This is another way of saying that we must present our whole selves to God.  This is the action on our part. 

2.      Our call to this action of presenting ourselves as living sacrifices does not drop out of nowhere, unconnected from everything else that Paul has said.  Some of us read the Bible that way, though.  We know, of course, that the Bible is true and useful, so we tend to drop in at random on different spots.  It is like reaching in and grabbing a verse or two and holding it up like a shiny nugget.  We say, “Look what I found!”  But we are maybe too lazy to care much about the context.  But in reading that way, we unintentionally do violence to the authors of Scripture.  You wouldn’t pick up a novel and flip to a random place in the middle and be satisfied with just a paragraph or two.  You wouldn’t know what was going on!  In saying this, I do not at all intend to communicate that the Holy Spirit is unable to use a single verse pulled in this way powerfully in a person’s life.  Of course he can.  I do intend to communicate that if this is your regular practice you are like a man or woman in the desert who bypasses an oasis, a spring overflowing with water to settle for a thimble of water.  Different books are written differently, and they are meant to be read according to the way they’ve been written.  So in this case, with Paul in the book of Romans, he is not just giving us a bunch of true things that just happen to be sort of loosely connected.  Paul doesn’t waste words, and God doesn’t waste words through Paul.  Paul argues.  He is crafting arguments!  The way that you read Paul will be revolutionized if you realize that he is crafting arguments and that he is trying to get you to follow his arguments.  As I said, our call to the action of giving our bodies up as living sacrifices does not fall out of the sky unconnected from everything else Paul is saying, but it comes at a critically important place in Paul’s gospel argument that we call the book of Romans.  It is really the turning place of the book.  Paul has just spent 11 packed, glorious chapters talking in detail about God’s holiness, man’s sinfulness, salvation, justification, adoption, sanctification, God’s sovereignty, his plan for Israel, and how all of this stuff fits together to bring him glory and to bring us good.  But in those earlier 11 chapters, he doesn’t tell us to do anything.  It is all bedrock truths about what God has done for us already, prior to our doing of stuff.  The connector word is therefore.  Whenever you read “therefore”, you should ask what it is there for?  Paul spends the next four chapters concluding his book by telling us how to live, but it all comes back to God’s prior mercies, explained in the first 11 chapters.  The gospel order here is significant.  We are not good in order that God may accept us.  But rather, in light of God’s merciful acceptance of us, we find the proper motivation and freedom to become truly good.  This second point comes down to the fact that our obedience to any of God’s commands must be a response to his character, his mercy, or else it is an obedience that merely serves our pride, a sort of disobedient obedience. 

3.      We are told not to be conformed to this world. I tend to think this is what happens if we allow ourselves to run on cruise control, turn our brains off, and do what comes natural. This requires resistance and effort and the help of God.  Paul presents for us the antithesis and shows us what the opposite of this is, what we should do in order to truly avoid being conformed to the world.  We are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds.  God calls for our transformation, and the way he tells us that this will happen is by the renewing of our minds.  The way that we will be transformed is by thinking.  It will, of course, be thinking in ways shaped by God’s Word and in accordance with his Spirit, but our minds are an essential and explicit player in our transformation into what God wants us to become in order to worship him the way should.  The result of this transformation is an increased ability to discern God’s will. 

I started this talk with the sentence, “Because God is God, he should be the ultimate end in everything that we do.”  From him and to him and through him are all things.  There are means and there are ends.  For many of you, you view school as a means to an end.  Perhaps school is a means to your future livelihood.  Perhaps it is a means to get into college.  Perhaps it is a means to keep your parents happy with you.  When we give our lives to God in worship, we are attempting to bring everything else together as a means to the end of knowing and delighting in God, so that he is back of everything.  For example, I go to school, so I can get a job, so I can provide for my family as a way to glorify God.  He becomes the answer to every string of “why” questions.

              As I explained when I went over the syllabus, I will be taking time through this course to show how mathematics may be done to the glory of God.  In the beginning weeks of this course, I will be starting by arguing for the importance of thinking in general before moving to the importance of mathematics specifically as a means of glorifying God.  To give a broad overview statement, thinking is a created means of loving and glorifying God, and mathematics is a means of becoming a better thinker in general.  This is one of several ways that we see math itself doing what it was meant to do in God’s creation – point to God.  During the first few weeks, many of my thoughts about thinking in general will be shaped by the book entitled “Think” by John Piper, which I recommend.  It is fairly short and fairly readable but it will… make you think.

A Quick Explanation

I am a math teacher at a private Christian school called Trinity Christian School.  I will be using this blog spot for my class.  It is my desire and passion to show how Christ is preeminent over all of life, especially mathematics.  Some posts here will be more math related, some more God related, all serving this ultimate purpose.  Therefore, dear internet, if you would like, you may follow us as we go on this journey!