"Blind Faith"
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Some message believers look at the evidence of Failed Prophecies that we and others have presented and state "You just don't believe" and then advocate a kind of "blind faith" that requires true believers to ignore any negative evidence. Didn't Jesus encourage people to have blind faith?When Jesus presented Himself to Thomas, He made an important statement that is occasionally offered as an affirmation of some form of “blind faith”:
Without any other context to understand what Jesus believed about the relationship between evidence and faith, this single sentence (“Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed”) does sound like an endorsement of faith independent of evidential support. But context changes everything. Like other declarations offered by Jesus, this statement has to be reconciled with everything else Jesus said and did before we can truly understand what He believed about the role of evidence. But the Apostle John takes the approach that evidence is importantAs it turns out, the Apostle John wrote more about Jesus’ evidential approach than any other Gospel author. According to John, Jesus repeatedly offered the evidence of His miracles to verify His identity and told His observers that this evidence was sufficient:
John frequently described Jesus as someone who offered the evidence of His miraculous power to demonstrate His Deity. In fact, the passage describing Thomas’ doubt is also an affirmation of an evidential faith, if it is read in its entirety:
John makes an important statement right after the line that is typically offered to “demonstrate” Jesus’ alleged affirmation of a non-evidential faith: “Therefore many other signs Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples…”. What? Blessed are those who did not see and yet believed, therefore many other signs Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples? Do you see the contradiction here if Jesus was speaking against evidence? Why would Jesus continue to provide evidence if those who believe without evidence are supposed to be blessed? The answer is found, once again, in the Gospel of John. In Jesus’ famous prayer to the Father, He prayed for unity and He carefully included those of us who would become Christians long after Jesus ascended into Heaven:
Jesus is talking here about all the people (like you and me) who will believe in Jesus not because of what we will see with our own eyes but because of what the disciples saw and recorded as eyewitnesses (“their word”). Yes, Thomas was blessed to believe on the basis of what he saw, but how much more blessed are those who will someday believe, not on the basis of what they will see, but on the basis of what the disciples saw and faithfully recorded. Jesus understood the value of evidence and continually provided “many convincing proofs” (Acts 1:2-3) to His followers so they could record their observations and change the world with their testimony. Jesus commended this process. His words to Thomas were not an affirmation of “blind faith”. Anti-intellectualismOne of the offshoots of blind faith is anti-intellectualism. This is rampant in the message. The Results of Anti-IntellectualismIf you follow anti-intellectualism to its logical conclusion. When your faith is tested, you can’t defend it, because you have divorced your spirituality from any connection to logic or reason. The only recourse is to throw out one shallow, emotional, logical fallacy after another, trying to cut the legs from under many things that a reasonable person believes to be true, in order to associate their beliefs with those “truisms”, scripture, science, etc. As I mentioned last week, anti-intellectualists pride themselves on their blind faith, when in reality, it is an indicator of lack of faith! Hupostasis, the word translated as “substance,” in Hebrews 11:1, means “that which underlies the apparent; that which is the basis of something, hence, assurance, guarantee and confidence.” The English “substance” is built from a prefix and a root which together mean “that which stands under.” 19th century famous preacher Charles Spurgeon said that faith consisted of three intertwined elements, a “triune faith” if you will: knowledge, assent, and trust. You can’t have faith in something you have no knowledge of. Let’s take a plane flight as an example of the knowledge component: If I am about to fly for the very first time, I might be very, very, nervous. Why? Because my faith in that plane to get me safely to my destination is very weak. If you are a frequent flyer, your faith is much higher, and you might share with me your experience, and to the extent that I accept that knowledge, my faith in the plane will rise. If the veteran pilot who was a former plane mechanic and an engineering enthusiast comes out pre-flight and spends 10 minutes sharing some of his intimate knowledge of the technology, the multiple levels of mechanical redundancy, the statistics of flight safety, and his absolute confidence in that plane, my faith may be increased substantially. Combine that with a few years of flying myself, and I may well be helping some other newbie get over their fear of flying. What is the point of all of that? At no point did my faith in the plane go up simply by telling myself to “have faith” or chanting “planes are safe,.. planes are safe!!”. My KNOWLEDGE of the object of my faith increased. But knowledge is not the end all/be all of faith, otherwise the most intelligent folks in the world would be the most dedicated Christians. There has to be an ASSENT, an “amen” from the heart that accepts the validity of that knowledge. If my fear of flying reached phobic proportions, no amount of insight from the pilot, my friend, or any other source will increase my faith, because there is no assent, I have rejected the validity of the knowledge, however irrational that may be. The trust factor is a byproduct of proportional and harmonious growth of the knowledge+assent. The more I learn about the object of my faith, and the more I accept that knowledge, the more at peace I am with the expected outcome, though I cannot empirically know that it will be that way.. I have faith. And the higher the faith, the more assured I am, the less stressed I become, and I rest… in faith. See the difference? Real faith is far from illogical. You can’t “defend the faith”, if your faith is some mystical notion that requires an emotional trigger for activation and an absence of resistance for survival. Paul didn’t walk around the Parthenon in Athens screaming “Jesus is Lord”, he was supremely gifted in logic, and is described by Luke nearly a dozen times, as “reasoning with his listeners”. So, if you seriously believe that I don’t have proof that I have a brain, I will tell you that, having viewed an actual human brain myself, having seen countless scans of others brains, read literature about the brain, and seen evidence in my own thought that leads me to accept this coherent set of clues to an inducted, non-empirical, conclusion that, yes “I have a brain.” If you seriously believe that there is no proof of God, I will tell you to watch a single debate between a knowledgeable Christian apologist and an atheist. Though, again, empirical data cannot prove in a deductive sense, that God exists, you cannot bat an eye or study any subject at all without being in contact with a million inductive pointers that lead to his existence. Add to that the illumination of the Holy Spirit while seeking his nature through his word, and accept him at his word,… it’s called faith. And here is the final distinction between blind message faith and true Christian faith. Every scientific discovery brings more evidence of his existence and strengthens our faith in God. Every archaeological finding brings increased veracity to the providence of God in forming and protecting the canon of scripture for over 1,500 years. Meanwhile, every single discovery of fact in the life and ministry of William Branham does just the opposite, making the position of “message believer” an increasingly untenable position. ReferenceParts of this article were adapted from an email by J. Warner Wallace, the author of Cold-Case Christianity - Stand to Reason |
