Letters To A Missionary

A friend of mine sent me the following. Its a pastor responding to a missionary who is losing the Christian faith. There are three letters but I will give them to you one at a time. Some good stuff here...thanks Jamie.

Dear Kendall,

Thanks for your bio. I enjoyed it immensely. One short note of amusement. When I read over your bio the first time, I thought you said that you "led an inner city TORTURING ministry for three years." With what we northerners know about what is said about South and Central America, it seemed especially good preparation. {He had actually said he was leading an "inner city tutoring ministry"}

I was fascinated with what you said about evidence, and not even finding that sort of incontrovertible evidence on the mission field, where it is so often proported to be. Surely nothing that would convince your unbelieving father (who may be looking over your shoulder in your minds eye). But, I think evidence in the Bible is an odd sort of thing. I think everybody at sometime wishes to see the "incontrovertible", but the Bible seems to raise interesting questions about that. The three periods in Biblical history when there were plethoras of (presumably) that sort of evidence, it didn't do any good. The Children of Israel surely saw enough, one would think, to convince anybody, when they came out of Egypt. But apparently, very few believed. It hardly convinced a soul. And, of course the same is true of both the period of Elijah and Elisha. And finally of course, Jesus own visit to earth. One could set it up like this: "If only God Himself would visit us in visible form, converse with us, and display the very powers of a Creator; then faith would follow." Better yet, "I would believe." But everybody knows what the outcome of just that Visit was. He was Crucified, and the nation was HARDENED in unbelief. Just an aside: this is an odd literary way to treat these accounts of evidence if one is trying to persuade. All one can say is it is odd, odd, odd.

There is what amounts to a paradigm case in John 12. A voice speaks to Jesus that the text implies is the Father. But the crowd standing by said that it "thundered", or was an "angel." After that, it says that Jesus "hid" from them. And then..."Though he had done so many signs before them, yet they did not believe in him."

The point that I am making is that the Bible has its own internal "theology" of doubt and unbelief. And unbelief (it is plain as a pikestaff) is not some "modern" phenomena. In fact, one way to read the Bible is that it is entirely a book devoted to speaking to and exposing unbelief as the "normal" state of man. To be able to believe (the Bible seems clearly to state) is itself a miracle, and to not believe is normal, natural state of our spiritual diseasedness.

Pascal says somewhere in THE PENSEES that the true religion would have to be able to account for God's "hiddenness", because it is plain that God IS hidden, or He doesn't exist. (Note above that Jesus "hid" from the people, and it seems a metaphor for God Himself making Himself unfindable.)

If you will permit me to indulge myself a little, I want to repeat some things that I wrote not too long ago. John chapter 12 carries on with the "theology of unbelief", and it is at least worthwhile seeing what the Bible itself says about the matter.

To explain the unbelief, John goes on to quote Isaiah 6, which is Isaiah's call. Isaiah's call is a terrible one. He is called to preach, being told ahead of time that all that his ministry will produce is unbelief. In fact unbelief to the point that God will destroy the nation as punishment. Verses 9-10 of Isaiah 6 are a paraphrases of Ps. 115:4-7 and Ps. 135:15-17. Look them up. Both Psalms then go on to say, "Those who make them are like them; so are all who trust in them." I.e. if you worship a rock, you will become a rock. Seeing you will not see, hearing you will not hear. Rocks don't see or hear, and neither will you if you worship them.

In the Psalms, those ideas are applied to the heathen surrounding Israel, and this is why they do not see or worship Jehovah. But in Isaiah, this terrible reality is applied to Israel. Israel now worship idols, and now cannot see or hear. God is "wholly hidden." This Isaiah passage is repeatedly quoted in the NT by Jesus, especially in reference to why he teaches in parables (which makes his teaching "hidden"--Matthew 13:14-15). Now, an interesting question to ask is, why does the NT quote these passages in reference to the Jews of Jesus time since idolatry is precisely what they were cured of in the Babylonian Captivity? And the answer seems to be that there is a new and more damning kind of idolatry now than before. The Pharisees perhaps especially, became (in Bonhoeffer's words) "men of conscience". The law was reified, and human effort was exalted. The Jews, in-other-words, became their own source of righteousness, and did not submit to the gift of Divine righteousness. Put simply, the Jews no longer worshiped rocks and blocks of wood, they now worshiped themselves. The effect was that God Himself could stand right before them, and do mighty works of Creation, and they found it impossible to "see" or "hear" anything.

This is strikingly modern. Since the Enlightenment, Western man has progressively deified himself and his own reason and conscience (finding a kind of apogee in Kant). And through this time, God has become progressively more "silent" and "invisible". In fact, the odd thing is that in this condition, the more one looks, the more one listens, the more there is Nothing (and this follows, and is dictated precisely from the Kantian and post-Kantian epistemology). The most "intelligent" see the least. May I suggest, this is precisely the irony that the Bible foretells? And it foretells it as a judgment. Modern Western Europeans and (increasingly) Americans are the modern Jews. "They have stumbled over the stumbling stone, as it is written, `Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone that will make men stumble a rock that will make them fall..." (Romans 9:32b-33) Christ Himself becomes the source of unbelief.

Now, I live in Boulder, Colorado, and people seem to know all about Boulder when I travel around. Boulder is an egghead town and is properly named. It is as hard as a rock, and very few here "see" or "hear". I don't do very much evangelism here. I rarely try to win people to faith. Instead, I try to help people "see" that they are in fact dogmatic unbelievers. They will believe almost anything (New Age theology, "angel guides", astrology, Hinduism, Buddhism, as well as old fashioned university reductionism with the University of Colorado being here) before they will believe that Jesus is the Messiah. But there is a great deal of self deception. People here largely want what is promised with the coming of Messiah. They want Messianic results, they want some facsimile of the New Jerusalem (a little more psycho-therapy, a little more grant money---and it will come). People want it all without the Messiah. I sometimes work hard to encourage people NOT to believe, to be clear and honest about their unbelief. It can make people very uncomfortable. When they have to face it, a great deal of other stuff evaporates, and they are left with Nothing. This encourages me, because the promise that Jesus gave is that when the Holy Spirit comes, He will convict people of their sin, "because they do not believe in me" (John 16:9). People sometimes have to stumble very badly over the Stumbling Stone before there is any hope. Jesus has actually won. He has set the whole agenda. Unbelief in the end defines as much as belief does in the believer. It is a backhanded admission that Jesus IS the Messiah. After Jesus, there is Nowhere to go but Nowhere. It is impossible to go back to being a pagan. There is Nothing.

If you will permit me a little impudence, you are on the road to Nothing. You may still believe something, but if you are a careful scholar going the direction you are going, you will very brilliantly end with Nothing, and even see it as a triumph of the intellect. But it is not honest unbelief. It is the unbelief of the reification of the intellect and conscience. It is the unbelief that at the outset already declared that intellect and conscience are autonomous, and therefore BY DEFINITION have no need of God or of Messiah. It is a slight of hand trick. Let me by all means encourage you on your road. Do all you can to prove the text corrupt, mythological, late and unscientific. Carry your reductionisms to the utter end. There is nothing that autonomy cannot explain as autonomy. Good. In the end, you will have no reason to believe in thought or even consciousness (there is nothing there that cannot be explained and explained away by the geneticists, biologists,and sociologists.) But in all likelihood, you comfort yourself by wanting all of the things that Messiah came to bring without the supernatural Messiah. But stop kidding yourself. These are all impulses that can easily be explained by the psychologists, and sociologists. They are Nothing.

Rich
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