Answering questions. Or not.

Years ago a friend—let’s call him Matty—led the college-age small group at his church. (Not my church; not my denomination either. They’re Christian though. I knew Matty from school.) They’d meet and chat, he’d give them some bible lesson, they’d pray, and at the end he liked to play Bible Answer Man for a bit—he took questions.

Most questions were easy, with nice short answers. But sometimes they needed a more detailed answer, so Matty would put a pin in it, and make it the subject of next week’s lesson, where he could spend a half hour or longer on it. Which, he admitted, he appreciated; sometimes he didn’t know what he was gonna talk about next week, but “God provided.” (Well, when his topics weren’t all that profitable, I’m not so sure it’s God who provided. But whatever.)

So… one week the question had to do with women in ministry. The scriptures have no problem with it, and therefore neither does Matty, so the next week he made a thorough biblical argument in favor of it. Thing is, his church is sexist, so you can already see where this was headed: Someone at the small group who disagreed with him, tattled on him. In their denomination the board, not the pastor, runs the church; and the board decided Matty ought not teach the college-agers any longer. So he didn’t.

Here’s the thing: The young’uns still had questions, and since Matty was the answer man, they’d bring them to him, class or no class. Pastor got wind of this, called Matty in for another meeting, and told him, “You gotta shut that down.” Shut what down? These kids and their questions. If they have questions, they’re to take it to one of the pastors. Not Matty. They didn’t trust Matty.

I’ll be honest: This’d be the point where I left this church. But Matty had a lot of years invested in this church, so, y’know, sunk cost fallacy. He felt he oughta be a team player, so he agreed. Whenever the college-agers had questions, he now said, “Oh, you should ask Pastor.” So they did. Then they started leaving the church.

Matty ran into one of those young people after she’d left their church, asked her what’s up, and got the whole story: Seems when Pastor got a question he didn’t like, his response was, “You ought not ask such questions.” The frustrated young people recognized a red flag when they saw one, and soon left that church. Some of ’em sought and found a church where pastors do answer questions. But more of ’em simply presumed Christianity didn’t have answers, and quit church altogether. (And I find if you grew up in one of those Fundamentalist churches which loudly declares or implies every other church is misled, too liberal, too heretic, or otherwise dangerously wrong, you’re likely to despair: “There are no other churches I can go to,” and likewise quit church altogether.)

There’s more to this story, but I wanna stop here to say this is the point of this article: When churches don’t or won’t answer questions, they’re gonna lose the people who have those questions. And rightly so. I’ll be blunt: If you aren’t allowed to ask questions in church, it’s a cult. You should leave.

Good behavior is part of our ready defense.

1 Peter 3.15-18.

As I said in my previous piece on 1 Peter 3.15, Christian apologists love this verse because they figure it justifies everything they do to “defend” Christianity by arguing in its favor. Nevermind the fact argumentativeness is a work of the flesh; they’re doing it for Jesus, so that makes it righteous.

But when we keep reading 1 Peter 3, you’ll notice it’s not to be done argumentatively. We’re to keep things civil. Respectful. Gentle—with our emotions in check, because it’s a proper fruit of the Spirit, and actually righteous.

We’re not to resort to the misbehavior of fleshly Christians and pagans, who care far more about winning than behaving themselves and being truthful. They’re gonna violate their consciences, ’cause they’re willing to do what they know is the wrong thing—manipulate and cherry-pick data, try to get one’s emotions to override facts, insist their opponents listen to them instead of listening to the Spirit. Roman rhetoricians did all that stuff when they debated, because they sought to win no matter what. But it does matter how we defend ourselves. Still gotta avoid fraud, untruth, anger, and sin.

And if we’ve done that, our opponents can’t point to our misbehavior and use it to justify dismissing us. See?—goodness has its advantages. As Simon Peter pointed out.

1 Peter 3.15-18 KWL

15Sanctify Christ the Lord in your² minds,

always ready with a defense

for everyone who asks you² for a word

about the hope in you.

16But do it with gentleness and respect,

having a good conscience,

so when you’re² spoken about,

those who verbally abuse your² good lifestyle

might be disgraced.

17For, God willing, doing good is better

than to suffer for evildoing,

18because Christ Jesus once also suffered for sins—

the just for the unjust—

so that he could bring us to God,

putting us to death in the flesh

and making us alive in the Spirit.

Finite amounts of faith.

Christians regularly talk about putting our faith in God. But we don’t always get the definition of “faith” correct. Sometimes we think of faith as a substance—same as we sometimes think of grace. We think of it as a supernatural object God has to grant us. Because Jesus’s apostles asked him about increasing their faith, Lk 17.5 they got the idea it’s a spiritual material we have in us… and there’s only a certain amount we can hold. Like the battery in your phone; like the gasoline tank in your car. Sometimes the “faith tank” is full; sometimes it’s low.

But precisely like grace, faith is not an object. It’s an attitude. It’s our trust in God. And either we have it or we don’t.

The supposed amount of faith we have, isn’t really an amount. It’s whether we have faith in God in a given situation. I’ve known Christians who absolutely believe God can cure illnesses; they’ve seen it happen! But when it comes to whether God will cure them personally, they’re not so sure.

I know how they feel. I knew, hypothetically, God can cure the sick, ’cause Jesus does it all over the gospels. Didn’t really trust him to cure me… until one day, when I was seriously nauseous and finally, finally prayed, “God, could you please just take this away?” and he immediately did. I was fine. Hadn’t happened before; haven’t been in a situation where it happened again; but at the time I think God wanted me to experience for myself how he can do that, so he did that.

It didn’t increase my faith level; it meant I didn’t really have faith before, but I definitely have it now. My attitude changed. Because again, faith is an attitude.

Christians who try to discourage you away from bible apps.

When I bought my first Macintosh, I also bought bible software. I’ve written a little about it elsewhere. I switched software a few times, finally settled on Accordance, spent a lot of money on modules, and now exclusively use it for bible study. I’ve got it on my phone too; I read it instead of my tiny bibles.

My print bibles? Getting dusty.

And I’ve met certain Christians whom this bugs to no end.

Most are bibliolaters, who worship the Holy Bible instead of the Holy Spirit. They may not be aware that somewhere, baked into the moldy filling of their over-elevation of the scriptures, they grew to also revere the printed word. To them, digital books aren’t real books… even though they absolutely are. They’re pretty snobbish about it.

It’s not the medium which makes a book. A book can exist in a stone tablet, a papyrus scroll, a parchment codex, an eight-ring binder, a strip of microfilm, a 30-pack of audio cassettes, a 12-pack of audio CDs, a floppy disk or CD-ROM or thumb drive, the solid-state hard drive of your iPhone or Kindle, or the solid-state hard drive of some internet-accessible server somewhere (which people like to call “the cloud,” but yeah, it’s physically somewhere).

Me, I prefer the hard drive. I don’t always have a wifi signal, so the cloud’s definitely my second choice.

So during Sunday morning services, when these bibliolaters wave their big black pleather-clad KJV study bibles at the listeners and say, “Got your bibles?” what they want to see is a room full of big black pleather-clad KJV print bibles waving back at them, like foam fingers at a baseball game. When they see phones instead… well, a little bit of them dies inside, and not the idolatrous part which needs to die.

Because to them, these aren’t bibles. They’re just phones. And they’re pretty sure you don’t read bible on ’em.

And they’re also pretty sure you don’t actually have a bible on them. In that, they’d usually be correct. I’ve met many a Christian who has no dedicated bible app; they go to Bible Gateway. And when they do have a bible app, most of those apps don’t actually install any text on your phone, which you can still read even when you’re offline. All their bible translations are on a server, not your phone. They’re entirely dependent on internet.

I don’t really see that as a problem, but bibliolaters certainly do: They worry that at some point in the future, probably during the End Times, the Beast’s government is gonna ban bibles, and if you don’t have a print copy you’re boned. Me, I suspect most Beast-like autocrats are gonna be just fine with bible. Will even pretend they love the bible, and hold it up for photo opportunities, and even claim their favorite verse is somewhere in “two Corinthians”—because they know perfectly well Christians don’t follow it, which is how they got elected in the first place. But that’s a whole other tangent. Back to bible apps!

Is it fair to say people don’t read bible on their phones? Well, kinda. Which is just as true for bibles in print.

Church shopping. ’Cause sometimes you need a new church.

CHURCH SHOP 'tʃərtʃ ʃɑp verb. Look for the best available church to attend or join.

[Church shopper 'tʃərtʃ 'ʃɑp.pər noun, church shopping 'tʃərtʃ 'ʃɑp.pɪŋ noun]

If you haven’t been going to church lately, or you never did go to church, and you seriously want your relationship with Christ Jesus to grow, it’s time to start. There are lots of other good reasons, which I spell out in my article, “Go to church!” but the main reason is because you need a Christian support system, and church—a good church, anyway—is that.

If most of the reason you don’t go, is because the church you think of as “yours” is not a good church, it’s time to start shopping for a new one. Yes, I use the word shopping. I didn’t come up with the American term “church shopping,” but I still use it, ’cause church shoppers kinda are shopping. When you shop for clothes, you wanna make sure they fit. You try them on. Churches likewise.

Other times, you have to shop for a new church. Happened to me when my last church shut down: I had to go to another. I didn’t shop long; I went to the same church almost everybody else in my old church moved to, realized it was a good fit, and stayed. Took me longer to find that previous church; I had moved to town and was looking at other churches for a few months.

Church shopping isn’t complicated. You visit a new church and try it on for size. If you like it, stick around. If not, try another.

It only gets complicated because certain Christians are extremely choosy about their churches. They insist it should have just the right faith statement. Just the right type of sermon and preacher. Just the right type of music and singers. Just the right type of people—friendly and loving and inclusive, to the right level; you don’t want ’em to be pushy. (Although there are some folks who don’t wanna be befriended, loved, and included; somebody hurt them, and they need therapy.)

Which leads me to talk about bad reasons people might be choosy about their churches. They don’t like the decor. Or there are certain misbehaviors they wanna get away with, and they’re hoping this church will give them a free pass. Or they wanna go to the “cool” church, however they define coolness… which means they look down on their current church, and likely not for the right reasons.

But for most Christians it’s fairly easy. There’s a church in town they’ve either visited, and wouldn’t mind visiting again. Or a church they’ve never tried, but they’re curious about it, and would like to visit. They go, they like it, they stay. Easy.

For others, church-shopping is an ordeal. They visit a church for a few months: They get involved, get to know the people. Even try to join, minister, or try to get into church leadership right away. And then… they discover the dealbreakers, the things they simply cannot abide in their church, and realize they can’t join this church, and leave. And they’re just heartbroken. They’ve been church-shopping for so long. Sometimes years! Just about every church in town—heck, the county—has met these folks: “Yeah, they went here for five months. So they’re at your church now? Well I’m glad they’re somewhere. I always wondered.”

I gotta tell you, though: If you’ve been through 25 different churches in the area and can’t stay in a single one, it’s not the churches which are the problem. It’s you.

The trilemma.

Years ago I made the mistake of trying to edit a Wikipedia article. It’s not always safe to do that, y’know. Some Wikipedia editors consider certain pages their territory, and will fight to the death any of your attempts to fix or update them.

The article in question was on C.S. Lewis, and you know how some Evangelicals are about Lewis. Christian apologists especially. He’s one of their patron saints. He’s a former atheist who turned Christian; an academic who taught at both Oxford and Cambridge, and apologists love when academics join their field. In 1941 and 1942, during World War 2, he wrote three radio talks for the British Broadcasting Corporation. The transcripts were initially published as Broadcast Talks, then renamed The Case for Christianity in 1943, then re-renamed Mere Christianity in 1952. It’s an introduction to Christian beliefs for anyone who might be on the fence about Jesus. Plus they’re usually fond of his Narnia books; especially the bit about Aslan not being a tame lion, and apologists often like to imagine they’re not tame lions either.

I’m a fan of Lewis too. I grew up on his Narnia books, and discovered his Space Trilogy and apologetics works in college. But unlike many a Lewis fan, I can’t agree with everything he taught. I take great issue with how the characters in his novels were willing, even thought it righteous, to kill their enemies. In the Narnian wars it’s somewhat justified; these are wars after all. But Elwin Ransom beating Weston to death in his 1943 book Perelandra—I don’t care that Weston was possessed by Satan. You could bind the guy, same as God’s angel is gonna do with Satan during the millennium, Rv 20.1-3 and get the very same result. I’d’ve much preferred Lewis got his ideas from the New Testament than the Crusades.

Anyway, the part I tried to update was the article’s section about the “trilemma.” It’s still there. I tried to move it to another page, and someone has since successfully done so.

Trilemma isn’t Lewis’s word, by the way. It was probably coined by Philip Henry in 1672. Its meaning in Christian apologetics was defined by “Rabbi” John Duncan (1796–1870), professor of Hebrew and oriental languages at New College, Edinburgh, Scotland. His fellow Scottish Free Church pastor William Knight collected many of Duncan’s interviews and sayings into a book, Colloquia Peripatetica/Deep-sea Soundings: Being Notes of Conversations with the Late John Duncan. L.L.D., published 1907. And among his sayings is this one:

Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or He was Himself deluded and self-deceived, or He was Divine. There is no getting out of this trilemma. It is inexorable. Knight 109

I don’t know whether Lewis read Duncan. He definitely read Catholic novelist and pundit G.K. Chesterton, whose 1912 novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill described one of the book’s characters, Adam Wayne, this way:

“He may be God. He may be the devil. But we think it, for practical purposes, more probable that he is off his head.” Chesterton 171

Or maybe he heard the trilemma concept from another fellow Christian. Either way, it got into Mere Christianity like so:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. Lewis 1.8

Josh McDowell, in his 1979 book Evidence that Demands a Verdict, reduced it to Lunatic, Liar, or Lord. These are our three options; Jesus is one of the three. It’s not a di-lemma, with two options; it’s a tri-lemma, with three. Get it?

Are the communion elements literally Jesus?

TRANSUBSTANTIATE træn.(t)səb'stæn.(t)ʃi.eɪt verb. Substantially convert into the literal body and blood of Christ Jesus. Used to describe the elements of bread and wine during the Christian ritual of holy communion or Eucharist.

2. Change something’s form or substance into something wholly different.

[Transubstantiation træn.(t)səb.stæn.(t)ʃi'eɪ.ʃən noun.]

Since I’ve been writing about the living bread in John 6, passages Roman Catholics love to use to back up their doctrine of transubstantiation—particularly Jesus’s bit about eating and drinking him—I figured I’d write about that idea in a little bit more detail.

As you can tell from the vocabulary word I provided up top, transubstantiate, Catholics take John 6 literally and claim the elements of holy communion—the wafers and wine they use—literally become Jesus. They don’t merely represent Jesus, as many Protestants have come to believe. Jesus, Catholics insist, wasn’t being metaphorical, wasn’t using hyperbole, when he said,

John 6.53-58 NABRE

53B“Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. 54Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. 55For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. 56Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. 57Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. 58This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.”

When Jesus says, “My flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink,” he’s not mincing words: We’re literally meant to eat him.

The Galileans he spoke to when he said this, and his students, had no clue at the time exactly what Jesus meant by this. He hadn’t yet taught his followers about holy communion; wouldn’t for a few more years. So it was still a mystery—but one which freaked out the Galileans. In contrast Jesus’s kids had trusted him this far, so they stuck around long enough to watch him ultimately fulfill it, which he did at his last supper. (Nevermind that he didn’t do holy communion at all in the gospel of John. The author was aware of the other gospels, and didn’t feel the need to repeat them.)

So when Jesus did this at his last supper, it triggered the memory of when he talked about the living bread:

Mark 14.22-25 NABRE

22While they were eating, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them, and said, “Take it; this is my body.” 23Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, and they all drank from it. 24He said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed for many. 25Amen, I say to you, I shall not drink again the fruit of the vine until the day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.”

Again, Catholics insist, Jesus wasn’t using metaphor. That was his body. That was his blood.

If it’s not, why did Paul and Sosthenes have to warn the Corinthians against practicing holy communion without acknowledging it’s Jesus’s body?

1 Corinthians 11.27-32 NABRE

27Therefore whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord. 28A person should examine himself, and so eat the bread and drink the cup. 29For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself. 30That is why many among you are ill and infirm, and a considerable number are dying. 31If we discerned ourselves, we would not be under judgment; 32but since we are judged by the Lord, we are being disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world.

This is why Catholics won’t let non-Catholics partake of Eucharist. Unlike other Christians, who figure if you’re Christian of course you can worship Jesus along with them, they don’t want people ignorantly eating and drinking judgment upon themselves. After all, those elements aren’t merely wafers and wine: They’re Jesus. It’s why Eucharist is the central part of the Catholic worship service—it’s when Jesus enters the building. It’s a big, big deal.