Tag Archive for: false prophets

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Faith and Reason: Friends or Enemies?

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Does having faith in God mean you cannot or should not use your head properly any longer? If we would be honest with ourselves, this is one of the nagging questions that come to mind when we take a cursory look at the current Christian landscape in Ghana. It is as if one must throw away his mind in order to be able to believe in God. It seems that strong faith is equal to bad reasoning or less thinking. I have actually heard one of the well-known preachers on radio say that the Word of God (i.e. the Bible) is not for the mind but for the spirit. This is a false division and a very tragic one indeed, for it is wrongly assumed that the mind has no place in spiritual life. It is statements of this sort that make non-religious folks get confirmed in their belief that every religion is devoid of reason.

Yet Christ never called for undiscerning minds. He called for thinking people! It seems some Christians today, however, are afraid that scrutinizing the teachings of the Christian faith might lead them to lose their faith. [Perhaps, this may be due to stories they have heard from people who claim that their rigorous research led them to disbelieve in God.] But this fear is unwarranted. “You will seek me and find me when you seek with all your heart,” is what the God of the Bible promised the Jews once (Jer. 29:13). Also, Jesus said to his disciples, “… seek and you will find …” (Matt. 7:7). An honest hunger for truth is the prerequisite for proper reasoning. The Christian faith is not a blind faith; you do not need to abandon your mind and jump into a fairy tale world as some believers today are making it seem. Instead, it is the proper response of trust to the God who is there and who has proven, through countless marvellous deeds (seen and unseen), that he is worthy of our trust. Oxford mathematics Professor, John Lennox, is credited with the following statement:

“Fictional gods may well be enemies of reason: the God of the Bible certainly is not. The very first of the biblical Ten Commandments contains the instruction to ‘love the Lord your God with all your mind’. This should be enough to tell us that God is not to be regarded as an enemy of reason. After all, as Creator he is responsible for the very existence of the human mind; the biblical view is that human beings are the pinnacle of creation. They alone are created as rational beings in the image of God, capable of a relationship with God and given by him the capacity to understand the universe in which they live.”

Professor Lennox is spot on. The God of Bible is the reality of the really real, so to speak, and does not oppose proper reasoning. In fact, he is a reasoning God. Jesus asks people to count the cost before becoming his followers. He wants people to deliberately think things through before making a commitment to him. He says he is the Truth. It is therefore not surprising that he is not worried in the least by a person’s honest examination of his life and teachings. In fact Jesus is convinced that any genuine truth lover or seeker will find him too attractive to resist, for he says, “… Whoever belongs to the truth listens to me” John 18:37 GNB. I am convinced that anyone who is honest in the heart will be forced to use his head correctly. Dishonest hearts hate proper thinking. This is the bane of the current popular Christianity which is spewing out false teachings and practices at dizzying speed. Anytime Christians stop thinking properly, a false spirituality follows.

Jesus often used parables to force his listeners to think. The gospels contain a number of questions, a lot of which are asked by Jesus himself. One of the trademarks of Jesus is that he often answered questions with questions to compel people to come clean in their assumptions: “Should we pay taxes to Caesar?,” some people asked him; “Whose image is on the coin?,” answered Jesus. “Good teacher what must I do to be saved?,” asked one person; “Why do you call me good?,” replied Jesus. “What must I do to receive eternal life,” one teacher asked; “What do the Scriptures say? How do you interpret them?” Jesus asked (Lk 10:25,26).

I am inclined to think that some Christians today have a struggle with morality because they think it is some people at the top in the Church who have agreed and made such laws to restrict people’s freedom. Yes, I agree that in some churches this might be the case. But Biblical Christian morality is nothing about oppressive and antiquated laws that we cannot understand nor see why they should exist. When the Christian has thought deeply and carefully about God’s nature, he recognizes why he ought to live the way that the Bible prescribes because God’s love and holiness naturally draw boundaries for righteous living. Loving the Lord with the mind means thinking after God’s thoughts as expressed in the Bible, wrestling with them, asking questions, probing and searching and researching to find answers that fit the facts in there. The early church fathers were thinkers who thought long and hard through the Christian teachings and also engaged head-on with the prevailing philosophies in their day. These include men like St. Augustine, St. Aquinas, Origen, Iraneaus. In later centuries, we find Christian men like Martin Luther, Blaise Pascal, John Wesley, and C. S. Lewis thinking deep on the Christian faith. Further, critical thinking about the universe as a creation of God led men like Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Johannes Kepler (just to name a few) to make wonderful contributions to the field of scientific enquiry. By thinking, probing, and wrestling with the teachings of the faith and the happenings in reality, these men were able to understand God and the gospel of Christ and even our universe better and explain them to others.

Is this the same attitude we have among Ghanaian Christians today? No, we dare not think critically, ask questions or search the scriptures to verify the Man of God’s interpretation of the scriptures, since it is a direct “revelation.” If we do so, we would be challenging God, so the thinking goes. And which faithful believer wants to be God’s challenger? We would rather settle for misinterpreted Bible verses and building our faith on erroneous teachings. The reluctance to engage in proper reasoning when it comes to Christian doctrines is a great threat to Christianity. Interestingly, when the great Apostle Paul went to preach the good news in Berea, the historian, Luke, with a sense of commendation said, “The people there were more open-minded than the people in Thessalonica. They listened to the message with great eagerness and every day they studied the Scriptures to see if what Paul said was really true.” Acts 17:11 GNB.

How many preachers today would be comfortable knowing that they are being scrutinized by an open-minded congregation every time they preached? Yet such an attitude in a congregation would force the preacher to be on his toes and not compromise the Bible’s teachings, or even preach cheap, un-researched sermons. I am not at all calling for Christians to become disrespectful or unduly critical of their pastors and elders. I am calling on Christians to halt the unbalanced worship which involves only the heart and spirit without the mind and where we do not have any respect for what is true. Once a certain teaching sounds like what we want for the moment, we do not care for its truthfulness or falsehood. And yet Jesus says that not only must worshipers of God worship in Spirit but they must also worship him in truth; and the mind is what serves as a filter where truth is concerned. Without truth as a guide, Christianity becomes exactly the kind that we have in this country today – limitless superstition, fear of the intellect, oppression and abuse. Jesus wants his followers to have alert intellects – wise as serpents, as he put it – along with childlike (rather than childish) faith; one that is simple, single-minded and teachable.

The Christian faith is healthy enough to contain and satisfy logical thinking and honest questions and curiosity. Jesus says he is the truth, and we know that truth corresponds with reality. This means that sound logic (a feature of reality) should characterize Christian teaching and practice. Since God, through his Son, created all things including our minds, he wants us to think and think properly after his thoughts and his marvellous work in creation, to understand them as much as our minds can take and to be able to worship him with a deeper understanding and devotion.

Constructing the circle of faith

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Author: John A. Turkson

Looking back some five years ago, in Junior High School, Pre-technical Skills was one of my favourite subjects; specifically the Technical drawing aspect of it. I don’t know how they call it these days, considering the frequent alterations in our curricula over these past few years.  There was something special about following all those given instructions to construct various fascinating figures, the precision that came with practicing, the accuracy you needed to employ in your drawing to gain the highest mark, the habit you needed to form to present the neatest work possible, the instruments you needed, even the wide range of pencils required to perform specific tasks. Those were the days; when you’d go to school carrying your big drawing board as if you were that architect chosen by God to draw the plan of an entire new world!

 It sounds funny at first, but that is exactly who we are: architects chosen by God to draw for the world to see His grand blue-print of love! With the tip of the compass firmly planted in Christ, the author and finisher of our faith, we Christians are supposed to describe certain circles in the world with our lives. Christ must be the centre! Christ must necessarily be our focus and salvation, our goal! But all we see in the ‘goalpost’ today are ‘balls’ of gospels about wealth, work promotions, favours, concocted prophesies etc. when the purpose of the gospel message is to reach as many as we can with God’s gift of salvation. Christ is no more the centre and without the centre, a circle does not exist! As tiny as that point is, Jesus, His death and resurrection—the gospel—holds us together in one piece. When our lives are void of this key ingredient, we are lost in the haze of hopelessness and like a lead-less pencil, our lives are pointless. Jesus must be the focus!

 Johannes Kepler, upon analyzing the astronomical observations of one Tycho Brahe proposed three laws supposed to describe the nature of planetary motion. In the first law, he asserted that the orbit of a planet was elliptical with the Sun at one of the two foci. An ellipse is an almost-circle with two ‘centres’ called foci (singular: focus). At one of these foci, in our solar system, the Sun holds the planets in place. Christianity is a kind of solar system in which Jesus is the Sun. The strategic position of the Sun is imperative to our survival. As it stands now, the Earth is hanging in space because it is suspended by threads of gravitation from the Sun; likewise the other planets. It’s been said about Jesus, “And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17, ESV). Jesus is our Sun, around whom we are supposed to revolve. Without him, we shall fall. Apart from him, we’d sink into darkness. But today, we hear about preachers instead of Jesus. The gospel which will lead to salvation has become relegated to the appendix session of our sermons when in the life of the early church, it was the main theme (Peter’s sermon in Acts 2, Paul’s famous Athenian sermon in Acts 17:16-31 and many more throughout the book of Acts). Apart from the Vine, the branches are as useful as firewood! If we are indeed bearing fruit apart from the Vine, I shudder to think we have decayed for some opportunistic multicellular fungus like mushroom to sprout on our ‘skin’! Have we not been deceived enough already? Look within and examine yourself: is Jesus at the centre?

 After the rains have fallen, the winged reproductive termites will want to congregate around a source of light. This forms part of their ‘nuptial’ flight ritual. In the process, they lose their wings. This mode of life is natural. The termite species will not survive without this process the same way we the branches cannot do without the Vine. Apart from the Vine, we lose our wings of faith. We lose our wings when we choose to hover around some drugging ‘miraculous’ light lit to trap our attention from the real Bull’s-eye, Jesus. Jesus promised us he’d send us a comforter, the Holy Spirit. Even as we believe Jesus has sent forth His Spirit to enable us bear fruit, the Holy Spirit will only flow through us through the Vine and not apart from Him. Jesus still remains a chief part of the equation! After all, the Holy Spirit was promised through Jesus to empower the Church (Acts 1:8)  to further the cause of reaching far and near with the gospel—that Jesus, died and resurrected and that it is only in believing in him that we are saved (1 Corinthians 15:1-4). The various gifts the Holy Spirit stirs in us are not to be used for amassing wealth, or procuring passports or visas, or promotions. The message must not be about how God wants us to be wealthy (really?), about prosperity, success etc but must be about Jesus in the right concentration—the gospel (1 Corinthians 15:1-11). The dilution thereof makes the ‘solution’ fake (Galatians 1:6-10). The centre must be Jesus, otherwise the fruit is wrong and the bearer, false! (2 John1:9-11).

 Today, the Prophet, the Apostle, the Miracle worker and the Teacher are the celebrities. Where is Jesus? Today, we can only have faith when we have that ‘special’ wrist band on our wrist, that white handkerchief, or that bottle of ‘anointing’ oil, or that ‘Florida’ water. Where is the Author and Finisher of our faith? Today, it’s all about prophesies and miracles (I am in no way saying they are not real. God reveals to redeem. He also works awesome miracles) but have we forgotten about the fruit of the Spirit; about love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; the very ingredients that make us Christians? Have you even examined that Prophet and seen the fruit in him? What did Paul really mean in 1 Corinthians 12:28-31? What is the most excellent way? In the subsequent chapter, we read about love. Does that celebrity Preacher come to mind as a lover of the needy, friend of the widow or a vendor of the recipe to prosperity? Or Jesus does— the pure definition of love? Is Jesus at the centre of the web of ‘spirituality’ you are entangled in?

 Jesus still stands in the centre of time—He virtually holds history together with wood drenched in His blood. Blood He shed for you and I to earn a place at the centre of our hearts. Where is Jesus in relation to your life—outside that circle, inside somewhere or at the centre?

 In constructing that circle of faith in your life, Jesus MUST be the centre. Without Him, “things fall apart and the centre cannot hold”!