I liked science in high school. I really liked biology, so I took microbiology and physiology. But when I took my first physics class, I fell in love. I hoped to marry physics with my desire to be a missionary, planning to study nuclear physics to get a “tentmaking” job overseas.
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But in my first year at university, I took a philosophy class, and it subtly began to seduce me. My second year I took an Intellectual History class on the Enlightenment, and my high school infatuation with physics was completely dethroned in favor of this new fascination.
But Enlightenment thinkers insisted on divorcing morality from God’s revelation. They felt ethics could be deduced logically. Some were atheists, but many were deists, believing in a distant god. They vehemently denied that such a god would ever act outside the natural laws of physics. Their god had set the world spinning like a top and settled back to enjoy the show.
That’s why Thomas Jefferson’s Bible censored gospel verses that hinted of miracles. His god was a spectator. Jefferson literally cut-and-pasted verses (the old-fashioned way) dealing with morality, and cut-and-discarded the virgin birth, resurrection, miracles, or Christ’s divinity.
Twenty-five years after Jefferson’s Bible, Friedrich Schleiermacher (perhaps 19th Century’s most influential theologian) thought he “saved Christianity” by affirming morality and by dumping all supernatural. His religion was “morality and feelings of the eternal.” He laughed at the Virgin Birth, saying,
The being of God in Christ cannot be explained by absence of a male in his conception.
Enlightenment thinking evolved into Modern thinking, and it infected some Christians with a kind of elitist, condescending pride over neophytes who believed in the supernatural. Rudolph Bultmann (one of 20th Century’s most influential theologians) belittled believers when he said:
It is impossible to use electric lights and the wireless … and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.
Science And The Supernatural Can Still Get a Marriage License
The fairy-tale of science crushing the supernatural has a long, sordid history, but a light switch cannot disprove supernatural activity any more than the caveman’s invention of the wheel could. After Yuri Gagarin returned from his orbit of earth, Khrushchev said, “Gagarin flew into the heavens, but he didn’t see any god there.” C.S. Lewis retorted,
If there is a God who created the world, I could no more “meet” Him, than Hamlet could meet Shakespeare. If Hamlet wants to [find] Shakespeare, he’s not going to be able to find Shakespeare by going up into the top of the stage. The only way Hamlet will know about Shakespeare is if Shakespeare writes something about himself into the play.
By sending Jesus, God supernaturally wrote himself into the play.
Long before cosmonauts, and twenty-five hundred years before Schleiermacher or Bultmann, Job addressed the science snobs of his day (after being supernaturally inspired by God).
In the 28th chapter of his book, Job lists impressive engineering feats of his time: mankind cultivates bread from the earth, drives deep mines in forgotten lands, discovers gold and precious gems in the roots of mountains, dams up rivers, and brings to light secrets.
Yet Job observes that none of these technological achievements unearthed wisdom: evil people still oppress, human suffering still robs souls of joy, and the best doctors can’t surgically remove our self-centeredness.
Only God knows wisdom, and the humility of change, and the secrets of joy. Science gave us the technological tools to created genetic manipulations and nuclear bombs, but it doesn’t give us the supernatural wisdom to know if we should have invented them in the first place.
Can I Rant a Bit?
Did you smell snobbery in Bultmann when he equates understanding radio waves with proof that the supernatural is a delusion? He condescends to the fools of Jesus’s day, because they didn’t have light switches. Bultmann belittles the brains of disciples who saw the resurrection.
If I can ask Alexa to switch on my lights and can Zoom with my brother in Australia … then it is impossible to believe anything that neophyte, collaborating-conman, Bultmann proclaimed.
The Enlightened Christian feels equally fine either lighting a candle or flipping on a light switch immediately before asking God for a miraculous answer to prayer. Science is no obstacle.
But Christianity is nothing if it isn’t supernatural.
Sam
Dregs of Culture
This is tremendous, Sam. Thank you so much.
I knew it would resonate with you.
Thanks
Well done Sam.
Praise from the praiseworthy is praise indeed.
Thanks
Wow, Sam – after watching your interview with Gary today (could’t see it live) I am particularly impressed with your movement from Science, to Philososphy, to Theology and clearly discerning the flaws of the “Orthodox” in all three. Job can be such an intense Book, when we cast ourselves as the persecuted, doubting man who “thought he knew God”. Yet as you say above, Job merely conceived God as a distant personage who had no desire to interact with the beings He created. Job’s God insisted on Prayers, Worship and Offerings but who gave in return ONLY when we behaved exactly as He wished.
That viewpoint would characterize God as a “selfish man”. That viewpoint would make God ‘understandable’ and we would want to “help him”, as we might help a Homeless man on the street by giving him a dollar bill. (Just put the money in the offering plate and God will bless you!”)
But God doesn’t need your money. As you say in your video, He wants our worship for who He is, NOT whom we imagine Him to be. Job is really quite contemporary, if we see him as he really was, and see God as He really is!
This post really hit me in the heart!
Thanks, Sam!
Hi Jack,
Thanks. I really (REALLY!) love the book of Job. He is such a complex character. God says, “I have no one like him, blameless and upright.” (How would we like to hear God say that about us?) And after he loses his children and all his wealth (livestock), he worships God: Naked I came, naked I go, may God’s name be praised.
Later on, he questions God, sort of like, “I was so good, how could you do this to me?”
But I think it is Job’s friends who are the real Pharisees, not Job so much. Because Job keeps praying. Scripture is filled with condemnations of people who “murmur” against God; but Scripture is also filled with God’s praise of people who pray their lamentations to God. In the end, God doesn’t condemn Job, but he does rebuke Job’s friends. (He even tells them to ask Job to pray for them that they not be smitten!)
One of my all time favorite passages in Scripture is in Job chapter 14. It is so beautiful, I almost tear up reading it time and again. Here is the sequence in that chapter:
But then he moves into something beautiful. He anticipates our resurrection. And this is how he does it (Job 14:15-17). He says that even though he might be dead:
I don’t know how Job anticipated the resurrection. Nobody in those days knew about it. But somehow Job knew God’s heart so well that Job said God would bring us back from the dead because he longed for us.
Absolutely beautiful.
Sam
“But Christianity is nothing if it isn’t supernatural.”
Indeed. Each generation fancies itself more enlightened than the last, pointing to their achievements and advancements like the ancients used to point to their idols. In this day, it’s a spectacle flashy enough to fool even the elect, if that were possible. The elect are not special – they merely have a sight telling them the difference between an incandescent light bulb, and the Origin of light shining in their very soul.
Well written, as always.
Great line:
The very concept of a miracle is 1) that it can’t be explained by rational thought and 2} can’t be replicated. To separate miracles from Christianity is to presume it was thought up by a man named Jesus who was persecuted for his ideas and died…end of story.
How pathetic. I don’t understand how Bultman could call himself a Christian. Perhaps if he lived today he would not have.
Hi Tom,
I echo your ache, “I don’t understand how Bultmann could call himself a Christian”
And yet, throughout Christian history, there are been Christian thinkers who side more with their culture than with God’s word. Even back in the prophet Samuel’s day, Israel said, “Let us have a king like all the other nations.” All heresies have two things in common:
Like you, I just wish they would admit they have abandoned Christianity and created another religion. But something inside them refuses to admit their collaboration with the world.
And their apostasy infects millions of believers.
Sam