The Anatomy of a Question — Several stories

Peace comes first, then certainty

Part 1

"For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind" (2 Timothy 1:7).

Who, me?

The cynic sneers, "You may as well tell a depressed person he's not been given a spirit of depression but of joy. 'Well where is it then?' he should ask." This is, at its roots, a question about sanctification and its evidences. Without new experiences to impress upon us new visions, we run over old ground with our imaginative guesswork and analytical games until the ground is scored with hypnotic new patterns that distract us from the authentic inspiration.

Contumaciousness about those patterns is neither a denial nor affirmation of truth, but an attitude toward people that grates against our essential need to constantly explore. The contumacious person creates anxiety by preventing exploration from happening; this results in either obsession with the exploratory maneuvering around the dogma whilst preserving it, or stubborn anti-intellectualism (which is ultimately impossibly self-contradictory). The Pharisees kept God's Word, but it is to be preached rather than preserved. Doing the former resulted in a good reformation and there may be more to come. An imperious person says it is sinful to ask questions, yet we must at least ask with Gauguin, "D'où venons nous, Que sommes nous, Où allons nous?"

And yet.

No question was ever born of a certainty, and Christians are certainly certain of some things. Yes, everyone has been guilty of mistreating people who ask questions or of mistreating those who waver in their certainty about matters for which we have a vested interest. But that is an attitude toward people, not toward truth. In other words, it points to a moral failure in us. It is because of sin that we do this. Another thing we might do out of frustration is to question why someone would ask questions at all. But imagine someone asks me how I know that 2 and 2 make 4. Would I be so frustrated if I could answer them by holding up four fingers and counting aloud? Of course not—not, at least, unless I'm impatient as a general character flaw. What this demonstrates is that uncertainty in those who field the questions and are asked to answer them is the fault—not the questions themselves, no matter how obvious, impertinent, silly, or pointless, some questions may seem.

Many atheists struggle—sometimes with even more success than Christians—to be moral people in the world. What, then, is God doing by our sanctification if Christians are often worse moral actors than pagans? To answer, we should bear in mind two things:

(1) Creation and all of us in it are not a rough draft or a waste; there will be a new heavens and a new earth where our sanctification will have been made complete (and what sets Christians apart isn't our struggle against sin but our redemption and right relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ). Creation doesn't need a do-over; God's will is done and his people are redeemed. Christians aren't merely preserved but raised to new life. The Christian can only study the Bible and try his best to apply what he learns about the will of the living God. This is an ignorance that was covered by Christ's righteousness. Furthermore, we are also passive in the knowledge we receive of God from Scripture in the sense that it is given only in the Word and only received by faith; knowledge of God, in other words, isn't cooked up by the application of our imaginations to the text. So, Christians aren't coworkers in their own spiritual education, though we are coworkers in applying what we have learned through Christian work in our vocations.

(2) Questions of any sort are neither the fruit of faith, nor are they inroads or signposts to the objects of faith. The Creator of the universe and of you is not trying to communicate with us by way of puzzles or questions or signs we have to be clever to catch. When we draw from extra-biblical sources for any certain knowledge about any matter that has us invoking God in conversation about it, even the most seemingly-benign observations are ultimately expressions of sin or shame. My hope, therefore, is not for satisfactory answers to why we suffer shame and sin in this life; I wouldn't hope for answers to questions born of the very faults I bemoan in my questioning. Christians are not to swallow the words of Scripture as though we might be spiritually sustained by them in our sleep. The Bible evokes our imaginations—as would any good teacher. Unfortunately, many of us still operate on a 'seeing is believing' principle and, because we do this, we will never be satisfied by merely hearing history, poetry, promises, and so forth.

What are we to imagine, then, when we consider our hopes for the hereafter, when even these hopeful things are biblically defined in a way that clashes with what we know about the world from extra-biblical sources? For example : (1) When we eliminate all things that are made valuable by some lack, scarcity, or disorder, what is left? (1a) Did people first put on clothes because they were ashamed to be naked or was it for (now) commonsense protections against the elements? (1b) What will buildings in the new heavens and new earth be there to shelter us from? Inclement weather? (2) We know power only by measure of exertion against resistance. Is God's infinite power therefore inconceivable?

Christians know, first of all, that what is written in the Bible is true (more on this later). Such questions as I asked above are non sequitur responses to the Bible and they are protests against its truth. "Did God really say…?" (Genesis 3:1). At any rate, I'll answer each question very briefly : (1) What is left is what makes them valuable as more than remedies to suffering. (2) God's infinite power cannot be entirely comprehended but the fact of it is given to us—not conceived by us.

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Part 2

We began with the question of what God is doing in our sanctification. I've just shown that questions of any kind are born of uncertainty about more than the content of the question. Let's venture deeper into the topic of how certainty is one result of sanctification.

For honest, moral actors, what is good takes the place of what is certain in their minds. I think it's better to experience peace than certainty. So what of that experience of "peace?" Are Christians actually more deeply hopeful or joyful as well? My first answer: Honestly, who cares? Our primary transformation (if we can talk about it this way) is eternal life, not exceptional cheerfulness.

But this feels a bit like a dodge. It was a hard question. Why are Christians just as miserable or as happy as everyone else? We worry as much, albeit about different things. The happy people are happy, the worriers worry, and only the subject matter of what occupies our minds is different.

I think the answer will have to be a denial of the premise that we are indeed just as happy or unhappy as everyone else. It might go like this: insofar as we are conformed to Christ, we are perfectly happy; insofar as we conform to the world, we are topsy-turvy—not necessarily unhappy, but only satisfied or dissatisfied by temporary pleasures or gains and losses. But we shouldn't be so fluid in how we relate to God depending on our stormy thoughts; we wouldn't conflate eternal things with our acne or a broken limb either. We shouldn't analyze what we read and hear as much as we simply receive it as God's word for us. When He requires it of us, we'll remember what's necessary.

Evangelists sometimes teach that we want something else more deeply than what we want in any given moment. But you can't measure desires by their depths and illegitimate the more shallow desires as being somehow unreal. Desires don't have depth; they have intensity. Sometimes what I want really is undeniable and intense, and yet I know that I should not want it. What then? I pray for a new and clean heart — but is that for new desires? What would they be, precisely? I can answer generically: to do the will of God. But precisely what is that when it comes to experiencing the most intense and mutual sexual attraction, for example? Simply to berate oneself for what came to him before he could even reflect on it and decide it wasn't true or deep or real? Likewise, one moral teacher might say that having such a desire met wouldn't really, truly, deeply make one happy — but what one single thing does make anyone perfectly happy?

All desires are ephemeral, save one; we change our minds, even after the fact, as to what we want. The one desire that is not ephemeral is the one that is sacrificed when we have sinful desires met. But no desire is met without sacrificing another desire. So a moral question arises here. How to choose is no longer a matter of ignorance regarding which object we want more deeply (because there's no such thing), neither is it a matter of choosing the more intense desire (because we are fickle and our regrets often tell us after the fact which was indeed more intensely sought), but it is a moral decision. The one desire that is not ephemeral is lasting because it is something like the promise of an eternally, publicly, vindicated record of who we truly are— truly, yes, and beneath the always changing masks. We are only that man or woman in Christ.

What is it like to always have that saved, vindicated, self in Christ in mind? Well, for starters it answers "Qui sommes nous?" (Who are we?) Does that come with any expectation of a difference in quality of life for being Christian? For example, couldn't someone argue that it makes Christians at least smarter than highly superstitious tribespeople, and by being smarter they make healthier this-world choices too (barring the odd bridge collapse or cancer diagnosis, of course)? Even then, though, the Christian society would be more likely to organize the research for a cure (for obvious reasons, I think). The slippery slope leads down to prosperity gospel junk. But that doesn't mean what's observably true is false: that a Christian will probably be happier not only because of the gospel hope in him but also because he'll make better decisions conforming maybe to natural law.

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Part 3

The opposite of faith is not neutrality but skepticism. I mentioned above that Christians know the Bible is true. There is one certain way to settle with the idea that it is not—not, at least, in the sense Christians mean when they say that it is true. That way is this: to say that Christianity was at its roots a cult which followed a failed apocalyptic prophet; the intellectual believers in this cult, in a desperation all charitable people can sympathize with, said to themselves, "It must still be true, we must be reading this the wrong way." And in the spirit of all unmet Jewish expectations for themselves as the favored people of God, they lived in denial, and churned out unfalsifiable hypothesis after unfalsifiable hypothesis for why the Messiah did not come soon.

Though the above psychological reductionism is absurd, why did they believe so unskeptically as they did? Is there anything that we can say that changes minds such that people experience, by receiving the Word of God, something like the sort of humbled or fearful awareness of God we see in the Bible that won't be a trick of the mind? Are there enough parables in the world to convince those of us believers who, Bible in hand, want to believe but cannot? If there were some combination of words or concepts that a genius or some council of learned men could conjure that would convince the Muslim about the Trinity, for example, then the most essential problem would be ignorance rather than sin.

Too many of us are tempted to think of our pre-scientific ancestors as ignorant, simplistic, or irrational. When something happens that we don't understand, we moderns often allege that it was a "random" occurrence. Ironically, we'd in the next breath accuse our ancestors of ignorance when we consider that they'd suppose God had done it. Who is more correct? The same effect is had, by the way, when we ask ourselves why we believe anything as a foundational axiom (e.g., I could ask myself whether, if I should start again with nothing but empty hands to turn pages, I would come to believe as I do now).

The truth is that no matter what it was, nothing happens without God being in ultimate control. Now apply that to evil. Our ancestors would say Satan or his minions are behind the evil; whereas, what would the moderns say? We'd just as likely say that it was "random" again. Who has the more simplistic view? Let's consider a personal tragedy involving something like an airplane crash—our ancestors would say God was in control; whereas we would say, "it was random"; moreover, we'd go on to claim that there couldn't be a Christian God with all His supposed attributes if such random and inexplicable things happen (following the general rule that if we can't replicate it, it's random; and if we can't explain it, it's inexplicable). But then, again ironically, we go on to try to explain what happened in terms of mechanical failures, etc. Rationality is the product of consistency of thought. So who is being more consistent?

Now almost invariably the 21st century atheist will complain that this could apply to any other kind of replacement of the Christian God. Why not the Muslim god? Why not Thor? Why not the Flying Spaghetti Monster? But this objection is either a failure or refusal to acknowledge who and what we mean by God. If they consistently and rationally continued to explain how Thor could have just as easily brought everything into existence, they'll end up describing Thor as having all the attributes of our God.

They'll have simply (read: stupidly) replaced God's name with Thor to be clever. Well, they may call Him what they like, but they're still thinking of God. I'd suggest they be more rational and consistent and call Him by his name.

Let's dive into a couple of examples of the supposed ignorance of ancient people that the 21st century reader might find absurd, yet that wouldn't pose a stumbling block for the 1st century nonbelieving reader. First century Jews were scientifically ignorant by our standards — did they think there were any epileptics that weren't demon possessed? I've seen commentators say that the demon "aggravated" the condition of epilepsy, and others comment that it wasn't epilepsy at all but a possession that merely looked precisely like epilepsy. And to my mind, the only way to know for sure which was meant would be to know whether the people of that day thought that all such conditions were the effects of demon possession. Consider the account of an angel "stirring up water" in the pool of Bethesda. Was this also something we would see now through our post-Enlightenment, naturalistic, eyes? As Christians, we might be quick to say something to the effect of, "Yes, that's an angel because the Bible says so; however, since we also know that such-and-such chemical in that water has therapeutic qualities, therefore we can add that this angel is 'working through natural means'." Or would we actually see an angel in the pool? The greatest frustration here isn't that people are commenting from deep knowledge of epilepsy, of therapeutic natural springs, or of exactly what happened in either scene (as if they have more words on the page than I do in front of me); the biggest frustration is with the commentators writing as if they're not simply guessing.

Then I come across this explanation: "However, the Bible does mention epilepsy as a condition separate from demon possession. Matthew 4:24 says, "So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, those oppressed by demons, epileptics, and paralytics, and he healed them" (emphasis added). Here epilepsy is listed with other physical ailments, indicating that epilepsy is a medical condition that can cause symptoms similar to demonic possession. Jesus healed epileptics, and He also cast out demons. The two conditions were not synonymous" (https://www.gotquestions.org/epilepsy-Bible.html). When I read that, I think, "well that might be satisfactory for now." But in the end, what and whom am I believing? All I can say for certain at this point is that there was an angel in the pool, and there was a demon possessing the boy.

Continuing down this path, exploring the possibility that the chief roadblock to belief is ignorance, there's another pebble in the shoe of believers who spend most of their Bible reading time fighting away doubts in its veracity: contradictions in the Bible. There are six contradictions I've picked out that I think are often avoided as too difficult or troubling for an easy answer. Here they are: The Lukan Census of Quirinius, Did Jesus tell them to bring a staff?, Where did Jesus go after his birth?, Had Jairus' daughter already died?, Had Jairus' daughter already died? (another view), What time of what day was Jesus crucified?, Does the NT misquote the OT? (1) Does the NT misquote the OT (2). I've posted these videos because I think they include decent overviews of each supposed problem and good solutions to the problems without avoiding the harder-to-reconcile details.

Let's talk about the manuscript traditions and textual variants. When I read my Bible, at the bottom of every page there are footnotes. Most of these footnotes are the products of uncertainties. When I read my Bible, I want the word of God—not yet another scholarly discussion on what the Academy thinks the Word might maybe possibly could've been (depending on our current archeological recovery of ancient fragments). Does that mean I should blithely dismiss scholarship and live in a fantasyland where those uncertainties don't exist? No, because if they mattered enough for a footnote, they matter enough for at least one blog post.

The Septuagint and the Masoretic texts in Jeremiah 31:32 have very different meanings. Which thing did God say to Jeremiah? Hebrews quotes the Masoretic text, which says God told Jeremiah, "I showed no concern for them." But when I flip back to Jeremiah, God says to him, "I was their husband". When I read Hebrews, God tells Jeremiah one thing. When I read Jeremiah, God tells Jeremiah something else. In Hebrew, that's one letter difference in one word. Clearly someone goofed in their copy work.

The problem with that is that we don't seem to know what God said to Jeremiah. Sure, we can get the "gist" of it and this tiny discrepancy doesn't change dogmas—but is that all we read the Bible for? Reaffirming a shortlist of dogmas that came from the parts of the Bible about which we're certain? Of course not!

Christians believe Jesus Christ is the Lord of history. That means He guides all things—the manner in which we got our Bibles included. According to my best understanding of the principle behind those who advocate for the received text (KJV-onlyism), the Protestant reformation was also a reformation of the manuscript tradition. If I were in that camp, I would argue that Christians know whom exactly God guided (the folks who put together the TR) by their confessions and by the self-authenticating Scripture in the KJV — rather than knowing who was specially, divinely guided, by any claims to authority or archeological discoveries of better texts. According to this view, God didn't just guard and recover the gospel but the canon, too. He is the Lord of history! Then again, this would mean God has only preserved the real Bible in small English speaking American denominations. Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, on the other hand, have it that God decided to guard the truth through specific people whom we know by their offices rather than by their confessions. I don't like either of these options.

But why bother with any of this? What is a theologically significant reason for trying to get back to the autographs with academic research? If we say that it is absolutely certain that uncovering new variants yields no theologically significant result—that is, if we preclude the possibility entirely that something could be discovered that changes entire books of the New Testament—then we have the absurd result that, by definition, no content of Scripture can have ever affected theology; after all, by the first premise we asserted that Scripture and theology were of separate, non-overlapping categories. If we have the verses of Scripture as our sole source for dogma, then why is it impossible that dogma should change if we had more verses of Scripture? Textual variants may be small and seemingly irrelevant, but that doesn't mean every future discovery of new variants won't be more significant. As Christians, we cannot claim that some textual variant is the Word of God whereas another isn't on the basis of the first one being found in an older manuscript fragment. That's not how we know if something is the Word of God—not, at least, if we're going to consider the Bible self-authenticating.

In response, we'd have two arguments available to us. The first would be that theology—our received doctrines in particular—isn't solely derived from information in the Bible, but is perhaps received alongside the Bible. Moreover, we'd claim that no such discoveries are even possible for no other reason than this: that God in his providence would not have allowed us to be so deceived for 2,000 years. That is the argument for Sacred Tradition, especially as defined by Yves Congar in the Roman Catholic tradition of the twentieth century. Moreover, if we have to uncover the true readings now, then it's too late to say that there was a plenary Scripture for everyone who came before us. Discovering the truth of what God says in the Bible would be a matter of dialectic or historical consensus. That is precisely the thrust of JH Newman's presentation of God's providence.

One thing is certain. All Christians, whether they know it or not, at least implicitly trust that God's hand isn't only in the autographs but is also in the recovery of every manuscript tradition, their eventual compilation, and canonization. Otherwise, who knows what could change if it's all a matter of what imperfect people have cobbled together, unguided by God? God is not the deist's Watchmaker; He didn't disappear from history after inspiring the original texts! If the preservation, recovery, and canonization of whatever manuscript traditions were uniquely guided by God, then we begin talking about God's activity in far more than the inspiration of an original text (e.g. Holy Tradition of Roman Catholicism, or the KJV advocate's divine preservation of the received text during the Reformation). But what should the non-Roman Catholic, non-Eastern Orthodox, non-KJV onlyist, Christian believe about the relationship between the Word and all the various manuscript traditions with their variants?

Without further ado, here is my answer to the question of uncertain textual variants: We know God's Word chiefly and most intimately by its work in our lives and not by holding various manuscripts up to scientific standards, looking for markers to indicate what is or isn't the Word. That means we should begin to think about these problems by first keeping in mind that God grabs ahold of us and turns our lives around. The Bible isn't the sole Source of Christian belief—God is! We are not convinced by hypotheticals which allow for the non-existence of God at the helm of history. Our ignorance of how God uses what are clearly different textual traditions that comprise his Word reflects our limits and failures and no one else's. The ending to the Lord's Prayer, for example, seems to be something that was incorporated into the text because, since we find it in the Didache, there's good reason to believe that it was in the liturgy of the early church. If we didn't know this, then all we'd know would be that "for thine is the kingdom…" was just something that "was added"—as if it were an arbitrary, uninspired, insignificant, fact of history. Why does it matter that it was in the liturgy? Because that was the Divine Service: a place where the Word was delivered to the saints in the Christian churches.

Additional helps: https://lutherantheology.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/scripture-and-faith/ (Hermann Sasse) ; https://www.christforus.org/Papers/Content/Luther%20and%20Biblical%20Infallibility.pdf (Robert Preus) ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaX6z-tIM_E , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY-DKVNRfGs (Jeff Kloha) ; https://ethosinstitute.sg/poisonous-snakes/ ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UByE-mr-2vE

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Part 4

Having now covered the supposed contradictions, the corruption of the manuscript traditions, the ignorance of ancient people, and psychological reductionism of the sort we often see leveled against Christian apologists, we've reached the most difficult problems I can think of: If Christianity is true, then the difficulties in being a Christian—according to Christian teaching itself—should be suffering and sinning, not doubting and straining to make sense of the Bible. It should be easy for a Christian to see the folly of caricaturing Christianity as the forced compliance to laws embedded within a story about historical events for which there is no evidence. The greatest challenge should not be to logically reconcile different accounts in the text with each other. In other words, received in faith, the Word of God shouldn't remain a puzzle; the difficulty should be what the texts say will be difficult (e.g., the world rejecting Christians, etc). So then, when we study these biblical accounts, why are so many of us tempted to say we are satisfied by the mere possibility of logical non-contradiction between them? Why can a skilled apologist lay out several options he has invented in order to show that the two stories don't necessarily contradict? That doesn't tell us anything about what we're actually reading except that, somehow, for the sake of someone somewhere, it's all "true" (whatever it is).

Are we supposed to be so convinced by the Scriptures being true that we have faith? Or are we supposed to believe that, no matter what this text is communicating, it's better to commit to it being true a priori? I'd answer with a question in reply: Truly what? It's meaningless to say "it's true but I don't know what it is." It isn't helpful to study in order to be convinced that "the Bible is true". We study true accounts, letters, poems, and so forth, in order to discover what happened, what the message is, etc. We must stop asking whether we believe in x, y, or z, and explore the accounts as we would any other. And an attitude of pre-emptive defensiveness about the inerrancy of God's Word won't help anyone actually believe that it is inerrant (no, I'm not saying it isn't inerrant, but I am saying that that fact is a non sequitur when someone asks why they ought to believe what's in the Bible!) The proof of the pudding is in the eating it. Whether or not Jesus was a failed apocalyptic prophet boils down to whether or not we hear the Word with faith in Christ. Faith comes by hearing!

I'll close this section with a quote from Pieper. "What the church lacks in our day is not a reliable text of the Bible, but faith in a sufficiently reliable text." I think that if we understand sufficiency as truly being enough, then only by flights of irrationality (misunderstanding or refusing to accept the word "sufficiency") or by our entertaining sin and vice would we seek for more than what we receive from God.

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Part 5

Our attitude toward truth is either one of certainty or uncertainty. I don't believe that peace comes as a result of certainty but that peace is rather an absolute precondition for it. Sin, not ignorance, is why we don't have peace. We think we want to know the world in greater detail because that knowledge will give us certainty, and certainty will give us peace of mind—but, ironically, this is a false perception. Sin is the reason we don't have peace, certainty, love, hope, or joy in us; it's the reason we don't heed God's Word when we hear it; it's the reason we are scornful and imperious instead of soft-hearted and sympathetic to the lost who, but for the grace of God, are we.

How do I know all of that? How do I know when something is certainly true? We know something is true when, given a sound mind, we no longer feel compelled to ask. But if we aren't yet Christians, I submit that we can start by acknowledging that we all sense that we have a Creator, that history is real and moves in a certain direction rather than cyclically or randomly, and that death is tragic. If we start there, then at least we'll have established how to know when something is true, namely, whether it coheres with those observations. We can continue down that path, taking note of all our discoveries along the way, but none of them will deliver us that one good thing we must not sacrifice.