Faith
The Simple, Bare-Bones Secret to Radical Faith
Back in the early 19th century British Protestant missionary to China C. T. Studd said:
“Too long have we been waiting for one another to begin! The time for waiting is past!…
“Should such men as we fear?
“Before the whole world, aye, before the sleepy, luke-warm, faithless, namby-pamby Christian world, we will dare to trust our God,..and we will do it with His joy unspeakable singing aloud in our hearts.
“We will a thousand times sooner die trusting only in our God than live trusting in man.
“And when we come to this position the battle is already won, and the end of the glorious campaign in sight.
“We will have the real Holiness of God, not the sickly stuff of talk and dainty words and pretty thoughts; we will have a Masculine Holiness, one of daring faith and works of Jesus Christ.”
A manly, near-reckless faith. Where does one get that? Great question. First, let me explain what I’m doing this week.
Here’s the deal: I want to devote the entire week to what I started yesterday as a review of David Platt’s book Radical.
That book is simply too rich to compress into one 1,000 word post. And simply too valuable to drop after just one day.
We need to expand. So let’s go.
Resisting Typical Expectations
Arguably the best chapter in Radical is the second to the last: “Living When Dying Is Gain.” That chapter can be summed up like this:
The stories we hear about believers who are hated, beat and killed in distant countries are stories about people who’ve found a desire deeper than the basic human will for self-preservation: the desire to serve Christ and be his witness.
This desire even trumps the fear of death.
In fact, death isn’t viewed as an enemy and a coffin as a rot box. They’re viewed as a reward and a launching pad. This is the essence of what Jesus taught in Matthew 10:38-39:
And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
Thus, when talented young men and women dismiss the expectations and promises of the world to live in filthy Palestinian refugee camps on the outskirts of Egypt…
Or in dilapidated section 8 housing in dangerous urban neighborhoods to share the gospel with the people who live there…
Only to die in obscurity a few months or years later…
Their lives are not a waste and neither are their deaths a tragedy. Rather, those lives are treasures and those deaths rewards.
Let me explain what I mean by that.
Death Is Dead to Me
The Bible teaches us that the instant we die we are ushered into the presence of Christ.
In that instant we glimpse God’s glory and unimaginable majesty. Remember, this is the great reward of the gospel: God himself.
But WAY too many Christian’s have lost that vision. A vision confiscated by the American Dream.
See, when we accept the reality that death is nothing more than a line we cross between life and God’s presence, something happens to us: We embrace a near-reckless devotion to spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ.
This is the way Paul puts it:
When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
“Death is swallowed up in victory.” “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?”
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Corinthians 15:54-57
Death has been conquered. And victory secured. What do we have to fear?
Don’t Make This Mistake
Some people bristle at the notion of setting our minds on death and the afterlife because they believe it makes us worthless here on the earth.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The person who sets his mind on heaven knows that his destiny is secure and glorious. He’s free to live the most radical life of love and sacrifice here on earth.
Listen. The hope of safety in the afterlife cures us of timidity, fear and hopelessness. It releases a radical, risk-taking love that baffles skeptics and forces them to ask for the reason for the hope that is in us.
When you invest emotional and mental equity into the hope that death is reward and the doorway to our savior, you’ll be set free to live a fearless, near-reckless life of love and sacrifice.
That’s the kind of believer the modern church should be training and churning out. What can we do to make that happen in our own churches? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
What Is True Saving Faith?
When the Apostles proclaimed the gospel in the first century, it had a certain content.
People could reject that content. But they could also accept it as true.
They could even believe in it.
Yet, that still left them with out true saving faith.
Listen: Accurate content and sincere belief in that content doesn’t amount to saving faith…
Those are necessary elements–but not sufficient elements. There’s one more element.
Let’s address the first two elements before we get to that last one.
Notitia–the First Element of Saving Faith
One, we must make sure that content is accurate. No use believing in something that isn’t true or heretical.
As you probably know, there’s something dreadfully wrong with this statement: “It doesn’t matter what they believe–as long as they are sincere.”
Joseph Kony was sincere in his belief that he was called by God to abduct children, murder entire families and displace over a million Sudanese so he could establish a theocratic kingdom.
Sincerity can go awfully wrong.
The same is true for Christians: It’s meaningless to be sincere in our belief but not know whether our belief is accurate or not.
We risk heresy if we do otherwise. Thus, the first element of saving faith is accurate content–notitia. Let’s look at the second.
Assensus–the Second Element of Saving Faith
Second, we must believe that content is true. We must assent to it. This is assensus.
But it’s still not enough to redeem us.
I believe that Augustine wrote the City of God. However, that doesn’t redeem me. There has to be something more.
Fiducia–the Third Element to Saving Faith
The third element to saving faith is fiducia–personal trust and commitment in the accurate content we believe.
This is when a Christian accepts, receives and RELIES on Christ alone.
Granted, the message of that content is important. I could put my trust and commitment in Augustine–but it wouldn’t do me any good.
He’s not offering salvation. Only Jesus Christ is.
What Saving Faith Does to Our Lives
We look to Jesus [not Augustine nor any man] for justification, sanctification and eternal life.
With saving faith, we tremble at the commands of God…yield in obedience to the mandates of Christ…and put our trust in the promises of God for now and for the future.
In essence, it radically rearranges our lives. Christ becomes our object of delight. Our obsession.
And we long to do nothing more than please him. [We don't always succeed, but that's another story.]
Here’s the core content we we confess as true, deserving of our belief and worthy of our submission:
That Christ was born, willingly and perfectly lived under the law of God and died as an atoning act. We believe he was dead, buried and rose again.
Only when we believe that information is accurate and trust it holds the power to save us can we safely say we are born again. Anything less and Jesus is not saving us.
Pluralism [What You Need to Know--and Why]
**Guest post by Rob Powell. Part of a series on truth.**
In continuing our discussion about truth and absolutism let’s move to how that idea intersects with the wide diversity of faiths represented in our world, specifically in the concept called “pluralism.”
We’ve all heard the allegory of the blind men feeling different parts of an elephant.
Each man describes a completely different animal based on what part they are feeling.
The moral of the story is that each is relating just a small but true part of a larger truth.
This parable is a feel good way to reconcile the differences between the thousands of different religions in society.
In fact, somebody should make a song out of it so they can add a verse to It’s a Small World.
Pluralism: The Good and the Bad
On the surface pluralism seems like a reasonable explanation for the diversity of faiths we see.
Nobody gets their feelings hurt by being told they are wrong and everybody gets to do what they think is true.
A little deeper inspection though shows that just like relativism this view falls apart under it’s own weight.
To allow all these discordant faiths to agree the pluralist has to do a few things, but first let’s take a look where faiths disagree.
Do All Religions [Basically] Agree? Eh, No.
To make that less than a 2 year doctoral thesis we’ll limit our discussion to the most populous religions.
Not that numbers equals truth but even the most PC pluralist isn’t going to say that the Heaven’s Gate Cult or the Branch Davidians has a truth claim equally as valid as Buddhism or Islam.
Bottom line: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism all have a diagnosis for what is wrong with humanity and a cure to fix it.
It’s past the scope of this article to delve into all the differences but they are not insignificant. Here are a few:
The number of gods. Some religions believe there is no God while others believe in only one and still others embracing many.
The problem of sin. All religions describe a very different program to curing sin.
The body and mortality. Each religion seeks to explain the purpose behind our bodies and solve the riddle of death.
In all these examples, the cures range from faith in Christ, to an esoteric experience where we see we are immaterial self aware beings with all knowledge or to realizing that all we are is fleeting conscious states.
The pattern here is clear.
There are a diversity of perceived spiritual problems–and a myriad of just as diverse solutions.
What We Must Avoid
To try and boil all this down and just say that people are broken and need a cure would be as silly as saying a person has “sick” and needs “better”.
If your appendix has ruptured you will not find a doctor that recommends in vitro fertilization.
Each specific diagnosis needs a specific remedy.
Maybe the pluralist believes that God will save those not of a certain tradition based on how they responded to what knowledge they had accessible to them. For example, the Christian God might save Buddhists because they were sincere in their belief.
Unfortunately this is not what ANY of these individual faiths teach. Also, past just the general diagnosis, religions disagree on what makes up a human.
What the Pluralist Must Do to Make Religions “Agree”
Do we have an enduring soul or are we merely a collection of momentary states? Either people come in two (or more) distinct flavors or you have to believe these both of these self contradicting things to be true at the same time.
So how does the pluralist make all of this work for them?
For example, there is no mechanism in the Christian worldview where the Buddhist’s sin problem is resolved outside of faith in Christ. Nor is there is no mechanism in the Buddhist tradition whereby the Christian becomes enlightened.
So the pluralist must create their own system whereby the two are compatible and neither can hold the other as incorrect.
This involves either treating all religious exclusive claims as either being non-literal (mythical) or having limited importance.
This would include any claims to miracle which would seem to add credence to one faith over another. What really matters to the pluralist is harmony, love, justice and unity.
In other words, how you live your faith (orthopraxy) is more important than what how your faith says you should live (orthodoxy).
The Pluralist’s Sleight of Hand
But did you see what just happened there? The pluralist in attempting to negate all the exclusive claims of different religions created an exclusive claim of their own.
The pluralist denies the Muslim a chance to define his or her own religion with exclusive claims but is completely free to do so themselves.
Pluralism fails pluralistically. Which brings us back to the elephant.
A pluralist takes each person describing their religious truth and enlightenment and says “Yes but what you don’t know is that you are blind and only see in part.”
That’s perfectly laughable because the implication is that the pluralist can see just fine and in whole–and you can’t.
In the end, he’s more than happy to make a claim to exceptional knowledge that he won’t let any single faith make own their own.
The Pluralist Is Just as Blind
As you can see, pluralism isn’t an overarching view that combines all faiths in one big bubble bath of goodness. It’s just one more view claiming special enlightenment and truth–which isn’t very pluralistic, don’t you think?
So when someone says “What matters is that it makes sense to me and enables me to grow spiritually,” it’s easy to see the benefit to this claim even taken at face value and not applying it to itself.
It allows everyone to do what they want how they want to do it.
But if there is no objective truth to be found outside of one’s belief then you can never be wrong in what you believe.
In essence you’ve created a Stepford God that is made in your own image–he’s a robotic butler who will never contradict you but always please you.
Unfortunately this approach destroys the distinction between the terms “truth” and “belief” and implies that something is true because “I believe it.”
Where Pluralism Threatens the Christian Church
So where does pluralism affect the Christ follower and it’s church. Here’s a quote from JP Moreland’s book Love Your God with All Your Mind that I think says it well.
[Such] a church . . . will become . . . impotent to stand against the powerful forces of secularism that threaten to bury Christian ideas under a veneer of soulless pluralism and misguided scientism. In such a context, the church will be tempted to measure her success largely in terms of numbers—numbers achieved by cultural accommodation to empty selves. In this way, . . . the church will become her own grave digger; her means of short-term “success” will turn out to be the very thing that marginalizes her in the long run.
The call is clear to preach the obnoxious and offensive gospel to a world and church that most of the time doesn’t want to hear it.
How Faith Is Created in Your Soul
Ever wonder how you got the faith necessary to believe Christ is the Son of God?
Some people would tell you that God’s grace assists a believer to exercise his faith…
A faith that’s native to his being.
That’s the so-called semi-Pelagian view.
And on this view, everything depends decisively on a person’s response.
But this was not the view of Augustine, Luther, Calvin or Edwards. Nor is it the teaching of the New Testament.
The New Testament tells us that we are spiritually dead and blind rebels and unless the Holy Spirit raises us from spiritual death, God’s offer of grace would be like giving water to a dead man.
Dead men don’t drink water.
Neither do dead men respond to offers of grace. At least not until they are raised from the dead.
This view is spelled out in Paul’s letters. For instance, Paul writes, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”
What is NOT our doing? Paul is clear: the origination of our faith.
The Killer Blow to Semi-Pelagianism
Yes, it becomes our faith. We exercise that faith. Nobody else does it for us. But we can’t exercise what we don’t have, so God, through salvation, gives us faith to accept his grace.
Paul’s simple statement is a deathblow to all forms of semi-Pelagianism. It affirms that the faith by which you are justified…by which you are united in Christ…and that is the instrumental cause of your justification…did not originate in some activity or decision of your will.
It did not come from unregenerate flesh. It came from God. Decisively.
God made a promise to save every person who responds to the gospel with faith:
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16
Fortunately for us that response doesn’t depend on our self-absorbed, wretched will.
No. It depends on God. That way our faith is eternally stable and secure. Our preservation is a promise that can’t be broken.
In all things–from creation to redemption to glorification–he remains the sovereign, provident and all-powerful God.
And that is a God worthy of our adoration.
Anthony Horvath: Director of Apologetics Ministry Talks
I get the feeling that Anthony Horvath doesn’t sleep.
The guy’s got a lot going on.
For starters, he’s the director of Athanatos Christian Ministries, an organization “committed to applying the Christian world view in creative contexts that range from Christian apologetics to education to the edification of the church to literature and the arts.”
He’s also a public speaker on the pro-life circuit [for good reasons]. An author of two fiction books. The founder of a literary apologetics writing contest. And the brains behind this publishing group.
Throw in a wife and four children–and Anthony is busy. But very interesting. As you’re about to see.
1. Give me a little bio of you and your ministry.
I was raised in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and had every intention of becoming a pastor when, in my first year of college, abandoned my beliefs.
When faith returned, my new passion was Christian apologetics.
I graduated with a pastoral ministry degree with a minor in the Biblical languages and then proceeded to be a religion teacher and other church work positions.
In the midst of the professional church work I continued to do apologetics. I started with AOL and then moved to forum discussions.
About five years ago circumstances conspired so that I became a ’stay at home’ dad and apologetics my ‘full time’ activity. I am a father of four, and on account of the birth of my daughter who has spina bifida, my ministry has a distinctly pro-life bend in it, too.
2. What motivated you to start Athanatos Christian Ministries?
ACM made official what had been going on all along. There are any number of duties involved in running a ministry, much of them having nothing to do with ministry at all. People don’t appreciate this fact. I think small businessmen will understand, though.
Most of the ministry activities we’re doing now were started before ACM became an official non-profit. I chose the name ‘Athanatos,’ which is Greek for ‘immortal’ or ‘not dying’ rather than ‘Sntjohnny’ (my AOL presence my ministry began with) to cast a larger vision for an apologetics ministry.
“He has set eternity in the hearts of men…” Solomon said. As Lewis said, “We have never met a mere mortal.”
I take as my starting point that everyone is longing for truth and meaning and they pursue it as naturally as they breathe. ACM seeks to facilitate that pursuit by any means possible.
3. You state on Anthanatos website that you no longer believe “the best, exclusive use of my time is to reach out and contend with atheists.” I like how you qualified that statement, but I’ve found in my own experience that engaging atheists enhances my understanding of my faith and actually better prepares me to answer challenging questions from Christians. Would you agree with that statement or disagree.
Well, I can see how this might come across as not wanting to engage with atheists but perhaps the statement should be understood by contrast to what I was doing before. My discussion forum, slightly a ghost town now used to consume all of my time.
When I say ‘my time’ I mean something on the order of 40 to 60 hours a week.
This includes the loads of reading and research that one would have to do to write intelligently. I draw heavily on this experience as I seek to equip Christians.
I definitely think that that kind of engagement is useful, because it helps us bridge the gap between what we think people’s objections will be and what they actually are.
I still contend with atheists (and others!). It just isn’t as much of my time as before. Also, as alluded to before, much more of my time is needed to management and administration of the ministry, which is a reality I’m not particularly happy about.
4. In 2006, you said that the Church was actually creating atheists. What did you mean by that? You also said that if you made that statement today, it’d hardly get noticed. What’s changed in four years?
That 2006 pronouncement was born of my realization that many, if not most, if not even all, of the atheists I was conversing with had been raised in the Church.
This goes to the other reason why I’ve shifted my time to equipping Christians over against banging heads with atheists: I deemed it might be more practical to stop Christians from falling away in the first place rather than try to win them back after they were long gone.
The really controversial part of my 2006 pronouncement, though, was that the Church itself was instrumental in breeding atheists.
Now, a certain natural cycle of doubt and questioning and a certain amount of people deciding that Christianity doesn’t have the answers is to be expected and is not problematic on its face.
The problem is that the Church is doing a poor job making sure that people are asking the right questions and then exposing them to the best answers. It’s worse than that: much Christian education actually sets people up to be clobbered when they finally started thinking through their faith.
I think Ken Ham’s Already Gone documents this very well. That book represents a survey that he personally commissioned and to his surprise they discovered that those most likely to have hardened positions against Christianity were those who had been through Sunday School, VBS, Confirmation, and the like.
Nonbelievers who were ’softer’ on Christianity hadn’t actually been through any Christian programming! While I don’t agree with Ham’s total conclusions, I think his theory on why this particular phenomena is taking place is probably correct.
Since I made that pronouncement in 2006, there have been a variety of studies that have come out showing that a high percentage of unbelievers were raised in the Church. Ken Ham I mentioned. Barna has produced numerous reports indicating something is amiss. There are others, too.
It isn’t a controversial pronouncement any more because I think generally speaking it is agreed that there is something seriously, seriously wrong in the transmission of the faith.
The remaining dispute is over what is wrong and what to do about it.
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