I’ve always had somewhat of a love-hate relationship with my Biblical Studies “career.” Back in 1995-1996, I attended Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia for the sole purpose of wanting to learn more about the Bible. I remember thinking, “Even if I end up doing absolutely nothing with this degree, I want to take two years just to learn.” It turned out those two years at Regent were possibly the most pivotal years in my life. At that time, it was the New Testament world that opened up to me. More specifically, I learned how to read and interpret the New Testament texts within their historical and literary contexts. I could say it was spiritually enlightening (it was), but more than anything it was just fun.
At the same time, though, I remember taking a Biblical Criticism course—although I certainly learned a lot from it, my eyes were opened regarding some of the “academic/intellectual games” many in the academic world play. For some scholars, their goal isn’t so much to get at the original intent of the authors or to understand the original context of a given text, but rather to play little intellectual games in order to come up with something edgy and novel. I remember specifically reading an article regarding a “feminist reading” of the Book of Revelation. Long story short, John was a misogynist who both hated women but who was also erotically attracted to them—hence the “abyss” in Revelation 9 should be understood as the “Vagina Dentata.” John desires it but is terrified of it. My friends and I thought that was the dumbest…and funniest…thing we ever heard. Speaking for myself, I couldn’t believe that such “scholarship” was really taken seriously by anyone.
If I did get any kind of a big head after my program at Regent, it certainly was deflated when I took a job at a small Christian high school in California and found myself teaching a 9th Grade Bible class. They didn’t care at all about all that “heady knowledge” I had learned in graduate school. That experience humbled me (perhaps humiliated me?) pretty quick. And so, over the course of those four years, two years at Trinity Western University (getting a second MA), four years at a Christian high school in Arkansas, eight years at another Christian high school in Alabama, and sticking PhD work in the middle of all that—teaching high school kids kept me rooted in reality.
If there is one thing I think I do really well is take all that academic knowledge in Biblical Studies I’ve acquired over the years and make it understandable, engaging, inspiring, and yes, fun, to regular Christians who are never going to get graduate degrees in Biblical Studies. Some of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten as teacher is from former students who tell me that my classes gave them better understanding of the Bible and helped deepen their faith and love for God. Some of the saddest things I’ve seen have been when some students have gotten into that academic world of Biblical Studies only to have (there is no other way to say it) “shipwrecked their faith.” They’ve gotten so caught up in academic accolades and intellectual pursuits, that they end up completely rejecting the Christian faith.
Although I did get to teach at the university level for about seven years, I’m now back teaching high school English. It turns out those two years at Regent (where I didn’t care if I did anything “career-wise” with the degree) turned into a second MA, a PhD, 16 years teaching Bible classes at Christian schools, and seven years teaching Religious Studies courses in college. Biblical Studies did give me a career for a time. But like I said, I’m back to teaching high school English, and that’s fine with me. Having now had three years away from any official teaching position in Biblical Studies, but still “keeping a toe in those waters,” so to speak (primarily through reading), I have little desire to ever get back into that academic world. Why? Because I’ve come to see that the absurd and funny trend within Biblical Studies I laughed at while a student at Regent isn’t really an outlier—it’s a considerable chunk of the academy.
What Does This Have to do with Irenaeus?
Over the past few years, I’ve started reading more early Church Fathers. One of the problems with that, though, is that a lot of the English translations are just really convoluted and a bear to understand. And so, I’ve started to write my own abridged/paraphrase version of many of the early Church Fathers I’ve read. It forces me to slow down and think about what is being said. And although it can be tedious at times, I’ve found it well worth doing.
This year, I’m tackling Against Heresies by the second century Church Father Irenaeus. I’ve read books on him and used some quotes by him in my book The Heresy of Ham when discussing his view of Adam and Eve, but I’ve never taken the time to pick up that 500+ page book and try to read it all the way through…until this year. Here at the beginning of July, I’m through the first three “books” within the “five-book” Against Heresies. At some point, I’ll probably write a larger series on what I’ve learned, but today I wanted to share a particular chapter: Against Heresies: Book 2, Chapter 26.
In the first two “books,” Irenaeus goes to town, not only explaining all the theories and teachings of various Gnostic schools but dissecting their absurdities and contradictions. Maybe it is saying more about my personality, but when I read his take down of Gnostic teaching, I can’t help but think he was engaging in some of the meanest, most sarcastic smack-talk I’ve ever read. In any case, although I already knew about the Gnostics and about what they basically taught, I never really thought too much about who they really were. As I’ve been reading Irenaeus, though, it has occurred to me that they were, for lack of a better term, the “conceited academics” who were putting out “edgy and novel theories” about God, Christ, and the Bible. More specifically, they, like many academics today, spent their time tearing down the Tradition and Faith of the Church in order to put forth their own “enlightened” teachings instead. They had “secret knowledge” that those poor, stupid, unstudied, ignorant Christians don’t have.
In Book 2: Chapter 26, Irenaeus talks specifically about the arrogance and conceit of these Gnostics. Now, obviously I’m not saying all academic Biblical scholars are the equivalent of Gnostics. There are scores and scores of tremendous Biblical scholars. But…there are those who, I have to say, really sound a lot like the Gnostics Irenaeus was dealing with back in the second century. Given where I am currently at now in my life, I guess this chapter just stood out to me.
Enjoy my preliminary paraphrase of Against Heresies: Book 2, Chapter 26. I’d love to know what you think. Comments are welcome.
Chapter 26: Knowledge Puffs Up, but Love Builds Up
1. Ultimately, it is better to live a simple life, away from the academic world, and get closer to God through love. It’s so easy to get so caught up in the world of academics and philosophy that you become so full of yourself and end up being one of those people who constantly blaspheme God because they treat their own academic theories as greater “gods” than God Himself.
That’s why Paul said, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” He knew full well people can get so conceited presenting a pretense of knowledge, that they completely fall away from any love of God at all. They end up thinking that they really are perfect, while they argue that God is flawed in some way…and they have figured it out! You simply cannot get more conceited than thinking that you are better and more perfect than God who formed you and gave you the breath of life.
That’s why it might be better to have no academic knowledge at all. What’s more important? Being able to explain why or how things were made, or still believing in God and continuing in His love? It’s so easy to let academic knowledge make you so arrogant that you fall away from the very love that gives life to man. The only real “knowledge” one should aspire to is the knowledge of Jesus Christ, the Son of God who was crucified for us. If you run down academic rabbit holes or insist on splitting academic hairs, you are in danger of falling away into ungodliness.
2. For example, what should we think about someone who looks at when our Lord said, “even the hairs of your head are numbered,” and then goes about “investigating” how that can be true? He then starts researching how many hairs a human being can have, why different people have different numbers of hair follicles, why some people have bigger heads or smaller heads, why some people have bushy hair…or thinning hair…or no hair at all—and after all that, gets praised for his “research” and thinks he really has accomplished something that really matters!
Or let’s say someone reads, “Aren’t two sparrows sold for a penny? Not one of them falls to the ground without the will of your Father.” That person then gets an academic grant to study how many sparrows are caught every day, both throughout the world and in specific regions. He studies why so many were captured yesterday, or the day before, or on the various days of the week, and based on his research, then comes up with some grand hypothesis to help explain the truth of what Jesus said. Wouldn’t we say that person has wasted his time and missed the basic point Jesus was making? And wouldn’t we think those who were impressed by him and praised him for his research were absolutely insane?
3. If one instead asked how all these things are known to God and inquired how everything created is in accordance with His providence, that person would gain a much better understanding of the nature of things, because he would be seeking out God’s purposes within His creation.
Unfortunately, some people are so desperate for recognition that they become obsessed with trying to count up every single sand grain on the earth, every wave on the sea, and every star in the heavens, thinking that that discovery will mean something. Sorry, but that kind of labor will end up being in vain. Most people will realize a person like that is basically mad, without any sense of true reason, and devoid of common sense. Why? Because a person like that ends up with such a big head, he actually thinks he isn’t inferior to God. His useless “knowledge” has puffed him up so much, that he thinks his “discovery” is so important that it effectively changes who God is. He thinks his own opinion is greater than God.
How about a solution to the longstanding problem of the Sign of Jonah?
https://www.joeledmundanderson.com/im-back-lets-look-at-the-sign-of-jonah-matthew-161-4-and-1238-45-and-mark-811-13/
“If one instead asked how all these things are known to God and inquired how everything created is in accordance with His providence, that person would gain a much better understanding of the nature of things, because he would be seeking out God’s purposes within His creation.”
This is an interesting statement for me because this is pretty much what I did on my journey to the complete deconstruction of my faith. Here was one of the questions I wrestled with:
– What was the ultimate purpose of God creating?
And these were the assumptions I made as a Christian as I tried to answer this question:
– Modern humans are the ultimate end goal of His creation since they are the only animal, as far as I know, that can have a personal relationship with Him. And thus He can care for us and we can worship and praise Him.
– Earth is the only planet in the entire Universe that can possibly be inhabited by His creation.
– He used the Laws of Nature and Physics to complete His creation.
If you don’t agree with these assumptions, we can discuss.
With those assumptions and accepting current science then here is what I needed to believe that a perfect God did to get where we are today.
– Started with a Big Bang and set everything in motion.
– Waited 9 billion years as 200+ billion galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars and untold number of planets were created by natural processes.
– Selected 1 non-descript galaxy, selected 1 non-descript star in that galaxy and selected 1 planet in that solar system to start the perfect plan of His creation. And 99.9% of the remaining Universe is uninhabitable and impossible to traverse.
– Used evolution over a period of 3+ billion years to populate the planet.
– Allowed at least 5 extinction level events (that we know of) to wipe out huge numbers of creatures during those times.
– Built the planet through lengthy ice ages, massive continent shaping and wildly swinging climate changes.
– Finally, after 4 billion years, Modern humans (remember the ultimate goal of His creation) come on the scene, again through natural processes, and we thrive and endure.
And so I asked myself; is “everything created in accordance with His providence”? Really? How does one differentiate between the natural processes that are obviously responsible for what we see and a perfect Supreme Being that used those same processes? YECs have their theory but it is completely untenable. It seems that your answer is; don’t ask these questions which is the answer I have heard from other Apologists.
There is nothing that leads me to believe that an all-powerful, perfect Being would choose this manner to create his ultimate masterpiece. I honestly don’t how you justify it other than completely ignoring the data and blindly accepting whatever your religion tells you to believe which is basically what your post tells us to do.
Why are you assuming that God hasn’t done anything anywhere else in the universe? Why wouldn’t an all-powerful God create in the way we now see and understand? It seems your basic rationale is that since we have a better understanding of the vastness of the universe, therefore God doesn’t exist.
What Irenaeus’ point is that we are to go on what has been revealed to us, and we shouldn’t (like the Gnostics did) try to come up with nonsensical answers to questions that aren’t even presented in the Scriptures. You’d have to get a better idea of the Gnostic schools and claims to fully appreciate what Irenaeus is addressing, but that’s his point. The Scriptures reveal that there is a singular Creator God (not many gods, not many Aeons in a “spiritual Pleroma,” not a “Demiurge”) and that Jesus Christ is the Son of God through whom God the Father is re-creating His creation and human beings, and bringing everything into a higher form of life that mere material life.
I believe there likely is life somewhere else in the Universe (and no, Aliens have not visited Earth). But if you’re suggesting that God created that life then are you also implying that there are alien lifeforms who worship God and have a personal relationship? Did Jesus have to sacrifice himself for them as well? Will there be alien lifeforms in Heaven?
“Why wouldn’t an all-powerful God create in the way we now see and understand?”
The real question is why don’t we see irrefutable evidence that an all-powerful God did create? Why the Divine hiddenness? Please point to a scientific theory, discipline, problem or hypothesis that invokes the Christian God as the only possible solution. Or a research paper that quotes passages from the Bible as a source material.
I’m curious; how did God create? Did he set everything in motion and then just sat back and let it run forward, knowing that at some point modern humans would appear and then we see the events of the Bible? Or was He a tinkerer, coming down from time to time to directly interact with creation. He created dinosaurs and then got bored with them and sent an asteroid and wiped them out because that was the only perfect way to move on to mammals.
Yes the Bible says God is the Creator but nothing has been ‘revealed’ in the last 500 years of science that comports with that claim.
So your issue with theology is that scientific principles cannot attribute meaning to life? This is an odd perspective because you most likely do not look for answers to philosophy in the study of botany. Your arguments here rely on a number of assumptions that are either not explained as to how this conclusion was formed or has little relevance to the question at hand.
“I believe there is life on another planet therefore it would be weird for Jesus to come here.” Based on what scientific principle are you suggesting aliens exist (and do not use the Drake equation as that is a calculation of the possible, not what is)?
“Modern humans are the end goal for God to achieve therefore dinosaurs are weird”. If that was the end goal for God to achieve in creation then why is it strange that the process that coverts bones into oil that is used by modern humans to make their lives better? I’m not saying that is the purpose of dinosaur’s creation, but you seem to say “I don’t know how these things match up so they must not.” This is essentially the “God of the gaps” argument, but instead of “God” it’s “meaninglessness”.
“Why is God not appearing in the sky every few minutes to tell everyone to be good; why hide from us outside of the Biblical stories that span around 1500 years of human history?” I’ve heard a freshman high-schooler ask that question before and it wasn’t that thought-provoking then. Well, let’s consider that if the goal of creation is for human beings to choose “good”, therefore choosing God (who is the ultimate “good”), then forcing that decision robs the decider of the free will to actually choose. Of course this relies on many assumptions that are found in the Biblical texts such as the fact that God did not remove free will from anyone and it is clear that the intention in the texts is for God to be the ultimate “good”.
I know this is not a satisfying answer as one may get for how the subatomic particles in a Hydrogen atom may interact with other atoms to eventually react in a star and produce enough light to eventually make a planet habitable by carbon-based creatures, but if we knew every answer to this question there would not be a question of faith, but a question of if one cared. I understand your desire to understand these seemingly basic questions and it is far easier to believe in arbitrary chance because limited understanding always create an arbitrary perspective, that is the nature of not having all the answers.
Long story short, if you could prove God exists with science that would not only “de-God” the big guy, but it wouldn’t change your perspective at all. You would just know who exactly to be mad at.
I think you need to go back and re-read my comments because you seem confused. At no time have I implied that science should provide meanings for life. In fact, life and physical sciences have no place in the philosophical discussion arena. I do think religion has its place with sayings and admonitions on how to live a good life. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is a wonderful example that I wish more MAGA Christians would adhere to.
“I believe there is life on another planet therefore it would be weird for Jesus to come here.” Again, you are misrepresenting what I said. I initially questioned why God would create such a vast Universe that was 99.9% uninhabitable and impossible to traverse. It was Joel who questioned why would I assume that God hadn’t created elsewhere. I think that some form of life could be elsewhere not necessarily intelligent life. But if Joel is saying God created elsewhere then wouldn’t that creation need to be intelligent and able to interact with Him? And if that is the case then wouldn’t they need redemption by another Jesus sacrifice?
“Modern humans are the end goal for God to achieve therefore dinosaurs are weird” The claim is that God is the Creator of everything and it is perfect and I’m questioning that claim. Please tell me what mechanism God used to create and what was the goal. Again, my point is if God tinkered with creation shouldn’t we see evidence of that? And if you say He only used natural processes to complete His plan then He really isn’t responsible for all creation, is He? Also, bones don’t turn into oil, it is plant material under millions of years of pressure.
“Well, let’s consider that if the goal of creation is for human beings to choose “good”, therefore choosing God (who is the ultimate “good”)”
Thank-you for confirming that human beings were the end goal of His creation. My whole point has been that if a perfect, all-powerful God created everything that has happened over the last 13.5 billion years, why did he take such a circuitous route if it was just to get to humans and them choosing “good”? Why was so much death and destruction needed to get there?
I’m not sure why you invoked the Free Will defense, do you honestly believe that if God showed himself that it would cause people to lose their free will to choose Him? He was showing Himself to people all the time in the OT. Jesus was doing miracles everywhere in the NT. But now we can’t possibly see any of that because it robs us of our free will? Seriously?
I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of the problem of evil, free will and all the conflicting theodicies that Christians have created. But until someone can fully explain how God can be the “ultimate good” and still allow 2 dozen young girls at a Christian camp to drown, I’m going to continue to doubt such a Being exists.
James, if I may.
If God or a god didn’t create the universe . . . how did it get here? And what’s it for? Why is there something rather than nothing?
If God or a god didn’t create the universe . . . where does human consciousness come from? Working from a purely naturalistic Darwinian framework, how do you get from unthinking, inanimate matter to conscious, self-aware thinking, moralizing matter? Where does morality come from? (If you say from “society” or “biology” that raises a whole host of sticky problems.)
As atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel persuasively argues in his *Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist, Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False,* naturalistic Darwinism can’t explain consciousness or the human mind.
And if, as lots of neuroscientists and biologists assert, evolution has hard-wired us for survival, not discovering truth, how can we trust our own cognitive faculties in telling us this (or anything else!)?
And what about human DNA, which former Human Genome Project director Dr. Francis Collins calls “the language of God”?
I’d say all of these are pretty good pointers in the direction of a creator.
But Dr. Anderson may not want his thread hi-jacked.
Pax.
Lee.
That’s totally fine. Comments are welcomed.
I won’t dive too deep into your reply simply because these topics have been debated for a very long time by people way more intelligent than I am.
I don’t know why there is something rather than nothing and honestly it hurts my brain when I try to imagine what nothing actually looks like.
As for consciousness, I have a question for you: When did consciousness first appear? I’m guessing you believe that Adam and Eve were real people? What species were they? Do you agree with William Lane Craig that they were Homo Heidelbergensis around 900k years ago? Or do you fall into the Joshua Swamidass camp that Adam and Eve were unique creations but then interbred with other Hominids that already existed outside the Garden? Or are you a YEC and follow Todd Wood’s assumption that Adam and Eve were Homo Erectus and all other Hominids descended from them about 6k years ago? Did other Hominid species have consciousness?
You say all of these things point to a Creator, fantastic, then please answer my question from my previous post; what was the mechanism that He used to create? Did He start everything in motion 13.5 billion years ago and let it run forward with natural processes? If so, then He didn’t do a whole lot of creating. Or was he a tinkerer and came down from time to time and did something to create a new species or destroy an existing species?
I’m not trying to answer deep philosophical questions. I simply don’t see the perfect creative process that Christians claim has happened. Why was so much death and destruction needed to get to a conscious being that would worship Him?
Out of curiosity, are you aware of my history with the creation-evolution debate and YECism? I wrote an entire book on it.
This is very interesting, Doc. If you publish this I’d buy a copy.
Scholars like Elaine Pagels and Karen King have pushed a reinterpretation of the Gnostics as a group of egalitarian, inclusive, eco-friendly feminists sitting in a circle, holding hands and singing “Kumbaya.”
When in fact, as Orthodox author and apologist Fredericka Matthews-Green reminds us, the various ancient Gnostic sects were exclusivist, dogmatic, misogynistic, and generally thought the created space-time universe was the evil creation of an imposter demiurge with delusions of godhood, whom they often identified with the Jewish God YHWH.
Dr. Craig Evans wrote in Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholarship Distorts the Gospels, that:
“What we have is a form of hyper-criticism that is all too common in scholarly circles and sometimes seems to arise from confusing criticism with skepticism—that is, thinking that the more skeptical the position, the more critical it is. Radical skepticism is no more critical than is credulity.”
And finally, late author Anne Rice researched the life and times of the historical Jesus for her fictional novel, “Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt,” just prior to her brief return tp the Catholic Church. In the afterword she commented on mainstream academic Jesus scholarship:
“Many of these scholars, scholars who apparently devoted their life to New Testament scholarship, disliked Jesus Christ. Some pitied him as a hopeless failure. Others sneered at him, and some felt an outright contempt. This came between the lines of the books. This emerged in the personality of the texts.
I’d never come across this kind of emotion in any other field of research, at least, not to this extent. It was puzzling.
“The people who go into Elizabethan studies don’t set out to prove that Elizabeth I was a fool. They don’t personally dislike her. They don’t make snickering remarks about her, or spend their careers trying to pick apart her historical reputation. They approach her in other ways. They don’t even apply this sort of dislike or suspicion to other Elizabethan figures. If they do, the person is usually not the focus of the study. Occasionally a scholar studies a villain, yes. But even then, the author generally ends up arguing for the good points of a villain or for his or her place in history, or for some mitigating circumstance, that redeems the study itself. People studying disasters in history may be highly critical of the rulers or the milieu at the time, yes. But in general scholars don’t spend their lives in the company of historical figures whom they openly despise.”
Finally, Prof. Philip Jenkins, commenting on modern Jesus studies in the 1980s and 1990s in his 2005 book Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost its Way” commented:
“Despite its dubious sources and controversial methods, the new Jesus scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s gained such a following because it told a lay audience what it wanted to hear.”
Dr. Jenkins was exactly right.
Pax.
Lee.
Totally agree. I’m hoping to get my Irenaeus volume out no later than Christmas…maybe I’ll shoot for my birthday in November!
Let me known when its out. Irenaeus is a favorite Father of mine.
Pax.
Lee.
James, you seem to think that if God didn’t create the universe according to a strictly wooden, literal reading of Genesis, then whatever else he may have chosen to do is therefore not very impressive. Your argument seems to imply that if God created the mechanism of evolution and thereby basically “let evolution do all the work for him,” instead of creating everything fully-formed in six literal, 24-hour days, roughly 6,000 yrs ago then that isn’t a very impressive example of creating. To which I respectfully beg to differ. I’d say that its pretty impressive for a being which necessarily exists outside the space-time universe to create the “proto-matter” which eventually became the space-time universe, with all the attendant laws of physics which, were any one of them off by even a millimeter our universe would be totally different and incapable of sustaining any kind of life, biological or otherwise. Is it any *less* impressive to create the sperm and eggs that will form a human embryo which will eventually grow into a fully-formed human being than it is to create one full-formed? Is it any less impressive to design the *schematics* for the SR-71 Blackbird stealth plane or do I also have to *build* it? No I I’d call that design in itself *very* impressive. But perhaps I’m easily impressed?
So I don’t care whether God did creation in six literal 24-hour days (no, I’m not a YECist) or over billions of years. For our purposes it doesn’t matter HOW he did it as much as that HE DID IT.
Nor does it matter exactly WHEN consciousness first arose. What matters is that naturalistic Darwinian evolution can’t account for it. Thomas Nagel is at least honest enough to acknowledge that extremely large pachyderm in the room, although like a good atheist he cannot/will not consider God because he basically doesn’t want there to be a boss of himself (he honestly admits this, too).
I, too, have a hard time imaging absolute *nothing* myself; nevertheless I can look around me and observe that, for example, PC’s don’t just pop into existence fully formed and functioning from nothing. No, there are designers/creators who *cause* PCs to be.
In nature, babies don’t just appear as fully-formed human beings from nothing–they don’t create themselves, they’re created by their parents. But I’m supposed to seriously entertain the idea that the very UNIVERSE ITSELF created itself from NOTHING? to me that takes more blind faith than believing that God created it because everything in nature that exists, had a beginning and everything which had a beginning, had cause.
Finally, your closing question assumes that God’s aim in creating humans was to make people who would basically tell him how awesome he is. I know that’s basically what many Christians assert, but I have issues with that. God didn’t/doesn’t *need* us to worship him; according to scripture the angels and other heavenly beings were already doing that when he created us. But perhaps God earnestly desired to create self-aware, rational, thinking beings he could interact with, who would have the*choice* to interact with him or go their own way and basically try an achieve their own divinity by other means (the basic thrust of Genesis 1-3). God doesn’t need us to tell him how awesome he is. One of the definitions of “worship” in Webster’s is:
“to regard with great or extravagant respect, honor, or devotion.”
Which would necessarily be due to any being who existed outside of time-space yet created it.
Just some things to think about.
Pax.
Lee.