Why does God Allow
Evil? Click here: /Apologeticshtml/Why Does God Allow Evil 0908.htm
Should God’s existence be
proven? /Apologeticshtml/Should the Bible and God Be Proven
Fideism vs WCG.htm
Does the Bible teach blind
faith? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Gospel of John Theory of Knowledge.htm
A Serious Debate Between Informed, Educated Evangelical Protestant and Two COG Members Described
Here
I describe a debate that I and another friend in the UCG had with another man
who upholds some very different doctrinal beliefs. At that time in 2009,
my opponent was a young married man, an engineer by trade, who has also an
M.B.A. and was about to get a Masters in Divinity. One friend of mine in
the UCG thought it would be spiritually productive to meet with him after
work one day in order to talk over our differences in doctrines. The
conversation, although sometimes a little intense, avoided cheap shots and
personal/ad hominem attacks, so it was good in that regard. The reason
for documenting this debate concerns about how we in the COG can prepare
better against intelligent, informed evangelical Protestants when
they defend their teachings against Church of God doctrines.
When
we debated about whether the pagan customs surrounding Christmas and Easter
should still be used to honor the true God today, I turned to our classic
"proof text" on the subject, which is Deut. 12:29-32. I also
used the incident of Aaron's making the golden calf, and then
calling the celebration they had the next day a Feast to the Lord (Ex.
32:1-7). While agreeing with us that idolatry and statues of God are
always sinful, he had three basic arguments in response. One, he
asserted that just because pagans invented something, that doesn't mean we
Christians can't use it also when worshipping God. Since he can
play the guitar, he used this example: If pagans wrote songs to
false gods that were played when using the guitar, that doesn't mean Christians
couldn't use the guitar in church services and then use it to play songs
worshiping the true God. My response here was that he was confusing
rituals used to worship false gods with (amoral) technologies that are
based on natural discoveries that are morally neutral. For example, it
isn't a pagan act of worship to use the laws of logic that the pagan Greek
philosopher Aristotle discovered, even when doing theological analysis.
It isn't pagan to use a Bible printed on paper despite (presumably) pagan
Chinese men invented that technological process. He was making a
category mistake in this regard, since technological inventions or natural
discoveries about nature shouldn't be confused with rituals tied to
particular false gods.
Two,
he wanted to narrow the application of such a text to really awful pagan acts,
such as using temple prostitutes and sacrificing children to Molech.
My response was that he was applying this text much too narrowly,
that it also prohibited learning the customs used to worship pagan gods in
general.
But
then there was argument three, which was the most interesting: Christians
can come along, and rename and reuse something instantly and arbitrarily for a
different purpose, regardless of its past historical use. I
disagreed. The analogy I used was that God, who demands exclusive
devotion, would object to the use of pagan customs to worship Him in the same
way that a wife would object to her husband having pictures of his
ex-girlfriends put on prominent display in their house. His way of
overcoming that objection assumed that we humans can ignore all past history
and customary use of any ritual or practice, by an instantaneous arbitrary
assertion: The Xmas tree was used by pagans in the past, but now we
Christians can totally change the meaning of the ritual, and use it to worship
the true God. At the time, I could clearly see the flaw in this
argument in that it ignores past history totally. There's a reason why
God had Israel under Joshua totally obliterate the pagans along with their
practices, as harsh as that all sounds today, because one can't separate
the past history from a practice so instantaneously and arbitrarily.
(In this light, it's worth thinking about one of the interesting, but assumed,
views of the Catholic historian Hilaire Belloc is that it takes many
centuries for people of a culture to fully absorb a religion's teachings (here
Catholicism), including its unspoken assumptions entering into daily life and
everyone's worldview as an unshakable, nearly unquestionable reality. Such
a change isn't something accomplished in a few years by a bunch of new
converts or even a mere generation or two). The statue that
Aaron made that looked like Apis meant a pagan god was being worshipped, even though
Aaron asserted it was the God that rescued Israel from Egypt. The history
of a custom can't be instantaneously and arbitrarily dismissed so readily.
As
I think about that argument more now, there's another flaw, which may be based
indirectly on something I read in Joseph Campbell or C.S. Lewis about the
meaning of the rites of pagan religions: Should rituals that are
tied to fertility rites be used to worship the true almighty God? Well,
isn't there an intrinsic problem with such rituals even when we hereby arbitrarily
decree they have a different meaning, because bunnies and eggs as symbols are
intrinsically about having lots of babies? That intrinsic meaning simply
can't be obliterated summarily from such customs. It assumes
language allows words to be arbitrarily and subjectively redefined
at whim, such as I could claim the sound and symbol of
"book" now means a "car" in its denotation (the actual
object in the external real world) every time I use the word, regardless of how
everyone else uses those symbols and sounds when speaking the English
language.
Now,
when we debated about whether the Sabbath or Sunday should be the day for
Christian worship, he mostly leaned on an extra-biblical source, Ignatius's
mention of worshipping on the Lord's Day, written c. 110 A.D.
Although he is very much a Protestant (although he was raised a Catholic), he
felt compelled to lean very strongly on church history to buttress his
argument. He claimed that we should use this source (or other early ones
like it) to interpret Revelation 1:10's reference to the Lord's Day as a
specific day of the week. I replied it is far more sound to use Isaiah or
Joel's mentions of "The Day of the Lord" when interpreting this
book. (After all, it is an apocalyptic piece of literature about the
world's end, so what other "Day of the Lord" is it likely talking
about anyway, given this book's overall purpose and context?) We should
use a Semite to interpret a Semite. He also repeatedly trotted out I
Cor. 16:1-2 as proof for Sunday worship. He also argued that Sunday
worship was Biblical because there isn't any record of a controversy
concerning the changing over from Saturday to Sunday in the early
historical record of Christianity, unlike concerning the
Passover/Easter question, such as shown by Ignatius' assertions
that Sunday worship is an ancient practice by a man who (supposedly) knew
John in an old established area for Christians.
I
had several responses to his arguments. I pointed out that we use the
whole Bible for doctrine. We assume continuity and we shouldn't
assume everything changed. My key text for this principle for
theological interpretation was Matt. 5:17-19, although I also mentioned I
Cor. 10. We should base our doctrines on Scripture alone [for such an
issue], "sola Scriptura." After all, where does the New
Testament ever say the day was changed? Where does it say the first day
of the week is holy or shouldn't be worked on? Rev. 1:10 and I Cor.
16:1-2 don't say the first day of the week is holy, shouldn't be worked on, etc.
In particular, I used a formulation Ian Boyne, the late pastor of CGI Jamaica,
came up with: The burden of proof is on you (meaning you as
representing the Protestants and Catholics) to prove something
changed. After all, we (in the COG who uphold the Sabbath and the Holy
Days) have the Old Testament, which commands these practices. It's your
job now to prove things changed. He counter-attacked that
assumption: Why should we assume things stayed the same? Here I
then used an engineering example that I learned from a man in the COG back in
1995: He was involved in assembling prototype cars for Chrysler
using special parts. Well, when something changed in the specs, he was
told, "This has changed." But if he wasn't told that a
specification changed, then everything stayed the same. He really
had no reply to that assertion, although he tried to use the text
about being a new creation to justify the idea that everything doctrinally had
changed in the way he believed after Jesus' crucifixion. That's
an obvious over-reading into that text, and extracts out of it far
more meaning than God ever intended. He brought up the issue of
Jesus' resurrection being on Sunday, but of course I mentioned that we don't
believe it was on that day of the week. (He mentioned Mark 16:9, but the
conversation moved on to another subject before I turned to another text in
reply).
A key text I turned to about the importance of the 4th
commandment was Acts 5:32. If God gives the Holy Spirit to those who obey
him, but someone is systematically disobeying God in this area, he can't be
saved. He immediately knew the seriousness of that point. His reply was
that if someone denies the Trinity, they are worshiping a different God than
His God, and that person can't be saved. I pointed out that we believe
that Jesus is God, unlike most non-Trinitarians, but that didn't cut any ice
with him. Hence, we denied that each other was saved, yet
avoided descending into casual insults and personal attacks.
He has an interesting historical interpretation of
Christianity's spread and growth throughout history, which certainly seems to
be like Augustine's. He pointed out the growth of Christianity
in Africa (from around 2% of the population to around 50%
today), and the reinvigoration of Christianity in Latin America through
the growth of Protestantism and more Catholics taking their faith there
more seriously in response. Then he mentioned the demographic
reality that in the USA that religious people have many more children than the
secular people, such that in three generations or a century, the Christians
will take it over. I mentioned in response that the secular people
control the commanding heights of the culture. But he pointed out that
normally children keep the same worldview that they are raised with. I
didn't have time then to point out how so many are converted in college to
giving up their faith. But his overall perspective I partially had read
about before in Alistar McGrath's "The Twilight of Atheism." I
also heard some of this before from a friend who's partially associated
with the Church of God who also has been heavily influenced
by Reconstructionism (Rushdoony, North, etc., a variety of conservative
Calvinism) when he got his masters in theology or divinity. This
perspective puts an interesting spin on the world's destiny, such that the
dismal, decaying state of traditional Christianity in America and
(especially) Europe, i.e., the developed Western world, is a false way to
look what's going on in the world in general. Although I didn't say this
to him then, it may be a way God is doing pre-evangelism before the second
resurrection and/or the second coming, that the true God will be known by at
least casually (and distortedly) by half of the world's population,
especially if we include Islam in that total. The true God isn't known
merely by some small, tiny cult that meets in the wilderness someplace, but
He's the God, however distortedly or casually, is nominally worshipped by about
half of the world.
His eschatology is partially amillennial and partially
post-millennial, which obviously ties closely to this view of church
history: Instead of a small embattled flock struggling for spiritual
survival through the centuries, he sees the history of the Christian church as
one of general growth throughout history from a very
small beginning. He rejects any notion of a general apostasy or
of a "Lost Century" in church history that allowed for huge
errors to overtake the (Catholic) church. Based on this view of the past,
he is very much an optimist when looking to the future. Indeed, I think a
key error of post-millennialism is that it doesn't take seriously the
idea of an evil human nature and its effects on society and mankind's
general development (i.e., his civilizations). God rescues us
collectively from war and death by sending His Son to dramatically change
civilization from the top down; it isn't a gradual moral improvement
working from the bottom up through individual humans' decisions until the whole
society is converted. My response at the time, lifted from a sentence
that I wrote in my book about Judaism's false arguments about
Christianity, was that post-millennialism should have died in the fields of
Flanders and the ovens of Auschwitz. That is, post-millennialism looks upon
humanity's present prospects too optimistically. I mentioned that the end
times would be like the time of Noah, when only 8 people were saved.
The point I could have added then was that pre-millennialism takes evil
human nature seriously. But he interprets the Book of Revelation in a
preterist manner, and wants to confine the first 17 chapters to first century
Rome. He thinks Revelation 20 or 21 is occurring now (I'm not quite
whether it was either or both). This whole schema is an amazing way to
blind oneself to the dire predicament that the human race is now in, in
which we have the ability to blow ourselves up and it's becoming easier and
easier and cheaper and cheaper for even small and/or weak countries (like
North Korea, Pakistan, Iran) to gain the ability to do this.
He said his story of the church through history was much better
than ours. My response, although I had little time to explain
it much (i.e., explain the plan of God as symbolized by the Holy Days), was that
our story of God's plan for humanity was much better than his:
We don't believe billions of people will be cast into hell to be eternally
tortured forever who never had a chance to be saved. The problem of evil
in this light rolls off his conscience like water off the back
of a duck. He just confidently said that in the ages to come
we wouldn't ever question God's justice in this regard. My
response was that human reasoning can figure out God's moral reasoning
some, such as shown by Romans 1-2 about the gentiles following the law
based on their conscience. And then there's the story in Numbers (I
believe) of the 5 daughters who said it was unjust that their father's
inheritance would go to another tribe because he had no sons, and then God told
Moses that their reasoning was right. True, although he believes in
eternal separation, and denies annihilation of the wicked, he denies that the
unsaved will be "tortured," which apparently doesn't take the Bible's
words literally in this regard. So in general in this area, it would
be necessary to attack this type of optimistic eschatology as a
fundamental misreading of the world's present crisis (i.e., premillennialism
makes more sense when reading the newspapers) and of human nature's intrinsic
evil. It also would be necessary to point out the
moral problems with the ignorant being cast into hell for eternity from
the viewpoint of human moral reasoning alone, even when making only
minimalistic claims for it, since our ability to morally reasoning is built into
our minds and brains by God to begin with. By attacking this kind of
eschatology, it also allows us to attack this optimistic view of church
history: For if I say, "Revelation teaches that the true church is a
small flock, not a great church," he would attempt to confine Revelation
12-13, and 17-18 to first-century Rome. For a refutation of preterism,
one can turn to the criticisms of Calvinist Reconstructionism (such as Dr.
Thomas Ice, "Dominion Theology: Blessing or Curse?).
For a better view of church history, such as how this man used Ignatius to
buttress his views of what is the correct day for Christian worship, we
need to know enough of the Church of
God's traditional perspective in this regard, such as (say) from Ivor
Fletcher's book or John Ogwyn's booklet. The idea of a "lost
century" and overwhelming apostasy contradicts this man's eschatology
and view of the great church normally going from strength to strength
throughout history, despite occasional set backs.
My main point is that we should think about
this man's arguments, and be prepared to respond to them. I believe I did
a reasonable job, as God helped me. However, I could readily see how this
man's arguments could confuse people in the COG who aren't well founded in their
faith and know how to defend it.
Eric V. Snow
Click here to access
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Why does God Allow Evil?
Click here: /Apologeticshtml/Why
Does God Allow Evil 0908.htm
May Christians work on
Saturdays? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Protestant
Rhetoric vs Sabbath Refuted.htm
Should Christians obey
the Old Testament law? /doctrinalhtml/Does
the New Covenant Abolish the OT Law.htm
Do you have an immortal
soul? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Here
and Hereafter.htm
Does the ministry have
authority? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Is
There an Ordained Ministry vs Edwards.html
Is the United States the
Beast? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Are
We the Beast vs Collins.htm
Should you give 10% of
your income to your church? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Does
the Argument from Silence Abolish the Old Testament Law of Tithing 0205 Mokarow
rebuttal.htm
Is Jesus God? Click
here: /doctrinalhtml/Is
Jesus God.htm
Will there be a third
resurrection? Click here: /doctrinalhtml/Will
There Be a Third Resurrection.htm
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