reformed blogging.

I was able to have a substantial conversation with a fellow student on campus today. He considered himself ’spiritual’ rather than religious. In addition, he made sure that I knew that he was familiar with Christianity, having spent most of his life in a Lutheran Church.  Throughout our conversation I began to wonder more and more whether he even understood the gospel. When I finally posed the question he was indignant. Rather than offer any reply he went off about how it was wrong for me to question his beliefs, that it was wrong for me to judge him and that Jesus’ one command (that he happened to accept) was not to judge others. After I reassured him that I had no ill-intentions but was asking an honest question he finally replied. In a significantly less assertive tone he answered that Christianity was a set of moral teachings given by Jesus. After a few more minutes of talking he went on to deny Christ’s resurrection, and considered the existence of Christ a matter of interpretation. At the end of our conversation he, in essence, denied the ability to have certainty in any matter (except those matters that were convenient to him). The discussion was obviously going nowhere so we decided to stop.

I walked away from that conversation with a lot on my mind. What got me more than anything is the fact that this guy has no clue what the gospel was despite his life spent in Church. Maybe he had bad ears or maybe the gospel wasn’t coming from the pulpit, hopefully it was the former. His ‘gospel’ is no gospel at all, in fact, it sounds more like Gnosticism.

The Gnostic doctrine was set forth as a timeless message in which reference was made not to past events as the basis of salvation but to certain general religious ideas, presented in mythological form.
- Bengt Hägglund, History of Theology (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House), 410.

 

A fellow student on campus was flabbergasted that I would compare America’s indifference to the Holocaust with her indifference to Christ. Up until this point she had understood and agreed with what I had been saying. Namely, that the grounds for her unbelief were not logically warranted and that, as she concurred, objective truth could not be found through the “neutral” presuppositions of atheistic science. It was agreed, and it almost seemed as if something clicked in her head; her face lit up but just as quickly darkened as I explained that science had to work off of theistic presuppositions in order to make any sense.

At this point she shook her head and, though she could not provide any alternative, confidently asserted that sooner or later viable explanations would surface. When I pointed out that she was still working off of unbelieving presuppositions, which would never allow the possibility of Christian theism, she shifted grounds and replied that she was rather comfortable without any certainty, religious or scientific. It was at this point, then, that I told her that her indifference would not make change objective reality, and that it was akin to America’s indifference toward the Holocaust. She was taken aback. After she had thought it through she emphatically denied the claim.

Time was short, however, and she had to go to class. As we parted she asked why it was that I did what I was doing. My response was brief, but it drove the point home. Until now we had been discussing philosophical issues, barely scratching the hard issues of the truth of the Gospel. I told her that I did what I was doing because I believed that man was God’s creation (rather than God being man’s creation); and that God had, at a point in time within history, sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to die for my own sins. She understood everything I had said and even acknowledged most of it, even that Christ was a historical figure, yet belief in Christ Jesus as Savior could not be an option.

The truth of the gospel–that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came, suffered and died at the hands of men according to God’s foreordained plan as my Surety–is a truth that cannot and must not be denied. Men suppress the truth in unrighteousness, but this in no way changes the truth of the Gospel nor its absolute necessity.

And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.
- Acts 4:12