Inerrancy and Worldview E-Book

Vern S. Poythress

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 429

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Though the Bible presents a personal and relational God, popular modern worldviews portray an impersonal divine force in a purely material world. Readers influenced by this competing worldview hold assumptions about fundamental issues—like the nature of humanity, evil, and the purpose of life—that present profound obstacles to understanding the Bible. In Inerrancy and Worldview, Dr. Vern Poythress offers the first worldview-based defense of scriptural inerrancy, showing how worldview differences create or aggravate most perceived difficulties with the Bible. His positive case for biblical inerrancy implicitly critiques the worldview of theologians like Enns, Sparks, Allert, and McGowan. Poythress, who has researched and published in a variety of fields— including science, linguistics, and sociology—deals skillfully with the challenges presented in each of these disciplines. By directly addressing key examples in each field, Poythress shows that many difficulties can be resolved simply by exposing the influence of modern materialism. Inerrancy and Worldview's positive response to current attempts to abandon or redefine inerrancy will enable Christians to respond well to modern challenges by employing a worldview that allows the Bible to speak on its own terms.

Leseprobe

“I can think of no one in the world better qualified to write a defense of biblical inerrancy than my lifelong friend Vern Poythress. This book is no ordinary defense of inerrancy that merely focuses on proposed solutions to several difficult verses (though it does examine some of them). Rather, it is a wide-ranging analysis that exposes the faulty intellectual assumptions that underlie challenges to the Bible from every major academic discipline in the modern university world. I think every Christian student at every secular university should read and absorb the arguments in this book. It is profoundly wise, insightful, and clearly written, and it will surely strengthen every reader’s confidence in the trustworthiness of the Bible as the very words of God.”

Wayne Grudem, Research Professor of Theology and Biblical Studies, Phoenix Seminary

“Vern Poythress has written what I consider to be definitive books on many subjects, including biblical interpretation, language, science, and sociology. In Inerrancy and Worldview, he brings his insights from these disciplines and more together to address the relation of biblical inerrancy to worldview. He shows quite convincingly that the issue of inerrancy is not just a matter of asking whether this or that biblical passage is factual. Rather, our attitude toward the claim of biblical inerrancy depends on our general view of how God is related to the cosmos and to us as individuals and societies. And that general view, in turn, depends on our relationship to Jesus Christ. The book gets deeper into the question of inerrancy than any other book I know.”

John M. Frame, J. D. Trimble Chair of Systematic Theology and Philosophy, Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, Florida

“Every new item that Vern Poythress writes is thoughtful, creative, and worth reading. This book is no exception. Among the many things I like about it is his emphasis on the personalist worldview of the Bible, as over against the impersonalism that dominates modern Western culture. Besides the book’s crucial contribution to the subject of clarifying how God communicates to us through the Bible, the basic idea of a personalist worldview will be fruitful for a good number of other topics as well. Thanks, Dr. Poythress—and thanks, God, for giving him to the church.”

C. John Collins, Professor of Old Testament, Covenant Theological Seminary

“To our shame, the response of Christians to challenges to our faith can often be dismissive, shallow, defensive, or disrespectful. On the other hand, we can err too much on the side of tolerance for error when truth is under siege. In Inerrancy and Worldview, Vern Poythress shows us how to be neither fools nor cowards. Through intelligent, informed, insightful, and respectful engagement, key foundational faith defeaters taught in many disciplines at every secular university are explained and critiqued from a biblical perspective. Poythress challenges the challenges to biblical belief at the root of their assumptions. We are left with a solid basis and defense of the Christian way of thinking. Inerrancy and Worldview should be required reading for all who want to think more deeply about their faith and defend it within a skeptical culture.”

Erik Thoennes, Professor of Theology, Talbot School of Theology/Biola University; Pastor, Grace Evangelical Free Church, La Mirada, California

“Vern Poythress has provided both the church and the academy a remarkable service with Inerrancy and Worldview. Recognizing that the modern objection to Scripture is neither univocal nor objective, but rather varied and religious, he helpfully reframes the discussion in terms of competing worldviews. By surveying the various options for the allegiance of the modern mind, Poythress shows not only that an inerrant Bible is a reasonable expectation of a personal God, but also that our rejection of it is rooted not in evidence, but in our sinful rebellion against that God. With clear logic and pastoral care, Poythress leads us through an amazing tour of both the ‘wisdom of our age’ and the follies of our hearts, bringing us at last to the God who speaks—humbling our pride and setting our hearts free.”

Michael Lawrence, Senior Pastor, Hinson Baptist Church, Portland, Oregon; author, Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church

INERRANCYAND WORLDVIEW

Other Crossway Books by Vern Sheridan Poythress

Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach

In the Beginning Was the Word: Language—A God-Centered Approach

Redeeming Sociology: A God-Centered Approach

Inerrancy and Worldview: Answering Modern Challenges to the Bible

Copyright © 2012 by Vern Sheridan Poythress

Published by Crossway

1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Studio Gearbox

Cover image(s): Dover

Interior design and typesetting: Lakeside Design Plus

First printing 2012

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-2387-8

ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-2390-8

PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-2388-5

Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-2389-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Poythress, Vern S.

Inerrancy and worldview : answering modern challenges to the Bible / Vern Sheridan Poythress.

    p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 978-1-4335-2387-8 (tp)

1. Bible—Evidences, authority, etc. 2. Apologetics. 3. Christian philosophy. 4. Christianity—Philosophy. I. Title.

BS480.P66 2012

220.1'32—dc23

2012001926

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

VP  24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12

14   13   12   11   10   9   8   7   6    5    4    3    2    1

To my wife,

who has faithfully encouraged me in trusting God’s Word

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

PART ONE

TWO COMMON RELIGIOUS DIFFICULTIES

1 How Can Only One Religion Be Right?

2 Are Moral Rules a Straitjacket?

PART TWO

CHALLENGES FROM SCIENCE AND MATERIALISM

3 Worldviews and Materialism

4 Modern Science

PART THREE

CHALLENGES FROM HISTORY

 5 The Historical-Critical Tradition

 6 Responding to Historical Criticism

 7 The Change from History to Structure

PART FOUR

CHALLENGES ABOUT LANGUAGE

 8 Challenges from Linguistics and Philosophy of Language

9 Words and Meanings concerning Many “Gods”

10 Growth in Understanding

11 Contexts for Language

12 The Idea of Closed Language

13 Breaking Out of Closure in Language

14 Analysis of Biblical Narratives

PART FIVE

CHALLENGES FROM SOCIOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

15 Challenges from Sociology

16 The Idea of Closure of Culture

17 Breaking Out of Closure in Culture

18 Marxism and Feminism

PART SIX

CHALLENGES FROM PSYCHOLOGY

19 Challenges concerning Cognition

20 Interaction of Minds

21 Thinking about the Inspiration of the Bible

PART SEVEN

CHALLENGES FROM EXAMPLES

22 Ordinary Life and Science

23 Understanding an Alleged “Contradiction”

24 Law in Cultural Context

25 Proverbs in Cultural Context

26 The Glory of Christ

PART EIGHT

CHALLENGES FROM OUR ATTITUDES

27 Do We Need Help?

28 Corruption in the Mind

29 Counterfeiting the Truth

30 Truth

31 The Bible

32 The Danger of Pride

PART NINE

CHALLENGES FROM CORRUPT SPIRITUALITY

33 Religious Gullibility

34 The Nature of Ultimate Commitments

35 Why Are We So Gullible?

PART TEN

CONCLUSION

36 Scripture and Worldviews

Appendix: Human Authors of the Bible

Bibliography

PREFACE

How do we understand the Bible? In recent decades a number of books, articles, blogs, and other voices within the broad community of evangelical Christians have urged us to rethink how we understand the Bible. These discussions about the Bible have special interest for evangelicals and fundamentalists who believe that the Bible is the word of God.1

Some of the new voices express discontent with the traditional view of the Bible’s absolute authority as the word of God. The traditional evangelical view says that the Bible is inerrant; that is, it is completely true in what it says, and makes no claims that are not true.2 Inerrancy has become a sore point. Some of the voices directly attack inerrancy. Others redefine it.3

The struggle about the Bible has many dimensions. Modern challenges come from various directions. We confront postmodernist thinking, alleged discrepancies or errors in the Bible, growing information about the ancient Near East that allegedly throws doubt on traditional readings of the Bible, and tensions between the Bible and science.

I agree that our modern world confronts us with some distinctive challenges. But I do not agree with the modern attempts to abandon or redefine inerrancy. To respond to all the modern voices one by one would be tedious, because the voices are diverse and new voices continue to appear. Rather, I want to develop an alternative response in a positive way.

Some of the new voices tell us that we need to think through more thoroughly the humanity of Scripture. The Bible itself identifies some of the human authors who wrote its books—for example, Paul, John, Jeremiah, Amos. It also indicates that the writing of the books was superintended by God, and that God sent the Holy Spirit to the human authors to work in them in such a way that their writings were also God’s writings, his own word (2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Pet. 1:21). Thus, the Bible does invite us to think about the human authors and what they did. But we are unlikely to appreciate the role of human authors accurately and in depth without understanding God, who made human beings in his image (Gen. 1:26–27).

The Bible has much to say about God and about how we can come to know him. What it says is deeply at odds with much of the thinking in the modern world. And this fundamental difference generates differences in many other areas—differences in people’s whole view of the world. Modern worldviews are at odds with the worldview put forward in the Bible. This difference in worldviews creates obstacles when modern people read and study the Bible. People come to the Bible with expectations that do not fit the Bible, and this clash becomes one main reason, though not the only one, why people do not find the Bible’s claims acceptable.

Within the scope of a single book we cannot hope to deal with all the difficulties that people encounter. We will concentrate here on difficulties that have ties with the differences in worldview.

1I consider fundamentalists to be a subgroup within evangelicals. I grant that the words evangelical and fundamentalist today are rather loosely defined.

2The classic statement on inerrancy is found in Benjamin B. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1948). See also Archibald A. Hodge and Benjamin B. Warfield, Inspiration, with introduction by Roger R. Nicole (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979); Richard B. Gaffin Jr., God’s Word in Servant-Form: Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck on the Doctrine of Scripture (Jackson, MS: Reformed Academic Press, 2008); John D. Woodbridge, Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982); Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend, vol. 1, Prolegomena (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 353–494. Some people have seen Bavinck and Kuyper as differing significantly from Warfield and Hodge, but like Gaffin I see all four—Hodge, Warfield, Bavinck, and Kuyper—in harmony. On the diversity of genres in the Bible, see Vern S. Poythress, In the Beginning Was the Word: Language—A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009), esp. chaps. 19 and 23 and appendix H. See also chap. 31 of the present book.

3Cornelius Van Til did not live to see the challenges thrown up in the last two decades; but what he wrote in responding to similar challenges in his own day is still pertinent. See Van Til, The Protestant Doctrine of Scripture (n.p.: den Dulk Christian Foundation, 1967); Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology: Prolegomena and the Doctrines of Revelation, Scripture, and God, 2nd ed., ed. William Edgar (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2007).

INTRODUCTION

Many people—even people who would call themselves Christians—have difficulties with the Bible. Some people are morally offended by parts of the Bible. Some parts of it do not fit modern ideas about good religion. What do we do with these parts? The Bible has exclusive claims about what is right and wrong in religion. It makes exclusive claims about God. It says that Jesus is the only way to God (John 14:6; Acts 4:12). It talks about hell.

Some people are troubled by apparent discrepancies between the Bible and modern science. What do we do with these discrepancies? Some people have decided that we must give up on the Bible. They say that the Bible has been shown to be outmoded and primitive. Others hope to find some core of truth in it, though they argue that the “wrappings” around the core need to be discarded.

Still others think that the Bible is the word of God, true for all time. But can they explain how to relate it intelligently to the swirl of modern questions and controversies?

These are important questions, so important that we can profit from taking our time to work toward answers. The challenge of interpreting the Bible has many dimensions and many challenges. We cannot consider them all equally.1 We focus here on issues involving response to our modern situation.

Our Modern Situation

Our modern situation offers us various competing assumptions about religion, about the nature of humanity, about what is wrong with the world, about the purpose of life, and so on. These assumptions may have effects on how people read the Bible. We can begin to answer many of our difficulties in a number of areas if we make ourselves aware of the assumptions that we tend to bring along when we study the Bible.

But our deepest difficulties cannot be resolved merely on a narrowly intellectual plane. Our deepest difficulty is sin, rebellion against God. We have desires in our hearts that resist the Bible’s views and what God has to say. We want to be our own master. The Bible talks about those who resist God as being “dead in . . . trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1) and “darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart” (Eph. 4:18). God himself must overcome our resistance (Acts 16:14; 2 Tim. 2:25–26; John 3:3–8). We will focus primarily on more intellectual difficulties, because these can be more directly and more easily addressed. But it is wise to remember that more stubborn difficulties lurk beneath the surface.

1All the books I have published relate in one way or another to biblical interpretation. For discussion of many kinds of questions about interpreting the Bible, I must direct readers to these books and books written by other authors. Readers who want an overview of most of the foundational areas, brought together in one place, may consult Vern S. Poythress, God-Centered Biblical Interpretation (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1999).

1

HOW CAN ONLY ONE RELIGION BE RIGHT?

Let us consider one common difficulty that modern people have with the Bible: how can there be only one true religion?1

The View that All Religions Are Right

People ask this question partly because they are aware of multiple religions—Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism, to name a few. How do we respond to this multiplicity? One person, whom we may call Sue, concludes that all religions are equally right. She says that they all have a common core having to do with a loving God and being kind to your neighbor. But in selecting a common core Sue shows her own personal religious preferences. Sue speaks of a loving God. But Buddhism does not believe in a personal God. So Sue has excluded Buddhism rather than being all-inclusive. She has also excluded polytheism, which believes in many gods rather than one.2 Sue speaks of being kind to your neighbor. But some religions have practiced child sacrifice (Deut. 18:9–10).

When Sue talks about a common core, she has also put into the background the irreconcilable differences between major religions. The Bible teaches that Jesus is the Son of God. The Qur’an says that he is not the son of God, but only a prophet. The New Testament part of the Bible teaches that Jesus is the Messiah promised in the Old Testament. Modern Judaism denies that he is. Sue implicitly disagrees with all of these convictions when she implies that they really do not matter. Christianity, Islam, and Orthodox Judaism all exclude one another by having beliefs that are denied by the other two. Sue in practice excludes all three by saying that the exclusive beliefs are not the “core.” Tim Keller observes, “We are all exclusive in our beliefs about religion, but in different ways.”3

The View that All Religions Are Wrong

Let us consider another example. Donald looks over the field of religions and concludes that they are all wrong. He thinks that they all make arrogant, overreaching claims to know the truth. The differences between the claims show that no one really knows.

Donald’s position is just as exclusive as Sue’s, and just as exclusive as the claims of any one traditional religion. How so? He claims to know better than any religious practitioner the true status of religious claims. But you have to know a lot about God—whether he exists, whether he reveals himself, what kind of God he is—to make a claim that excludes all religions before seriously investigating any of them in detail. Donald thinks that religious claims are arrogant. The irony is that he is acting arrogantly in claiming to be superior to all religions.

Social Influence on Religious Beliefs

Many people in many cultures have had confidence in their religious views. But Donald does not have confidence in any religion. And today in Europe, Canada, and the United States we meet many people like him. Why? Sometimes sociology of religion has played a role. Sociologists observe that many people hold the religion of their parents or the predominant religion in their location and in their ethnic group. Religious convictions are passed on by society, and especially by parents. When Donald observes this social dimension of religion, he concludes that exclusive religious claims are a product of narrow ethnocentricity. Donald thinks that religion as a whole is suspect.

But now let us ask why Donald is so different from many people in non-Western cultures who confidently belong to a particular religion. Just like other people, Donald has received social influences, including the influence of sociology of religion. Donald’s views about religion have been socially shaped. If social shaping undermines truth, it undermines the truth of Donald’s views as well as everyone else’s. Donald’s views are just as “ethnocentric” as everyone else’s, but Donald is unaware of it.4

Worldviews

Part of the challenge in searching for the truth is that we all do so against the background of assumptions about truth. Many basic assumptions about the nature of the world fit together to form a worldview. A worldview includes assumptions about whether God exists, what kind of God might exist, what kind of world we live in, how we come to know what we know, whether there are moral standards, what is the purpose of human life, and so on. Donald and those like him have inherited many convictions from the society around them.

Most modern worldviews differ at crucial points from the worldview offered in the Bible. When we come to the Bible and try to listen to its claims, we can easily misjudge those claims if we hear them only from within the framework of our own modern assumptions. Letting the Bible speak for itself, that is, letting it speak in its own terms, includes letting the Bible speak from within its own worldview rather than merely our own.

A Personal God

I propose, then, to explore this theme of differing worldviews through subsequent chapters. But I want to focus a little more narrowly. One crucial piece in the biblical worldview concerns who God is. According to the Bible, God is the Creator and sustainer of the world, and God is personal. God’s personal character makes a difference. If you want to find out about an apple sitting in a fruit bowl, there are many ways you might go about it. You might photograph it, chemically analyze it, smell it, cut it up, eat it. It is up to you; the apple has no choice in the matter. But getting to know a person is different. You are not completely in charge. You may be able to observe a stranger’s actions at a distance. But for real acquaintance, you must meet the person, and the person must cooperate. It is up to the other person how much he or she will tell you.

Some of the thinking about religion makes a mistake right here. If, in our thinking, God or religion becomes like an apple, we are in charge and we do our own investigating in whatever way we please. On the other hand, if God is a person, and in fact a person infinitely greater than we, it is up to him how he chooses to meet us. Until we get to know him, we cannot say whether he makes himself known in all religions equally, or in none of them, or in one particular way that fits his character.

The Bible claims to be God’s communication to us. That is an exclusive claim. But mere exclusiveness, as we have seen, does not disqualify the claim. We have to find out by reading the Bible, not by rejecting it beforehand. And we have to reckon with the fact that God as a person may be different from what we imagine him to be. Getting acquainted succeeds better if it takes place without a lot of prejudice getting in the way.5

1See the further discussion in Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Dutton, 2008), 3–21.

2A more nuanced discussion would have to consider monism as religion. By breaking down the distinctions between religions and trying to move toward one God behind all religions, Sue may be on the way to trying to break down all distinctions whatsoever. All is one. This view, articulated within philosophical Hinduism, actually has an affinity with polytheism. According to Hinduism, the “One” has a plurality of manifestations in nature, and this plurality is worshiped as many gods. See John N. Oswalt, The Bible among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), esp. chap. 3.

3Keller, Reason for God, 13.

4“If the pluralist had been born in [Morocco] he probably wouldn’t be a pluralist” (ibid., 11, quoting Alvin Plantinga, “A Defense of Religious Exclusivism,” in The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader, ed. James F. Sennett [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998], 205). “You can’t say, ‘All claims about religions are historically conditioned except the one I am making right now’” (Keller, Reason for God, 11).

5See chap. 32, on pride.

2

ARE MORAL RULES A STRAITJACKET?

Consider a second difficulty with the Bible. Some modern people see the moral instruction in the Bible as a straitjacket.1 They may disagree with some of the Bible’s specific moral pronouncements. But they have a deeper difficulty: absolute moral rules seem to them to be an assault on their freedom.

The Worldview Question

People in other cultures have not found the same difficulty with the Bible. Many Christians in previous centuries have valued its instruction. So what causes the differences?

Once again, competing worldviews are one source of difference. The God of the Bible is a personal God. According to the Bible’s teaching and its personalist worldview, God has a moral character. Whether or not we accept his moral guidance matters to him.

But if that is all we say, we can still feel as though moral rules are an imposition on human freedom. The Bible has a many-sided reply to this modern feeling. God made human beings in his image (Gen. 1:26–28), so that we have a moral character ourselves. We have a sense of right and wrong. And God made us with a purpose, so that we would grow in fellowship with him and find freedom and satisfaction in fellowship with him rather than in isolation.

Different worldviews lead to different conceptions of freedom. If there were no God, freedom might mean freedom to create our own purposes. It might mean freedom from all constraint, which implies, in the end, freedom from the constraints of personal relationships. The ideal freedom would be to live in isolation. On the other hand, if God exists and is personal, freedom means not isolation but joy in appreciating both other human beings and God the infinite person. God’s moral order is designed by God to guide us into personal fellowship and satisfaction. It is for our good. It is for our freedom, we might say, in the true sense of “freedom.” The person who goes astray from God’s wise guidance burdens himself with sorrows and frustrations. In fact, he ends up being a slave to his own desires.

What Makes Sense

The person who rejects the Bible’s moral guidance thinks that he has good reasons for rejecting it. It seems reasonable to him to seek “freedom” rather than the Bible’s instruction, which he deems to be oppressing and confining. But his judgments about freedom and about oppression are colored by a worldview. He already has assumptions about what would be a meaningful and fulfilling life—what true freedom would mean. And his assumptions depend on his conception of whether God is relevant, and whether God is personal. Thus, he may reject the Bible not because the Bible does not make sense in its own terms, but because he is not reading it on its own terms. He is injecting his own worldview and his own agenda about the kind of freedom that he pictures for himself as ideal.

The Bible’s own view of the matter has still another dimension. The Bible indicates that God created us and designed us to have personal fellowship with him and to follow his ways. But we have gone astray and rebelled. We want to be our own master. That is sin. Sin colors our thinking and makes us dislike the idea of submitting to anyone else. Even though God’s way is healthy and our own way is destructive, we do not want to stop following our own way. So when we interact with the Bible, we are not just innocent evaluators. We have a destructive agenda. And that is part of the problem. The problem is not just the worldviews “out there,” so to speak, but the worldviews and sinful desires “in here.” Our secret desires for sin mesh with the ideological offerings of the worldviews that are “on sale” in our society.

1Timothy Keller, The Reason for God : Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Dutton, 2008), 35–50.

3

WORLDVIEWS AND MATERIALISM

Consider a third area of difficulty. Some people say that modern science has shown us that miracles are impossible. In addition, they may say that we now know that the world consists of matter and motion and energy. God is irrelevant. These claims are at odds with the Bible. How do we approach these challenges?

Worldviews

Once again, awareness about differing worldviews can help. We can generalize from the examples in the previous two chapters. In the first chapter we asked whether there can be one true religion. In the second chapter we asked whether absolute moral standards put a straitjacket on human freedom. The responses to both questions show that we are influenced by our assumptions—our worldview. Most modern people have a modern worldview that is deeply at odds with the view of the world that the Bible offers.

So what is this modern worldview? In a sense, the pluralism of our time offers many worldviews. The various traditional religions still exist, and each offers answers to basic questions. What is the nature of our world? What is its basic structure and meaning? Where did it come from? What is the significance of human nature and of each individual human being? What is the goal of living? What if something is wrong with the world or human beings in it? How can the wrong be remedied? How do we know what is morally right and wrong? Is there an afterlife? What is it like? What implications, if any, does the afterlife have for the way we live now?

Modern Materialism

Alongside the answers from traditional religions come distinctly modern answers, especially answers that build on and appeal to the findings of modern science. One dominant influence is what we might call modern materialism. Materialism is a worldview that offers answers to the basic questions about the meaning of life. According to materialism, the world consists in matter and energy and motion. The world is physical in its most basic and deepest structure. Everything else is built up from complex combinations and interactions of matter and energy and motion. Elementary particles form into atoms; atoms form into molecules; molecules form into larger structures like crystals and living cells; cells form organs and organisms; and each one of us is such an organism. The structure of our brains leads to complex human actions and thoughts, and these lead to human meaning.

According to this view, the world has physical meaning that derives from matter and energy and motion. Everything else is added human meanings that we ourselves create in the process of interpreting what we experience.

According to materialism, the universe as we know it originated in the big bang. Human beings are random products of biological evolution, so we have no particular distinct significance except what we create for ourselves. The goal of living is whatever each of us as an individual chooses. But the cosmos as a whole has no goal, no purpose. And it looks as though life itself is only temporary, because the winding down of the amount of free energy in the universe will eventually make it impossible for life to exist. The universe will end up cold and inert.1

According to this view, there is nothing wrong with the world—the world simply is. There is no afterlife. Morality is a by-product of the human brain in its biological structure and human social interaction.

When considered in its totality, the materialist worldview is bleak and forbidding in comparison to human spiritual aspirations. We may meet people who try to hold to it consistently. But we meet many more who are influenced by it without swallowing every piece of it. They long for human significance. They find ways of adding more comfortable extra stories onto the materialist substructure of matter and energy and motion. Some people may add a religious dimension of a pantheistic sort. They may postulate a kind of spiritual “energy” in the cosmos, with which they can commune. Nature becomes “Mother Nature.” There are variations on this theme. As a society, we become pluralistic in our views of human significance, just as we are pluralistic in many other respects. We autonomously choose which ideas we wish to embrace, even when those ideas are at odds with reality.

The Difference between Natural Science and Materialism

Materialism derives most of its prestige from modern natural science. Science2 studies matter and energy and motion in their many configurations. The narrow and single-minded focus on matter and motion, and on larger things like cells that involve complex interactions of matter and motion, is one of the secrets for scientific success. Concentrate. Through concentration on matter and motion, scientists build up gradually more and more elaborate understandings of how they work.

But the path from natural science to materialism involves a key transition. The scientist makes a decision at the beginning of his investigation to narrow his focus. Materialism converts this scientific decision into a philosophy that says that the focus of science is not only one possible focus, but the only focus that is significant. The key idea of being the only focus is an addition. Scientific investigation, narrowly conceived, does not prove materialism. Rather, materialism arises from confusing two distinct moves: (1) the narrow scientific strategy of focusing on what is material and (2) the claim that the narrow focus is all that there is.

Materialism nevertheless has a broad influence. It influences even the people who do not adopt it as the complete story. They are tempted to think that materialism is at the bottom of the world, and much of the rest arises from human creation of meaning.

Materialism also influences our view of regularities in the world. Scientists study regularities. The more profound regularities are called laws, such as Newton’s three laws of motion.3 These laws are regarded as impersonal. They are a kind of cosmic mechanism that keeps the world going according to general patterns.

Many people absorb from modern culture the conviction that matter and motion are the ultimate bottom layer. But, as we observed, not everyone today is a pure, hard-nosed materialist. A worldview with only the initial bottom material layer is too bleak. People add other layers on top: layers for living things, layers for beauty, truth, human society, maybe some moral convictions. But in their thinking these extra layers are just as independent of God as the bottom. After all, the extra layers are built on the bottom. And the bottom layer, the matter and motion, is just there, independent of God. The bottom layer is impersonal. And therefore the extra layers that we add are just as impersonal as the bottom. Human beings are of course persons, but all other kinds of structure are impersonal. These structures include the physical arrangements and physical activities in our bodies on which we depend. Human beings themselves are ultimately held in being by impersonal regularities.4

The word impersonalism is probably better than materialism for labeling these richer views that have materialism only as an initial bottom layer. In an impersonalist view, all the layers are just “there,” independent of God and unrelated to God.5

This ultimate impersonalism often goes together with some kind of acknowledgment of personal significances. In fact, it is not so hard for some people to desire to reanimate dead matter by ascribing semi-personal characteristics to phenomena of nature. We already mentioned the expression “Mother Nature.” Such an expression gives to nature semi-personal characteristics.

If matter is at the bottom of everything, there is continuity between human beings and trees. This conviction may lead some people to dismiss what is uniquely human: they could say that consciousness and moral judgments are illusory. But they could also travel in exactly the opposite direction. They could try to commune with trees and imagine that trees too must dimly possess quasi-human characteristics. A hard-nosed scientific materialism in one part of the mind can actually be combined with a soft yearning for communion with spirits; people can travel toward new forms of animism, spiritism, polytheism, and pantheism. Everyday people within advanced industrial societies are looking into astrology and fortune-telling and spirits and meditation. That direction might seem paradoxical. But actually it is not surprising. In principle a thoroughgoing materialism breaks down all hard-and-fast distinctions within the world. If a materialist viewpoint is correct, all is one. And the many—the diversity of phenomena—all flow into this one. This result has a name—pantheism—that shows its religious commitment.6 Such religious commitments may begin to populate the world with many spirits and many gods, which are semi-personal. When a viewpoint includes spirits and gods, it may in a sense appear to be personalist. But ultimately it is impersonalist, because the “one” dissolves what is distinctive to persons. In what follows we will focus on the impersonalist root rather than on the religious variations that may flourish on the basis of this root.

A Contrast with the Biblical Worldview

In contrast to impersonalism, the Bible indicates that God is involved in the world. God is personal, and he governs the world by speaking—by issuing commands. He created the world by speaking. He said, “Let there be light,” and there was light (Gen. 1:3). Scientists in exploring laws are exploring the speech of God and the mind of God that issued in the laws.7 The Bible in this way provides a role for science. But science is understood within a personalistic context. The view of the world offered in the Bible is personalistic at the core, while the mainstream modern worldview is impersonalistic. That makes a profound difference, especially when we ask about the meanings and purposes of things.

When we begin to study the Bible, the difference in worldview makes itself felt. We can gain many insights into the Bible using approaches to history, culture, and language that have been developed in the modern world. But these approaches, when we examine them more minutely, prove to be infected with the impersonalistic worldview of modern life. If we apply such approaches thoughtlessly to the Bible, we create difficulties. In fact, we are likely to think that the Bible shows deficiencies. But the deficiencies actually belong to modern thinking.

How Is Materialism Deficient?

Is materialism actually deficient? Whole books have been written on the question.8 We cannot enter into all the issues in detail. Perhaps the easiest way of exposing one of its problems is by way of ethics. Is murder wrong? Is theft wrong? Why or why not? Do standards for human behavior have any foundation other than the fact that individuals or societies have invented them? If everything boils down to matter, that is, if materialistic, purposeless evolution gave rise to human beings, each individual is simply the product of evolution of matter and motion. We would then have to say that each person’s moral preferences are also the product of evolution. You have evolved in such a way that you prefer helping the old lady across the street. Joe has evolved to prefer mugging the old lady and taking her money. According to this view, both you and Joe are equally products of the same impersonalist evolutionary process.

But if Joe were to mug you, you would know instinctively that it was wrong. No one actually lives on the basis of complete moral relativism or materialism. There is an obvious disconnect between someone’s claim to be relativist and his own moral judgments, including his judgment that people ought to be relativist.

Can we rescue ourselves by appealing to a social rather than merely individual moral judgment? Is murder wrong just because society declares it to be wrong? We still have to deal with whole societies that have practiced child sacrifice or have enslaved outsiders. And in modern times we have had to deal with Nazism, where the oppression of the Jews had official government sanction. A whole society was in the wrong. We know that. And we also know when we make a judgment of that kind that we do not intend merely to express a personal, subjective preference, like preferring vanilla ice cream to chocolate. We instinctively know that there are absolutes in morality, even if some of us try to evade such knowledge by clever rhetoric.

The problem of having a foundation for ethics is serious not only because our moral judgments contradict relativism, but because every area of human endeavor, not just our attitude toward gross crimes, depends on moral foundations. People cannot practice science, or undertake historical investigation, or use language to make promises or communicate truth, or even argue for moral relativism, without presupposing that we ought to be faithful to standards for science and history and language. They presuppose an “ought,” in the form of real moral standards. In particular, they presuppose that we ought to honor truth. If the standards are merely artificial social products, they are ultimately meaningless, and the products produced under the guidance of the standards have no trustworthiness or ultimate value. Why not rebel against social standards, as atheistic existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre contemplated doing? The disappearance of transcendent morality undermines not only ability to act against blatant crime, but ability to evaluate anything at all. In particular, without moral standards, criticisms that people launch against the Bible from the platforms of science, historical research, or linguistics have no foundation.

The Bible provides a clear answer. God is the source of morality. He is absolutely good and he created us in his image, so that we have a sense of right and wrong derived from him. We depend on God being there whenever we make moral judgments. But our judgments are corrupted through sin. A lot more is corrupted as well. So we have to come to Christ to receive redemption. As part of that redemption, we receive instruction from the Bible about who God really is and what he requires, as well as instruction about redemption itself.

Influences of Materialism

Now we need to examine more closely the influences of the modern impersonalist worldview on various specialized areas of thought, such as history, language, and society. We will try to distinguish helpful insights from the unhelpful distortions that creep in from modern thinking. In the chapters to come we will consider difficulties having to do with science, history, language, social structure, and psychology.

Any one of these areas could receive more detailed discussion than what we can give here. I have chosen instead to concentrate on a common thread, namely impersonalism. For more detailed treatment of some of the areas, I must refer readers to other books. For a God-centered, personalist view of science, see Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach. For language, see In the Beginning Was the Word: Language—A God-Centered Approach. For society and sociology, see Redeeming Sociology: A God-Centered Approach. For a general overview, see God-Centered Biblical Interpretation.9

1One current cosmological view holds that the observable expansion in the universe will gradually slow down, then stop, then reverse, leading in the far future to a “big crunch” in which all matter will come together into a very small area. The “crunch” would be like the big bang played in reverse. If such a crunch were to take place, it would wipe out all physical life as we know it. But most cosmologists think that the present expansion will not be reversed. They predict in the far future a universe that is cold and inert. In either case, either in a crunch or in inertness, life as we know it will eventually come to an end.

2Much depends on how broadly we conceive “science.” Do we, for example, include social sciences? Natural sciences, especially the “hard” sciences such as physics, chemistry, and astronomy, have the greatest prestige. So our summary is focusing on them. Biology studies living things, but these living things are often seen in modern times as “reducible” in principle to matter and energy and motion.

3Because of twentieth-century advances in the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, we now know that Newton’s laws are an approximation. But they may serve as an example of how people think about scientific laws.

4In a more robust account, we need to discuss chance, that is, apparent randomness, as well as regularities (lawfulness). Materialism sees both of these aspects as ultimately impersonal.

5On personalism and impersonalism, see Van Til, The Protestant Doctrine of Scripture (n.p.: den Dulk Christian Foundation, 1967), 37. Van Til’s writings consistently emphasize the personalism of the biblical approach to the nature of God and the world.

6John N. Oswalt, The Bible among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), further articulates the implications of this kind of “mythic” thinking or “continuity” thinking that tries to surpass all distinctions.

7See the next chapter and Poythress, Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006), chap. 1.

8See, for example, John Lennox, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Oxford: Lion, 2009).

9Poythress, Redeeming Science; Poythress, In the Beginning Was the Word: Language—A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009); Poythress, Redeeming Sociology: A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011); Poythress, God-Centered Biblical Interpretation (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1999).

4

MODERN SCIENCE

Now let us begin to look in more detail at special areas where people find difficulty with the Bible. The most obvious difficulty in many people’s minds comes from modern science. Science, it is said, contradicts the Bible. It shows that the Bible is just one among many collections of human religious ideas.

This challenge could receive an extensive answer. The short answer is that we have to look carefully at both the Bible and science to find out whether there are real contradictions. We have to avoid reading into the Bible false meanings. And we have to inspect the work of scientists to see whether their conclusions are sound in particular cases of dispute.

Challenges arise both with respect to natural sciences and with respect to social sciences. Let us first look at issues from natural sciences.

Two Forms of God’s Word

Consider first the Bible’s view of the world. The Bible indicates that God expresses his truth both in the Bible and in the commands by which he rules the universe. The commands from God control the weather.

He [God] sends out his command to the earth;

his word runs swiftly.

He gives snow like wool;

he scatters frost like ashes.

He hurls down his crystals of ice like crumbs;

who can stand before his cold?

He sends out his word, and melts them;

he makes his wind blow and the waters flow. (Ps. 147:15–18)

God establishes the regularities of the universe.

By the word of the LORD the heavens were made,

and by the breath of his mouth all their host. (Ps. 33:6)

The verses we have just cited show that God rules the world by his word; he rules by speaking. In addition, the Bible is a particular form of God’s speech, namely, written speech from God addressed to human beings (2 Tim. 3:16). We must consider both forms of God’s speech. God’s word governing the world is the basis for science. God’s word in the Bible is the basis for theology. According to the Bible’s worldview, the two words are intrinsically in harmony because God is in harmony with himself. Because God is infinite and our knowledge is limited, we may not always have enough information to see immediately how all of the pieces fit together. But many pieces do fit together to reinforce the conviction that God knows what he is doing and can be trusted in both areas—in what he does in the universe and in what he says in the Bible.

To work out all the details does take time. So at this point let us consider only three sample issues: (1) the nature of miracles, (2) the issue of whether the Bible uses an obsolete earth-centered view of the world, and (3) the nature of the days of creation in Genesis 1. In each case we need to reckon with worldviews. (For further discussion I must refer readers to books that work out more details. My own book Redeeming Science and C. John Collins’s book Science and Faith make good starting points.1 )

Miracles

First, let us consider the nature of miracles. Do miracles take place? Are they consistent with science? Do miracles violate scientific laws? Has science shown that miracles do not exist? To answer these questions, we need to step back and consider briefly the nature of scientific laws. How we think about these laws and about miracles depends on our worldview. That does not mean that all worldviews are equally right or equally wrong. Rather, it means that we must be circumspect and be aware that our own view may be at odds with what God has established. We must be prepared to change our thinking.

As we have observed, God created the world by his word (Ps. 33:6). And he rules the world providentially by his word: “he upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3). The real law is God’s speech. Scientists who investigate the world in order to discern its laws are really looking into the mind of God and the speech of God. When they formulate laws, those laws are their human guesses about the real law, which is God’s word.

God’s word is personal. It is what he commands. His commandments specify the regularities, such as the phenomena of light and the movements of sun and moon and stars. He also specifies the extraordinary events that surprise us, including the resurrection of Christ. The extraordinary events, the miracles, conform to God’s word, just as do the regularities. Miracles are exceptional, but they make sense when we understand God’s personal plan, which accomplished salvation and brought new life through Christ’s resurrection from the dead.

For example, according to Exodus 19–20 God spoke in an audible voice to the people of Israel from the top of Mount Sinai. This speaking was an exceptional, miraculous event. It may or may not have happened in conformity with modern scientists’ formulations of various natural laws. It was in full conformity with God’s purposes: it was a special event in which God showed his power to his people and also inaugurated a personal relationship with them, as expressed in the Ten Commandments. The exceptional character of the physical manifestations at Mount Sinai makes good sense when we consider the physical events as an expression of God’s personal purpose for the people of Israel. The events make little sense, on the other hand, if they are viewed as merely the products of impersonal laws. Skeptics, reasoning on the basis of an impersonalist conception of law, prefer to believe that Exodus 19–20 is a made-up story, because only in such a way can it be reasonably integrated into their overall assumption that impersonal laws govern the universe.

The same principles hold for other miracles in the Bible. The common modern approach thinks of the laws of science as fundamentally impersonal. They become mechanical. Miracles are then thought to be impossible because a miracle would break through or violate the established impersonal order. This view not only misunderstands miracle by making it a violation of law; it also misunderstands the true character of law.

The change from a personal God to impersonal law makes a difference all the way through scientific practice. But the difference can be subtle. Scientists from all religious backgrounds appear superficially to agree about what the law is. All scientists, for example, accept Newton’s second law of motion, namely, F = ma (Force F equals mass m times acceleration a). This law is a good approximate representation of the relation between forces and accelerations, provided the masses involved are not too large or too small, and the velocities are not too big.2 All scientists “agree.”