Is Religious Faith a Form of Dementia?

            Sometimes I seriously wonder how long it will be before the American Psychological Association declares religious belief to be a mental illness.  Such a worry would seem far-fetched, until one reads passages like the one I came across three weeks ago in The New York Times.  In an October 6, 2009, article on Francis Collins, a Christian who is the former head of the human genome project and the new director of the National Institutes of Health, New York Times reporter Gardiner Harris offers the analysis that “many scientists view such outspoken religious commitment [as that of Dr. Collins] as a sign of mild dementia.”  Francis Collins has ruffled feathers in the scientific community because he insists that the complex designs evident in nature presuppose an Intelligent Designer, a Being Dr. Collins believes to be the God of the Bible.  Since modern science has no real answer to that claim, it engages in the sort of attack we call ad hominem, arguing that in this one area of his life, the otherwise brilliant Dr. Collins must surely be suffering from a mild mental illness.

 

Source: www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/health

 

 

Idols of the Heart

            How many books that any of us have read can we say have really and truly changed our lives in fundamental ways?  A new book that I think will “rock your world” is Counterfeit Gods, just published by Timothy Keller, a wonderfully gifted and insightful Presbyterian minister from Manhattan (New York: Dutton Book, 2009).  I say I believe the book will change your life because it landed like a tornado in my own soul when I read the book last Friday.  (Yes, that is how good the book is.  I bought it Friday morning at Barnes & Noble and finished it by 9:00 o’clock Friday evening.)

            Dr. Keller’s premise is that idolatry is the fundamental sin of the human heart, the sin that underlies all other sin.  He makes a strong biblical case for that conclusion, not least of all from Romans 1:18-23.  And after all, does it not make sense that idolatry must be the greatest temptation for our souls, given that the First Commandment condemns it (Exodus 20:3), and the “Great Commandment” of Deuteronomy 6:5 calls us instead to love the true God with all we are and all we have?

            Dr. Keller surveys the biblical teaching carefully and defines idolatry as “anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give” (p. xvii).  Through the scriptural accounts of Abraham, Leah, Zacchaeus, Naaman, Nebuchadnezzar, and Jonah, Dr. Keller shows how God reveals and deals decisively with idols like our deepest desires, our quest for human love and acceptance, money, success, power, and hidden gods.  It is not that all of these desires of our hearts, like the quest for love or acceptance, are wrong in and of themselves.  In fact, many of them are good impulses God himself wired into our hearts.  The acute danger to our souls arises when we make idols out of these desires, that is, when we raise these desires in our hearts to a place of significance above the quest to know and delight in and be satisfied supremely in God. 

            In the final two chapters of the book, Dr. Keller shows how God’s defeat of the life-sapping idols of our hearts lies in total surrender to the Lord and in spiritual disciplines like prayer and Bible intake.  The “bottom line” is that “Jesus must become more beautiful to your imagination, more attractive to your heart, than your idol.  That is what will replace your counterfeit gods,” Dr. Keller concludes (p. 172).

            There is so much more I could say about this important and life-changing book Counterfeit Gods.  For now allow me to encourage you in the strongest terms to secure a copy just as quickly as you can and read it slowly, taking in the very great biblical wisdom God has graciously imparted to the mind and heart of Timothy Keller.  In the end, read this book for nothing less than the sake of the welfare of your soul in your love to God!

 

Worldview Corner-- Christians and Halloween

            One of the main purposes of this blog will be to help you and me develop a thoroughly biblical worldview, that is, a set of presuppositions that lead us to think as Bible-saturated Christians about all the realities around us, from our work to politics to war and peace to sports to eating lunch.  Since Halloween is coming up in just a few days, it seemed right that the first “Worldview Corner” commentary should concern Christians and the question of how exactly we should deal with this strange holiday.   The fundamental biblical principle that applies to this question of Halloween appears, of course, in 1 Corinthians 10:31 (ESV): “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”  Given that we are to live for God’s glory in all things, how exactly can the followers of Jesus honor God in our relationship to Halloween?   Can we glorify God by observing it to some degree, or do we give him greater honor by seeking to ignore the day altogether, or by practicing some alternative in between?  This is a difficult question, because believers who love Jesus and who conscientiously seek to apply Scripture to their lives have come to different conclusions on this question.  I have known Christians who have concluded that the Lord permits their children to dress up in costumes and trick or treat.  I have known other believers-- just as faithful to Christ-- who not only do not allow their children to trick or treat but who darken their homes on October 31 and give out no candy to others.  To be perfectly candid, our own family has gone back and forth through the years on the question of  whether our children would be allowed to dress up and go around the neighborhood collecting candy and other treats.

            I think there at least two principles concerning Halloween on which all Christians should agree.  One, Christians have no business at all toying with witchcraft or black magic or anything of the sort, practices which some groups flaunt on Halloween, because of its decidedly pagan origins.  The Bible condemns all practices of witchcraft in no uncertain terms, because those practices are from the devil and thus can only do harm to those who carry them out.  The basic biblical statement on this point appears in Deuteronomy 18:10-12, which is utterly comprehensive in its condemnation of witchcraft: “There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or a charmer or a medium or a wizard or a necromancer [person who seeks to bring up the spirits of the dead], for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord.” 

            Why are practices of the magical arts an “abomination to the Lord”?  God condemns witchcraft because it arose from pagan superstitious practices and thus would do nothing but spiritual harm to those who practiced it.  Practices of black magic were part of animistic religions that knew nothing of the one true God who created and who rules all things.  Magic is a purely human effort by which its practitioners believe they can gain a certain measure of authority over their personal circumstances.  The Bible teaches to the contrary that such supremacy belongs only to the Lord, who alone rules in total sovereignty over all things (Psalm 115:3; Daniel 4:34-35; Acts 17:24-26; Romans 11:36; etc.).  Magic thus dishonors God because it purports to steal from him sovereignty that is his alone.  Nothing about witchcraft and its motives has changed in the 35 centuries since God spoke the words of Deuteronomy 18 to his people, so I would argue they remain in full force for the followers of Jesus today.  For Christians, then, dressing a child as a witch or other similar character is not an option.  We are not even to give the appearance of condoning the wicked and destructive practices of witchcraft.

            Beyond that point, I would add that since observance of Halloween appears to be a matter of Christian freedom, when we speak with fellow believers who draw a different conclusion for our own, we should treat them with respect and Christian love.  However, it is also true that as believers who seek to honor God in all things, we must not choose a position on Halloween simply because it is what everyone else around us is doing-- or not doing.  As parents we owe our children the responsibility of praying and thinking about this matter with an open heart before God, seeking his wisdom as to how we might glorify him (James 1:5-8).  Probably the best advice we could heed on this whole subject comes, not surprisingly, from the Apostle Paul, who wrote that in matters of Christian freedom, “One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike.  Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind.  The one who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord . . . . For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself.  If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord” (Romans 14:5-8).     

            As a postscript, let me remind you that every October 31 is a good day to remember the courage of Martin Luther, the great Protestant leader who on that date in 1517 launched the Reformation by nailing to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, his famous Ninety-Five Theses.  Whatever else we may or may do on October 31, one great practice is on that day is to give special thanks to God for raising up Martin Luther to restore to the church the glorious doctrine of justification by faith alone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome to this Blog Site!

            Welcome to this blog site, and thank you very much for checking it out.  I have taken the name of this blog – “An Appetite for God”-- from a phrase C.S. Lewis uses in his wonderful little book Reflections on the Psalms. Lewis observes in a chapter titled “The Fair Beauty of the Lord” that though the psalmists knew less of the glory of the Lord than modern believers do, because they had not witnessed the death of the Son of God for their sakes, nevertheless they exhibit in the Book of Psalms “a longing for [God], for His mere presence, which comes only to the best Christians or to Christians in their best moments.”^[1]  Lewis labels this passionate desire to know God better the psalmists’ “appetite for God,” because “[i]t has all the cheerful spontaneity of a natural, even a physical, desire.”^[2]  In other words, these biblical writers had tasted and seen that the Lord is good (Psalm 34:8), and they knew instinctively that in God’s presence alone can human beings find “fullness of joy” (Psalm 16:11).  My desire is that the Lord would be pleased to use this blog for his glory to stir up holy affections in our hearts that whet our “appetites for God,” to the  point that, by his grace, we would indeed love the Lord with all we are and with all we have (Deuteronomy 6:5).

            This will not be the kind of blog you necessarily need to check every day, because I will probably update it only every few days, perhaps at some times even less than once per week.  However, I appreciate your stopping by today, and I pray God’s richest blessings of grace in Jesus Christ on you.

 

 

 

---

^[1] C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (London: Fontana Books, 1958), 47.

^[2] Ibid.