As I indicated before, small contradictions in the bible have not really bothered me much. I can accept that maybe I am reading them out of context or maybe there have been translation problems or I am just not understanding them. This post will be my first post that really dives into a problem I've been seeing with the Christian doctrine. First, I want to define what the doctrine is and what it means. These 3 paragraphs took a long time to write but I think are an accuracte summary of how Christianity works. If anyone thinks this is not accurate please comment:
According to Christian theology and doctrine, it is true that God exists, and that he controls everything that goes on. He loves us and wants to be with us, but our sin keeps us separated. God provides a way to redeem us from our sin and become one with us again (Jesus). In order to be "saved" we must have faith in God. We must have faith that he exists and is in control, and we must trust him to be the Lord of our lives. This desire and faith is expressed in some form of "sinners prayer," where belief in God, devotion to him, and repentance for sin are all confessed and God is asked to "come into your heart." All this requires faith, because you can't prove for sure that God exists.
However, once you have faith, and believe in God, he comes to live in your heart and you are saved. The gospel message is "confirmed" in you, and God gives you personal, first hand knowledge of him. You receive the Holy Spirit, who speaks to you and guides you through life, and you literally experience and have a relationship with God.
So according to the Christian doctrine, if you are TRULY saved, you receive absolutely certain knowledge that God exists, that he is in control of the universe, and that he is the God of the Christian Bible (i.e. He came to earth as Jesus, died on the cross, was the God of the old testament, inspired the Bible itself, etc.). You receive this knowledge in a personal and undeniable way. And you also receive the knowledge that living for and with God for the rest of your life is the best possible path you can take.
---
There is one thing that I think breaks down this Christian Doctrine. The deserter.
It is simply a fact that a certain percentage of people who at one time claim to be Christians (claim to have been saved) eventually turn away from the faith, decide they don't believe it any more, and never come back. The problem is, according to Christian doctrine, that isn't possible. While it requires a leap of faith to trust in God initially, once you do it, that knowledge is supposedly confirmed in you, and you see it as certain that he exists and that Christianity is right. So how could people, after having been exposed to God himself through the Holy Spirit, and after having their faith shown to be right to them, and after having God Himself prove to them that He exists, decide they don't believe it anymore?
I have heard 2 explanations for deserters. (1) That person was never really saved. (2) The allure of sin has gotten to them, and they have diluted themselves and ignored the fact (that they know very well to be true) that God exists so they can live how they please and not feel guilty. The problem is, if all deserters were in one of these two categories then one of these two things would also be true:
The deserter should either (1) not be able to give an account of their salvation experience and/or remember their experiences as a Christian as superficial and not a real genuine commitment or (2) have one or more sins in their life that they embrace and love and must ignore the call of God on their lives in order to continue in this sin (we should note that this sin must be more gregarious and important to them than the sins committed by Christians. Nobody is perfect, everybody admits that. But in order to be compelled to ignore God when you know he exists, that sin has got to be really important to you and central to your life.)
It’s great that a Christian theory predicts empirical results. However, when we do a little research, and check out these results, they don’t seem to hold up. The vast majority of adults who at one time were devoted Christians but have since abandoned their faith have similar stories. They are decent, moral, hardworking people who are living acceptable lives. Of course they still sin every now and then, but their sin isn’t any more blatant or central to their lives than a Christian’s. We certainly can’t say that the REASON they don’t believe in God is that they want to keep on sinning. So, the only thing to say about these people is that they were never really saved in the first place, and never came face to face with the certain knowledge of God. But, if you talk to these people, many of them can remember how absolutely devoted to the faith they were. I know people like this. They express how deeply they believed and defended the faith. They can remember their “salvation experience” vividly. They were as good a Christian as anybody. But, they eventually decided it was a ridiculous doctrine and abandoned it.
Christians will take this as a warning. They will say that those people who appear the MOST devoted may not be Christians at all. Even their pastors, when they fall into sin, or leave the faith; the people will say he must never really have been saved. The willingness of a Christian to conclude that somebody was never really saved extends to everybody, even Billy Graham. But there is NO GOOD REASON FOR THIS. As far as I can tell, these people really did believe in God at one time. They really did confess their sins to him and want forgiveness and to live for him for the rest of their lives. And it was great for a while. But they eventually decided the faith didn’t make sense and they left it. And there is no reason whatsoever to go back and edit history so that they were never really Christians in the first place. The only reason is to keep the Christian message consistent. But this is approaching the problem from the wrong angle. It’s saying “We have this thing that we believe, and anytime we get evidence to the contrary, we’re going to rewrite that evidence, or explain it away, so we can continue believing this thing.” That is completely illegitimate.
My point is that if you sit back and take a fair look at the evidence, it seems entirely possible for somebody to really be a Christian (inasmuch as anybody can ever be a Christian) and then change their mind, and decide it’s not really true. This, of course, directly contradicts the conclusions that Christians want to draw, and runs counter to the very essence of the doctrine concerning salvation. Christians should think twice about declaring that a deserter was never really saved in the first place. That is an unfair conclusion, and the only basis for it is that the system of belief has as a natural consequence that they must not have been. It’s like a scientist saying “my hypothesis predicts X, so I will assume X happened” instead of saying “my hypothesis predicts X, so I will go investigate and see if X happened"
Chatboard (0)