I want to share with you a bit of what I will be doing in the near future...
We with the School of Biblical Studies here in Kona are passionate about bringing the Word of God to the nations of the earth. The school that I am leading now ends it's lecture phase in December, but that is not the end of the journey for me, and hopefully not the end for many of the students. In January I will meet up with a YWAM outreach team that will be on the mission field traveling for 15 months! I will join them in Egypt and teach a bible course over the next three months that they will be completing on the field. Their main project over this trip is to publish a photography / documentary project advocating for social injustice issues.
The three month course I will be directing is called Biblical Foundations for Photographic Communication, and will hopefully ground these students and their project in Biblical truth, as well as God's heart for the poor, the outcast and the destitute for whom they are advocating. I hope to bring an outreach team from SBS along for this time, to teach in the countries we travel as well as teach part of the course. Please pray that God would move in the hearts of SBS students to take all they have been studying to the nations!
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Monday, August 3, 2009
The unseen vs. the Unknowable
Many post-modernists today accuse Christians, or more broadly “theists,” people who believe in some sort of God, of basing their life and their belief system and their values on “blind faith.” They would even go so far as to say that God demands blind faith from anyone attempting to follow him. The kind of faith the Bible calls for however, is by no stretch of the imagination blind faith.
Biblical faith is a logical progression of projecting past experiences and acquired knowledge into the present reality, and the future existence. What a Christian is asked to believe about the unseen is nothing more than anyone who claims to live in the real world is required to believe countless times each day, and certainly cant be categorized as irrational faith.
For example; my volleyball team has lost its first two games this season. The statement “I have faith that I will win a game” is not irrational for several reasons. If in fact, I did not play volleyball at all, did not have a team and there were no games to be won, this statement becomes unfulfillable and therefore irrational. The facts that (a) I do play volleyball, (b) there are more games to win (c) winning is a valid result to volleyball games, makes this statement something more than blind faith.
Take square roots. Can you describe what a square root looks like? How much it weighs; what color it is? When children are taught math they are taught the square root of four is two. Are they asked to believe it blindly? No. They are given examples, and the concept is explained and “mathematically proved” but no one in the history of the world has been shown an actual square root. The end result of mathematical training therefore, ends with faith; faith that the next time the answer to the square root of four is given; the answer will still be two.
The same could be said about gravity. Our faith that the next step we take will not send us rocketing off the face of the planet is based on our past experience of gravity, and our knowledge, however limited, of the invisible law. Gravity, which keeps our earth in motion around its sun, and its surface securely beneath our feet has never been seen, tasted, smelled or heard, but mankind’s’ accumulated experience with gravity as an unchangeable force touching one of our senses is enough for us to put our total faith in it’s reliability as a constant, unchangeable physical law.
Belief in a God who created unchangeable physical laws, mathematical absolutes and the universe they govern is not an irrational conclusion based on blind faith. It is the most logical conclusion then; that the unchanging laws that make the universe what it is are reflections of an unchanging creator who designed a universe in accordance with his character. What would be more irrational is to say that these “laws” unchanging as they are, are the result of the random occurrence of a spastic and unorganized universe which, by some miracle, managed to morph reality to conform to universal laws. Knowledge of, and faith in God, are the only logical results an examination of our acquired knowledge and experiences can bring us to: Faith.
Biblical faith is a logical progression of projecting past experiences and acquired knowledge into the present reality, and the future existence. What a Christian is asked to believe about the unseen is nothing more than anyone who claims to live in the real world is required to believe countless times each day, and certainly cant be categorized as irrational faith.
For example; my volleyball team has lost its first two games this season. The statement “I have faith that I will win a game” is not irrational for several reasons. If in fact, I did not play volleyball at all, did not have a team and there were no games to be won, this statement becomes unfulfillable and therefore irrational. The facts that (a) I do play volleyball, (b) there are more games to win (c) winning is a valid result to volleyball games, makes this statement something more than blind faith.
Take square roots. Can you describe what a square root looks like? How much it weighs; what color it is? When children are taught math they are taught the square root of four is two. Are they asked to believe it blindly? No. They are given examples, and the concept is explained and “mathematically proved” but no one in the history of the world has been shown an actual square root. The end result of mathematical training therefore, ends with faith; faith that the next time the answer to the square root of four is given; the answer will still be two.
The same could be said about gravity. Our faith that the next step we take will not send us rocketing off the face of the planet is based on our past experience of gravity, and our knowledge, however limited, of the invisible law. Gravity, which keeps our earth in motion around its sun, and its surface securely beneath our feet has never been seen, tasted, smelled or heard, but mankind’s’ accumulated experience with gravity as an unchangeable force touching one of our senses is enough for us to put our total faith in it’s reliability as a constant, unchangeable physical law.
Belief in a God who created unchangeable physical laws, mathematical absolutes and the universe they govern is not an irrational conclusion based on blind faith. It is the most logical conclusion then; that the unchanging laws that make the universe what it is are reflections of an unchanging creator who designed a universe in accordance with his character. What would be more irrational is to say that these “laws” unchanging as they are, are the result of the random occurrence of a spastic and unorganized universe which, by some miracle, managed to morph reality to conform to universal laws. Knowledge of, and faith in God, are the only logical results an examination of our acquired knowledge and experiences can bring us to: Faith.
Andrew Greenplate
picture taken on Mauna Kea, Hawaii
picture taken on Mauna Kea, Hawaii
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