On Facing Fear of Ridicule and Rejection
2
ON DISCIPLESHIP TO JESUS
On the Hard Yet Rewarding Work of Dealing with Doubts
Dr. Craig,
I would like to first start out by thanking you for all the work you do. Your articles, books, and talks have been a major benefit to my heart and mind. I’m 21 years old and attending my second and final year at film school in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Upon entering my first year of film school the doubts I had lingering in my head for the summer prior hit me hard. For the next couple months I went through an intense, mind-numbing search for answers. It was probably the most difficult time of my life. I thought my world was caving in and taking me with it. I scoured the bookstores for anything on the existence of God and the historicity of Christianity. I came across numerous titles by authors such as Norman Geisler, J.P. Moreland, Peter Kreeft and many others. I came across your works by searching the endnotes of the books I bought. I have listened to many of your talks and debates and read many of your articles. I look forward to the release of the latest edition of Reasonable Faith. I have since come to take a great interest in Philosophy and Apologetics. I am currently considering studying Philosophy after I finish film school.
The main reason I am writing to you is because I have a question for you, but we’ll get to that in a moment. Over this past year of doubt and searching I have had high points and many low points. I can’t honestly say I’m feeling the security right now in my beliefs I wish I had. There are points when I just get so frustrated with all this thinking/arguing/debating. Sometimes I’ll feel like I’m starting to figure it out when I come across some stupid Internet forum posing some argument against Christianity or the existence of God and I slump back down because I don’t have an answer to it. (It’s at those points when I really want to listen to your talks). It’s become this tiring high/low cycle. A friend of mine has been going through a similar situation as me. We finally found out about each other’s struggle after a couple months of going through it. He has since become my close companion on this journey. We talk about our doubts, thoughts, questions, and cynicism together and how we both love listening to your talks. (I introduced him to your works and website about half a year ago and he’s told me (in a comedic way) that when he’s really feeling weighed down by all the questions he’ll listen to your podcasts and talks from your site when he goes to bed and says to himself, “Yes Dr. Craig … that does make sense … maybe God does exist … it all makes sense …” as he falls asleep). So both he and I are on similar journeys.
While we were talking the other night, we were both wondering if the doubts and insecurity will ever fade away, or minimize to a bearable amount. My question to you is this, when does the doubt/non-belief go away, if ever? Will there ever be a time where I will actually whole-heartedly believe in God? (I understand you can’t actually answer that, but I guess what I’m asking is whether or not there comes a point where it’s “BAM! I believe in God!”). Right now it feels like I believe in God on a good day but doubt His existence on another day. But even on those good days it only really feels like I take comfort in the prospect of God’s existence and it’s not that I actually believe in Him. I want to believe in God more than anything. I understand what happens if God doesn’t exist and I can’t live with thinking that. But the thing is I can’t force myself into belief. There will be days when I have to tell myself there’s meaning just so I can take joy in being with my family and friends, that it isn’t all pointless. It’s as if I’m in a balance of belief and non-belief, tipping back and forth as the days go by. It gets frustrating. I was telling my friend that one of the things that keeps me going through this struggle is looking at where I see myself in the future. In the future, I see myself believing in God and raising my family with that belief and conviction, to guide me so I can guide my family. I see it down the road, but I don’t know how long it will take me to get there. I’ve decided that it’s something I won’t give up on. I won’t settle for non-belief. If it takes me until my deathbed I’ll fight the non-belief in hopes of being taken over by belief. But the thing is, I don’t want to be “pretending” I believe in God until then.
I don’t even know if this is making sense. I’m not expecting you to have an answer to all those questions. I guess maybe all you could really do is maybe relate your own journey from non-belief to belief. Was the transition overnight or did it take time from the moment you said you believed in God for you to actually feel the full conviction? I don’t know what I’m expecting or hoping to hear from you. I hope some of this is making sense to you. Thanks for any advice/wisdom/reading recommendations you can provide.
Steven
Dr. Craig’s Response
Thanks for your very touching letter, Steven. I admire your courage and your honesty in discussing your struggle with faith and doubt. I suspect that there’s no simple, quick recipe that if followed will make your doubts vanish like magic. You’ll probably have to work through your doubts in a slow and agonizing process. But be assured that many great men and women of God have traveled that same path before you and have not lost faith.
INSIGHT
In the paragraphs that follow, take stock of how Dr. Craig’s biography is shaped, including even by the environment of such institutions as Wheaton in the 1960s, and including his aversion to the theological rationalism of “evidentialism.” May I say that in this correspondence you get to experience Dr. Craig in a more pastoral or “soul-care” role than what may have been obvious in other exchanges. His response here is one of my favorite in this collection. Pay close attention to how he gets the job done.
To speak personally, I myself was not raised in an evangelical home, but I became a Christian my third year of high school, not through any careful consideration of the evidence, but because the Christian students who shared the gospel with me seemed to be living on a different plane of reality than I was. Their faith in Christ imparted meaning to their lives along with a joyous peace, which I craved. Unlike you, I remember looking into the future and saying to my Christian friends, “I just can’t see Bill Craig as a Christian!” But after an agonizing six-month search for God, I was marvelously born of the Spirit on September 11, 1965, at around 8:00 in the evening. It set my life on a whole new course.
THE CONFLICT OF THEOLOGICAL RATIONALISM
As a young believer full of enthusiasm and faith, I went off in 1967 to study at Wheaton College. During the sixties Wheaton had become a seedbed of skepticism and cynicism, and I was dismayed to see some of the students whose intellectual abilities I admired lose their faith and renounce Christianity in the name of reason. The prevailing atmosphere was one of theological rationalism (or, as it’s sometimes misleadingly called today, “evidentialism”), the view that faith, in order to be rational, must be based on argument and evidence. In my theology courses I learned that none of the classical arguments for the existence of God is sound, and my Bible professors never discussed evidences for the reliability of the gospels. Among the students, doubt was touted as a virtue of the mature Christian life, and one was supposed to follow unflinchingly the demands of reason wherever it might lead. I remember well one of my theology professors insighting that if he were persuaded that Christianity were unreasonable, then he would renounce Christianity.
Now, that frightened and troubled me. For me, Christ was so real and had invested my life with such significance that I could not make the confession of my professor. If somehow through my studies my reason were to turn against my faith, then so much the worse for my reason! It would only mean that I had made some mistake in my reasoning. Thus, I confided to one of my philosophy teachers, “I guess I’m not a true intellectual. If my reason turned against Christ, I’d still believe. My faith is too real.”
So I went through a temporary flirtation with Kierkegaardian fideism—though my mind couldn’t rest long in the position that I believe Christianity because it is absurd. As often happens in the lives of earnest students, the reading of certain books proved pivotal in my thinking and directed my life along a different route. The first was E. J. Carnell’s Introduction to Christian Apologetics, which convinced me that reason might be used to show the systematic consistency of Christian faith without thereby becoming the basis of that faith. The second was Stuart Hackett’s Resurrection of Theism, which stunned me by its demonstration that there were, after all, persuasive, cogent arguments for God’s existence.16 Hackett’s book was part of an incomplete project, however, and left one with a sort of deism rather than Christian theism. But then, third, I became acquainted on a popular level with Christian evidences, particularly for the resurrection of Jesus, compiled, for example, by Josh McDowell in Evidence that Demands a Verdict. It became evident to me that it was possible to present a sound, convincing, positive case for the truth of Christian theism.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN KNOWING AND SHOWING CHRISTIANITY TO BE TRUE
Still I couldn’t embrace the view that argument and evidence constitute the essential foundation for faith, for the fruits of that viewpoint had become forcefully clear to me at Wheaton. I put the issue on the back burner while I pursued other questions during my seminary and doctoral studies in philosophy, but it came to the fore again in 1977 when I was invited by Campus Crusade for Christ to deliver a series of lectures on apologetics to university students in Munich. My opening lecture was to be on faith and reason, and in meditating on this problem, I hit upon a scheme that has proved to be very helpful to me in illuminating the relationship between faith and reason—namely, the distinction between knowing Christianity to be true and showing Christianity to be true. It has been gratifying to me that what I grasped in a rough and superficial way has been confirmed by the recent work of religious epistemologists, notably Alvin Plantinga.
INSIGHT
Here is one of Dr. Craig’s best articulations of his long-standing distinction between showing and knowing.
I hold that argument and evidence play an essential role in our showing Christianity to be true, but a contingent and secondary role in our personally knowing Christianity to be true. The proper ground of our knowing Christianity to be true is the inner work of the Holy Spirit; and in our showing Christianity to be true, it is His role to open the hearts of unbelievers to assent and respond to the reasons we present. If you’re interested in seeing how I develop this, take a look at my contribution to Steve Cowan’s Five Views on Apologetics.17 Better yet, read Plantinga’s inspiring book Warranted Christian Belief.18
I have found this to be both an intellectually and experientially satisfying account of the matter. As I look back on my Wheaton days, I see now how infected with theological rationalism our community was and how perverse a concept I had of what it meant to be a “true intellectual.” It was the testimony of Christ’s Spirit within me that gave me the fundamental assurance that my faith was true; and my refusal to give this up in the face of potential defeaters was not a sacrificium intellectus but was wholly in accord with the deliverances of reason.
If this approach is correct, then it has tremendously important practical implications in the struggle between faith and doubt. One of the most pernicious problems with theological rationalism is that it is deleterious to one’s spiritual life. It leads precisely to the sort of agony you describe, where one’s faith hangs in the balance with every new issue of The Philosophical Review or turn of the archaeologist’s spade. God has provided a more secure foundation for our faith than the shifting sands of evidence and argument. He has given us the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit as the proper foundation for our knowledge of the great truths of the gospel.
FAITH AND DOUBT—THE NECESSITY OF GOD AS A LIVING REALITY IN YOUR LIFE
This implies that we have to be very mindful of our own spiritual formation. First and foremost, you need to be sure that you are a regenerate Christian. If you have not been born anew of the Holy Spirit, then you lack His witness within you and so find yourself cast solely upon such arguments and evidence as you in your limited time and knowledge come across. If that’s the case, it’s no wonder you feel doubt and uncertainty!
A couple of years ago, when I was out at Talbot School of Theology teaching a two-week course, a fellow from the San Francisco Bay Area who was visiting his family in San Diego dropped by to talk with me about doubts that were troubling him. As we chatted, I sensed that he had not yet come to have a personal relationship with the Lord. So I asked him, “Would you say that your faith in God is just an intellectual belief based on your assessment of the evidence or would you say that God is a living reality in your life?” When he said it was just the former, I asked, “Have you ever really committed your life to Christ and invited Him to be your Savior and Lord?” When he replied that he really hadn’t, I asked him, “Well, would you like to right now?” He said that he would, and so we bowed our heads together in prayer and he prayed with me to ask Christ into his life. After we had prayed, he was so grateful; it was just the step he had needed to take.
If you’ve never been born anew, then I’d urge you to go to God in repentance for your sin, tell Him that you believe He sent His Son to die for your sin and to restore the relationship with Him that you were created to have, and invite the Holy Spirit to come and make you spiritually alive.
THE NECESSITY OF CULTIVATING CHRISTIAN VIRTUES
But perhaps you’re already a regenerate Christian. Then you need to cultivate the work of the Holy Spirit in your life. You can grieve the Holy Spirit through sin and quench His leading and power by not allowing Him full reign in your life. Confess sin as soon as you’re aware of it, and allow the Holy Spirit to empower and direct you. Be sure to maintain a devotional life, with regular times alone of prayer and Bible study. Take your doubts to God and ask Him to give you grace to persevere. Cultivate the Christian virtues in your life, and then you can claim the promise of 2 Peter 1:5–11 (RSV): “if you do this you will never fall.”
INSIGHT
Dr. Craig rightly discerns the spiritual formation implications of doubt. This isn’t a game. It is not about mere intellectual sport. It is not something that we merely tolerate or prize. Rather, we must come to ruthlessly address our doubts so that they do not remain as obstacles or hindrances to a confident faith in God.
Make sure you participate in truly meaningful corporate worship in the setting of a local church. Lone Ranger Christians generally don’t make it, and even a small group setting is no substitute for the church, which is the body of Christ locally, replete with all His gifts. Be sure you’re exercising your own spiritual gift in the context of a local church, so that you are serving others. I assume that you’ve followed through on your conversion by being baptized and regularly celebrate the Lord’s Supper. Be intentional about sharing your faith with unbelievers, despite your doubts (they’ll probably respect your transparency and vulnerability!). Nothing will so infuse your spiritual life with excitement as seeing God use you to lead another person to a saving knowledge of Himself.
Be on guard for Satan’s deceptions. Never lose sight of the fact that you are involved in a spiritual warfare and that there is an enemy of your soul who hates you intensely, whose goal is your destruction, and who will stop at nothing to destroy you. Which leads me to ask: why are you reading those infidel websites anyway, when you know how destructive they are to your faith? These sites are literally pornographic (evil writing) and so ought, in general, to be shunned. Sure, somebody has to read them and refute them; but why does it have to be you? Let somebody else, who can handle it, do it. Remember: Doubt is not just a matter of academic debate or disinterested intellectual discussion; it involves a battle for your very soul, and if Satan can use doubt to immobilize you or destroy you, then he will.
I firmly believe, and I think the bizarro-testimonies of those who have lost their faith and apostatized bear out, that moral and spiritual lapses are the principal cause for failure to persevere, rather than intellectual doubts. But intellectual doubts become a convenient and self-flattering excuse for spiritual failure because we thereby portray ourselves as such intelligent persons rather than as moral and spiritual failures. I think that the key to victorious Christian living is not to have all your questions answered—which is probably impossible in a finite lifetime—but to learn to live successfully with unanswered questions. The key is to prevent unanswered questions from becoming destructive doubts. I believe that can be done by keeping in mind the proper ground of our knowledge of Christianity’s truth and by cultivating the ministry of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
DEALING WITH UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
The point is this: the secret to dealing with doubt in the Christian life is not to resolve all of one’s doubts. One will always have unanswered questions. Rather, the secret is learning to live victoriously with one’s unanswered questions. By understanding the true foundation of our faith and by assigning the proper role to argument and evidence, we can prevent unanswered questions from turning into destructive doubts. In such a case, we shall not have answers to all our questions, but in a deeper sense that won’t matter. For we shall know that our faith is true on the basis of the Spirit’s witness, and we can live confidently even while having questions we cannot answer. That’s why it is so important to keep in mind the proper relationship between faith and reason.
Finally, I’d encourage you to pursue your doubts into the ground. I said that the secret to handling doubt in our lives is to learn to live victoriously with unresolved questions. Any thinking Christian will have a “question bag” filled with unresolved difficulties he must learn to live with. But from time to time, as you have opportunity, it’s good to take the bag down from the shelf, select one of the questions, and go to work on answering it. Indeed, I can say that working hard on an unresolved question and pursuing it until you finally find an answer that satisfies you intellectually is one of the most exhilarating experiences of the Christian life. To resolve a doubt that has troubled you for some time brings a wonderful sense of intellectual peace and inspires confidence that there are solutions to the remaining difficulties in your question bag.
When you have a doubt or a question about a particular issue, set aside time to study that specific issue by reading books or articles on the subject. Libraries at Christian colleges and seminaries can be particularly helpful, if those are available where you live. Even public libraries can order what you need through their inter-library loan service. Find out what Christian scholars have written in the area you are exploring and write to them—or, if possible, visit them to discuss your question. Seek out and talk with those members of the body of Christ who have studied the subject. In that way, the members of the body will be helping to build each other up. But don’t let your doubts just sit there: pursue them and keep after them until you drive them into the ground.
I don’t know the answer to your question of whether your doubts will suddenly come to an end. That’s probably very person-relative. But I don’t think that’s the most important thing. The really important thing is learning to live with unanswered questions without allowing them to become destructive doubts. That, I believe, is, by God’s grace, possible.
What Does It Mean to Have a Relationship with God?
Dr. Craig,
I am a philosophy student and an ex-Christian. I lost my faith during my undergraduate education upon realizing that I had accepted my faith without reflection. Like many others my age, I abandoned my worldview and embarked upon a search for answers. The search quickly took on an intellectual character that eventually led me to the joys of philosophy (which, I am happy to say, I have chosen as my career path). And having had a taste of good philosophy and good apologetics, my doubts about Christianity have been intellectually satisfied.
Yet despite my admission that God exists and that Christ was resurrected, I have absolutely no idea what it means to have a relationship with God; the concept is completely mysterious to me. What does it mean to trust God? And for what? Why talk to God? What would one say? What would one hear? What is expected of me and what should I expect of God? Is there a unique experience to such conversations or should one pray despite the feeling that no one is listening?
What’s worse, however, is the feeling that I am motivated not by love but by expectation. That is, I grew up in the Church and had it impressed upon me that a relationship just comes with the territory of belief. I now believe, so I am expected to begin a relationship; I don’t otherwise feel led to cultivate a relationship to God.
The things the Bible says about the matter seem mysterious or rely too heavily on a human relationship analogy (e.g., surely the Father-son analogy only goes so far given God’s hiddenness and permission of suffering). And as for Christ’s death, I must admit that I have difficulty feeling grateful for His sacrifice since many parts of the justification story are in tension with my intuitions on justice (e.g., substitutionary atonement).
I understand that these aren’t very well formulated questions but that simply indicates my confusion on the matter. Any reply will be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Mark
Dr. Craig’s Response
It was so heartening to receive your letter, Mark, and to learn of your return to belief! I hope you’re drinking deeply from the well of Alvin Plantinga, especially Warranted Christian Belief, which has a good deal of material which is relevant to your question, particularly his discussion of the religious affections.
As I read your question, I couldn’t help but wonder if you might not find yourself in the situation of someone who has returned intellectually to belief in a Christian worldview but who has not yet come into a saving relationship with God. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but since I don’t know your story, I can only guess at what seems to be amiss.
One of my concerns about a ministry like mine, which focuses on the truth of the Christian worldview and arguments for it, is that people may not realize that the Christian faith is not just about having a change of mind and coming to accept a new worldview. It’s about coming into a new relationship and becoming a new person. That’s easy to miss when we’re so focused on defending propositional truth.
INSIGHT
It is important to keep in mind why we seek to help someone deal with their (intellectual) questions, and it is not for the purpose of satisfying their curiosities. We serve in our capacity as question answerers in order to enable people to be free to learn how to enter into a new and living relationship with the one true God.
The Christian faith is about coming into a saving relationship with God. Obviously, we’re all related to God in certain ways, such as creature to Creator, but the Christian faith emphasizes that on a personal level we do not naturally find ourselves properly related to God. Instead, we find ourselves spiritually alienated from God due to the sin (moral evil) that pervades our lives. We do not fulfill our moral duties, toward God, toward others, toward ourselves: we have done what we ought not to have done, and we have not done what we ought to have done. As a result we find ourselves morally guilty before a holy God and under His just judgment. Our personal relationship to God has thus been ruptured. Like a Father and a son who are estranged from each other because of the son’s rebellion, so we find ourselves estranged from God. God did not create us in order to stand in a relation of condemnation to us, but of welcoming acceptance, nor were we created to stand to God in a relationship of indifference or even hostility, but one of love and adoration. Thus, I think you can see how ruined and twisted our relationship with God is. Instead of friendship, there is alienation and enmity. That’s what it means to lack a personal relationship with God.
So God has set about restoring the personal relationship with Him that He created us to have. Since we are, according to the Bible, spiritually dead in our sinful condition, that is, lacking a proper relationship with God and powerless to do anything about it, God must quicken us spiritually in order to restore us to a right relationship with Him. The Bible calls this “regeneration” (in popular piety, it is called being “born again,” which is just what “regenerate” means). This takes place by the action of the Holy Spirit in response to a person’s placing his faith in Christ for salvation.
Now, “faith,” as the Reformer Martin Luther emphasized, is a multivalent word. At the most basic level, faith involves what Luther called notitia, which is simply cognizance or understanding of a proposition. Next comes what he called assensus, which is assent to the proposition in question. Finally, there is fiducia, which is trust in the relevant person or thing. All three are involved in saving faith. First, there is understanding the great truths of the gospel, such as that God exists, that I am morally guilty before God, that God sent His Son Jesus Christ to die on my behalf in order to reconcile me to Himself, that forgiveness and moral cleansing are available through Christ, and so on. Next, I must not merely understand but believe these truths. Finally, I must place my trust in Christ as my personal Savior and Lord in order to be saved from sin and separation from God.
“What does it mean to trust God, and for what?” It means that you place your life, your well-being, wholly in His hands, relying upon Him and Him alone to save you. It is making a wholehearted commitment to follow Christ as His disciple, to allow Him to reshape you to become the kind of person that He wants you to be. It means saying to God, “Not my will, but Thine be done. I am no longer my own man; I am Yours, to be and do what You will.”
When you make such a commitment to Christ, the Holy Spirit regenerates you spiritually and restores you to the proper relationship with God that you were meant to have. Not only so, but in some mysterious way you are actually indwelt by God’s Spirit, and as we yield daily to Him He transforms our character to make us become more Christ-like and directs our paths according to God’s providential plan.
How this new relationship plays itself out experientially varies from person to person and over time. Sometimes one may sense God’s presence in a very real way; other times one will hardly be aware of it, but one walks by faith, not by sight. Minimally, you should experience an assurance of salvation, a sense of being rightly related to God as His child, forgiven and restored. As you walk in the power of the Spirit you should experience joy, peace, love, and the other fruit of the Spirit in the life of a regenerate person who is yielded to Christ.
“Why talk to God?” Because you love Him! (This is like asking, why talk to your wife!) Of course, you needn’t talk out loud, since He reads your mind. And of course, you don’t need to provide Him with any information, since He knows everything. But you should communicate with your heavenly Father. “What would one say?” Tell Him you love Him; tell Him how thankful you are for saving you; offer Him praise for what He has done and is doing in your life; ask Him to guide you, to strengthen you, to help you to resist temptation.
“Should one pray despite the feeling that no one is listening?” You should talk to God, or pray, whether you sense His presence or not. It is part of your life of faith. “What would one hear?” Some people claim to hear from God almost audibly, but most of the time He “speaks” to us through the inspired writings collected into the Bible. When reading the Bible reflectively, you’ll sometimes find that a passage will strike you powerfully in a new way, perhaps convicting you, or encouraging you, or inspiring you, or directing you. We should expect God to speak to us in this way, through His Word.
“What is expected of me and what should I expect of God?” The answer to the first part of your question is: Everything! Look at Jesus’ parable of the unworthy servants (Luke 17:7–10 RSV). Jesus says, “So you also, when you have done all that is commanded you, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’” We’re to give God His legal right—namely, all that we have and are. We are to be as a matter of course totally dedicated to God and filled with the Holy Spirit.
The answer to the second part of your question is that God bestows upon us, positionally, as we are in Christ, forgiveness of sins, eternal life, adoption as sons, and the availability of unlimited help and power for Christian living. Moreover, He gives to us, experientially, as we are Spirit-filled, the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. When our relationship with God is healthy, the product in our lives will be righteousness, and the result of righteousness is happiness. Happiness is a by-product of holiness, as God’s righteousness is realized in us.
If you don’t feel led to cultivate a relationship with God, Mark, it may be because you’re not yet a regenerate Christian. You may have come only so far in faith as assensus but have not yet reached fiducia. You’ve not yet fallen in love with God, and so your heart is cold toward Him. Jesus said that he who has been forgiven much loves much. I’d encourage you to meditate on your own sinfulness and on how much God has forgiven (or will forgive) you and what it cost Christ to win your salvation—He was willing to die for you! Appreciating this doesn’t require that you have some theory of the atonement in mind. Whatever theory of the atonement you accept, the fact remains that Jesus went to the cross for you and your redemption—a sacrifice, even on a purely human level, that is hard to fathom.
If you’re not yet a regenerate Christian, then I encourage you to go to God in solitude and offer a prayer of commitment like the following:
God, I really need You. I recognize that I am sinful and wretched and in need of Your forgiveness. I believe that Jesus died on the cross to save me from my sins. And right now, in the best way I know how, I open the door of my life and invite You to come in and be my Savior and Lord. Forgive my sins, take the throne of my life, and make me into the kind of person You want me to be. I give myself to You.
Then, like a spiritual newborn, begin to receive the nourishment that comes through God’s Word, meaningful corporate worship, prayer, confession and restitution, sharing your faith with others, and other spiritual disciplines.
It’s not enough just to believe the truths of the Christian worldview. Our relationship with God needs to be restored and healed. That will come only through the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit in response to trust and commitment.
On Protecting Against Spiritual Failure
Dear Dr. Craig,
Let me just say I love your work; it has helped numerous times. Anyway, my question is regarding spiritual failure. I have heard your recent Reasonable Faith podcast regarding this topic. You were talking about ex-Christians losing their faith. I will be straightforward: Ever since I started to doubt, it has taken a toll on my spiritual life and I feel that I am heading the same way the ex-Christians went. Ever since I started studying more and more apologetics I have become intellectually proud or vain. Anyway, I would like some advice on how not to fall away from faith.
Sincerely,
Christopher
Dr. Craig’s Response
I think the most hopeful aspect of your question, Christopher, is your honesty in recognizing your own intellectual pride and vanity and realizing that it is precisely factors of this nature, rather than purely intellectual issues, that pose the greatest danger to our persevering in the faith. Scripture warns, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6 NIV). How dreadful it would be to find God actually opposing us because of our pride and ambition!
One of my greatest concerns as a Christian is that I might somehow fall away from the faith and so betray Christ. It would be the height of folly and presumption to think that this could not happen. Think of what happened to Judas. It’s amazing that a man who was one of the original twelve disciples, who had been for years in such close proximity to Jesus, should in the end turn against Him. Is it then any wonder that we can similarly fall away and betray Christ? Paul speaks of several whom he knew who had left the faith (1 Tim. 1:20; 2 Tim. 2:17; 4:10). He warns, “Let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Cor. 10:12 ESV). Paul included himself in that admonition, “lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified” (1 Cor. 9:27 ESV). If someone of Paul’s spiritual stature and commitment took seriously this danger, how much more should we? Paul urges us, “Examine yourselves, to see whether you are holding to your faith” (2 Cor. 13:5 RSV).
IMPORTANT GUIDELINES FOR STAYING STRONG IN THE FAITH
So how can we avoid falling away? I don’t think there is any sort of simple recipe, but 2 Pet. 1:5–11 (RSV) provides some important guidelines:
For this very reason make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these things are yours and abound, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For whoever lacks these things is blind and shortsighted and has forgotten that he was cleansed from his old sins. Therefore, brethren, be the more zealous to confirm your call and election, for if you do this you will never fall; so there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Look at the promise here: “If you do this, you will never fall.” What a wonderful promise! This is exactly what we are looking for, and so we need to pay close attention to the text. What is striking about the conditions of this promise is that they are primarily moral and spiritual in nature. We are advised to supplement our faith with seven character qualities:
Faith
+
virtue
knowledge
self-control
godliness
love
Moreover, we are to pursue this character formation with utmost diligence: “make every effort …” This is intentional; it doesn’t just happen.
Now, what are these qualities? I’d encourage you to do a biblical study of them.
• Virtue means moral excellence. We’re to become good persons, reflecting God’s holiness.
• Knowledge implies a solid grasp of Christian doctrine. This is part of spiritual maturity, as Paul emphasizes, “that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine” (Eph. 4:14 RSV). This is the one intellectual quality in the list.
• Self-control means self-mastery, which implies the ability to control one’s lusts, temper, tongue, and desires. We all know how easy it is to be just carried along by one’s passions rather than having them under one’s own control! But just as an athlete in training exercises self-control in all things, so we are to bring our passions under our control (1 Cor. 9:5).
• Perseverance connotes endurance, being in it for the long haul, despite the ups and downs of life. We need to be long distance runners, not just sprinters, or we’ll burn out.
• Godliness implies having a spiritual orientation to one’s life rather than having a materialistic, consumer mentality which values and focuses on worldly goods (1 Tim. 6:6–11).
• Brotherly kindness involves having a genuine affection and care for fellow Christians (Rom. 12:10; 1 John 3:16–20a). Do we really care about them as persons, or are they just means to our ends?
• Love is described in 1 Cor. 13:4–7. We should strive to fit the description that Paul gives there. If we are diligent about inculcating this kind of character into ourselves, we are promised that we shall not be ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of Christ.
INSIGHT
Notice these helpful descriptions. It is worthwhile to ponder what these mean and their implications for our lives.
THE FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT AIDS OUR SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT
Now, this might seem so daunting a task that it puts us under the pile rather than comforts us! How can we who are so weak and flawed realize these sorts of character qualities in ourselves? It might seem hopeless.
Ah, but here it’s very interesting to compare this list of character qualities with the list Paul provides of the fruit of the Holy Spirit in our lives (Gal. 5:22–23)! Paul says the fruit of the Spirit is
• joy
• peace
• patience
• kindness
• goodness
• faithfulness
• gentleness
• self-control.
Here many of the same character traits are said to be the work of the Holy Spirit as we are submitted to Him: love, kindness, goodness, self-control.
Furthermore, notice that faithfulness and patience in combination add up to perseverance. Moreover, since these qualities are the fruit of the Spirit, to have these qualities just is to have a spiritual orientation, or to be godly. So as we are filled with the Holy Spirit, that is, yielded and empowered by Him, He will produce the fruit of these qualities in our lives. We are not just on our own, gutting it out by our own efforts. Rather the key to character formation is being filled with the Holy Spirit.
Interestingly, the one exception seems to be knowledge. That’s something that we have to acquire through study of God’s truth. But as we seek to gain knowledge, what can we do to combat the sin of intellectual pride?
First, we need to realize the primacy of love over knowledge in God’s economy. Socrates said that he was the wisest man in Athens because he knew that he knew nothing! The apostle Paul, when confronted with Greek Gnostics, who touted the importance of knowledge, took a similar line. “Knowledge,” he warned, “puffs up, but love builds up. The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know. But the man who loves God is known by God” (1 Cor. 8:1b–3 NIV). According to Paul, if we think we’re so smart that we’ve got it all figured out about God, then in fact we don’t know anything. We’re just inflated intellectual blowhards. By contrast, the person who loves God is the one who has truly come to know Him. This has shattering implications for our proud intellectual attainments. It means that the simplest child of God who lives in love is wiser in God’s sight than the most brilliant Bertrand Russell the world has ever seen.
Second, we need to realize the feebleness and finitude of our human knowledge. I can honestly testify that the more I learn, the more ignorant I feel. Further study only serves to open up to one’s consciousness all the endless vistas of knowledge, even in one’s own field, about which one knows absolutely nothing. I resonate with a statement Isaac Newton once made, reflecting back on his discoveries laid out in his great treatise on physics, the Principia Mathematica. He said that he felt “like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” How feeble, uncertain, and unstable are our own intellectual attainments!
Finally, third, I want to pass on some advice from Hugh of St. Victor, who wrote in his Didascalicon (1125),
Now, the beginning of study is humility. Although the lessons of humility are many, the three which follow are of especial importance for the student: First, that he hold no knowledge and no writing in contempt; second, that he blush to learn from no man; and third, that when he has attained learning himself, he not look down upon everyone else.
On Facing Fear of Ridicule and Rejection
Dear Dr. Craig,
My question is more personal. I hope you can answer it as I think it may be useful to a lot of Christians, particularly in heavily secular/non-Christian environments.
What advice would you give to us who struggle against this fear of attack/persecution/ridicule/fear of man in the context of evangelism and apologetics, in the light of the good evidence and reasons for our Christian worldview?
Maybe you could share what your mindset is whilst debating, or the way you think about non-Christians when speaking with them. How do you feel/react to attacks? What do you think about them even before they occur?
I’m sure that if many of us were able to conquer this and be bold and clear in our witness and conversations, we’d see a lot of fruit for the gospel in our lives.
Yours faithfully in Christ,
Rohit
United Kingdom
Dr. Craig’s Response
Rohit, I remember your name from a few years ago, and it’s good to hear from you again. Thanks for your encouraging words! Let me share a few thoughts in response to your question.
Think of what Christ endured for you. Jesus was willing to go through unspeakable torture and what in Jewish thinking was the most humiliating of deaths for us. He hung on the cross naked, in a public display of humiliation and shame, an object of ridicule and derision, for your sake and mine. How could we possibly be embarrassed of Him when He was willing to endure such depths of scorn for us? Recall Jesus’ words: “Whoever is ashamed of me and my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels” (Luke 9:26). Can you imagine that Christ would be ashamed of you as His disciple? May it never be!
Great blessing is promised those who are abused for Jesus’ name. Jesus said, “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matt. 5:11–12). What a promise! I think of this in debate situations. When people heap insults upon you, be thankful and glad because they are really heaping blessings upon you. Would you forfeit those blessings?
Think of what others have suffered for Christ. When believers in China and various Islamic countries are being imprisoned, tortured, and even killed for their faith in Christ, it is nothing short of scandalous that we in the West should shrink from enduring so much as even verbal abuse or embarrassment for Christ’s sake! How could we dare to look our brothers and sisters in the face when our commitment is so paltry, so weak, compared to theirs? We suffer nothing by comparison with what they endure. Reflecting on what they have borne and do bear for Christ’s name can give us the resolve to embrace what small amount of suffering we are called upon to shoulder.
Ask God to fill you with love for your adversaries. Jesus said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44 NIV). God loves them so much He sent His Son to die for them. They are lost and dying without Christ. When I hear some unbelievers railing against me, I think of the apt aphorism: “I could no more be angry with him than if a blind man had stepped on my foot.” Pray that God would remove their spiritual blindness. We are involved in a desperate battle to rescue them from everlasting ruin. Ask God to give you a heart of compassion for the lost so that, like Paul, you feel constrained to speak out (2 Cor. 5:14).
Remember that to respond in kind is counter-productive. Our goal is to win people, not arguments. So even though we may be tempted to respond to sarcasm with sarcasm, that will usually backfire and only push the other person further away. Try to respond graciously and substantively. Now, I do think there is a place for confrontation and termination of an unfruitful conversation, if you sense the other person is insincere and just wants to argue. But it should always be done calmly and in love.
These suggestions will be much easier to carry out if we are ourselves well-equipped to provide positive reasons for why we believe as we do and solid answers to unbelievers’ questions and objections. Being so equipped will give us a quiet confidence that will serve us well in dialogue. Since we know the answers, there’s just no reason to get all hot and bothered about the unbeliever’s attacks. I think that being well-trained plus keeping the above points in mind can embolden our witness for Christ, so that just as He treated the shame of the cross with scorn (Heb. 12:2), so we, too, can treat dismissively the ridicule unbelievers might hurl our way.
INSIGHT
Notice the valuable insights and wisdom in these paragraphs. They are rich with advice for a thick civil discourse and genuine tolerance.
16. During the course of writing A Reasonable Response, I learned Stu Hackett died. Readers may be interested in Dr. Craig’s further reflections on Hackett, which he presented at the website of the Evangelical Philosophical Society: “In Memoriam: Stuart Cornelius Hackett (1925–2012): http://bit.ly/WLCHackett.
17. Steve Cowan, ed., Five Views on Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000).
18. Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).