11 December 2010

Propositions vs Relationship

I was watching a video recently on the Internet that was a round table discussion of the British scholar, author, and Cambridge professor C.S. Lewis and his intellectual life. Lewis is a hero to many in my generation and had a towering intellect. Perhaps his most prominent scholarly work was the sixteenth-century prose and poetry book for the Oxford History of English Literature (OHEL) series. For the project he read every book from the sixteenth-century that was in his university library. And, I imagine Cambridge had a pretty extensive collection.

One of the men in the discussion I watched is a Lewis scholar named Alan Jacobs who wrote the best biography of Lewis I have ever read, The Narnian. In the video he says that when Lewis came to put his faith into Christianity it was not a matter of an intellectual assent to a series of propositions, but rather something larger, something almost undefinable--faith. In other words, becoming a Christian is not exactly like filling out a checklist, finding that you agree with everything on it, and then checking the box at the bottom that says you would like to become a Christian now. There was something else necessary, for everyone from one of the intellectual giants of his age to every believer in my small church in the middle of Kansas.

Truth (with a capital-T), therefore, is not only a matter of intellectual assent to propositions, but something else. This may sound confusing and is in many ways. Truth is not something neat and tidy and easy to express. Jesus told Thomas in the Gospel of John that he is truth (14:6). Certainly Jesus is not here saying that he is a proposition or even a combination of propositions. Again, James tells the early Christians that mere belief in God, intellectual assent to the question of his existence, is insufficient and, indeed, signifies nothing since even the demons believe in the existence of God (2:19).

My point is not to say that propositions are of no value. The Christian faith through the Bible makes many propositional claims that the faith hinges on-- the virgin birth of Jesus, his sinless life, death and resurrection, to name a few of the major ones. My point is only to say that faith is more than propositional assent. This is why a popular term for Biblical truth-- inerrant-- is insufficient. An author I am reading on scriptural interpretation, Dan McCartney, says rather humorously that “a telephone directory might be inerrant, but its ‘truth’ is not likely to set anyone free” (Understand 38).

Doctrine is important but insufficient. Truth contains doctrine, but overwhelms it as well. Christian Truth has as much to do with relationship as it does with proposition and doctrine. We cannot neglect this fact both in our own spiritual lives and as we reach out to the people God has placed in our lives. If our faith is resting on intellectual assent to a handful of religious propositions and has nothing to do with a relationship with God then there is something missing. Likewise, our mission to our friends is not merely to get them to acknowledge doctrinal truth, but inspire them to a relationship with the God of the universe who made them and loves them and died for them. Propositions without relationship is meaningless.

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