The Church’s mission is summarised succinctly at Matthew 28:18, known as the “Great Commission”.

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (ESV)

Much has been said about the decline of the Church in the West, including the interpretation that it is beginning or harbinger of the Great Apostasy mentioned in 2 Thessalonians 2 (which draws upon Matthew 24 – see Alan Kurshner’s table of parallels). The following factors are usually mentioned in these discussions:

• The Second Vatican Council
• WWI and WWII
• The influence of Marxism, Socialism, Post-modernism, Scientism, Empiricism, Existentialism, and Nihilism
• The fall of the British Empire
• The corruption of American politics
• The spread of psychologising tendencies within the Church
• Hypocrisy and scandals within the Church
• The influence of textual criticism and post-Enlightenment philosophy within first Protestantism and then Catholicism
• Globalism, including mass immigration
• The refusal of parts of the Church to engage with the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements
• Changes and lapses within the education systems of Europe, the UK, and the USA

There is probably some truth to each of these points. Assessments of the situation fall on a spectrum, the two poles being a denial that any of this is the Church’s fault and a hand-wringing capitulation that believes it is all the Church’s fault.

Neither of these extreme positions is particularly helpful. If we believe it is all our own fault, we will be tempted to think we can fix the situation entirely by just changing and putting all our efforts into those changes. This is unwise for several reasons.

1. It runs the risk of burn-out: people exhausting themselves thinking that the answer is entirely within their own control. This will lead to demoralisation and despair.
2. It overlooks free will. Calvinism is false. If we think we can manipulate people into the Kingdom, we cease treating them as people, we deny their inherent dignity, granted to them by God. Ultimately, it is each person’s choice whether he accepts the Gospel or not.
3. It opens the way to temptation, the temptation to abandon the truths of our faith in order to make it more palatable to outsiders. This is not only immoral, but also foolish. The failure of this policy in the Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion, and other Protestant denominations should furnish enough evidence to discourage such attempts.
4. It overlooks the role of God in the process of evangelism. The Great Commission is sandwiched between the declaration that all authority is vested in Christ and that Christ is with us. Evangelism and the survival of the Church do not stop with us: God is intimately involved in those aims.

Equally, the extreme of thinking that this is entirely and external problem is unwise.

1. It overlooks our duty to know the truth as best we can and to present the truth in the best way we can to outsiders who will listen to it. When we misrepresent the Gospel, albeit unintentionally, we do a disservice to outsiders; we run the risk of people rejecting the Gospel and doing so in a way that potentially could have been avoided.
2. We run the risk of our love growing cold. If all we have for unbelievers is contempt, anger that they are rebelling against God, then we are hypocrites. We were unbelievers once, and which of us is completely without sin now? If we are to persevere in evangelism, we must make an effort to understand why the Gospel has been largely rejected by our countrymen. If we love them, we will do everything we can to help them make an informed decision.
3. We run the risk of stagnation. Sometimes we need challenges, whether internal or external, to make us revisit our beliefs and practices. The Reformation was one such challenge. It successfully liberated common people from abuses carried out against them by certain sections of the clergy.

“Indifference” seems to be an apt description of the challenge the Church faces in the West. Persecution does play a part, but the conditions in the West are not identical to those that obtain in the East. There’s nothing we can do about that and we should not invite persecution. Persecution will naturally follow those who truly imitate Christ, but that is not the same thing as inviting it.

We can ask sincere questions (and treat the answers at face value) of people both inside and outside the Church. There is no guarantee that they will listen in turn to what we have to say, but questions are a starting point. We can pray: asking God for wisdom, for compassion, and for the strength to persevere. We can examine our own consciences and ask questions of ourselves. We must also be attentive: outsiders will generally not give us opportunities to share the Gospel (at least not at length).

During our service this morning, we had traditional Advent readings and a selection of carols. As I was listening to Matthew’s account of the angelic dreams Joseph experienced, a thought occurred to me.

Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost. Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily. But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.  And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name Jesus: for he shall save his people from their sins.

Matthew 1:18-21

The overarching narrative of the Bible is about the relationship between God and humans. God being perfect, and wanting good things for His creation, wants us to be free moral agents. However, being free, we are capable of making evil choices, and these choices have impacts, like ripples, across creation.

This structure leads to a tension between law and grace. Both are facets of goodness, and are interestingly manifested in the story of Joseph, the adoptive and legal father of Jesus of Nazareth.

Joseph was a good man in both senses of the word: he knew and reverenced the law, but he was also capable of great compassion. Remember, before the angel visited, he had no reason to believe that special circumstances applied to Mary. As far as he could tell from the available facts and the usual course of events, Mary had been unfaithful.

Unfaithfulness is morally wrong. If we do not recognise moral failings, then we deny justice and take a step further away from the ideal to which we aspire: a world in which people consistently make good choices.

However, we are also loving. If we punish moral failings, but do not show compassion, we create a world in which rights and duties matter, but the underlying reason for them is forgotten. In short, we create a world without joy.

Joseph was thus faced with a dilemma, and he opted for a compromise. To administer some element of justice, but to temper it with compassion. This was as far as he could go. He could not solve the problem of sin – Christ was born for that purpose.

The story is important as a reminder of our real-world lives. At times the events of the Bible seem very removed from our daily lives. Most of us are not kings like David or wandering prophets like Elijah or warriors like Samson. Most of us have not seen obvious miracles like the Parting of the Red Sea.

But we do all have interpersonal relationships. Marital breakdown in some form affects most of us: whether as spouses, children, relatives, friends, or workers. The Joseph story, in its own way, is a good nutshell for the Gospel message. Something to think about in the remaining days of Advent.

Martin Scorsese’s film, Silence, explores important parts of Christian faith through the historical example of Japanese Catholics and European missionaries during the Tokugawa Shogunate. I consider the film’s lesson to be essentially contrary to orthodox Christianty (I believe conservative Catholics generally disapprove of this film).

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Sanctify them through Thy truth: Thy word is truth.

–Jesus speaking at John 17:17

For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse

-Romans 1:20

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God defies definition. This is not to say that the concept GOD is incoherent (although humans are capable of misunderstanding, mischaracterising, and misrepresenting God). God is other; He is distinct from His creation, and yet – so Christianity teaches – God invites mankind to interact with Him. Such interaction requires some element of commonality; without it, there can be no communication. Christians understand God’s interaction with us to be through condescension; to understand Him fully is beyond us. The greatest act of condescension, as taught by the Gospel, is that God took on human flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

If God exists, the Incarnation is paradoxically both surprising and logical. God is by definition supremely benevolent. If this characteristic is removed, the concept of God becomes incoherent and God cannot exist: for anything that is incoherent is not real. (Note, incoherence itself has categories: humans can hold incoherent views in the realm of imagination; but this does not entail that such views correspond to anything in reality).

Such benevolence would lead to creation of a world. When that world went wrong (through free will), benevolence would lead to its redemption. The nature of human sin and is such that the path of redemption leads through the Incarnation of God Himself (although mankind did not clearly foresee or understand this; wisdom on this matter has come through revelation and hindsight).

Benevolence is a personal characteristic. Benevolence apart from personhood is incoherent. Feuerbach, an atheist, posited the idea that the concept GOD was a projection. He held that mankind, troubled by the hostility of the physical world and their own capacity for evil, created the concept GOD and chose to believe in God’s existence as a coping mechanism. It is more comforting to believe that the universe was created and created by a supreme Benevolence, than to accept that it simply exists and that there is no objective meaning to our existence.

Have we followed the route that Feuerbach described? Or have we believed in God because there is a God and because His nature and existence can – and must be – inferred from reality?

Can an eternal being exist without personhood? Is that a coherent concept? What is the substrate of existence? What is the ultimate Reality? It cannot be less than the glory of mankind – indeed it must be more.

The philosophy of emergent properties is a complex sub-discipline, much of which must lie beyond the scope of this post. However, it is sufficient to observe that our contingent minds cannot come from something that is not mind at all. Therefore, there must be a necessary Mind and that Mind must be co-extensive with Ultimate Reality.

(Intermediate great minds between humanity and God are also possible – thus thrones, principalities, powers, angels, demons, etc. However, God is logically necessary, which is why Greco-Roman paganism cannot be true, since its pantheon does not conform with the coherent definition of GOD.)

This post has served to introduce the main part of the argument. A following post will round off the series by unpacking that part in more detail.

In the previous post we concluded that there must be an ultimate, objective Reality. Plato, the Rationalists, Empiricists, and Transcendentalists all realised the problem of knowing what the reality is actually like. Descartes attempted to argue that our senses do tell us truths about the world because, having proved to his own satisfaction that God exists, God is not a deceiver. Berkeley denied the existence of mind-independent objects. Hume argued that the concept MIND-INDEPENDENT OBJECT is actually the result of confusion. Kant explicated the principle that certain concepts cannot be derived from experience, but are in fact necessary presuppositions in order to interpret experience.

Accepting the existence of the ultimate Reality is one thing. Showing that the Reality is God is another. Even if one shows the existence of God, further work is necessary to demonstrate that God corresponds to the figure found in the Bible, as opposed to that articulated by other religions. It certainly is true that the different religions are mutually exclusive. They cannot all be true. Either one is right or they are all wrong.

The Reality must be coherent. What is coherence? Coherence is the absence of contradiction. It must also be non-contingent. If it is ultimate, it depends on nothing else for its own existence.

However, reality is more than these things. Humans attach, for want of a better word, meaning to reality, which is bound up with the problem of Truth. The struggle between the Rationalists and Empiricists revealed the difficulty that arises when one tries to say what reality actually is, independent of our senses. And so, Kant elaborated transcendentalism. This epistemological wall that hinders penetration of the garden of ontology is the reason why metaphysicists sound like mystics.

Atheism is not a common metaphysical commitment among humans. It is very natural for humans to attribute personal qualities to the Reality. In attributing personal qualities, humans turn that Reality into God. The naturalness of such attribution, if accepted, is not an argument that the Reality actually is God. Since humans are capable of mistakes, this could be a mistake.

However, “attribution” is a misleading word. It assumes that humans are fashioning God, whereas they may in fact be discerning His qualities through legitimate reasoning. The argument from coherence seeks to show that the nature of the Reality can be sufficiently explored to demonstrate that the Reality is God.

The key to the problem is personality. Hume thought that an impersonal Reality was no less reasonable a proposition than God. Such being the case, with no side in Hume’s estimation having a conclusive power, the agnostic was perfectly entitled to withhold his assent. (The atheist, having an assertive position, would need further material before he could claim legitimacy).

Was Hume’s assessment correct? He stood in opposition to St Paul, who declared in the opening of the Epistle to the Romans that:

Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse…

Although the context of this passage concerns other matters, the use of it in this post is appropriate. In order for Paul to address his view that humans are rebelling against God, he must presuppose that:

• God exists;
• Humans are capable of knowing that God exists;
• Humans are capable of knowing God’s will; and
• Humans are capable of freely choosing to disobey God’s will.

The following posts will tackle the problem of inferring personhood from the existence and nature of the Reality, and from that inference accepting that there is a God.

The debate between the rationalists and empiricists concerned the rationalists’ claim that there is a class of synthetic propositions that can be known a priori. Kant agreed with the rationalists on the existence of this class, claiming that various mathematical propositions were synthetic, but could be known a priori. To the best of my knowledge, he did not put the proposition, “God exists”, in this class.

The claim, “God exists”, seems to defy categorisation. It seems to be both analytic and synthetic – and more. Aquinas rightly perceived, as seen in his arguments, that our world of experience must be dependent on something beyond it. In other words, our experience is contingent, but the Great Reality is necessary. He wanted to say that the Great Reality is God. Hume held that this was a leap too far, that the inference of the Necessary Being could not, in and of itself, tell us whether that Being is God or simply an eternal universe.

This Necessary Being sits at the conjunction of the analytic and synthetic, of the a priori and a posteriori. The reasoning that leads our minds towards the inference of this Being’s existence tells us about both the structure of our conceptual world and objective reality. In other words, thoughts concerning the Necessary Being put us in touch with reality; this line of thought crosses from the phenomenal to the noumenal.

It should be noted, however, that humans cannot grasp God in His fullness. To enter the noumenal is not to know all or to know God in perfect exactitude. In this instance, it is to know that our thoughts have connected with the Great Reality.

Without the Objective, there is nothing at all. Nothing at all. Subjective existence, alone in the void, is a contradiction. This is because the subjective is contingent; it must depend on something else, ultimately upon the Great Reality.

This reasoning is not new. Long before Locke, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant, Descartes explored the  conjunction of the analytic and synthetic. He realised that our world of experience could be a lie (the Evil Genius Hypothesis). He may not have had the language of analytic and synthetic, of a priori and a posteriori (these appear to have been codified by Kant), but he was able to work through the reasoning in his own language.

He wanted to show that God existed and that we could, in essence, trust our experiences and reasoning. While subsequent philosophers have found problems in his reasoning, and in the leap from the Great Reality to a personal God (on to which Christians must add further reasoning to show that God is Yahweh), his basic instincts are correct.

The next post will continue on the journey to the Argument from Coherence.

Note: Although Brexit is topical at the moment, and I enjoy reading posts about it on this and other blogs (when time allows), today I would prefer to direct readers elsewhere on that topic and encourage them to spend time in prayer on the matter.

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Parliament will be prorogued, which means a short break between the sessions of its (normally) five-year term. This article at The Conservative Woman, is worth reading on this topic.

Constitutional outrage? No, the way to a good, clean Brexit

I have written in the past about Mystery Babylon here and here. Chalcedon has also exploded the false teachings of Alexander Hislop on this subject here, with which I concur, having seen them refuted in Joel Richardson’s Mystery Babylon. I have recently been watching ministry videos from Paul Keith Davis, who believes that Mystery Babylon represents (among other things?) a kind of religious system, from which Christians are to exit (“Come out of her my people!”).

Mystery Babylon in Revelation is one of the most difficult and controversial passages in Scripture. I do not propose to offer a definitive interpretation here. However, the recent videos have caused me to return to a topic which I had left alone and, in particular, they have made me think about the topic of Christian unity, whether or not that is the point of the passage.

It is evident that many of the traditional churches have been corrupted. I am conscious that as a sinner myself (as all humans who have conscience are), it is awkward for me to find fault. Nevertheless, I feel I must make some observations because the situation is grave. There are many members of the clergy who cannot be called orthodox: for they deny (or do not assent to) fundamental tenets of the faith. These people, in positions of power and authority, are extremely problematic.

It seems unlikely that they will be forced out of the Church. Furthermore, they are making it harder and harder for orthodox, conservative enclaves within the Church to continue unmolested. Therefore, many Christians, even if they do not explicitly confess it to others, find themselves asking if the cry “Come out of her, My  people!” is applicable today. This does not mean that such questioning Christians believe that the final time of the end is upon us; rather, they wonder if the underlying principle of that cry has come into effect once more, just as it did in times past.

Such thoughts are more characteristic of Protestant Christians (and the churches lineally descended from the Protestant groups) than of Catholics and Orthodox Christians. Ecclesiology plays a role in how one interprets the data. Herein lies the problem: to hear the voice of God, one must remove preconceptions that hinder that audition. How does one determine whether a preconception is of God or not? It is by the Word and by the Spirit (and some would say the Spirit acting through Tradition (the Apostolic Deposit of the Faith)).

How do we discern the difference between the voice of the Spirit and the voices of other spirits or the voice of our own hearts? The Spirit’s word will be in concordance with Scripture. The work of God can surprise us sometimes. The Disciples were scandalised by people who did the work of Christ but did not travel as part of Jesus’ entourage. He told His Disciples not to hinder them, because they were doing His work. Such people belonged to Him, even though they did not travel in the entourage.

Do we need to learn this lesson again today? How do we overcome the Great Schism and the Reformation? How do we as followers of Christ overcome the corruption of the clergy and laity? How do we come together? Christ told us to love one another.

Perhaps God will take us through this by internal promptings and external circumstances. Perhaps we do not need to formally come together: it may be sufficient that we are one in Spirit, that we support one another. If an exodus from the traditional churches is necessary to achieve complete oneness, perhaps there will be a coming of the Spirit, like at Pentecost, that will achieve this result. Perhaps persecution will compel us to flee the old institutions and supernatural revelation from the Spirit will guide us into new house churches that will restore what has been divided.

Prayer seems to be necessary whatever route God wants us to pursue. For my part, I am conscious that I must devote more time to prayer, that I must seek the Lord on these matters, that I must repent where appropriate, that I must give God space to impart revelation, to guide me in the attitudes of the heart and the strategies to be pursued.

The scene is grim. Although we in the West do not face the kind of martyrdom our brothers and sisters are suffering in the East, we are not without opposition. It is easy to feel alone, especially if one is zealous about the Gospel and reform. My prayer for my friends here at AATW, NEO, and Richard’s Watch is for the following things.

• Christians in your area with whom you can share the deep things of your heart, be they priests, members of the congregation, family members, or co-workers
• Fresh revelation from God about the times in which we live and how you as an individual can play your part for the Kingdom
• Healing and blessing for your body, soul, and spirit – may you be empowered to do God’s work
• Endurance, to run the race until the end
• Protection, against all kinds of evil
• Courage of your convictions – to make the difficult choices when you must

May God grant you all this and more, through Jesus Christ your Saviour.

Gloria Deo omnipotenti, Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto. Amen.