Counterfeit vs. Genuine

I was talking with someone about a mother whose child is dying of cancer. The mother is a health care professional, but did not recognize the symptoms early enough, and before the cancer was diagnosed, it was too far gone to stop. So this child is dying. S/he is rapidly losing weight, a limb has been cut off up to the joint where it joined the body, The tumors have invaded every organ, and is consuming most of the nutrition that can be gotten in. The parents believe God is going to heal the child and refuse to make the child a “No Code” status. No Code status means that if s/he were to experience cardiac or respiratory arrest, no effort would be made to resuscitate the child. S/he would just be allowed to die. Poor, suffering child. Poor, suffering parents.

This kind of thing always makes me wonder where the “Faith Healers” are? I think frequently about the difference between what is recorded in the Gospel accounts of the healing miracles of the Lord Jesus Christ and His Apostles, and what is on “Christian TV”. And here are the differences I think about:
1. When Christ and/or His Apostles performed a healing miracle, it was always in front of witnesses who knew the person who was healed. And, invariably, it was an ailment which was visible, or the symptoms were visible. In this way, all the witnesses to the miracle knew the person who was healed, the previous condition, and saw a visible, touchable manifestation of a real healing. These are the things that are ideally necessary by the laws of evidence in a court of law to establish a fact: That something happened, that there were eye witnesses, preferably many, most of whom were reluctant to believe anything confirmatory to the claims of Jesus, and many of whom were hostile, who actually saw a visible malady change and become normal as a result of something that Jesus Christ or one of His appointed agents (the Apostles) did or said. And, in this case, the event observed, is known to be impossible, and hostile witnesses are among the observers. In many cases, the statements of the hostile witnesses are recorded. I can’t think right off where any attempt to say that the miracle did not happen (because there were too many witnesses who knew the case before and after) even though they did resist the meaning of the miracles. All these things together confirm that Jesus Christ was in fact the Son of God, or that the Apostles were in fact His appointed agents to continue His work and doctrine after His return to the Father.
But when the televangelist/healers hold these healing services, the people who are allowed to come up before the cameras are strangers. And they are always healed of something that cannot be objectively verified by the onlookers. The closest thing I have seen to something observable is when someone comes up in a wheel chair or some other assistive device, and is supposedly able to get up and walk. The healer coaxes the subject and the audience so that the power of suggestion and the emotion of the moment persuades the audience, who already wants to believe this, that the person was completely incapable of walking at all, and now can walk normally. As an RN, I have seen plenty of people who can walk short distances reasonably well. The fact that they go about in a wheel chair does not prove that they cannot walk. So I have never seen an event at one of these meetings where there are unbiased, preferably hostile witnesses who knew the subject before, who have no element of suggestablity (this leaves out family members in the case of an invisible healing) and where the subject has an observable illness which requires no medical equipment or medical skill to assess, and who, in the presence of such witnesses, undergoes an actual healing.
An example of what I mean would be that a person missing a leg has his leg grow back. A person who is in end stage cancer with all the discoloration and muscle wasting suddenly pinks up and fills out and grows a full head of hair. Stories from the televangelist about the woman who went home and supposedly recovered later don’t count. They are unconfirmed stories with no witnesses to the healing. Or this child, who would be presented on the stage before the audience and all the witnesses with a missing limb, and weighing fifty pounds, with black spots and yellowed, drawn skin. Then the televangelist would lay on hands and the arm would grow back in, the flesh would pink up and fill out, the spots would disappear, there would be no more pain, and the child would be obviously and completely recovered before all the witnesses, preferably some hostile ones.

2. The outcome for Christ and His Apostles as a result of these events is different from that of the televangelist healers. For Christ, this stuff wound up getting Him in trouble with the majority of the religious people of the day, accused of sedition to overthrow Caesar, and crucified. As for the Apostles, I was reading again one of Paul’s statements about how things were going with the Apostles as a result of their faithful witness to events and meaning of the life of Jesus Christ. Paul said, “ I think God has set us, the Apostles, last, as it were, appointed to death: for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men. We are fools for Christ’s sake . . . we are weak . . . we are despised. Even unto this present hour we both hunger, and thirst and are naked, and are buffeted, and have no certain dwellingplace; and labor, working with our own hands: being reviled, we bless; being persecuted, we suffer it: being defamed, we intreat: we are made as the filth of the world and are th offscouring of all things unto this day.” This last phrase refers to the stuff you would scrape off the inside of your chamber pot (back when they were the potty du jour) during spring cleaning. In other places, Paul reflects that, in order to know Christ, he lost his reputation (a lofty one) and his possessions (he was wealthy), possibly a wife and children. In II Corinthians chapter 11, Paul talks about some of the terrible sufferings he endured as an ambassador of Jesus Christ. In a word or two, the neither Jesus or His Apostles became wealthy, famous, or powerful as a result of their ministry. This indicates that they really were what they claimed to be and that their message was historically true, factual and rational by the laws of evidence.

On the other hand, it only takes a little observation and some digging around on the internet to find out that the televangelists, though they probably never have a real bona fide, verified healing, live like kings. They have taylor made clothes. They live in palaces, and often have grandiose “prayer getaways” in the mountains or in some expensive overlook of the ocean.
They wear expensive jewelry. They have cosmetic surgery so they will “look like a man or woman of God.” (John Baptist wore a goat hair bathrobe with a leather bathrobe tie. As far as I know he didn’t shave, and probably was not a regular bather. Yet all of us who have believed the Gospel and have been saved have done so because of John’s ministry.) They claim to be God’s agents, and they frequently claim that they prophesy as spokesmen directly from God. When they talk, they sound like God stops by for coffee and doughnuts every morning to give them the rundown on the day. But they don’t suffer, they are not deprived, they are certainly not like the scraping of a chamber pot. They do rake in millions of dollars into their own pockets which are given by well meaning but deceived people who can ill afford to give money, but who are told if they give sacrificially “to support this ministry” God will meet all their needs. Well, that is another argument. But, in summary, they do what they do because it is lucrative. It is also cruel to their constituants. As far as I can tell, God prospers one who works and saves and lives frugally and who give to the poor. The televangelists are not poor.

Well, I’m rambling. My point is: that which passes for Christianity in America today on Christian TV for the most part, in my opinion, is Christian in the same way that counterfeit money is money. It only appears, through careful screening and crafting, to be a continuation of the Apostles’ work. But it really makes the Gospel appear, to thinking people, ridiculous. And it fosters the assumption that people who believe the Bible and are Christians are not very bright and practice the kind of faith that Mark Twain defined. It is attrubuted to him that he said, “Faith is believeing something that you know damn good and well is not so.”

However, that recorded in the Gospel accounts and the rest of the New Testament documents meets the requirements of the laws of evidence. The proclaimers thereof not only did not get glory, honor, wealth and fame, but they suffered. Conclusion: that the witnesses in the New Testament were telling the truth. The televangelists are presenting something that is undermining the message of the Gospel and making it look like make-believe religion of the opiate class (Karl Marx: “Religion is the opiate of the people.”) Moreover, the cruelty shows up in this nice mother who is unable to accept that in a fallen world, people, even our dear children, die gruesome deaths, and God is not going to heal them. This does not mean God is not interested, or that He does not love. It means He has declined the request for healing for His own secret reasons.

Nevertheless, the Gospel and the evidence for it presented in the documents of the New Testament are true. Any who wish to bow before The Living Lord Jesus Christ as Saviors and forgiver of his sins, let him do so.

“Let us press on to know the Lord. As surely as the rain he shall come.”
Love,
Wes

I like Thomas. I mean, I really LIKE Thomas! This guy always gets a bad rapp. He is usually attached to an epithet that I don’t think he deserves. This is the guy in the New Testament who usually is called “Doubting Thomas”. I think he should be called “Thinking Thomas”. He was one of the twelve. He was faithful to Jesus all throughout his ministry. He was one whose feet our Lord had washed. He was one of the fellows whom Jesus chose, after having prayed all night to his Father, to be Apostle-Prophets -- the special instruments whom He would send into the world to establish and publish the Christian Faith. But he wasn’t present, according to the testimony of the eye witnesses, at the empty tomb on Resurrection Morning. He had put his reputation on the line and had given about three years of devotion to one who wound up being crucified, an abomination to a Jew (“Cursed is every man that hangeth on a tree.” Deuteronomy 21:22; Galatians 3:13). He had run away from it all in fear and disappointment. And now, he was being asked to believe that Jesus was alive again, bodily risen from the grave. He didn’t want to believe something ridiculous. He must have been wondering how he was going to cobble his reputation with the Jews and his business back together and get on with his life. This account is in John chapter 20.

But the thing about Thomas that is so important to me is that he said “I will not believe unless I see evidence. My belief, my faith, must be based on hard evidence.” Jesus gave him the evidence he demanded. You can read about it yourself. But he did not condemn him because he took this stand. He said, “Thomas, because you have seen me, you have believed.” That is exactly why the others believed. They were all eleven (Judas being excepted) witnesses to the death of Jesus Christ, and now they see Him bodily alive.

Thomas is mentioned once again in Acts chapter 1, but afterward fades into the background. But tradition says he went to the East preaching and establishing churches. He wound up in India where he was eventually killed for his testimony. Whatever the details are, his witness to Jesus Christ and His message was the same as that of the other apostles. I say this because in the Lord’s prayer for these chosen instruments, He asks the Father to make them one, even as He and the Father were one. And in John chapters 13-16 He says things to these men like, “I have chosen you” to accomplish certain things. “I have ordained you” to do these things etc. He states that He will accomplish his purposes through their agency after He returns to the Father. He even indicates in several places that when they would ask God for something in carrying out their commission, they would do this because both their asking, and the answer would have been previously ordained by God. Or that when they made a decision, the decision would actually be Christ working through them to continue and establish the work He had begun. (Matthew 18: 19-20 for example.) All that tells me that from the beginning our Lord chose Thomas as an instrument by which to accomplish His will, and that He did just that. But one of the things He used in Thomas was his refusal to “just believe” apart from evidence.

The statement “Faith is believing something that you know damn good and well is not so.” has been attributed to Mark Twain. In other words, in this view, Faith is non-evidential, contra-evidential, irrational. I agree that faith in astrology, Darwinism, world religions of what ever sort, are exactly this kind of faith. But this is exactly what faith in the Bible and its Christ is not. B. B. Warfield, professor of Polemic Theology at Princeton in the nineteenth century said that faith in the Bible and in Christ is “confidence based on evidence.” This is what Thomas wanted. This is why I like Thomas.

I hate to write. But this is important.

I have started this Blog thing because I feel I have something important to say. And I spend a fair amount of time saying it in various iterations, usually across the table from someone who asks me about my Christian Faith. However, Gentle Reader, I find writing an onerous task, unlike my friend, Mr. Cowart, who takes some kind of masochistic pleasure in it. But hopefully, by this means, I can say some things that will be helpful to someone. I am angered when I encounter persons in the Christian Ministry who are being employed to promote the doctrines of Christianity, as they are expressed in the Bible, who do not believe the Bible, and seek to undermine its authority. I find these mistake their schooling for an education, and thus tend to consider themselves above admonition or correction. I respect their right to believe what they wish. But to take a salary and all the other perks that go with professional ministry, and then to use this platform to undermine the Book that authorizes their job is dishonest. I think it amounts to malfeasance of office.

Well, enough of the grousing. I came to Christ as an honest Agnostic when I was about 17 years old. I was a suicidal philosopher trying to find a good reason not to commit suicide. I developed an ulcer from this. By reading from the classical philosophers and some of the modern ones, I discovered that they didn’t know either; they just wouldn’t admit it. God invaded my space one day and made Himself known to me in a way
that answered my questions. Since that time, I have had an interest, almost an obsession, to understand for myself and to explain to others why the Bible is trustworthy, and why the Christian Faith should be believed. I think it would be ridiculous to believe in something that will not stand up to examination. However, if the Faith of Jesus Christ is what it claims to be, and if it tolerates the light of examination, then it is of eternal consequence whether one believes it or not.

When I post again in a few days, I want to start trying to explain some of that.

Thanks for reading,
Wes

I finally got a new computer.

My name is Wes. I'm a friend of infamous blogger, John Cowart (http://www.cowart.info/blog/) who is to blame for inspiring me to start this thing. I don't like to write. He loves it. But I've always known there is something wrong with John. This does not speak well of me, because we've been friends since the 1970s.

Anyway, I have considered starting a blog as a way to reach out to many people from my study without actually having to go out and meet them and put up with them. I'm kind of a borderline misanthrope -- a nice misanthrope -- but a little socially awkward and introverted. However, the important thing related to the reason for this blog is that I am a Christian. I used to be an honest agnostic. But God Himself made Himself known to me when I was in my late teens. Since then my study of the Bible, and of religion vs. Bible Christianity has increasingly convinced me that the Bible is God's self revelation captured in writing by His enablement of chosen persons, and preserved through time by His Providencial protection so that we may know surely the things given to us by God through Jesus Christ.

And that is what I will write about: my thoughts, observations, ruminations, reasonings about why I think Apostolic
Christianity is reasonable and should be believed.

I welcome your feedback. Thanks.
Wes