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Can God Speak to Us?
 Flash! Just in time for the Christmas season,
Newsweek reports this week that the Gospel accounts of
Christ’s nativity aren’t “fully factual.”  Do tell. Talk about investigative journalism!
Not to be outdone,
Time assures us this week that “constantly evolving
scholarship” casts doubt on the Gospel narratives. So what else is
new? Scholarly attempts to diminish Christ through the “higher
criticism” go way back. Thomas Jefferson simply edited all the
miracles out of the New Testament and thought he’d produced
Gospels that were fully factual.
Some more recent scholars, if
that’s what they are, aren’t satisfied with getting rid of
Jesus’ deeds; they also want to eliminate many of his words
— the ones that don’t fit in with the Latest Thinking. It seems
he wasn’t the Son of God, but a progressive-minded Unitarian.
For some reason, Christ’s
first disciples, the ones on the scene at the time, got it all wrong. He
didn’t do all the things they thought they saw him doing, or say all
the things they thought they heard him say. The truth isn’t to be
found in the Scriptures, but in the inferences of modern experts,
otherwise known as Constantly Evolving Scholarship.
But so certain were those
disciples that countless early Christians bore witness to the truth of the
Gospels by suffering the most excruciating martyrdoms imaginable. They
set off a huge chain reaction of martyrdom, converting even many of their
torturers, who were immensely moved and impressed by this superhuman
courage.
Even before the Gospels were
written, the martyrs were God’s media, so to speak, for bringing
men to Christ. Long before the printing press, the radio, movies, and
television, the martyrs spread the good news of the risen Christ.
Some still reject that news, and
one strategy of rejection is to water it down, mixing it with enough
skepticism to make the Gospels seem archaic and alien. Once we reject
the miracles because belief in the miraculous now seems
“outdated,” it becomes easy to reject the message as
outdated too. But G.K. Chesterton had the best answer to this:
“Whatever else is true, it is emphatically not true that the ideas of
Jesus of Nazareth were suitable to his time, but are no longer suitable to
our time. Exactly how suitable they were to his time is perhaps suggested
in the end of his story.”
![[Breaker quote: Don't ask the experts.]](2004breakers/041207.gif) The
resistance to his ideas, which got him crucified, has continued ever since.
Jesus remains the most hated as well as the best-loved man in human
history. And as he predicted, his followers have been hated and persecuted
too.
Secularists use the mantra of
“separation of church and state” as an excuse for keeping
God’s word out of our public life. We are allowed to worship
privately, but we mustn’t act collectively as if God has spoken to
us. We are to act as agnostics, which means as virtual atheists.
There are two kinds of agnostics.
One says modestly, “I don’t know.” The other says
belligerently, “Nobody can know.” The first is understandable;
nearly everyone has doubts at times. But the second is asserting a strange
dogma.
To say that nobody can know
whether God exists is to say something self-contradictory. God is by
definition the omnipotent creator and ruler of the universe, the source of
our being. It’s nonsense to say that this omnipotent being could
exist without being able to communicate with his own creatures!
He can, he did, and he does. Plain
atheism makes more sense than the arrogant agnostic’s
“maybe, but we can never know,” which reduces God to a
divine deaf-mute. He does speak to us, and just as wonderfully, he listens
to us — maybe a bit more keenly than we listen to him, judging by
the state of the world.
The more modest sort of
agnostic should ask not whether someone called “God” exists
at all, but whether he has revealed himself to us, and whether
we’ve been paying enough attention to hear him. Are our souls open
to him, or are we tuning him out?
The deepest questions must be
answered by each of us personally, not by scholars or even journalists. Our
minds can save us from errors, but in the end only our hearts can
recognize the Truth.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2004 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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