The rationality of unbelievers who have not had the inner spirit

[jubalsqaud]

So lets gets some groundwork laid out.
Deuteronomy 18:20-22 says its possible to lie about what the real god has revealed.

"20 But the prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name, a word which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, [i]that prophet shall die.’ 21 And if you say in your heart, ‘How will we recognize the word which the Lord has not spoken?’ 22 When the prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, and the thing does not happen or come true, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you are not to be afraid of him."

So here's the problem, since the real god can be given false stories there is nothing in theory stopping someone from believing in he real God but not being a Christian either because they haven't heard the good news or they have only read the story without the inner witness of the holy spirit revealing its truth.

The last people would be believers in the correct God, but rejecters of the correct history of what that God has done.

My question is rationally, if you have read the NT and the holy spirit has not internally revealed the book to be true to you, are you irrational to reject the NT.

 

[Elizabeth]

Well, from the unregenerate man's idea of rationality (which is at its core objectively irrational), I suppose it makes 'sense' to reject the NT.
Maybe I am not understanding your point?

 

[MyCrows]

So lets gets some groundwork laid out.
Deuteronomy 18:20-22 says its possible to lie about what the real god has revealed.

"20 But the prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name, a word which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, [i]that prophet shall die.’ 21 And if you say in your heart, ‘How will we recognize the word which the Lord has not spoken?’ 22 When the prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, and the thing does not happen or come true, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you are not to be afraid of him."

So here's the problem, since the real god can be given false stories there is nothing in theory stopping someone from believing in he real God but not being a Christian either because they haven't heard the good news or they have only read the story without the inner witness of the holy spirit revealing its truth.

The last people would be believers in the correct God, but rejecters of the correct history of what that God has done.

My question is rationally, if you have read the NT and the holy spirit has not internally revealed the book to be true to you, are you irrational to reject the NT.

Doesn't Paul condemn the whole world for failing to to the rational thing, namely, to give worship to the Eternal God and Creator?

Romans 1:18-23

 

[Contra_Mundum]

So here's the problem, since the real god can be given false stories there is nothing in theory stopping someone from believing in he real God but not being a Christian either because they haven't heard the good news or they have only read the story without the inner witness of the holy spirit revealing its truth.

The last people would be believers in the correct God, but rejecters of the correct history of what that God has done.

My question is rationally, if you have read the NT and the holy spirit has not internally revealed the book to be true to you, are you irrational to reject the NT.

It could help us to first define terms. When you write, "believ[e] in [t]he real God," but follow that with "not... a Christian," you are qualifying belief or faith. That's OK, but some qualifying language is necessary in the discussion context. For example, we speak of saving faith versus historic faith. Genuine Christians are marked by the former, while including the latter. Unbelievers of various kinds may have the latter, but won't possess the former, which explains why they are not saved.

Real saving faith is persevering faith, "to the end," Mt.24:13. Faith that apostatizes often gives all the same indicators of saving faith, but by the end has become "rejected faith," repudiating the elements once embraced--maybe even fervently. God would know the end at the start, but we humans wouldn't; even the man himself wouldn't have known the end if he was sincere in his own mind at the start.

Some Christians-in-name are Christians because of their background or church affiliation, but know nothing to speak of concerning the religion to which they are attached in some way. Whatever it is, it is a disqualifying way, perhaps like someone with a nominal attachment to the country of their birth doesn't actually care about that identification, and might take a bribe to betray without a second thought. You could say these people "believe" in the God who is real (having no other or better option), but they do not know this God. All they have is a half-formed description of him.

If that description of God was fully fleshed out to such, and they did not embrace that knowledge and most importantly the knowledge of God in Christ which is saving, they would be no different from the demons, who "believe and tremble, Jas.2:19. An historic or purely secular awareness and interaction with the content of divine revelation may occasionally yield a detailed and passing accurate conception of the Christian religion. I daresay there are some unbelievers who know the Christian faith better than many of its enthusiastic adherents.

It is possible to take God's word "at face value," yet remain unmoved by its strictures and claims. "Who is the LORD that I should obey his voice...? I do not know the LORD," Ex.5:2. Pharaoh came at length to know certain uncomfortable facts about the LORD, which brought him to a fearful and reluctant obedience; from which he promptly repented thereby insuring his destruction. He both knew the LORD and did not know him, as he suppressed the truth.

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I tried starting off this post by introducing clarifying qualifiers for "faith," saving, historic, persevering. Let me now turn to an additional terminological definition. "Irrational" can take on several shades of meaning. What would make the NT (or the whole Bible) rational? Do the sentences contain coherent thoughts? Are they composed of nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech that present understandable statements? Can one follow the internal logic of a story, a poem, a sermon contained therein? Can the Bible be validly classified as "great literature," showing for instance traits of intertextuality, multiple layers of meaning and significance? Do any of the attempts at demonstrating compendium-spanning unity (Gen.-Rev.) supply an intellectually and spiritually satisfying composure?

I can imagine the Bible's rationality being accepted at all of those levels (and further). Likewise, I can imagine some percentage of readers of the Bible stopping the "rationality" discussion at anything beyond the first order. Is the Bible irrational after that, and the interrogator rational? His brain is still functioning. He is following certain "rules" (consciously or not) of rationality as he makes his judgment. He says, "This does not make sense to me." Why does he say that? Again, we can come up with various reasons, including the a priori rejection of God, of miracles, of the idea of sacrifices, of the need for a Savior, etc. Again, an individual person could introduce his rejection at the start of that list, or further along. His rules for rationality preclude him accepting things the Bible contains that are, honestly, not rational by those rules.

But from the Bible's internal logic, from the picture it presents of the "real world," the irrationality is all within the unbeliever. His rules are formed by the world that surrounds him--a world the Bible describes as "in rebellion." The world he apprehends as real describes the world envisioned by the Bible, or viewed by people wearing "Bible-glasses" as mythological, the creation of ancient, ignorant, superstitious people--and he is a modern, informed, and completely materialistic person.

A "conversion experience" can be conceived as seeing something one never saw before. Why they did not see is partly due to what they expected to see. This happens all the time. There is an internet video that shows a scene, and asks the viewer to "count the bounces" or something. Then, after you watch and count the bounces, you are asked, "Were you surprised when the guy in the gorilla suit waltzed through the scene?" I kid you not, I re-watched the video and there is a guy in a gorilla suit that walks through the scene--I, and 99% of viewers never see him the first time. We aren't looking for him.

Conversions happen to the Christian faith, and they happen (from the human standpoint anyway) away from it. Becoming a genuine Christian involves accepting (at minimum) what God in his revelation says--as opposed to anyone else's truth claims--about me and about my relationship to him, initially apart from Christ and then with Christ as my Mediator. Clearly, there is more to the Christian's faith and life than that, if it is going to be mature and fully formed; but that is the origin. Our view of ourselves, and a God-centered reality, has changed. We adopt the Bible's perspective as normative and rational, and reject any other way of seeing the world as essentially (though not absolutely in every way) irrational.

De-conversion, or conversion away from Christianity or unto something else happens when for whatever reason someone decides that his view of reality can no longer be filtered through the Bible, or have the God of Scripture as its focal point. That world no longer makes sense to him. If he adopts atheism, he probably reduces everything to matter and motion, and thinks that all that is real and accessible to his mind and body is apprehended by his senses. If that is the sole reality, then those who still think Christ is raised from the dead "are of all men most to be pitied." In that case, the Christians are the irrational ones.

In either case, generally the brains of the believer and the unbeliever are working normally. What is different between them boils down to the a prioris, axioms (unproveable assumptions that are properly basic) about what is possible, and what isn't in and around this universe. The Christian and also this or that unbeliever (not all are atheistic) draw a rational conclusion about the world accessible to our senses: that it is born of a higher order, an "ultimate rationality." This seems to make more sense than the opposite notion: that ultimate randomness, chaos, and undirected/uncreated energy nevertheless has produced world with order that is comprehendible.

Rom.1 teaches that there is a limit to what the natural order reveals about God, and that men by degrees in their rebellion come up with alternative explanations, rationalizations that do not make sense to the biblical-mind. Those concepts being formed by image-bearers (the biblical concept, not their self-concept) who actually were blessed with rational faculties, these ideas exhibit rational structure. They make sense to the people forming them in their brains precisely--and not in spite of--their working order. But still, because there are things their minds refuse to see, things they cannot see, these are things that aren't there to those minds. There is a rational-irrational dialectic going on in their minds, if the Christian concept is to be believed.

Not strangely, they might say something similar (if on a different foundation) about the Christian, and probably other religions as well. They see the Christian as being in the grip of his own delusion, his mind torn by the same rational-irrational dialectic, with the irrational side dominating. When they couple this judgment with their own definition of "faith," they imagine the religious person lives in a mental fantasy--and no one wants a mentally disturbed person entrusted with serious responsibility. A typical atheist imagines himself the most rational of all men. "Faith" to this person necessitates the suspension of rational thought, it is the very definition of the word as he defines it. "Faith" is the antithesis of "reason" according to this philosophy.

It is a convenient straw man, and conveniently excuses the daily use of unproven (by strict logic or observation) expectations by all men everywhere not paralyzed by uncertainty. Ordinary "faith" is a prerequisite to living in the world with a scarcity of proof. The "proof" is in the pudding, as the saying goes. David Hume (famous atheist) ironically showed by his ruthless pursuit of global skepticism that acting on the belief that the future will be like the past is pure irrationality. In reality, the overwhelming majority of people with functioning brains live "by faith," yet are rational by any meaningful definition. This is because induction is valid reasoning, though it is not perfect with respect to granting certainty.

So, people of "faith" are not irrational except by a wordplay, an insult. But the counterpoint is also true: if we say the unbeliever is irrational and do not qualify that statement very much by a generous allowance (that he sees what he sees, and makes his judgments by use of his faculties), we are insulting him. This is both unwise, and unkind. How shall we obey the apostle's example if we abuse them? "Therefore we, who know the fear of the Lord, persuade others," 2Cor.5:11. "In humility correct those who are in opposition, if God perhaps will grant them repentance, so that they may know the truth," 2Tim.2:25.

Only God can give eyes to see, ears to hear, a heart that understands what before was incomprehensible.