Jack Pelham

It’s interesting—the unintended consequences that occur when a piece of one’s religious foundation is laid in the wrong way.  It causes all manner of predicaments and there’s really no way to correct for them all unless you strip down to the foundation and set things aright.  Many people can attest to this truism as it plays out in our physical world.  When the foundation for a house is faulty, the house itself pays the price for it.  When a mathematical solution is attempted by use of the wrong formula, the answer pays the price.  When the wrong kind of fuel is used in a car, it ruins the motor’s function.

Well, this principle holds true in religion, too.  When you get the foundational ideas wrong, you should expect to have trouble making the rest of your religion add up properly.

Once upon a time, God created humankind and promised an eternal afterlife for those among them who were righteous.  Again and again he stressed to them that they should live righteously and repent of their sins.  He assured them repeatedly that they would be judged in this fashion:

2 Corinthians 5:10  For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.

He even stressed to them that not even the angels were exempt from judgment for their bad behavior, and that the humans wouldn’t be, either:

2 Peter 2:4  For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into tartarus and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; ⁵ if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; ⁶ if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; ⁷ and if he rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked ⁸ (for as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard); ⁹ then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment, ¹⁰ and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority.

A great many such passages were written to warn and encourage the believers to “overcome” and to “endure to the end”, lest their faith should be in vain and their eternal destiny lost.

But then came the modern church business and the rush to get tithe payers in the door.  It was necessary to modify the doctrinal foundation such as to make for a “bigger tent” into which more people would be attracted.  Now the promise of eternal life isn’t just for the faithful who would endure righteously to the end; it is extended to anybody who would join the church and say he believed in Jesus.  The focus of what is called “salvation” shifted from living a successful life as a servant and student of Yahweh and Yeshua to merely accomplishing some small number of initiatory steps, such as, for instance, reciting “The Sinner’s Prayer” and/or being baptized.  Those who would do so are assured that their “salvation” has been secured, more or less.  The doctrine of once-saved-always-saved-but-keeping-coming-to-church was invented to keep them coming with those tithes.

Arguments about the specifics of doctrine kept arising and endangered the church business, so the churches began to attack reason and logic and evidence-based thinking as an unspiritual activity that is to be avoided in deference to what was called “faith”—not the original faith of the Bible, mind you, for that was a matter of reliance on and obedience to God and Jesus.  No, this new kind of faith called for them to hold fast, not to the actual words of God and Jesus, but to what they were being told that the Bible means.  It was necessary to give them ways to deal with the cognitive dissonance that would result from the conflict between their new traditions and the original texts, so another interesting thing evolved in the churches:  Things that had been explained by Jesus and his apostles were re-explained as still being mysterious and a great deal of effort was put into mystifying the religion.  “God moves in a mysterious way” became a favorite, and the idea that one can somehow magically “know” things apart from having actual knowledge of them—this would prove essential.  This is how a member can “know” that his eternal life is secured, even though the Bible warns him that his particular pattern of sins are a certain impediment to his invitation into the Holy City.  He “knows” it because he has trained himself to “feel it in his heart”.  What he has imagined in his own mind, he attributes to the very presence and affirmation of God therein.

In this system, “belief” is everything.  Once a person claims to believe in Jesus, the rest of the details are more or less dispensable.  So whether the rush is to get them to the altar or the baptistry, the goal of that rush is to get them to say “I believe”.

But there’s a huge problem with this:  One can say “I believe” in a second, without ever answering the question as to what they believe in.  Sure, the big prize in view is to confess that they believe “in Jesus”, but there’s more to this than meets the eye.  The Bible has 1,000+ pages of information, and there’s no way a person can quickly survey all that information in order to decide whether he believes it all—and certainly not to decide whether he is willing and able to obey it all.  Even so, they’re expected to state a belief in the Bible—a belief that they are in no position to declare responsibly.  But this is not seen to be a problem.

In actuality, however, it’s a huge problem.  In the rush to belief (and “membership”) many are taught to make such claims prematurely, and then they find themselves in several predicaments.  Among them are these:

1. They defend the Bible against critics without even understanding the books in it themselves.
2. They are expected to repeat the assertion that their church is “Bible based” when they don’t even know—and could not possibly know—the degree to which this is true or untrue.
3. They are expected to give an all-or-nothing endorsement of the Bible even though there may well be things in it that they would not agree with if they knew about them.
4. They have signed off on hundreds of things—and not only have they not read them, but they don’t have any training in how to make good sense of them.  They lack good hermeneutical sense, yet they are considered adequate to the task of endorsing the Bible.
5. They have no idea about the process of translation and the differences between Bible versions.  They have no concept of biases among the translators and the churches that sponsored them.

All these issues, however, are considered to be inconsequential because the really important goal has been accomplished:  endorsement of and membership in the local church business.

This is why churches boil down the 1,000+ pages into a few bullet points of “What We Believe”:  it makes it simpler for the initiate to sign off on.

And what do you get from this business scheme?  You get millions and millions of “members” who are not qualified to understand the very Bible they endorse.  Yet you teach them an air of adamancy and dogmatism about those few bullet points of doctrine, and you call their acceptance of it “faithfulness”, rewarding them with praise every time they do it.  This teaches them to be incurious and irresponsible about their beliefs as they keep those tithe dollars coming.

You also get a considerable deemphasizing of matters of morality, as questions of morality tend to split groups and diminish membership.  And this means you’ll find more and more church organizations where corruption takes hold among the leadership, for the members are desensitized to it and are ill-equipped to do much about it.  Where the original Christians were instructed thus: Ephesians 5:11 Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them, the modern believer has been trained to keep his focus on the first two words of Matthew 7:

Matthew 7:1 “Judge not, that you be not judged. ² For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. ³ Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? ⁴ Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? ⁵ You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.  ⁶ “Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.

Never mind that Jesus expected his followers to be able to judge between a speck and a log, what is holy and what is unholy, who is a pig, etc., this modern church generation has got it whittled down to just the first two words, “Judge not.”  This is their new gospel.  And to this, it was necessary for them to redefine “grace” from something that caused the original Christians to work hard and to so “no” to ungodliness into something that continually exempts them from such works!

Even the churches that claim not to do this are doing it consistently.  They let their leaders get away with habitual ungodliness.  They disregard passages of scripture that are problematic for their preferred version of the religion.  They will run off anyone who asks too many questions and raises too many objections, for it rocks their boat too much and endangers the continual success of the business venture.  But of course, this is all done in the name of Jesus, and not in the name of business.

This all puts the sincere believer in quite a predicament—catching him between the facts of the Bible and the cold realities of the church business in which he has found himself entangled.  If his curiosity over the texts prevails—and if his sense of obedience to God trumps his sense of obedience to the church—he will neither be welcome in time, nor wish to remain.  He will discover that the church is not what it was advertised to be.  And then he will have to struggle over what should be done about that.  Most will simply move on to some other church, where they will be less likely to rock the boat again, even though it will need rocking.

A few, however, will come to understand in time that the Bible presents a vast network of facts that must be carefully considered and analyzed in order to understand just what happened and what was taught.  In time, they will understand that what actually happened in Bible times bears little resemblance to what is practiced today in the churches.  They will see that the modern church business is like most other businesses—-giving in to the typical temptations of over-promising and under-delivering, of skimping on quality to save on overhead while exaggerating the benefits of its products and services.

I do not know of a single church that is not guilty of this.  Not one.  And there’s a reason it is like it is—but nobody wants to know the reason.  No, they’d rather make up reasons than to find out the real answer.  That is the predicament that comes with the rush to belief.  Here is what church members are trained to do:

• Suspend judgment and discernment
• Mystify what can be understood
• Claim to “know” what is not known
• Excuse bad behavior where God does not
• Declare belief before checking out the facts
• Be suspicious of fact, reason, and logic
• Give too much weight to the assertions of church leaders

As it happens, these qualities make for terrible students of the Bible.

You can tell a lot about people by observing the patterns of their behavior.  You can figure out what they think about things, and even how they do that thinking.

What is surprising is to discover what things people don’t think about.  Would it surprise you, for instance, to find a bomb squad technician who never thinks to check a bomb for hidden, secondary triggering devices?  Or what about a doctor Continue reading →

I’ve been studying cognitive science for the last three years or so, trying to understand why it’s so hard for people to correct their beliefs when those beliefs are demonstrated to be wrong.  It is fairly obvious from the research that there are three particular reasons that people get things wrong:

1. They just weren’t thinking.  That is, they were being a “cognitive miser”, reluctant to “spend” any effort on their thinking unless forced to.
2. They didn’t know how to do the kind of thinking necessary to come up with the right answer or decision.  This usually means a failure to grasp the basics of logic or probability.
3. They were employing a corrupted way of thinking.  A corrupted scheme of thinking is called a “cognitive bias”.  It’s like a small computer program that kicks in at certain times and that spits out decisions that are guaranteed to be wrong in certain situations.  For example, Billy was once robbed by two Italians, and afterward, he adopted a cognitive bias that says “All Italians are thieves.”  This bias kicks in every time Billy sees or hears about an Italian.  Every once in a while, Billy happens to be right about a particular Italian, but since not Italians are thieves, we can see that Billy will frequently be wrong when using this bias.  He either knows, or should know, that it is inaccurate, but he keeps it in his mind anyway.

Continue reading →

Before we get started talking about church revivals, let’s establish just how common a thing it is in our culture.

If you do a Google search for [church revival], you get 192,000,000 returns.  (In case you aren’t familiar with this sort of search, that’s a lot.  To put it in perspective, if you search [NFL], you get 330,000,000 returns, and if you search [Iraq war], you get 61,600,000.)  Suffice it to say, therefore, that the idea of churches needing some sort of revival is a very common idea in our culture.  Indeed, there are over 31,000 web pages with the words “revival” (or “revive”) and “church” in the page name!  Meanwhile, Amazon.com shows over 15,000 returns on a book search on the terms: [church revival].  So let’s face it, church revival is a big business. Continue reading →

In my previous post, I talked about how:

1. We have to actually read the Bible to know what’s in it.
2. Jesus seems to have thought that people’s misunderstandings were worth correcting, so we are to be in the habit of correcting ourselves by our further study.
3. We have to deliberately process what we read in order to get it right.
4. We have to crosscheck what we read in order to understand when one passage alludes to information found elsewhere, such as with the parables or apocalyptic literature.

All this was concerning how it’s hard work to know the Bible—much harder than many assume.

But it gets worse.  Here are yet a few more difficulties the devoted Bible student faces. Continue reading →

Jesus was talking to some from a religious faction (Sadducees)  one day and he told them a most instructive thing:

Matthew 22:29 But Jesus answered them, “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.

They were wrong about something because they did not know the scriptures.  They could have had the right answer, but apparently, they had chosen not to go find it in the scriptures.  Immediately after telling them they are wrong, Jesus explains the right answer to them, alluding to previous writings.

Their ignorance did not keep them from having an answer, mind you.  Indeed, they had an answer, but it was “wrong”, said Jesus.  And that “wrong” answer was worthy of correction; this we can tell because Jesus took the time to correct it.

So let’s review:  They didn’t have to be wrong, but they had neglected to learn all the available information on the topic before settling on a (flawed) model of understanding, and this was worthy of correction in Jesus’ mind.

Does this have any implications for us?  We’ll come back to that.

In his epistle to the Roman Christians, Paul seems to be correcting some misconceptions held by his audience.  In his explanation of what they are missing, he appeals thus:

Romans 11:2b  Do you not know what the Scripture says of Elijah, how he appeals to God against Israel?

Now, we have every reason to believe that the Roman Christians were good guys, not like those mean ol’ Sadducees, yet still, Paul was explaining to them something they could have already learned for themselves had they cared to do the research.

Jesus was criticized by the Pharisees for something they didn’t know enough about.  Look at his response:

Matthew 12:3 He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: ⁴ how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? ⁵ Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless?

This one’s even more interesting because, if you know anything about the Pharisees, you know that they had read these passages.  Obviously, though, they had never fully processed what they had read (perhaps because they did not like what it said?).  So once again, they could have known better, but had either neglected to “do the math” or to make themselves believe the answers.  So here they were leveling an erroneous criticism.

There are many passages of this sort in the Bible.  (You can see a few more of them here if you like.)

There are lots of players in religion; lots of people who want to be involved.  Yet it seems quite easy to make cognitive (thinking) errors about the facts of religion.  Why is that?  Why isn’t it easier?  Why didn’t God create a way for us to all have a fuller and more convenient knowledge of the facts?

It gets worse.

When Jesus came to the Earth as the Son of Man, he spoke to people in parables.  A parable is a story that teaches us about something other than the story itself.  For instance, the parable of the mustard seed wasn’t really about mustard seeds at all, but about reliance upon God and what a good return on investment can be expected from it.  Well, this muddies the waters considerably for the casualist, because with parables, it becomes practically impossible for the cognitive miser to understand Jesus.  (“Cognitive miser” is the term that cognitive scientists use to describe our stinginess with our thinking.)

Consider this:

Matthew 13:34  All these things Jesus said to the crowds in parables; indeed, he said nothing to them without a parable. ³⁵ This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet:

Interestingly, even though he was uttering what had been “hidden”, but was still not spelling it out in the most direct and clear terms.  We are told elsewhere, however, that he told his own disciples everything in plain language, unlike how he spoke to the crowds:

Mark 4:34  With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it. ³⁴ He did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything.

Is it just a coincidence that his own disciples had signed up for the full course, and not just the passerby version?  I think not.  Their intense interest was rewarded by a much fuller understanding; they were much less likely to get things wrong than were the casual listeners in the crowds.

You and I, however, are not among those whose honor it was to sit at Jesus’ feet.  He is not here to “explain everything” to us and to answer our questions.  If we want to know, we’re going to have to find out from what is in the Bible—and if it’s not in there, we’re just going to have to do without.

UNDERSTANDING THE NATURE OF THE MATERIAL

We may have lots of questions, but the inconvenient truth of the matter is that a great many of our questions are not answered conveniently in the Bible.  Sure, some things are easy to pick up, such as where Jesus says that we should not make a show of our good deeds.  Other things, though, require much research if we are to understand them accurately.  For example, when Jesus refers to himself as the “Son of Man”, we cannot possibly comprehend how loaded that statement is unless we have searched out all the “son of man” language in the Bible in order to understand how it was used and what it meant.  Or when he speaks of “this perverse generation”, how are we to know what he had in mind unless we have searched all the scriptures to find out what it might have been?

“But who has the time for that?”

I’m glad you asked.  A devout student has the time for that.  Others do not.  The Bible itself divides people into two groups:  those who will work to understand, and those who don’t care that much.

There is no Bible for cognitive misers.  There is no Bible for lazy people.  There is no “Bible for Dummies”, as we might expect to find in the bookstore.  (Yes, there is a book called “The Bible for Dummies”, but it can’t begin to explain all these things.)  There is no Bible that magically imparts the full information of the scriptures in convenient form.  It was not written that way.  It was written in a rich mixture of history and metaphor, parable and poem, narrative and vision.  It’s almost as if the idea were to keep the cognitive miser in the dark.  It’s as if God intentionally makes it hard for the casual reader to get things right.

And that brings us to the epidemic of error regarding the scriptures.  When we have thousands of opposing camps—each one claiming to have a better take on things than the rest—we can rest assured that most of us are wrong about a great many things.  And wrong we are—yet we may never know it this side of that dreaded appointment with God, for so many of us tell ourselves again and again that we have got it more or less figured out, and that if we were wrong about any of it, we’d surely know we were wrong!

This is what the church corporations tend to do.  They whittle it down for us into a convenient packet of information, and then they assure us that we needn’t bother ourselves to learn much beyond what they repeat again and again for us.  This catering to convenience and “belonging” has led us to a great many misunderstandings of scripture.  Their constant assurance that our continued attendance is more or less all we need to work at is a surefire way to keep the cognitive miser a cognitive miser—satiated, incurious, self-assured, complacent, and wrong about a great many things.

People of that sort, however, do not have a special Bible of their own; they have the same one that the rest of us have—all 1,000+ pages of it.  Funny, all of us (who believe) claim that the Bible is a treasure from God, yet a great many people dispense with the lion’s share of the texts, counting them unworthy of their apt attention.

And what is the consequence of this?

The consequence is that they are wrong about a great many things.  And further, they are wrong about being wrong.  What I mean is that Jesus, as we have seen, believed that errors were to be corrected, but the average modern Christian has managed to live with his or her errors, not lifting a finger to correct a thing.  Indeed, the average Christian may do so little reading as to rarely come across any signal that his erroneous understanding of this or that is in fact erroneous.

If we have no interest in learning the whole of the Bible, we demonstrate what terrible “disciples” we would be.  Nearly all of us remember that one-liner from Jeremiah 29:30, “You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.“  Many, however, seem to hope that God is not really the sort to mean such things.  They hope that God will count their spirit of convenience as a spirit of diligence, and their ignorance as knowledge.  They hope he will count their wrong answers as right ones, without they, themselves, having to lift a finger to learn or to correct anything.

Any why not hope for such things?  Without regular time in the texts to warn them against such ideas, why not believe it?  Why not imagine God to be exactly what would be the most convenient for the cognitive miser?

Well, if you know the scriptures, you know why not.  And once again, we see how the scriptures tend to make the differences between people fairly obvious.  If those of us who diligently study still have many things to learn and to correct, those who don’t study are hopeless in the Bible sense of that word.  Thus do they invent the hope that God is not as he says he is, and they build entire church organizations around that hope.

Read Part II here.