{"id":585,"date":"2008-06-08T16:31:04","date_gmt":"2008-06-08T23:31:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=585"},"modified":"2008-06-08T16:31:04","modified_gmt":"2008-06-08T23:31:04","slug":"one-more-from-stackhouse-on-faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2008\/06\/08\/one-more-from-stackhouse-on-faith\/","title":{"rendered":"One More From Stackhouse on Faith&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/stackblog.wordpress.com\/2008\/02\/03\/do-you-have-to-choose-between-your-brains-and-your-beliefs-no-no-and-sort-of-but-no\/#more-112\">This<\/a> is great:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The earliest and most fundamental Christian confession was this: \u201cJesus is Lord.\u201d And one of the Apostle Paul\u2019s earliest and most influential letters makes the following bold epistemological claim: \u201cNo one can say \u2018Jesus is Lord\u2019 except by the Holy Spirit\u201d (1 Corinthians 12:3).<\/p>\n<p>I fundamentally believe, as Blaise Pascal did, that there are plenty of good reasons to believe in the Christian faith\u2013plenty, and sufficient. I also believe with Pascal, however, that there are reasons adequate also to disbelieve.<\/p>\n<p>Those latter reasons, however, do not exonerate anyone. Why? Because faith is a gift, yes, not an accomplishment or natural outcome of reasoning. But it is a gift that God stands ready to give to anyone who wants it.<\/p>\n<p>Those that do not want it, therefore, do not get it. And they cannot therefore justify their disbelief even by pointing to the impossibility of proving Christian doctrine to be true by the light of natural human reason. For the offer stands\u2013to Richard Dawkins, to Christopher Hitchens, to you, and to me: faith is a gift (a \u201cgrace\u201d) God is ready to give to anyone who asks (Ephesians 2:4-10).<\/p>\n<p>Faith is always the exercise of trust beyond what we think we know, beyond what we think we\u2019re sure of. Does that mean we have to choose between our brains and our beliefs? No, but it means we must not let our brains circumscribe our beliefs. We don\u2019t understand electricity, but we use it. We don\u2019t understand light (wave? particle? both? how does that work?), but we are glad for it. We don\u2019t know everything about our business partners or surgeons or spouses, but we trust them with our livelihoods and lives. Likewise, we have good reasons to believe Christian teaching, so we should.<\/p>\n<p>But we can\u2019t believe that Christian teaching\u2013it\u2019s just too strange, and huge, and demanding!\u2013unless God grants us that power to believe. And for that reason, at the last, I am not unsympathetic with Dawkins, Hitchens, and the rest.<\/p>\n<p>Quite the contrary:<\/p>\n<p>I pray for them, and hope they will eventually receive the gift of faith as well\u2026<\/p>\n<p>\u2026as I pray God will strengthen my faith, too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is great: The earliest and most fundamental Christian confession was this: \u201cJesus is Lord.\u201d And one of the Apostle Paul\u2019s earliest and most influential letters makes the following bold epistemological claim: \u201cNo one can say \u2018Jesus is Lord\u2019 except by the Holy Spirit\u201d (1 Corinthians 12:3). I fundamentally believe, as Blaise Pascal did, that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-9r","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}