Many Christians only stress the importance of Bible reading.[i] While that task is important, more should be stressed.  That is, it also matters how one interprets the Bible.  It is often in the task of interpretation that false teaching, heresy, etc., are founded and thus spread.  We at TVN, however, want out readers to be cautious of bad interpretations lest they fall into some of the same errors.  Hopefully by looking at the error in Rob Bell’s approach to interpretation, our readers will learn from his mistake. [...]

In 1966 Time Magazine published this cover for all the world to see. The boldness of the lettering set against a black background remarkably parallels the intent of the author of those three little words, Friedrich Nietzsche. I want to explain what he meant by that infamous statement and, more importantly, explain how pluralism has proven him to be correct.

His statement is very easy to understand in broad strokes, so please don’t be turned back from this post because you think Nietzsche to be too smart or inscrutable for you to comprehend. I assure you, in this post, the most arduous task set before either you, as the reader, or myself, as the writer, will be for me to spell his name correctly (or at least consistently). Knowing this man and his philosophy will give you a deeper understanding of the world around you.

So let’s start by getting to know Nietzsche.

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If you are like me then I assume you want to click over to another of your favorite Christian blogs simply to avoid the rather frightening sesquipedalianism plastered across the title of this post. It is a big, unfamiliar word, but it need not scare you. Much like the overlong word used in the first sentence (which is ironically defined as long word), epistemology is easy to understand.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. It is a branch of philosophy which attempts to make sense of how humans know things. I beg you not to tune me out because I am discussing philosophy; I assure you that this post will be both understandable and pertinent to your life as a Christian. Trust me.

So, how do we know things? This may seem like a silly and pointless question on the surface, but it has massive implications. Most notably, the American university has allowed this question to shape the way in which they teach the students who come to them for a higher education. To quote Ravi Zacharias, “The modern student goes away to college in order to learn. They come back from the same school knowing that there is no way to know anything.” I would also add that that we leave knowing one other thing – that college is freaking expensive. Sorry for the digression. My point is that the simple, silly question asked at the outset of this paragraph has brought many people and institutions into some strange places.

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What is Truth? It sounds like a question raised on today’s college campuses, but in fact was uttered to Jesus himself by Pilate, the Roman official that ordered his crucifixion. In John’s Gospel, we see the account of Jesus questioned by Pilate to investigate why everyone wanted him dead.

John 18:33-38 ³³ Then Pilate went back into the headquarters, summoned Jesus, and said to Him, “Are You the King of the Jews?” ³⁴ Jesus answered, “Are you asking this on your own, or have others told you about Me?” ³⁵ “I’m not a Jew, am I?” Pilate replied. “Your own nation and the chief priests handed You over to me. What have You done?” ³⁶ “My kingdom is not of this world,” said Jesus. “If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight, so that I wouldn’t be handed over to the Jews. As it is, My kingdom does not have its origin here.” ³⁷ “You are a king then?” Pilate asked. “You say that I’m a king,” Jesus replied. “I was born for this, and I have come into the world for this: to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to My voice.” ³⁸ Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”

1.  Pilate chose Relativism over Truth.

No doubt Pilate was one of the most cultured men in the world at that time. His career gave him the opportunity to be more exposed to different cultures than any other. Why? Because he was a Roman official attempting to climb the ladder of the Empire. Caesar placed Pilate in Israel to keep them under Rome control while they still did their own thing as a nation. That’s why you see two types of legislation in the gospels: the Sanhedrin and the Roman officials.

The sight of religious practices came and went through Pilate’s eyes, so when Jesus challenged him by looking at this world through the reality of a coming Kingdom he had no concept of understanding Jesus. I speculate that Pilate’s life experience of governing other cultures caused him to deny an overarching story that summed up the fading away of this present world for a coming Kingdom.

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Not too long ago I read a passage of writing about the state of modern academia. It was a short narrative that followed a man as he wound his way through a war torn-city, destroyed by bombs and littered with the corpses of the city’s inhabitants. At one point he rounds a pile of rubble which was once a church and finds himself at the base of a tall, lean, and beautiful ivory tower. As he surveys the world around him, he finds the lure of the gleaming white building standing tall among the surrounding rubble to be irresistable.

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I recently went through a box of random books that has been sitting in my closet for over a year, completely untouched. Inside I found a small book entitled The Law. Its appearance was something of a mystery as neither my wife nor I had ever seen it before, but unknown books do occasionally turn up in the stashes of ardent book lovers. The Law was written by Frederic Bastiat, a French economist and statesmen, in 1850 just after the Revolution of February 1848. Originally written as a political pamphlet, the argument put forward in The Law is that socialism inevitably and logically leads to communism. It is a fantastic read which seems almost prophetic in the way it matches with our current social and political climate in America.

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I recently had a conversation with a self proclaimed “truth seeker” pertaining to the existence of god. His theory is one that falls in line with the pluralistic tide recently sweeping across the nation. This postmodern formulation of god can best be articulated through a commonly known analogy.

There are five blind men and an elephant standing in a room. Each man is reaching out and attempting to describe the contours of a specific part of that elephant. One man may state that the he feels something long, hard, and cylindrical with a bit of curvature coming to a defined point. Another man describes something that is also cylindrical; however, it is pliable with a pronounced hole at the end. This analogy goes on until all five men have depicted different parts of the same animal.

Of course they are blindly unaware of the correlating factors in their seemingly unrelated descriptions. As you may have noticed the elephant in this analogy is god while the five men represent the totality of world religions.

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Caution, this post contains spoilers.

Lost is a show that captured an audience for the past six years with an unparalleled ability to create fanatics across the world. It was groundbreaking in the U.S. as one of the most successful television programs that mixed so many nationalities into one story plot. It is also set apart with it’s intensity of philosophical, scientific, and mythological writing. Twists, turns, curveballs, questions, and more questions defined the series that seemed to change television writing in the last five years.

After six seasons, the series finale aired a couple of weeks back as they dedicated two and half hours to wrap up the lives involved in the flight of Oceanic 815.

I’m not writing this for Lost fans. Instead, I’m writing this for anyone interested in critically thinking about the message of death conveyed in the most influential show of recent history. In the end, we see a show about characters (specifically Jack played by Matthew Fox) who experienced tests to find redemption for their lives. In the finale, everyone who found redemption ‘moved on’ into an existence in an afterlife that included love, joy, and satisfaction in the relationships they established while living.

Redemption was discovered in four ways:

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I was driving down the road a few days ago with my wife and I noticed a bright red bumper sticker on the back of a hybrid which said, “God is too big to fit into one religion!”  We ended up pulling into the same parking lot and to my dismay parked close together.  I really wanted to ask this person about their bumper sticker, and I wanted to kind of probe their thoughts on such an interesting statement.   I ended up not doing so for the sake of saying something I might regret later, as I’ve been known to speak my mind rather straightforwardly and frankly in these sorts of conversations, and rather truthfully, she kind of scared me.

This did get me thinking though.  What would she have said if I had asked her what her bumper sticker meant?  Well, I’m pretty sure I know what she would have said, as the meaning of the bumper sticker is quite clear, but if truth is relative could the meaning of a bumper sticker also be relative?

“Is there meaning in this bumper sticker?”

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This post should simply be considered an ‘appendix’ within my last post on ‘The Future of Preaching.’  Here are 2 videos from David Platt that must be watched.  May the future of preaching, our preaching, be paralleled to this kind of preaching instead of fading away into the shadows of a hostile postmodern culture.