Video Transcript: Lesson 6 - Bob Zomermaand and Dr. Roy Clouser discussion

Reverand Bob Zomermaand - Well, we're back again, and I'm Bob  Zomermaand. I'm the Dean of the degree program here at CLI, and I'm here  with Professor Clouser, and we're going to talk about some of the things he's  just been lecturing about. And one thing I just do want to mention also he was  talking about, you know, you can stop it and go back if you need to, please do  because I want you to understand that we want you to grasp this material. One  of the things that is so key to helping us be Christian leaders is to have a good  philosophical standing for where we are and why we're saying what we're saying and and to to be able to express ourselves in a way that that doesn't lead to  argument or or some kind of debate kind of thing where we bear witness. Jesus  called us to be His witnesses. And so what, what I think we're trying to do here is to help us to be better witnesses of who Jesus is in our lives and so on. And  also, just for the last couple of things, if you saw him looking off to his right, a  little bit away from the center of the camera, I was his audience sitting in for you  so that he could, he could have somebody to whom he was speaking. And so if  he looked a little to the right several times, and you're wondering what is going  on here. He was looking at me because I'm so handsome and he can't see you  and how handsome and beautiful you are. So anyway, I was filling in as the  person who was the audience. And so then I want to just pick up some of the  things here, professor and the diagrams that you put up a while ago. Okay, that.  How should I think of Christianity, where you have a thing where God takes  humanity into himself? Can you just work on that? Just a little bit more sure? If  

Dr. Clouser - you take really seriously what the New Testament says about God  creating, and I'm thinking here, especially of Colossians 1. It's it tells us that God has created everything, visible or invisible. Yeah. Now that covers everything. I  mean everything is either visible or it's not that's ontology. So it means God has  created everything other than himself, but it also means that anything that we  find in creation has been created by God, and that would mean also even the  laws that we use to prove things, the laws of logic and laws of mathematics.  Now, that's not the usual. That's not the majority Christian position. Majority  Christian position says, Well, God's created everything visible or invisible,  except for those things that are true of him. They are all uncreated because he  is and that's not what this text says. It says He created everything visible or not.  Yeah. And so that's a real difference between Western Christianity and Eastern  the Eastern Church has always held that that's meant exactly what it said, that  that means that everything that we know is creaturely and we don't know the  essence of God at all. Transcendent creator is unknowable, but that  transcendent creator, otherwise unknowable, has entered into our creation,  taken on characteristics and relations to us that are creaturely and that we can  understand, and we do know that so but the to the Western to the Western  theology, that sounds weird because it sounds as though God's creating his own

nature. And that is exactly what the Eastern tradition says, and it's what John  Calvin and Martin Luther held too at the time of the Reformation. They  discovered this Eastern orthodoxy and Protestantism as a movement followed  them on everything but their doctrine of God. They stayed with the older doctrine that had come from Augustine, Anselm And Aquinas, which has God as the unity of all the perfections. So those perfections aren't created, but that's okay,  because they're not their God. God just is the unity of these perfections and but  the reformers and the Eastern Church both said, no, no, no, no, God, if there are perfections, as Dionysius says, if there are perfections, God created. Okay, so  and Gregory Palamas, 14th century orthodox theologian, says, out of a super  abundance of His love for us, God has imposed upon himself a really diverse  mode of existence. So it doesn't mean that God, that the nature of God makes  for himself this one he one time didn't have. And later did he does this eternally.  It's not that created. Doesn't mean began in time. It means it depends on God.  God determines what it will be.  

Reverand Bob Zomermaand - So what we're what we're doing with that then, is  saying that we understand God in the way that we do understand and meager  as that may be, but we understand God in the way he revealed himself,  

Dr. Clouser - yes, and the way he has accommodated himself to our  understanding. Yeah. Two things have to happen for us to know God. One is  that he has to accommodate himself to us by taking by standing in relations that  are created. Eastern theology calls God's energies. His essence is unknowable.  His energies are with us. It's still God. It's God acting in this way and that way,  and doing this and that. But all those relations have created characteristics.  They are subject to the law of non contradiction and all the other laws that hold  creatures, and we know that. And that's the way God always related to people.  And then in the Incarnation, he he brought about a real human being who  embodies all those, yeah, and is is taken into God himself. So what we there is  that about God which we can know, and that about God which we cannot, and  that about God which we cannot is not a lie. That is his nature, because that's  what what His will is nature to be, and He'll never change his mind. That's his  promise.  

Reverand Bob Zomermaand - And one of the things then, that that is always  meant a lot to me in in my years of pastoring so on, was the idea that at the  ascension, our humanity is taken up into heaven, yes, and is present with God.  In God, how would you put that in the present with God? 

Dr. Clouser - says we have our flesh in heaven as a certain security. Yeah, 

Reverand Bob Zomermaand - it's, it is a, it's a sure promise. Yes, yes, that's  

Dr. Clouser - right, the promise, of course, the Christian understanding of this is  what happened to Jesus will happen to us. It's going to take a lot longer, but we  too will be raised, and we too will be with him. And of course, each believer is  with him from the time they die until that resurrection. So yes, it's very  comforting for people who get seriously old as I am not old as dirt, and know  that that can't be too far off. And I don't find it frightening. I find it the thing that  strikes me most is that it makes me sad to think that I'll make other people sad  that love me, yeah, but, but I'm going to see a lot of people I've missed for  

Reverand Bob Zomermaand - a long time. Yeah, I know one of the things that I  just following up with, that I would do with funerals, oftentimes, was to talk  about, you know, the best thing that happens when when somebody died, is  they see Jesus, yeah, that's right. And then, along with that, there are those who have gone, yeah, that's right.  

Dr. Clouser - Then have your parents and your friends, yeah, yeah. One of my  brothers has died, my youngest brother, yeah, I'm the oldest of the lot. Okay,  

Reverand Bob Zomermaand - so is there anything else that you you want to try  to point out to me, and I know you want me to bat around with you? Okay, yeah,  

Dr. Clouser - that last type of religious experience, which is, in a sense, hearing  God speak to you, I mean having this come as the truth about God from God so  that you don't hear a sound, but you see it as true, and it's the way God speaks  

to us now most of the time, the real question this brings us up against for our  next session and ones after, is okay, and you have the experience of seeing this  to be true. Well, what kind of experience is that? What do you mean? You see it  as true, and what do you say to people who say, Well, I read it doesn't look true  to me. So I was going to the connection that I'm going to make is to say that the  way the New Testament especially describes this experience is with visual  metaphors of seeing the light, of having the light of the gospel dispel the  darkness and so on. And there's one place in Ephesians 1 where Paul says to  the Ephesian believers, you before you were in darkness and you didn't believe,  and now you see the truth with the eyes of your mind. That's those expressions  are perfect imitations of what happened in in the Greek or Roman world, the  pagan world, when they encountered truths that they. Called self evident. So  they knew that they couldn't prove everything. The rules of proof have a proof.  And there were axioms in geometry and so on. And there were new  mathematical truths, like 1 + 1 is 2, or the logical truths, which is if p is true, if p  implies q and p is true. Q is and simple stuff like that, but they recognized that a 

lot of the things they had to work with depended on them first seeing self evident truths. And I'm going to argue that that's what the New Testament recommends  to us, that when we see this as true, it's an example, it's a type of self evidency.  Now, when,  

Reverand Bob Zomermaand - when I'm going to school back in the day, one of  the things we studied was the Baltic confession. It talks about the Canon there  and and it says about the canon that, you know there's, there's these books, and it lists them all up and says we accept these as true. And one of the reasons is  because the Holy Spirit testifies to this in our hearts. Is that the kind of thing  you're  

Dr. Clouser - talking about that's right, that really is ultimately the criterion on  which the books that were kept for the New Testament in the old were kept.  Does God speak to us through that? Okay, then that's then. That's his word, and that's right, and when, and saying that self evident, I'm saying that it's a type of  same sort of experience that people have had with axioms and logic and math,  with principles of ethics and other things. In fact, there are two thinkers that I like to quote, and I'm going to do it in a moment. One is a Protestant, a theologian,  the other is a Catholic and a scientist, and you'll hear them both saying the  same thing. This is the first one. Is from the Protestant theologian. It's John  Calvin. As to the question, How shall we be persuaded that Scripture came from God? It's just the same as if we were asked, How shall we learn to distinguish  light from darkness, White from black, sweet from bitter? Scripture bears upon  the face of it as clear evidence of its truth, as white and black do of their color,  sweet and bitter, of their taste. Those who strive to build a firm faith in Scripture  through arguments. Are doing things backward, since unbelieving men think  religion stands by opinion alone, they in order not to believe anything foolishly or lightly, both wish and demand a rational proof that Moses and the prophets  spoke by divine inspiration. But I reply, the testimony of the Spirit is more  excellent than all such reasons. So what if you have the experience of seeing to  be self Evidently, the truth about God from God that's more powerful than any  argument anybody can give for or against it. That's what he's saying. Now  Pascal lived somewhat later and and he was not in group that admired Calvin,  yeah, reformers. He stayed with the with the Catholic Church, and he was a  brilliant scientist. And the end, he did a lot of fantastic work in physics and in  math, did you know he invented the probability calculus when he was a young  man in front of his would go to Monte Carlo, would win a lot of money. So he  invented the probability calculus to help his friend. Oh, really.  

Reverand Bob Zomermaand - Anyway, I didn't think Pascal would have done  something 

Dr. Clouser - like that. Okay, Pascal's comment, is we know truth, not only by  reasoning, but also by the heart. And you'll see what he means by that in a  minute. And it's in this way that we know first principles. The knowledge of first  principles, such as the axioms of space, time, motion and number, are sure as  anything we can get by reasoning, and reason must trust these intuitions of the  heart and base every argument upon them. Therefore, those to whom God has  imparted religion by intuition are very fortunate and justly convinced. And justly  convinced, justly convinced so that this is justified knowledge, so it's certain. It's  not. It's not, it's not their opinion.  

Reverand Bob Zomermaand - And one of the when I hear him talking about the  like number, time and motion, yet, yeah, either something is moving or it's not  

Dr. Clouser - moving. All the sciences, the there are the the axioms of motion,  the x the law of gravitation, we would add thermodynamic principles after laws of thermodynamics. And of course, he worked with all that stuff every day. And he  calls them intuitions. By saying intuitions of the heart, I don't think he means to  say that that's a separate faculty, some separate power. It's it's part of being  rational. It's part of being reasonable. Reason includes not only the ability to  reason from point a to point b to the second sequential this follows from this falls for this, but also to intuitively see the truth of the axioms. Okay, so that's reason,  and so that's another, another reason why, on my account, faith and reason  aren't opposites. Faith is the name for self, evidency, intuitions when they deliver what's divine.  

Reverand Bob Zomermaand - Okay, you better run that one by me again, that  that just faith blew right up here. New Testament  

Dr. Clouser - uses the word faith in three ways. Now I'm going to go over this in  the next lecture. Okay? It uses it the way we do sometimes, to mean what we  what we wish, hope we're going to begin faith tomorrow, that that it'll rain, or  George will keep his promise, or whatever it is. But and then they also use it.  New Testament uses in ways, two ways that never occurred before in the Greek  language. One is it uses it for the Christian religion as a whole, as when Paul  says speaks of the faith once delivered, in a sense, to the saints or be steadfast  in the faith. Yeah, okay. That's that's used as a collective noun, meaning the  whole of Christianity. Okay? And the third way that's unusual and brand new to  the language is that it's used to mean certainty derived from experience.  Certainty, oh, because these guys weren't nuts, they knew the difference  between belief. That's mere belief. Okay, I believe that tomorrow be nice, but I  know it could be wrong, you know, or I believe so and so's reported the auto 

accident even though I wasn't there, because usually trustworthy. Could he be  lying? Yeah, but I'm going to believe that's not it. It's believed. Would they use it  time and time again in contexts where the same the expression occurs this, we  believe, and know, yeah, Peter says that's Jesus. Who do men say I am? Who  do you say we believe and know that you're the Christ, the Son of God. That  expression occurs about 10 times eight or 10 times New Testament. We don't  just believe this. We believe and know it. So that uses faith to refer to those  times.  

Reverand Bob Zomermaand - So does the belief lead to the knowledge? Then,  is that what you're saying, or is or is it just something goes together? 

Dr. Clouser - It goes together okay? Because what becomes self evident is that  what Scripture is teaching us about God is true. And so we're it's not a blank  sheet is true, and then we fill it in. There's something that's true, that's not  content. And both Calvin and Pascal are saying that same thing. They don't use  the certain same terms at all. Neither one uses the expression self evident. But  that's what we what we would say today for what both of them are doing. It's we  know it intuitively. Pascal says, and Calvin says, It bears on the face of it such  evidence that self evidency was something self evident, because it's prima facie, it's experienced. It's prima facie truth, not deferred from anything else. And then  very often it also is irresistible. Perceptual beliefs are like that. If i No matter how much I want it to be a nice day, if I get up I open the curtains, it's pouring rain, I  can't help forming the belief that it's raining. I don't want it to be true, but it is,  and it forces itself to believe it's raining. It makes me believe it's ready, because  there is Yeah. So we're gonna, I'm gonna do all that again in, okay, lower and in  some more detail, but, and also, I want to talk about the way most people know  the term self evidence is only from Jefferson's use of it in the Declaration of  Independence and and he completely misused it will go over. So, yes, from,  from Jefferson, Jesus, okay, yeah, well, thanks, sure, guys, sir, appreciate it.  Okay, great. My pleasure.