In short, Thomas’s demand that he first poke his fingers in Jesus’ wounds before believing was a bit much. His friends’ report should have been adequate evidence, ergo the scold. Our insight clears up another confusion regarding “seeing” and faith. Paul tells the Corinthians, “For we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7). Once again, Paul is not using “seeing” as a metaphor to downplay evidence. He’s speaking literally.

I’ve warned before about the habit of reducing biblical accounts to mere spiritual metaphors—a popular sermon practice nowadays, unfortunately.
David slaying Goliath is not a lesson about facing the “giants” in our lives. Jesus silencing the stormy sea is not an invitation to consider the storms he could hush in our own lives. Those are not the reasons those accounts are in the Bible.
Of course, biblical writers do use metaphors, and all figurative speech is meant to communicate some literal truth. Occasionally, though, readers search for a literal truth behind a metaphor that isn’t actually a metaphor at all.
Consider Jesus’ dressing down of doubting Thomas after the resurrection: “Because you have seen Me, have you believed? Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed” (John 20:29). To many readers, Jesus’ reference to “seeing” is obviously a figurative reference to evidence—e.g., “Blessed are those who trust in Christ without demanding proof.”
I cringe every time I hear this take on that text coming from the pulpit, and I’ve heard it too often. According to that view, Jesus was faulting Thomas for seeking evidence to buttress his belief instead of taking the “blessed” path of blind faith.
There are two problems with reading Jesus this way. The first one is obvious if you follow the STR dictum “Never read a Bible verse” and read the entire context. The second problem, though, is not so apparent. It occurred to me only recently as a possibility, and then a Gospel cross-reference confirmed my thinking.
First, the blessed-are-those-of-blind-faith interpretation completely contradicts something John writes in the very next verse. In John 20:30–31—the verses immediately following Jesus’ reprimand of Thomas—John reveals his precise reason for writing a Gospel filled with reports of Jesus’ miracles.
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Moral reformers typically judge society from the inside. They challenge their culture’s standard of behavior and then campaign for change. If morality is defined as the present society’s standard, though, then challenging that standard would be an act of immorality by definition. Social reformers would not be moral after all, but rather moral outcasts precisely because they oppose the status quo.

To celebrate Stand to Reason’s 30th anniversary, we’re republishing classic issues of Solid Ground that represent some of the foundational ideas characterizing our work over the decades—ideas that continue to be vital to apologetics and evangelism today. 
For many in the world, the moral legitimacy of a U.S. military incursion into Iraq hinged on one issue: United Nations support. For them it was clear that, all other things being equal, armed invasion would be indefensible unless a single detail changed: U.N. approval.
At the heart of this view is the conviction that morality is a result of community consensus—in this case, the international community. There can be no “majority of one.” The guiding ethical principle is simple: Don’t buck the system. This is the same approach implicit in both “social contract” and postmodern views of ethics.
Many of us have seen this moral calculus before—on TV.
Star Trek Morality
“Trekkers” will recall the Prime Directive of the Federation prohibiting the crew of the Enterprise in Star Trek from interfering with alien civilizations. Moral standards are set internally, by one’s culture. What’s right for one society isn’t necessarily right for another. Since morality is relative—all competing values are equally legitimate—the crew of the Enterprise was forbidden to intrude.
On this view, morality is determined by the group. Generally, the relevant group is the larger cultural unit: the tribe, the linguistic community, the nation-state. In some cases, the ruling social unit can be expanded to a consortium of cultures, like the United Nations, but the basic principle is still the same: The majority rules.
Morality as Social Contract
Classical thinkers saw the apparently innate tendency of all human beings to think and act according to moral categories (what Francis Schaeffer called “moral motions”) as evidence for God.
Others disagreed. To them, morality represented nothing more than a social contract. As 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously put it, life in an unregulated state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In order to avoid such a fate, humans consent to live by a set of rules called morality.
This “Star Trek morality,” otherwise known as conventionalism, teaches that each society survives because of consensual moral arrangements each individual is obliged to honor. Morality is relative to culture, determined by popular consensus, expressed through laws and customs. Each person (or each country in the case of an international “community” like the U.N.) fulfills his end of the contract by keeping the code of the group.
No Immoral “Aliens”
Star Trek morality has serious problems in any of its applications. First of all, since each society is “alien” to another, no society could be judged immoral by another’s standards, no matter how bizarre or morally repugnant they may seem.
The torture of prisoners by military regimes, the injustice of totalitarian governments, and the apartheid of racist administrations would all be outside the reach of moral assessment on this view. One might counter that these policies, in many cases, are not the will of the people, but only of those in power. This rebuttal, though, fails twice.
First, why should one accept that the population at large is the relevant “society” determining morality instead of those who have the power to rule? If one has an obligation to obey society, then which society does one obey? This ambiguity is a weakness of conventionalism.
Culture is complex, with many overlapping internal “societies” making claims on us. Behavior acceptable at the gym in the morning is considered gauche at a dinner party later that evening. The moral convictions of one’s religious community may be at odds with the demands of his business community. Which group is primary? Culture is not homogeneous, making it impossible for it to define a common standard of behavior.
Second, the rejoinder also misses the point. Maybe such injustices don’t always represent the will of the people, but what if they did? The kangaroo courts of the French Revolution had popular support. So did the Third Reich, to a great degree. Do we grant French anarchists and German Nazis moral justification on this basis?
Nazis at Nuremburg
Indeed, the Nazis essentially used the Star Trek defense at Nuremberg. Advancing a notion called legal positivism, the German leadership claimed that the International Military Tribunal had no moral legitimacy to preside over the trials.
In The Law above the Law, John Warwick Montgomery describes their argument:
The most telling defense offered by the accused was that they had simply followed orders or made decisions within the framework of their own legal system, in complete consistency with it, and that they therefore could not rightly be condemned because they deviated from the alien value system of their conquerors. [Emphasis added.][1]
The Tribunal didn’t accept this justification. In the words of Robert H. Jackson, chief counsel for the United States at the trials, the issue was not one of power—the victor judging the vanquished—but one of higher moral law. “[The Tribunal] rises above the provincial and transient,” he said, “and seeks guidance not only from International Law but also from the basic principles of jurisprudence which are assumptions of civilization….”[2]
The first serious problem with the social contract view is that it violates our deepest moral intuitions, the foundational “assumptions of civilization.” Some things seem wrong regardless of what “society” says, including plundering innocent Jews, pressing them into forced labor, and exterminating them. If the Star Trek view is sound, then governmentally sponsored genocide can only be silently observed. If there is no law above society, then society cannot be judged.
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Naturalism denies the obvious, reducing human beings to physical parts stuck together without reason or purpose—biological accidents, cosmic junk. No wonder they call it nihilism—nothing-ism. And when you start really believing nothing-ism about human beings, bad things begin to happen. Most of us know better, though. Deep inside, we know we’re not simply chunks of meat in motion. Reality informs us there is something wonderfully unique about humans—qualitatively, not just quantitatively. Humans are special, wonderful, valuable.

To celebrate Stand to Reason’s 30th anniversary, we’re republishing classic issues of Solid Ground that represent some of the foundational ideas characterizing our work over the decades—ideas that continue to be vital to apologetics and evangelism today.
Lately, I’ve been enjoying my nine-year-old Annabeth’s theological common sense. “Papa, why don’t atheists believe in God?” she asked.
“Well, for a number of reasons,” I said. “Partly because they can’t see him, so they don’t believe in him.”
“Can they see atoms?” she offered.
“Good point. But I think they’d say that doesn’t count since they can still detect atoms with scientific instruments, something they can’t do with God. They won’t believe in anything they can’t measure scientifically.”
“That is the weirdest thing that I’ve ever heard,” she concluded.
My fourth grader was on to something that more educated types seemed to have missed: Lots of things are real that cannot be detected by science. How did she know that? She didn’t go to grad school. Innocence often sees the obvious.
Annabeth’s insight was about the inadequacies of naturalism, modernism’s worldview conviction that reality consists completely of material particles in a physical universe governed by natural laws.[1]
Naturalism is best summed up in Carl Sagan’s famous faith statement, “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.”[2] No God, no souls, no Heaven, no Hell, no miracles, no morality, no sin, no forgiveness, no transcendent purpose—just molecules in motion. It’s the worldview of virtually all atheists and the methodological philosophy governing all science.
Entire cultures have been subtly indoctrinated with this physicalistic view. Even many religious people have a naturalistic impulse in their day-to-day dealings with reality, relegating whatever spiritual “beliefs” they have to the shadowlands of “faith.”
Dealing with naturalism can be daunting, until we realize we have a powerful ally working in our favor: Reality is actually on our side.
Reality, Our Ally
This is an insight I learned from Francis Schaeffer. If Christianity is true, he noted, then the worldview it presents is accurate—it describes reality the way it actually is even for naturalists who deny it. “Regardless of a man’s system,” Schaeffer pointed out, “he has to live in God’s world.”[3] This situation creates a problem for skeptics but an opportunity for us.[4]
Someone once said that reality is what you “bump” into (and sometimes get injured by) when you don’t take it seriously. Consequently, anyone who denies some significant feature of the world is headed for a collision. Skeptics are not just at odds with “religion,” then. They are at odds with reality. Their claims about the world dictated by their competing worldview are going to conflict in important ways with the actual world they experience every day.
Schaeffer called this the “point of tension,” a kind of dissonance between what naturalists say about the world and the way the world really is. Sooner or later, they’re going to affirm—sometimes without even realizing it—features of reality that make no sense given naturalism.
On the one hand, the naturalist speaks from his own worldview. On the other hand, the way he lives affirms things that have no place in his view of reality but make complete sense in ours. He is sending two conflicting messages at the same time but doesn’t realize it. He’s bumping into reality.
Atheist Richard Dawkins is a prime example. On the one hand, his naturalism dictates that morality is just a relativistic trick of evolution to get our selfish genes into the next generation. On the other hand, he rails against the God of the Old Testament as a vindictive, bloodthirsty, homophobic, racist, genocidal, sadomasochistic, malevolent bully.[5] Do you see the problem?
Clearly, Dawkins is not coming to this conclusion based on his naturalism. Instead, that’s his commonsense moral realism talking. His protest makes no sense in his worldview but is perfectly consistent with ours.[6] Dawkins is living in a contradiction on this issue. That’s the point of tension. He’s trading on our worldview, not his. Dawkins is bumping into reality.
There’s something else I want you to see, though—not just the contradiction naturalists live in, but also the explanatory power of Christian theism over naturalism. Here’s what I mean.
Important details of the Christian worldview fit nicely with the way we actually discover the world to be. They resonate with our deepest intuitions about reality. This “fit” is the classical definition of truth.[7] Consequently, Christianity has the ability to make sense of salient details of the world and of human experience that naturalism cannot.
I want to suggest some practical ways to take advantage of both the naturalists’ “bump” into reality and the superior explanatory power of Christian theism. My goal is to be shrewd and creative—to catch him by surprise, if I can—maneuvering with questions wherever possible. This is the heart of the “tactical” approach.
First, a qualifier. There is no “silver bullet”—no perfect answer, no magic apologetic trick guaranteed to change someone’s mind in a single session. Rather, my aim with people who are deeply committed to a false worldview is to try to plant a seed of doubt or uncertainty in their mind, or to get them thinking in a productive way about Christianity. I call it “putting a stone in their shoe.”
There are lots of different ways to do this with naturalism, but I want to focus here on three bumps with reality that create serious worldview problems for the naturalist yet serve to validate the Christian view. I’m going to call them “the bump of stuff,” “the bump of bad,” and “the bump of me.”
The Bump of Stuff
My starting point for this maneuver is simple: Stuff exists. Not too controversial. The naturalist cannot easily deny the existence of the material world. It’s her stock-in-trade, the only thing she’s certain about.
Here’s the fundamental question: Why is there stuff? Why is there something rather than nothing? Where did everything come from? What caused the universe to come into existence?[8]
Let me show you how this line of questioning plays out tactically in conversation. I was once asked during an audience Q&A to give evidence for the existence of God.
“Can I ask you a few questions to get us rolling?” I said to the challenger. He nodded. “First, do you think stuff exists? Is the material universe real?”
“Yes, of course,” he answered.
“Good. Second question: Has the stuff of the universe always existed? Is the universe eternal?”
“No,” he said. “The universe came into being at the Big Bang.”
“Okay, I’m with you. Now the final question: What caused the universe to come into being?”
At this point, he balked. “How do I know?” he said. “I’m no scientist.”
“Neither am I,” I admitted, “but there’s really only two choices: something or nothing. What do you think? Do you think something outside the natural universe caused it to come into being, or do you think it just simply popped into existence with no cause, for no reason?”
At this point, the skeptic who prides himself in his use of reason finds himself in a rational box. Both the law of excluded middle and the law of non-contradiction (it can’t be neither option, and it can’t be both) oblige him to choose one of only two logically possible options available.
To admit something outside of the natural, physical, time-bound universe is its cause would be to contradict naturalism. Yet, who is in his rational rights to opt for the alternative? Even if he thinks it possible the universe popped into existence, uncaused, out of nothing, it’s an understatement in the extreme to say it’s not the odds-on favorite.

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In Jesus’ final instructions to his disciples the night he was betrayed, he told them that we testify. But we are not alone. The Spirit testifies along with our testimony (John 15:26–27). “The Spirit of truth,” he said, “will convict the world concerning sin, righteousness, and judgment” (John 16:8, 13). Yes, we must prepare ourselves to give an answer (1 Pet. 3:15). Yes, we must engage opponents with gentleness and patience (2 Tim. 2:24–25). Yes, we must reason with others and explain and give evidence (Acts 17:2–3). But the Spirit is the one shouldering the burden of bringing others across the finish line. Not us. 

I want to tell you why you will never be able to change anyone’s mind on the truth of any spiritual issue.
This may sound strange coming from someone who has given his life for the defense of the true story of reality—the biblical story—and who, for nearly half a century, has worked to persuade critics that Christianity is worth thinking about. But it’s true. I have been powerless.
There’s a reason for what, at first glance, appears to be my personal ineptitude. I want you to consider what the biblical record says about our opposition—that is, the forces arrayed against us.
The devil, commanding spiritual forces of wickedness in heavenly places (Eph. 6:12), employs demonic schemes to deceive the whole world (Rev. 12:9), blinding the minds of the unbelieving so they might not see the light of the gospel (2 Cor. 4:4). Thus, “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19).
Paul tells Timothy that those in opposition to the gospel are in “the snare of the devil, having been held captive by him to do his will” (2 Tim. 2:25–26). He therefore tells Timothy not to be quarrelsome, but to be patient and gentle with his opponents, “if perhaps God may grant them repentance leading to the knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare.”
Did you notice something about that last passage? God is the active agent who clears away the deceptive demonic fog and brings people to repentance, not us. That’s why Luke says of Lydia, “The Lord opened her heart to respond to the things spoken by Paul” (Acts 16:14).
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Only when we are properly informed by God’s Word the way it was written—in its context—can we be transformed by it. Every piece becomes powerful when it is working together according to the Spirit’s design. The sword of the Spirit is the Word of God (Ephesians 6:17). Used properly, it parries deception and pierces the heart. It protects us from error. A sword made of putty, though, has no power. It pierces nothing. It offers no protection. And it has no place in the arsenal of a Christian.

21st-century kids have cell phones, YouTube, and Xboxes. When I was a kid, we had simpler delights. One was a handful of malleable goo that could be pulled, twisted, or distorted into any shape imaginable. It was called Silly Putty®.
Sadly, many Christians use their Bibles like Silly Putty®. Just add the Spirit, and the Bible becomes putty in their hands, able to be molded into almost anything at all. Rather than approaching the Scripture as a treasure of truth for all Christians, some evangelicals have the dangerous habit of searching the text for a personal “promise” or “word” of guidance from the Spirit that is unrelated to the text’s original meaning.
Often, the results turn out to be silly. Other times, they are dangerous. Regardless of the outcome, this practice is always a bad habit. Here’s how it often looks.
The Holy Spirit Give-Away
Instead of studying to find the objective meaning of a passage and then making personal application of that scriptural truth to their lives, many Christians read the Bible looking for verses or isolated phrases the Spirit “impresses” on them with personal messages that are foreign to the context.
For example, a Christian woman who has been praying for her family’s conversion stumbles upon Acts 16 during her quiet time. Her eyes settle on Paul’s response to the Philippian jailer, who asked, “What must I do to be saved?” “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved,” Paul answered, then added, “you and your household” (vv. 29–31).
Encouraged by these words, the woman begins to claim the “promise” that her own household will be saved, with the justification that “the Holy Spirit gave me this verse.”
Why would she use that particular wording to describe what she experienced? Because in the normal, natural understanding of that passage, the verse wasn’t “hers” to begin with.[1]
Rather, she believes that, under the Spirit’s influence, there was a mystical transformation that took place causing the meanings of the words to change just for her, conveying a private message not intended by the original author (Luke, in this case) and not intended for anyone else. It was a private message from God just for her incorporating the words of the biblical text, but not previously in those words.
Notice, her confidence is not based on the objective meaning of the passage but on the unique subjective meaning given to her by the Spirit in the moment. I—or any other Christian, for that matter—could not claim that verse for myself unless the Holy Spirit “gave” the verse to me, as well.
Experiences like these are powerful because they seem intensely personal. But there’s a problem: Acts 16:31 is not her promise. It’s the Philippian jailer’s promise, if a promise at all.[2] Using the passage as she has done is an abuse of God’s Word. It’s also deeply relativistic.
Relativism is the defining characteristic of the age and has influenced the church in subtle yet profound ways. When an objective claim (a verse) communicates completely different meanings (“truths”) to different subjects (people), that’s relativism. Since truth is not in the objective meaning of the words but in the personal, subjective experience of the reader—in this case, an experience allegedly caused by the Holy Spirit—a personal prompting can be “true for me but not for you.” Since there are different experiences for different people, there are different “truths” for each.
Let me speak plainly: There is no biblical justification for finding private, personal messages in texts originally intended by God to mean something else. This approach is the wrong way to read the Bible. One reason I know this is because of what the Bible teaches about itself.
The Bible on Bible Study
First, the Bible teaches that the written words of Scripture are inspired.
“All Scripture [graphe, Gr.—the “writing”] is inspired by God” (2 Timothy 3:16). The wording here is important. Paul says that the writing itself is “God-breathed,” not the thoughts, impressions, or private messages that occur to us when we read the writing.
God told Moses to speak to Pharaoh the specific words of God: “I will be with your mouth, and teach you what you are to say” (Exodus 4:12). “Let them hear My words,” God said later at Horeb, “so they may learn to fear Me all the days they live on the earth” (Deuteronomy 4:10). These are the “living words” that Stephen said have been passed on to us (Acts 7:38).
God told Jeremiah, “Write all the words which I have spoken to you in a book” (Jeremiah 30:2). He said to Isaiah, “My words which I have put in your mouth shall not depart from your mouth, nor from the mouth of your offspring, nor from the mouth of your offspring’s offspring” (Isaiah 59:21).
God has always been concerned with the words because precise words are necessary to convey precise meaning. That’s why Paul confidently refers to God’s revelation not as words of human wisdom, but as “words…taught by the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 2:13).
Second, the Bible teaches it is important to accurately understand these inspired words of Scripture.
Note Jesus in Luke 10:25–28:
And a lawyer stood up and put Him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” And He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How does it read to you?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And He said to him, “You have answered correctly.”
Jesus did not ask, “What does the Spirit say to you on this issue?” He asked, “What is written? How does it read?” Then he waited to see if the lawyer got it right.
There is a correct and incorrect way to read the Bible. Paul tells Timothy to handle the Word accurately to avoid bringing shame on himself (2 Timothy 2:15). Jesus scolded the Pharisees for not understanding the Scripture properly. He then made an argument for the resurrection that hinged on the tense of a word: “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. He is not the God of the dead but of the living” (Matthew 22:29–32).
Third, the Bible teaches that private interpretations do not yield the accurate meaning.
Peter is clear on this point. He writes:
But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation; for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. (2 Peter 1:20–21)
Because there is a divine author behind prophecy, the apostle argues, there is a particular truth—a determinate meaning—that God intends to convey.
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Whenever you’re charged with intolerance, always ask for a definition. If tolerance means neutrality, then no one is ever tolerant because no one is ever neutral about his own opinions. This kind of tolerance is a myth.

In today’s relativistic, postmodern world, one word can stop an ambassador for Christ in his tracks: “tolerance.” No judgments allowed. No “forcing” personal opinions. All views are equally valid.
Once, in a discussion with a class of Christian high school seniors, I wrote two sentences on the board. The first—“All views are equally valid”—expressed the current understanding of tolerance. All heads nodded. Nothing controversial here.
Then I wrote the second sentence: “Jesus is the Messiah, and Jews are wrong for rejecting him.” Immediately, hands flew up. “You can’t say that,” an annoyed student challenged. “That’s intolerant,” she said, noting that the second statement violated the first. What she didn’t see was that the first statement also violated itself.
I pointed to the first statement and asked, “Is this a view, the idea that all views have equal merit?” The students all agreed. Then I pointed to the second statement—the “intolerant” one—and asked the same question: “Is this a view?” Slowly, my point began to dawn on them. They’d been taken in by the tolerance trick.
If all views are equally valid, then the view that Christians are right about Jesus and Jews are wrong is just as valid as the idea that Jews are right and Christians are wrong. But this is hopelessly contradictory. They can’t both be true.
“Would you like to know how to escape this trap?” They nodded. Reject the postmodern distortion of tolerance, I told them, and return to the classical view characterized by two principles I learned from Peter Kreeft of Boston College:
Be egalitarian regarding persons.Be elitist regarding ideas.
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The record is clear from the Old Testament to the Gospels, from the very beginnings of the early church to the epistles of the apostles: Biblical faith isn’t wishing; it’s confidence. It’s not denying reality, but discovering reality. It’s a sense of certainty grounded in evidence that Christianity is true—not just “true for me,” but actually, fully, and completely true.

I don’t like the word “faith.”
It’s not that faith isn’t valuable. True biblical faith is essential for salvation. But faith is often deeply misunderstood in a way that hurts Christianity and harms Christians.
Some think that having a level of certainty about the truth of Christianity makes “belief” unnecessary or irrelevant. That kind of knowledge undermines genuine faith and offends God.
The reasoning goes something like this. We all know God wants us to have faith. In fact, without faith, it’s impossible to please him (Hebrews 11:6). However, gathering evidence for God and Christianity leaves little room for faith. After all, how can one have faith in something he knows is true? Faith, then, is opposed to knowledge. Therefore, apologetics undermines the faith project and thus displeases the Lord.
On this view, faith is believing the unbelievable, clinging to your convictions when all the evidence is against you. Faith is a “leap,” a blind, desperate lunge in the darkness. When doubts or troubles beset us, we’re told to “just have faith,” as if we could squeeze out spiritual hope by intense acts of sheer will.
This view of faith reduces Christian conviction to religious wishful thinking. We can hope, but we can never know.
But this will never work. Someone once said, “The heart cannot believe that which the mind rejects.” If you are not confident the message of Scripture is actually true, you can’t believe it even if you tried.
The “I just take Christianity on (blind) faith” attitude can’t be the right approach. It leaves the Bible without defense, yet Peter directs us to make a defense for the hope that is in us.[1]
Also, the biblical word for faith, pistis, doesn’t mean wishing. It means active trust. And trust cannot be conjured up or manufactured. It must be earned. You can’t exercise the kind of faith the Bible has in mind unless you’re reasonably sure that some particular things are true.
In fact, I suggest you completely ban the phrase “leap of faith” from your vocabulary. Biblical faith is based on knowledge, not wishing or blind leaps. Knowledge builds confidence, and confidence leads to trust. The kind of faith God is interested in is not wishing. It’s trust based on knowing, a sure confidence grounded in evidence.
The following biblical examples make my point.
Blood, Boils, Frogs, and Flies
Israel’s exodus from Egypt was depicted in a clever animated film called The Prince of Egypt. After seeing the movie, my wife and I spent time reading the original account in the Hebrew Scriptures.
Though I’d read this passage a number of times, something jumped out at me then that I hadn’t seen before, a phrase God kept repeating over and over in the account.
The material relevant to my point starts in Exodus 3. Reading the encounter with God at the burning bush, we realize Moses is reluctant to be God’s deliverer. And it’s understandable. Why would Pharaoh, the most powerful leader in the world, submit to a renegade Jew? Why would two million Hebrew slaves follow a murderer and a defector?
“What if they won’t believe me or listen to me?” Moses demurred. “What if they say, ‘The Lord hasn’t appeared to you’?”
What God didn’t say in response is as important as what he did say. He didn’t say, “Tell Pharaoh he’s just going to have to take this on blind faith. Tell the Hebrews the same thing. They’ve got to have faith.”
Instead, God asked, “What’s that in your hand?”
“A staff,” Moses answered.
“Throw it on the ground.”
So he threw it down, and it became a serpent.
“Stretch out your hand,” the Lord said. “Grab it by the tail.”
Reluctantly, Moses did as he was told. When he grabbed the snake, it became a staff again.
“Do this,” God said, “and then they’ll believe that the Lord, the God of their fathers, has appeared to you.”
More signs followed that got the people’s attention: the river of blood; frogs covering the land; the gnats, flies, and locusts; the boils and pestilence; the hail; the darkness; and finally, the angel of death. All for one purpose: “That they might know there is a God in Israel.” Not simply “believe,” “hope,” or “wish.” Know. This is no idle comment, but a message that is central to the account. In fact, the phrase is repeated no less than ten times throughout the account.[2]
What was the result? “And when Israel saw the great power which the Lord had used against the Egyptians, the people feared the Lord, and they believed in the Lord and in His servant Moses” (Exodus 14:31).
Note the pattern: a powerful evidence (miracles, in this case), giving the people knowledge of God, in whom they then placed their active trust (faith).
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People are important to the Lord, and if they are important to him, they should be important to you and me. Addressing people by their name and showing genuine appreciation for their service are simple ways to show they’re valued. This speaks volumes about the One you represent. Never underestimate the power of simply being warm, pleasant, and polite.

Sometimes, being a good representative of the kingdom hinges on the simplest things, almost trivial. Let me give you an example from my own life.
I’ve had some of the most interesting conversations about spiritual matters with ordinary people who serve my table in restaurants. Since any contact with others is an opportunity to be an ambassador, I try to keep an eye open for what might turn out to be a “divine appointment.”
This is something you can do, too. Here are some ways to set the stage to engage them in a friendly way.
First, find out the server’s name.
This is simple if they’re wearing a name tag. If not, simply ask. If it’s a unique name or suggests some ethnic history, ask about it. It’s a friendly thing to do—even flattering—and will help you remember their name better.
Begin to use their name immediately. If you’re like me, it’s difficult to keep track of names, especially of people I encounter for the short duration of a quick meal. But there are a few things that help.
Just the conscious effort itself may be enough to help you remember. Another way is to associate something new with something old. When you tie the new thing to something you already know, the job is much easier. In my case, if the waiter’s name is Mike, I immediately think of Mike, my good friend and former tennis partner. That alone will temporarily fix the waiter’s name in my mind.
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Don’t get into a tug-of-war with skeptics about inspiration. Instead, invite others to engage the ideas first, then let God do the heavy lifting for you. The truth you’re defending has a life of its own because the Spirit is in the words. Once your friend has listened a bit, any further reasons you give for biblical authority will have the soil they need to take root in.

I want to help you solve a problem that has troubled many Christians. First, think for a moment about this statement Paul made to the Thessalonians:
For this reason we also constantly thank God that when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the word of God, which also performs its work in you who believe. (1Thess. 2:13)
Now, here’s the problem. A woman I once spoke with expressed frustration with a friend who had dismissed the Bible as “only written by men.” Her insistence that the words were inspired by God was no help. Instead, it led to a fruitless cycle: The Bible is God’s Word—But it was just written by men—But God inspired those men—But men make mistakes. Round and round they went, going nowhere.
Maybe you’ve encountered this problem, too.
Here’s one way you might respond: Give specific reasons why it’s reasonable to believe the Bible is a supernatural book of divine authorship and not merely the musings of men.
For years, I have taught six of these reasons in a talk called “The Bible: Has God Spoken?” If you’ve heard the talk and are able to recall the points and explain them, you may get someone thinking. It’s a way of putting a stone in their shoe, so to speak.
This approach is much more effective, however, after something else has happened first. Before I tell you what that is, I have a confession to make.
Though I give this talk often, these are not really the reasons I personally believe the Bible is God’s Word. They are sound evidences, and they have their place (I’ll explain more on that in a moment), but they are not how I came to believe in the Bible’s authority in the first place. I suspect they’re not the reasons you believe, either, even if you’ve heard the talk and thought it compelling.
I came to believe the Bible was God’s Word the same way the Thessalonians did, the same way you probably did: They encountered the truth firsthand and were moved by it.
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There is a difference between CRT as an explanatory paradigm (remember, the “T” stands for “Theory”) and racism as a reality. Classically understood, racism is a kind of group bigotry. CRT, by contrast, looks at power structures in cultures to explain why that bigotry and the inequity it causes exist and how they operate within social structures. It may be that CRT fails as a theory when closely examined. That does not mean racism doesn’t exist, though, but only that CRT does not describe the dynamic of racial oppression well.

The newspaper headline read, “Critical Race Theory Coming to a School Near You?” The paper was The Conejo Guardian,1 the monthly publication of Conejo Valley—the quiet, diminutive basin where I make my home in southern California, just beyond the teeth of the LA sprawl.
The article was a warning.
Critical race theory (CRT) is coming to a school near you—to your high schools, to your middle schools, even to your elementary schools (the universities have already been thick with CRT for years).
Critical race theory is coming to your public schools, and to your private schools,2 and has even stolen into some of your Christian schools and churches.3 And it’s coming to your workplace, too (if it hasn’t already), in the form of “inclusion” or “diversity” training.4 And, generally, it’s not optional—in school or on the job.
The indoctrination rapidly penetrating all levels of society is controversial, contentious, and divisive—aggressively pitting one group of people against another. It’s also thoroughly political, with the current federal government championing CRT—and legislatively backing it—lock, stock, and barrel.5
Regarding the aggressive education efforts in California (and in other parts of the country where CRT is penetrating the educational system), Anna Mussmann warns in The Federalist:
Parents need to understand that behind the waterfall of vocabulary is a militant ideology. When kids are taught to subject all of life to “critical consciousness” in order to find the “oppressor” and the “oppressed” everywhere and at all times, they are taught that the only ultimate meaning in life is power.6
As with other efforts with a totalitarian impulse, disagreement is not welcome. Dissenters are frequently treated with disrespect, harassed, and bullied:
Critical race theorists want students to accept the assumption that anyone who fails to swallow these rules wholeheartedly is a tool of oppression. Ultimately, it’s a highly effective way of preventing dialogue and pitting students against students.7
The attraction of CRT for people of conscience is its emphasis on “social justice” as an answer to racism. But CRT isn’t your parents’ (or your grandparents’) civil rights movement.
Not MLK’s Civil Rights
I was a senior in high school when Martin Luther King was murdered. It’s a vivid memory for me, as are the civil rights efforts of that time. The movement was a flashpoint for change in a long, ugly, brutal chapter in the American experiment, a test to see if the noble ideals of the Founding Fathers and of the Declaration of Independence would be enjoyed, finally, by all Americans.
That is how Martin Luther King Jr. understood civil rights, since he referred to those documents frequently. As a preacher from a long line of preachers, he also based his stand on Scripture. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” he cited the Bible liberally.
In King’s celebrated “I Have a Dream” address delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, he envisioned a nation where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
This famous line reflected a commonsense, liberal (in the best sense), and biblical ethical principle. The most important element uniting every human being—more significant than any differences that divide us—has nothing to do with any incidental physical characteristic. What ought to unite us is our shared and noble humanity.
“Now is the time,” King said, “to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.” He based his dream—his vision of a just America for every human being—on the reality that we are all brothers fashioned in the image of God.
Frederick Douglass, the eminent 19th-century black abolitionist, wrote these words to his former slave master in September 1848:
I entertain no malice towards you personally. There is no roof under which you would be more safe than mine, and there is nothing in my house which you might need for your comfort, which I would not readily grant. Indeed, I should esteem it a privilege, to set you an example as to how mankind ought to treat each other. I am your fellow man, but not your slave.8
Note Douglass’s moral kinship with King. A licensed preacher, Douglass understood that the theological “solid rock” of any appeal to racial justice was that we are each other’s “fellow man,” equally precious in God’s eyes. We are also, I will add, all equally broken at the foot of the Cross.
Keep these two things in mind—our universal intrinsic value as one race of human brothers and our universal moral guilt—as we explore the hazardous world of CRT. They are central to everything we need to know when dealing biblically not only with racism, but with all forms of human oppression. They trade on the notion that genuine justice is always grounded in truth, not in power.
King’s principal thrust during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was undoing segregation—whether on buses (the bus boycotts and the “Freedom Riders”), at lunch counters (Greensboro, North Carolina sit-ins), in public schools (Little Rock Central High School), and in higher education (the University of Mississippi).
Those days are over.
Today’s fight against racism lacks King’s noble intention to judge people by their character. In fact, rather than de-racializing our country, the current effort is to re-racialize it. Segregation is everywhere now—in graduations, in classrooms, in clubs, in adoptions—systematically endorsed and promoted by the new anti-racism movement.
There’s one significant difference, though. People of color are not the ones disqualified, disenfranchised, or demonized now. Rather, the ones currently disqualified, disenfranchised, and demonized by CRT advocates are white people. And males. And “hetero-normative” people. And “cisgender­normative” people. And, of course, Christians.9
The consequences are already tragic. At the moment, racial tensions are the highest they’ve been in the 21st century and continue to intensify.
Ask yourself this question. Regardless of your race, or color, or national or ethnic origin, do you feel, as a result of the events of the last 15-18 months, more comfortable amid the ethnic diversity of your community or less comfortable? The trend does not bode well.
What is going on?
Word Games
A sage once observed, “When words lose their meanings, people lose their lives.” Proverbs 18:21 instructs us, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” In short, words matter.
In 1984, George Orwell’s 1949 classic (and oddly prescient) dystopian vision of future totalitarianism, the manipulation of language is a powerful tool of distortion and deception. Orwell calls it “Newspeak” and “doublethink”—deceptive vocabulary that the citizens of Oceania were socialized by peer pressure to adopt. Some refer to it as “doublespeak”—clever efforts to purposefully distort, obscure, and euphemize ideas, masking their otherwise objectionable, unappealing, or even vile qualities. Orwell’s Animal Farm slogan, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” is a case in point.
In both works, Orwell was lampooning Soviet totalitarianism. Journalist Rod Dreher reminds us of “the Marxist habit of falsifying language, hollowing out familiar words and replacing them with a new, highly ideological meaning.”10
The Third Reich did it, too. Segments of the population who were “impaired” were described in German as “Lebensunwertes Leben,”11 literally, “life unworthy of life.” Thoroughly cleansing the European continent of Jews was called the “Final Solution.”
There is a lesson here for us that we have not learned well, especially the younger adults in our communities: beware of deceptive political euphemisms.
In its current course towards totalitarianism, the Left has shown itself a master at manipulating language. “Antifa,” for example, despite its members’ fascistic behavior, stands for “anti-fascist.” Who could argue with that? The noble name “Black Lives Matter” makes the organization virtually unassailable regardless of its views. “Social justice” is, well, justice, isn’t it?
“Liberals today,” Dreher observes, “deploy neutral sounding, or even positive, words like dialogue and tolerance to disarm and ultimately defeat unaware conservatives.”12
The manipulation of language is characteristic of totalitarian movements. This is especially true with the retooling of “connotation” words—words like “tolerance” or “racism” that have a certain feel to them. Their rhetorical force remains even when the words themselves are subtly redefined and pressed into service for different ends.
To that point, a significant shift has taken place between the civil rights language of the 1960s and the rhetoric of today’s “anti-racism” and “anti-white supremacist” CRT movement. That shift in language also signals a shift in substance.
The operative words sixty years ago were bigotry, racism, prejudice, discrimination, and segregation. Each had a particular meaning, a commonsense definition that resonated with ordinary moral intuitions. Each was connected to the others in a series of cascading vices terminating in terrible injustice: treating our human brothers made in the image of God in a way that denied their inherent dignity and value.
Bigotry was the first step, which Webster’s dictionary defined in 1965 as an individual character flaw of “intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself”13 (“intolerance” here means “unwilling to grant equal freedom and protection especially in religious matters or other social, political, or professional rights”14). Bigotry festers into an unreasonable contempt or even hatred for members of a group based solely on amoral qualities or characteristics like skin color, ethnicity, or gender.
Bigotry is an ugly vice in individuals—a kind of personal pride or arrogance, an I’m-better-than-you conceit—but it’s deeply dangerous on a wider cultural scale, where it often develops into racism.
Racism was a familiar term in the 20th century—indeed, it was national policy for two great powers—Germany and Japan—that dragged the world into global war. It’s “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race” (emphasis added).
In racism, then, one “race” is above the rest—Aryans and Japanese, to give two classical examples—being superior (allegedly) in extrinsic capabilities, and therefore having superior intrinsic value. All others are inferior.
Racism is bigotry writ large. It is deeply vile and degrading, denying the intrinsic value of every human being based on irrelevant extrinsic differences between groups of human beings.
The sense of racial superiority in racism becomes the breeding ground for prejudice, a “preconceived judgment . . . without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge . . . an irrational attitude of hostility directed against an individual, a group, or [a] race.”
Prejudice is evil because it ascribes vice to others based on factors unrelated to anything genuinely moral. A Jew, for example, was “pre-judged” as vermin in the Third Reich simply because he was Jewish, completely unrelated to any individual vice. In America, blacks were demeaned, judged by the color of their skin rather than by the content of their character—the antithesis of King’s dream.
Racial prejudice inevitably results in discrimination against those groups considered ethnically inferior. The root concept merely means “to distinguish between” and could be a virtue or a vice. Practiced properly, discrimination is benign (consider the thoughtful “discriminating” person). It’s an evil, though, when one discriminates “to make a difference in treatment or favor on a basis other than individual merit.” This is invidious discrimination—an arbitrary and irrational bias that disenfranchises whole groups of people without legitimate justification.
Segregation, the “separation or isolation of a race, class, or ethnic group,” is an application of invidious discrimination and the final consequence in this chain of civil rights abuses. It is racism in action, bigotry in practice. “Whites Only” policies of the early 1960s and before, for example, regulated patronage in restaurants, seating on buses, the use of bathrooms, and access to housing and education according to whether one was white or black. These are just a few of the disgraceful discriminatory practices of the time.
Bigotry, racism, prejudice, discrimination, and segregation made up the chain of social inequities that civil rights activists addressed in the 1960s. Individual bigotry led to corporate racism that resulted in a generalized prejudice against blacks. The result was illicit discrimination against them, not treating them equally under the law. Instead, they suffered the indecency of segregation.
Breaking that chain was the program of a bygone era of civil rights activism. That quest for racial justice is now behind us, and a new quest has replaced it, one bearing little moral kinship to the noble efforts of the past. Many of the original words remain, but they have been invested with new meanings and endowed with new values.
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Notes1. The Conejo Guardian, May 2021.2. city-journal.org/the-miseducation-of-americas-elites.3. firstthings.com/article/2021/02/evangelicals-and-race-theory.4. heritage.org/civil-rights/report/critical-race-theory-the-new-intolerance-and-its-grip-america.5. https://spectator.us/topic/biden-critical-race-theory-schools-department-education.6. https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/05/californias-ethnic-studies-opens-door-to-critical-race-theory-indoctrination-throughout-public-schools.7. Ibid.8. watchtheyard.com/history/fredrick-douglas-letter-to-slave-master-auld.9. https://christopherrufo.com/revenge-of-the-gods.10. Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies (Sentinel, 2020), 119.11. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors—Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (Basic Books/Harper Collins, 1986), 21.12. Dreher, 119.13. All definitions in quotes are from Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, 1965. I’ve used an older source not influenced by current rhetorical trends.14. The current postmodern understanding of intolerance is significantly different. See str.org/w/the-intolerance-of-tolerance.