One of the most brilliant minds in Christian Apologetics appears to miss the point.
The news article comes via Christian Post, telling us Josh McDowell seems to think the Internet is a major threat to Christian faith. If this is what he really believes, I think he’s losing it. It’s not so much I’m defending the Internet, but McDowell misses the whole point. This is the man who first made it painfully clear to me logic isn’t enough to change souls.
I can’t recall the details, but I distinctly remember back in the 1970s, while I was attending Oklahoma Baptist University, I overheard a riveting tale from a friend who had been to a conference where Josh McDowell spoke. My friend related the story of McDowell’s early days when he entered an international debate against some very big heavy hitters, and argued why faith in Christ was reasonable. He won the debate, and got his opponents to admit they would be foolish not to accept Christ as their savior. But they didn’t. My friend said McDowell’s point was it didn’t matter what you could prove, if the Spirit of God didn’t change people, faith doesn’t happen. I never forgot the lesson: Faith does not arise from reason, and is often quite contrary to reason.
Now it seems McDowell is worried if we don’t create some intellectual climate in favor of Christian faith, God can’t save our kids. Somehow, this free access to porn and atheism can undo all our efforts to help our kids become Christians. While we have to admit there are ways to ease the transition from spiritually dead to living in the Spirit, but that affects what happens after spiritual birth. Does he now believe we can teach people to be spiritually alive?
What you believe can keep you from enjoying the full benefits of your spiritual birth, but it can’t prevent it nor make it happen. Scripture bluntly says God alone initiates the change from dead to alive in the Spirit, and it hardly matters what you think or like beforehand. Paul’s Damascus Road experience should have settled that question. And surely McDowell already taught that point long ago.
Never mind how my own faith and understanding were vastly improved primarily because of my access to the Internet, this smacks of pandering to folks who want to throw their political weight around. Of all the people who should be smart enough — his IQ is far higher than mine — to know better, I think he’s let himself be bought. For whatever reason, he now supports the fascist controls sought by commercial interests, using fake news events to manipulate the sheeple. This is the same political agenda of Christian Zionists and the rising fake Christian fascism clinging to prissy middle-class materialist values. This is the same fight the Apostle Paul had with Pharisaical Judaizers, asking “Have you come this far by faith in Christ, that you are now going to bind yourself under the Talmud?” This is the mess of Jewish fables Jesus called “traditions of the elders,” an excuse to reject God’s revelation through Moses.
Granted, if what he’s referring to is a matter of God’s Laws, then by all means, let’s change our culture. Let’s go back and recapture what Israel was supposed to be like in ancient times. It’s not too hard to abstract basic and universal principles of life from the highly specific applications described in Moses. But let’s not be wedded to this hideous failure called Western Civilization, the same crap the Pharisees bought into with Hellenism. It was hopeless from the start, and all the intelligence in the world can’t fix it. The problem is not the free access to information, good or bad, but the assumptions which make every truth a lie. Our problem is we have far too much reliance on Aristotelian/Enlightenment reason, and none on faith in God’s revelation. There is nothing left to save, because it’s already under God’s wrath. However, I am quite certain God’s Laws are not what McDowell means; he’s talking about spiritual birth.
Shame on you, Dr. McDowell. You surely understood from your first days as a believer that God is not hindered by any human force, by any human condition, or anything Satan wants to build up on this fallen plane of existence. All it takes is one fool who is spiritually alive enough to simply act in faith for Christ to speak so loud no one misses the message. If people are not moved by His truth living in His people, no amount of education and conditioning can change that. Oh, how far you have drifted from the wisdom of the Lord!
