Existential Theology 2

Sovereign Grace Family Church

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May 3, 2016

00:00: I thank you for the opportunity to be in your house and to be about the business of studying, and we do pray, Lord, as we continue our study of the subject of existential theology and how it relates and has been so influential on modern false teachings and has been so influential in the liberalism movement.
00:23: Theological liberalism, Father, I just pray that you would help us to better understand what these people are saying, what these people are teaching, so as to increase our ability to interact with them and also increase our knowledge of truth, that we might be able to understand the difference between truth and error.
00:45: We thank you.
00:46: We praise you, Father, in Jesus' name.
00:49: Amen.
00:52: I think most of you have probably heard this before, but just in case you haven't, I wanted to begin with an illustration.
01:02: When banks and other institutions that deal with money want to teach their people how to spot counterfeits, they don't teach them to look at counterfeits, because there are so many different types of counterfeits.
01:22: There's so many different ways to make counterfeit money that to try to show them every way that a counterfeiter might use a different technique or whatever, it would take too much time and it would spend too much brainpower for them to have to try to figure all that out.
01:35: They'd never be able to figure it all out.
01:37: Instead, what they do is they actually force them to look at the real thing.
01:42: They teach them to really understand what makes a real bill a real bill, and thus they are so familiar and so intimately familiar with that real bill, that if they ever come across anything that is wrong, any faults or fraudulent bill, counterfeited bill, they'll know immediately that it's fake.
02:05: The same is true for our faith.
02:10: There are times where we need to study fault systems, and that's what we've been doing, but we should never forget that the primary goal is to always compare it and look back at the real thing.
02:25: Last week, we began to look at existential theology.
02:28: Existential theology has become a powerful driving force, not only in Christianity, but it's become a powerful driving force in society, and unless we understand the truth, unless we really have a good firm foundation in the scriptures and what the Bible says about God and about Christ and about salvation and about who we are as human beings created in the image of God, unless we have a firm foundation in that, it is easy to get lost in the minutiae of these fault systems, and it's easy to get taken up in their language, and as I mentioned last week, we have generally and by and large as a church body, not us specifically, but in the church in general and church at large, has been taken in by existential language, and we see this in Sunday school classes and in Bible studies all around the world because used to we would ask the question, well, what do you think about this? But we don't use that phrase anymore.
03:31: We say, how do you feel? Not what do you think, but how do you feel? And that is an existential phrase.
03:42: It's concerned more with the passions than with the intellect, and I brought today a picture.
03:52: I actually printed the picture online, and I just thought this was so great.
03:57: This is Thomas Sowell, and he's not writing or speaking on existentialism, but I want you to hear what he says and compare it to what we've learned so far.
04:09: He says, the problem isn't that Johnny can't read.
04:14: The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think.
04:18: The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is.
04:24: He confuses it with feeling.
04:30: Exactly.
04:31: I read that, and I was like, that is the birth child of existentialism.
04:36: That is what existentialism has given us.
04:39: It's given us a generation of people who no longer know how to think.
04:44: They only know how to feel, and all of their thoughts are governed first by how they feel.
04:54: I mean, look at what's going on in college campuses today.
04:58: We have to have safe spaces because your words hurt, and my feelings are paramount, and feelings trump truth, and feelings are the ultimate extension of who I am.
05:11: How I feel is the ultimate expression of my humanity, and if you hurt my feelings, you have committed the greatest of atrocities.
05:22: I couldn't help but, again, seeing another thing online.
05:26: It was so poignant.
05:28: It said in the Second World War, you know, we had 18-year-old men storming beaches in almost certain death, looking death in the eye.
05:39: If you've ever seen the opening of Saving Private Ryan, those men who were there, who saw the film, said it was the closest thing to have captured in visual form what actually happened, and one of the most interesting things, if you go back and watch it, most of us think of gunfights, and we see gunfights in the movie, and you hear the guns, pow, pow, pow, pow, but in the movie, you didn't hear the guns.
06:03: You heard the whistling of the bullets going by because the guns were being fired from so far away, and all they would hear is whistle, whistle, and somebody's dead.
06:14: This is what the preceding generations at 18 and 19 years old, like that, there was a candidate, I think it was a presidential candidate a few years ago, said an 18-year-old should never be given a gun.
06:30: A 19-year-old is not responsible for owning a gun, and I was like, dude, we send 19-year-olds into battle.
06:35: What are you talking about? We have so degraded our next generation, and we've so emasculated a generation, and see what's weird about it is we've emasculated men, and we've masculinized females.
06:54: We're talking about now drafting women into battle, or drafting women into the military, but the men aren't fit for military.
07:03: We want to draft the women and make the men unfit, because we've emasculated the man, and we've over-masculated the female, and again, all this is a byproduct of not thinking, but feeling.
07:17: So that's my introduction to get us back into what we're talking about today, but we're on the subject of existential theology, and I have the sheet here with the distinctive traits.
07:29: I have, do you guys have one of these? Does everyone else have one, a copy to look on? Okay.
07:42: Last week, we looked at the theology, and we said existential theologians claim that we have to demythologize scripture.
07:50: What constitutes a myth in the eyes of modern liberals or modern people in general? What constitutes a myth? Okay.
08:00: Okay.
08:01: In general? Something that's a legend, but not true.
08:08: Okay.
08:08: Typically, if you were to go on maybe a college campus, or if you were just to ask a person in general, what constitutes a myth? And they would probably say something that cannot be proven by science.
08:20: Science has become the new arbiter of all things.
08:24: It's the judge of all things.
08:26: I remember watching an episode of CSI years ago, and CSI about crime, and the guy in charge is a very heady, very smart guy, and you know, the hero of the group, because he always knows the answer to every problem.
08:39: And he was talking to a preacher in one of the episodes, and he says, you know, I believe in God, but I also believe in science.
08:48: And I remember thinking, well, what does that even mean? You know, what is he saying? Well, to believe in God means I have to suspend my belief in science.
09:03: No, I can believe in God, but I can also believe in science is what he was saying.
09:06: But if you were to ask him, if you were to probe him, if you were to push him, well, what do you mean when you say I believe in science? Well, his answer would probably be something to the effect of I believe that we can determine the mysteries of the universe simply by observation and repeatable testing, because that's what science is.
09:24: We observe what we're able to test and then repeat through the scientific process.
09:30: But the reality is, that's not the way science is done in a lot of cases.
09:34: A lot of times, science is done by conjecture.
09:36: It's done by determining historical science is oftentimes done by interpreting evidence that is not repeatable.
09:46: Things like evolution is not based on repeatable testing.
09:49: They can't repeat it and show that it's happening.
09:51: They have to simply go and say, well, we think this happened because this is what happened.
09:55: And now dinosaurs had feathers, and now they became birds, because that's the new, you know, there was a time when that wasn't even thought of.
10:01: But then Jurassic Park came along, everybody said, oh, the dinosaurs became birds, and now we know what happened to the dinosaurs, and now the dinosaurs have feathers.
10:07: It's kind of just silly over and over and over and over.
10:10: Very speculative.
10:11: It's on suppositions.
10:13: Yeah, absolutely.
10:13: They presuppose a lot of things.
10:18: But when we say demythologize scripture, what they do is they look into the Bible, they see anything that would be opposed to what they could understand scientifically, and they simply discard or reinterpret that part.
10:38: So you look at something like the burning bush, right? Moses sees a bush that is on fire, but yet it's not consumed.
10:53: So there's a fire within the bush, but it's not the bush itself, which is burned.
11:00: And he hears the voice, take thou sandals from off thy feet, for the ground upon which you stand is holy ground.
11:05: And so he takes his shoes off, and there he stands before the Lord, right? It's okay for God to be subservient in science.
11:14: Hey, there's certain verses I just happen to remember in King James.
11:21: Take thou sandals from off thy feet, and for the ground upon which thou standeth is holy ground.
11:26: So he stood there before God, and how would the existentialist say? How would the person who demythologizes the story? He would say, well, there wasn't a burning bush.
11:42: There wasn't even anything physical.
11:45: This was a spiritual moment in the life of this being, this person, Moses.
11:51: He had an experience, but it wasn't physical, much like the story of Jonah.
12:03: Now we know.
12:06: This is how it always starts.
12:09: And I always say, well, how do you know anything? So if you don't believe your brain was designed for thinking, why would you trust your own thoughts? And that's all my biggest question.
12:18: If you don't believe your brain was designed for thinking, why do you trust your thoughts? And the response, well, I do believe my brain was designed for thinking.
12:25: Well, who designed it? You don't believe in God.
12:30: Well, nature designed it.
12:31: So nature, an unthinking force, designed a thinking brain.
12:36: It doesn't work that way.
12:37: But anyhow, you go and you ask, well, what about Jonah and the great fish? And the response is, well, we know that a person can't survive in the belly of a fish.
12:53: And then you have people who say, well, no, wait, he was inside a whale and a whale breathes oxygen.
13:01: So we know how he survived because whales have oxygen and he breathed oxygen.
13:06: He wasn't in the lung.
13:08: He was in the belly.
13:12: The fish isn't going up and breathing in air from outside.
13:16: I mean, I saw Pinocchio.
13:21: But you understand, because science would say no.
13:27: And I tell people all the time, you're right, science would say the story of Jonah is impossible.
13:39: Water doesn't stand up.
13:41: You realize that, right? If you take water and you lift it up and you let go, it falls right back down.
13:48: Water has no substance.
13:50: The molecules aren't strong enough to hold the bond of form when it's in its liquid state.
13:56: It collapses.
13:58: Water is the great conformer.
13:59: It conforms to whatever its environment is.
14:02: But yet when the Hebrews made their way across the Red Sea, it says the water stood as a heap on both sides.
14:14: Stood as a heap.
14:15: Then it was piled on itself.
14:17: You can't pile water unless there's a container.
14:24: Science says no.
14:26: So the existential theologian would say no.
14:30: Can't be.
14:31: You know the answer to the Red Sea? How they interpret the Red Sea? Often not.
14:36: I'm not necessarily saying any specific person.
14:40: Well, I've heard that.
14:42: But it's even simpler.
14:45: They say it wasn't the Red Sea.
14:47: It's a misunderstanding of the Hebrew word reed.
14:50: It's the sea of reeds.
14:52: And it's only about a knee deep body of water.
14:56: It's very shallow.
14:57: And so they were able to walk across no problem.
15:00: There was an old story about the guy who's sitting reading the Bible in front of the college.
15:03: You may have heard this guy sitting there reading the Bible in front of the college.
15:06: And he's saying, wow.
15:07: And the professor walks by and he says, what are you so amazed by? And he says, God saved the Israelites by opening up the Red Sea.
15:16: And they walked through on dry land.
15:18: And he says, listen, young man, that story's not true.
15:21: It wasn't that way.
15:22: It was the sea of reeds.
15:23: And it was only knee deep.
15:24: They walked right through without any problems because it was very shallow.
15:27: And the guy said, oh, okay.
15:29: The professor walked away.
15:30: And as he's walking away here, wow.
15:33: He turned around.
15:34: He says, what now? He says, God just drowned the whole army in a knee deep water.
15:44: But this is what they when they say demythologizing.
15:48: They want to rob the scripture of its supernatural quality.
15:53: And you see, that's the problem with much of modern thinking is an anti-supernatural presupposition.
16:02: Everything must be understood according to the way I understand how nature works based on science.
16:09: So that's the only way it can work.
16:12: That's when I read in the scripture of something that is miraculous.
16:16: I have to reinterpret it according to the natural.
16:20: So let's see how they look at God.
16:22: The second part down.
16:25: Objective knowledge of God's existence is not possible.
16:29: The concept of God was a help for the early Christians to understand themselves.
16:33: But in our time with a different worldview, we can see behind the myth.
16:37: Again, the word myth.
16:39: Thus God is our statement about human life.
16:41: It is therefore clear that if a man will speak about God, he must evidently speak of himself.
16:46: That's Rudolf Bultmann's quote.
16:49: If God exists, he works in the world as if he does not exist.
16:54: And we cannot know about him in any objective way.
16:57: That's the key.
17:00: Existential theology.
17:01: Even if God is there, he's not working.
17:04: He's not doing anything.
17:06: He has not revealed himself.
17:08: The key to existential theology is that we are not looking at revelation from God.
17:14: We're looking at man's interpretation of his surroundings and the world around him.
17:19: And everything that we know about God is simply man's interpretation of the world around him.
17:25: Aliens we can believe in, but not God.
17:27: For sure.
17:28: But that's a strong phrase.
17:29: If God does exist, he works in the world as if he does not.
17:31: I'm sure you've heard of this phrase.
17:36: It's pretty popular now.
17:43: Deism.
17:44: What is deism? Go ahead.
17:51: That's okay.
17:57: I'll let you say it.
18:02: Deism could rightly be called bare theism.
18:12: Bare theism in that this.
18:14: Deism is constituted on the idea that there is a deity who is responsible for the world, but he is not in the world acting as any part of the world.
18:27: He's not even concerned with what's going on in the world.
18:30: He simply, as a child, takes a top and spins the top and then can walk away as the top is still spinning.
18:37: This deity started the world, got it going, and then simply step back and allows it to function.
18:47: That's bare theism.
18:50: God, if you can even call him that, is not an interactive or relational God.
18:59: He's simply the cause of all things.
19:01: And this is why I think that the argument of the first cause is a very it's too simple.
19:14: And I don't know if you've ever heard this argument.
19:16: How many of you familiar with the argument of the first cause? Argument of the first cause is simply this.
19:22: Everything that is in effect has a cause.
19:26: Everybody agree? That's science, right? Everything that is an effect has a cause.
19:32: Nothing is an effect that doesn't have a cause.
19:35: And so the universe itself has a point which it wasn't.
19:39: All scientists tend to agree that the universe itself was once not existing and it exists now.
19:46: And thus it is an effect because it exists now.
19:49: There was one it was once when it didn't exist and now it does.
19:53: And so the idea that it now exists and once didn't demands a cause because it itself is an effect.
20:01: The universe itself is an effect.
20:03: Because the universe itself is an effect, it requires a cause.
20:06: That is called the first cause.
20:11: That which first caused all other things.
20:15: Primary causation.
20:16: Everything else is secondary.
20:18: That's primary.
20:20: Okay? Here's the problem with that.
20:22: A lot of people use that to prove God exists.
20:24: I've talked about it before.
20:26: I've used it ex nihilo nihil fit.
20:28: Out of nothing, nothing comes.
20:29: If there ever was a time when there was absolutely nothing, no God, no anything, then there would still be nothing because nothing produces nothing.
20:35: Nothing can produce nothing.
20:38: Okay? Sounds, yeah, it'd be like, okay my brain, but nothing could never have been.
20:48: Because if there ever was, there would still be nothing.
20:53: So there's always been something.
20:54: And we would say that that something is God.
20:56: God is the only all eternal.
20:59: The only one that has always been.
21:03: And it's demanded that something has always been.
21:08: Science would say, well, energy is neither created nor destroyed.
21:13: Matter is neither created nor destroyed.
21:16: It simply goes through different forms.
21:18: Right? And they would say, so matter and energy are the two constant things that have always been.
21:25: The response to that, from my perspective, would say, well, energy, which is undirected, and matter, which is unintelligent, cannot produce that which is directed and intelligent.
21:39: It's like a strong wind hitting a pile of used car parts.
21:46: There's no way that that strong wind is going to force those parts to come together and form a car because it's undirected energy and it's unintelligent matter.
21:54: Together they don't do anything.
21:56: It requires an intelligence to cause that to come together and form and work.
22:04: The intelligence is where you get the term unintelligent design.
22:12: How many of you have heard that phrase? You see, intelligent design is not Christian.
22:19: Right.
22:20: Also, matter and energy cannot exist without time and space.
22:24: Okay.
22:25: Well, that their point is shot down right there.
22:29: Well, so they could always been that because it won't work.
22:32: You can't turn matter, you can't turn energy into matter without space and time.
22:38: Okay.
22:39: Well, that's even further.
22:40: Right.
22:40: But my point is, you've heard the intelligent design movement.
22:43: See, a few years ago, intelligent design over encapsulated the idea of creation.
22:53: Years ago, this became the new thing.
22:57: And nobody was talking about creation anymore.
23:01: People only talk about intelligent design.
23:02: Intelligent requires intelligence, all kinds of books, Darwin's black box and all this stuff, all kinds of books were written to point to the fact that there had to have been an intelligence to create the world.
23:15: Here's the problem, my friends with intelligent design is it doesn't lead to theism.
23:20: It doesn't lead to Christianity.
23:22: It leads to theism.
23:27: It leads to the idea.
23:29: Well, something got it started.
23:30: There was a first cause.
23:32: We don't know who he is or what he did.
23:34: And it goes right back to existentialism.
23:36: God doesn't involve himself in the world.
23:38: He doesn't act in the world.
23:39: But sure, we'll concede he was there to get it started.
23:44: That's not Christianity.
23:47: And so be careful when you get in bed with the intelligent design movement.
23:54: Somebody yesterday talking about, you know, some of the beginnings of stuff.
24:01: And I said, you know, they were talking about the expansive, the heavens and light years and all the things that science tells us it is.
24:09: And I said, I said, you know, that the that the modern ideas on on the length of time, the light year is all comes out of Einstein's theory of relativity, as the as the, you know, the amount of time the speed can travel, light can travel in a distance at a certain time.
24:28: And I said, Did you know, though, that it was rarely mentioned in most of the scientific journals, but Harvard, back in 2011, I think it was or 10, they managed to stop light and started again.
24:43: And I said, So So now, if they can do that, then doesn't that just throw every calculation of speed of light speed out the window? In other words, we don't really know what it is, we just came up with a number.
24:56: And, you know, now we know this planetoid is so many light years away or something.
25:02: And it's just another example of the, you know, science can be turned on its ear when you get right down to it, they don't really know, they just teach it as fact.
25:12: Yeah, a lot of what is claimed as absolute was is different than what was absolute 10 years ago, certainly different from what was absolute 20 years ago.
25:29: And just take for instance, climate change.
25:36: And again, not trying to get all political, but when my parents were young, everybody was concerned about global cooling.
25:47: There would be a, there would be winterized new ice age concern about loss of crops and things because there wouldn't be the heat that was necessary for the growth of crops and all these things.
25:59: There's a new ice age coming.
26:01: Right? Well, then what happened? It didn't come.
26:05: But heat came.
26:08: So it was global warming.
26:11: Then when they realized that wasn't, now it's climate change.
26:17: And now there's a new one, I forget what it's called, but there's a new phrase, climate disturbance or something or something else.
26:25: It's changing names again.
26:28: Why are we changing the names? Because the science is spurious at best.
26:34: It's determined not so much by scientific inquiry as it is the trying to find a cause for a natural phenomenon, a natural phenomenon, the Earth's temperature fluctuates.
26:50: Okay.
26:51: Nobody disagrees with that.
26:52: At least most people don't disagree that the Earth's temperature fluctuates.
26:57: But the question becomes, what's the cause? And those who want to limit, oh no, I'm getting political, be careful.
27:06: Those who want to limit freedom of individuals demand that it be man who is the cause.
27:14: Because if you can demand that man is the cause of the problem, then you can demand that man change his behavior to bring about a solution.
27:25: And it becomes an issue of freedom, because no, you can't do this, because this hurts the Earth.
27:33: Didn't we just have Earth Day a few weeks ago? What is Earth Day? Earth Day is a blasphemy.
27:40: I'll tell you, you might celebrate Earth Day.
27:42: Let me tell you what I think about Earth Day.
27:43: We can talk about it later.
27:45: We're not being recorded.
27:48: Let me tell you what I think.
27:50: I think the Earth is God's gift.
27:53: He created it for man, but it is on an expiration date.
27:59: There is one day when everything you see is going to be consumed with fire, and there's nothing that you can do to stop that.
28:10: And the idea that we worship this Earth as the pantheists who do say God is in the trees, God is in the bushes, God's in the dirt, you know, as they tell us to worship the Earth.
28:27: We worship Him who created the Earth, who will destroy the Earth, and who will recreate the Earth.
28:32: Exactly, exactly.
28:36: The whole attitude is that we are subservient to the Earth, and we have to concern ourselves.
28:44: And again, I do think that there are things that we should consider wastefulness for wastefulness sake is sin.
28:52: And so whether or not it's hurting the Earth is secondary to the fact that it's not good for the fact that God has not called us to be people who just waste for wastefulness sakes.
29:03: I mean, there's other reasons why not all the things they're telling us.
29:07: There's no reason, you know, there's no reason to put pollutants in the Earth if we can help it, you know.
29:14: But again, we take all this and we turn it over, and I've gotten way off the lesson now.
29:21: But we take all this, we corrupt it, and we make the Earth the mother of us all, which it is not.
29:30: But we say Earth is our mother, no.
29:35: Well, yeah, exactly.
29:36: Yeah, exactly.
29:37: There's, when I say Earth Day is blasphemic, what I meant was people who take the Earth, and they have this idea of this deification of the Earth, deification of nature's mother nature.
29:48: And that's really what it is.
29:50: It's a deification deity, deism.
29:53: It's a deification of the environment and nature.
29:58: Worshipping the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.
30:01: Amen.
30:01: It's Romans 1.
30:03: It's certainly Romans 1.
30:05: All right, let's do a couple more of these, because very quickly, we've got five minutes, and really the next three, because it's dealing with Trinity, Christ, and the Holy Spirit.
30:14: And basically, if you believe that the Scripture is a myth, then you're going to believe the Trinity is a myth, because it relates to God, who again, if God exists, we don't know who He is, and certainly don't interact with Him in any meaningful way.
30:29: So, Trinity then becomes what? It's not even, it's not even worth talking about.
30:35: It's a myth.
30:37: Christ.
30:38: Jesus is a common man.
30:41: As the New Testament is called myth, we do not have much, if any, knowledge of the historical Jesus.
30:48: That term, historical Jesus, should always raise a red flag in your mind.
30:56: When you watch television, the History Channel, is there even still a History Channel? I don't even watch TV anymore.
31:05: Netflix has ruined me for television.
31:08: I just don't watch it anymore.
31:10: So, on the History Channel, you'll see, Finding the Historic Jesus.
31:15: Finding the Real Jesus.
31:17: It's always the Real Jesus.
31:20: Well, that's, again, the purpose in all this, is it can't be what the Bible says.
31:27: We just can't take Christ at the Bible.
31:32: It's so funny, I heard a conversation between a Muslim and a Christian this week.
31:35: It was actually in London, on Speakers Corner, and they were arguing back and forth.
31:40: It was taped.
31:43: The Muslim is saying, how can you believe the Gospels when they're written a generation after Jesus had died? And how can you put your faith in these books that are written a generation after Jesus died? You know, and you're making this argument.
31:57: And it's like, but wait a minute.
31:59: You believe the Quran and what it says about Jesus, and it's written half a millennium after Jesus died.
32:04: Yeah, but you believe it's revelation from God, see? And so you can, time doesn't matter when it's a revelation from God.
32:13: The first books of the Bible were written, we don't know exactly how many, but certainly a few thousand years after the world was created, was when the first books of the Bible were written.
32:24: And yet, the first book of the Bible opens with what? In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
32:31: And we expect that Moses got that correct.
32:34: Why? Because we believe in divine revelation.
32:39: If you believe in divine revelation, then there's no problem with the books of the New Testament being written a generation after Jesus was born, because those men were wrote as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit of God.
32:49: Again, it does come down to an issue of faith, but time frame doesn't matter.
32:53: I just love the response.
32:54: It's like, wait a minute.
32:55: You believe the Quran and what it says about Jesus, and that's half a millennium.
32:59: If we're comparing apples to apples here, you've got a bigger problem than I do.
33:07: So again, the Holy Spirit, same thing.
33:14: It's all about the untrustworthy supernatural parts of the Bible.
33:19: Why should we believe anything about the Holy Spirit? It's all in the Bible.
33:21: We don't believe the Bible, so what? And then, of course, revelation.
33:26: And I'm going to try to finish today.
33:28: Let's just read this.
33:29: The Bible is not a source of objective information about God.
33:34: To understand themselves better, people in the first centuries created a myth about Jesus.
33:38: He did not perform miracles, nor rise from the dead.
33:40: If we can strip the myths from the gospel, we discover the original purpose behind the myth and can find guidance for our lives today.
33:46: This is called demythologization.
33:51: The Bible becomes a book that has its aim to transform persons through an encounter.
33:56: That's a big thing.
33:58: Encounter Jesus.
33:59: Encounter the real Jesus.
34:02: A lot of churches are adopting that kind of language.
34:04: Again, why? Because it affects the passions.
34:08: You know, churches' names now elevate.
34:11: When you feel better, you give more.
34:13: Well, that's a whole other story, but it's elevate.
34:19: It's ascension.
34:21: It's encounter.
34:26: You know, think of the way we name our churches now.
34:28: It's all about feeling.
34:29: It's all about this existential theology of the feeling versus the thought.
34:43: Very quickly, I watched a video on it because they put out a little video, and apparently they were starting church at 1122.
34:53: That was the time that they started, and so it became known as the Church of 1122 because that was the time that they would get started on Sunday, and that was how the name came.
35:03: Later, they started finding Bible verses to go with that, but there is a video where they very clearly say there was nothing spiritual about it.
35:15: It was just the fact that we always started a few minutes late.
35:17: We were supposed to start, I think, at 1115, but they always started 1122.
35:19: It became kind of a known thing.
35:21: It was like 1122.
35:22: Watch it.
35:23: Look up the video.
35:24: Actually, nothing wrong with that.
35:25: Whatever you want, but it's not like an over spiritualized thing.
35:31: That was just kind of a catchy thing, and here's what it is.
35:36: All right.
35:36: Salvation.
35:38: Like I said, we're just going to read through these and then pray and be done.
35:41: Salvation is to find one's true self.
35:44: This is done by a choice to put our faith in God, and this choice will change our view of ourselves.
35:49: Salvation, then, is a change of our whole outlook and conduct in life built on an experience of God.
35:56: It is not a change of man's nature, as we do not know anything about God objectively.
36:00: It's a matter of faith and faith, and see, that little phrase, I could spend the whole lesson on, but I'll make it very short.
36:07: That little phrase is the problem of modern theology because people don't study theology much anymore.
36:14: They simply say, well, you have to believe.
36:16: Believe in what? Well, you believe in belief.
36:19: Have faith in faith, and it may sound silly to you, but that's...
36:25: you ask somebody, they'll say, well, I believe.
36:28: Well, what do you believe in? I believe in Jesus.
36:34: What do you believe about Jesus? He died on the cross.
36:37: Why? I don't know.
36:42: For my sins.
36:43: What does that mean? I don't know.
36:48: That's...
36:50: Now, last but not least, they have a whole category for myth.
36:57: We've been talking about myth all day.
37:00: Bultmann understood myth as a way to speak of the transcendent in terms of this world.
37:04: Mythology is that form of imagery in which that which is not of this world, that which is divine, is represented as though it were of this world and human.
37:13: The beyond is represented as the here and now.
37:17: So, Bultmann is simply saying there that mythology is not bad.
37:24: It's not bad that we say that Christianity is a myth.
37:30: Now, from us who believe in the truth of the scripture and believe in the tenets of Christianity as standards for faith, we would say to call it a myth is blasphemy.
37:40: Because to call it a myth is to call it untrue.
37:43: But you see, the existentialists would say, and I've actually heard people make this argument, it's not wrong to say it's a myth because myths are beautiful.
37:51: Myths are wonderful.
37:52: Myths help us understand the un-understandable.
37:57: And so, huh? It wouldn't matter though.
38:02: No, I know.
38:03: But you understand though why they, what they're saying.
38:06: They're saying myths, we're not saying it's bad.
38:09: We're just saying it's myth.
38:11: But they have missed the point of what we're responding.
38:16: And we're saying this, when you say it's myth, you say it's not.
38:22: And that's the problem.
38:24: Father, thank you for our time to study together.
38:26: We pray that this has in some way helped us understand better our own faith and help us understand how we might interact with people who have twisted the faith and who have contorted it and forced into a myth that which we know is true.
38:42: In Christ's name, amen.