Upstream

Shane welcomes author, blogger, and podcaster Natasha Crain to discuss her new book, “Faithfully Different,” an accessible guide to help Christians understand our “worldview minority” status and what it looks like to joyfully live out our beliefs, even when most people don’t share them.    Pre-order "Faithfully Different" at: https://natashacrain.com/faithfully-different-is-now-available-for-pre-order/

Shane invites producer Wayne Stender to ask questions to clarify some terms and concepts he used in the interview with Colin Redemer.

I once came across a guy on Twitter who made a convicting observation. He wrote: “I have a device in my pocket containing the sum of all human knowledge…I use it to view pictures of cats, and start arguments with strangers.” That really stuck with me. The gap between the power of the Internet as a concept and our actual use of the Internet is staggering. I expect it would make an extraterrestrial explorer who was seeking intelligent life on this planet turn his ship around after observing what little use we make of this modern marvel of communication.

We spend a lot of time criticizing the dangers and dark side of the Internet. I’ve personally spent a lot of time doing this, including on this podcast. The Internet’s potential is on par with the printing press, the telegraph, and broadcasting. In terms of sheer data transmitted, it dwarfs all of these world-changing inventions by several orders of magnitude. But unlike the printing press, most of its output is not Bibles or copies of Pilgrim’s Progress. The top few most trafficked websites in the world are porn sites, and the competition isn’t that close. The Internet is the medium of near limitless harassment, slander, disinformation, and distraction. It has created an entire dark industry of child sexual abuse.

And yet—as I sat at a coffee shop last month writing a final paper for class, I needed to know the dates of a theologian’s birth and death. I Googled them and added them to my paper. The process took maybe five seconds. And it caused me to stop for a moment and reflect. How long would that same process have taken me fifty years ago, assuming the information wasn’t handy in my very heavy textbook? I would have had to drop what I was doing, drive fifteen or twenty minutes to the nearest library, search for the right section (either an encyclopedia or books on Reformation history), hope they were checked in, search for the theologian, and either write down the date along with other careful notes, or check out another heavy book so I wouldn’t have to return for the next theologian’s dates and thoughts.

The Internet made all that unnecessary. Wikipedia even cited its source, so there was little chance of error.

But does being able to find information quickly for grad school papers outweigh the oceans of evil sloshing across cyberspace? I don’t know. What I can say is that it’s clear to me the Internet is included in the “every square inch” over which Abraham Kuyper said Christ claims sovereignty. And it can be redeemed in ways that go far beyond cutting down research time. It seems to me its potential to revolutionize the pursuit of knowledge is something we don’t yet fully appreciate. And I’m not just talking about online courses.

In my discussion with Colin Redemer, vice-president of the Davenant Institute, we talked about his prediction that institutional higher education is due to collapse. In response, he and others have embarked on an audacious project to provide ultra-affordable, rigorous instruction outside of traditional institutions.

The project he’s involved in is called Davenant Hall, and Colin wasn’t shy about claiming he’d pit his graduates against the students of any seminary or university in the country. Davenant Hall, of course, relies heavily on the Internet for instruction. Many colleges and seminaries have done the same, especially since COVID. You could describe much of what they do as “online courses.” But to me, it’s a

proof-of-concept for something even more radical—something reminiscent of what William Tyndale envisioned when he set out to put the Scriptures in the hand of the lowliest plough-boy.

The Internet has made knowledge universally accessible. With the exception of a thin stratum of books and media too recent to be in the public domain, virtually the entire corpus of human writing is available for free online. And thanks to our mobile devices, it’s available at the tap of a finger, wherever we go. If you’re willing to pay a few dollars a month, you can have access to all those more recent works and even scans of titles too obscure to have earned an eBook or audiobook.

Using only YouTube audiobooks and Librivox, I’ve enjoyed Augustine, Athanasius, Anselm, Calvin, Dickens, Jack London, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, George Orwell, J. Gresham Machen, and a score of others. There’s an eleven-hour reading of Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” if you’ve got a big road trip ahead of you. And that’s to say nothing of the free PDFs, ebooks, and searchable scans on Google Books.

Maybe most importantly, the Bible itself is available online in literally every translation, with interlinear versions, word searches, and more historical commentaries than you could read in a lifetime. For the especially committed there are free courses in biblical Hebrew and Greek. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Christians in times past would have risked their lives to have this kind of access to God’s word.

What’s my point? The Internet’s democratization of knowledge means that traditional institutions are no longer the only means of receiving an education. Provided you can find a wise guide who can tell you what to read and help you make sense of it, vast swaths of knowledge are available at a click. It may be possible to become better educated through picking brains and reading carefully than through paying large sums of money for traditional courses. If Colin is right, letters behind your name may one day means less than your ability to demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about. And the Internet has, at least in theory, made that possible to anyone with a computer.

I can’t say for certain what the future holds for higher education, especially the kind that qualifies a Christians to stand in a pulpit or teach theology. But I can say with confidence that Christ places no boundary-markers on His authority, and He is not willing to surrender to Satan any product of human ingenuity—least of all one with the redemptive potential of the Internet. My conversation with Colin on Upstream helped open my mind to the innovation Christians could undertake as traditional academia falters. But it also reminded me never to underestimate the good God can do through unexpected means—yea, even the invention that brought us the cat video.

COVID has exposed the rot and bloat in higher education.

Shane welcomes Colin Redemer, vice-president of the Davenant Institute and head of an innovative new seminary alternative called Davenant Hall to explain how Christians are called to love God with our minds, even while institutions of learning collapse.

Upstream producer, Wayne Stender, asks Shane to explain some of the complex terms he and Dr. Moreland used in their conversation earlier this week. Shane helps define traditions in viewing miracles and unpacks some details about prayer that he mentioned in his weekly reflection.

Welcome to Upstream. I’m Shane Morris, and I want to reflect further on this week’s conversation. 

In our discussion of his new book, A Simple Guide to Experience Miracles, philosopher J. P. Moreland and I explored a number of subjects that mystify and fascinate Christians. Foremost among them, whether miracles still take place today, and if so, how we can experience them. But in the process, we touched on a question I have long pondered, and which anyone interested in miraculous answers to prayers will inevitably confront: the question of petitionary prayer, itself.  

When the subject of prayer comes up in evangelical circles, it’s common to hear throwaway lines like these: “We don’t pray in order to change God. We pray in order to change ourselves.” But while prayer certainly does sanctify us and shape our wills emotions, I think this view fails to do justice to the many biblical examples of (and commands to practice) petitionary prayer.  

For example, Abraham interceded with God on behalf of Sodom (Gen 18:22-33). Moses pled mercy for disobedient Israel (Ex 23:10-12). Elijah prayed and God shut up the heavens and then later sent rain (1 Kings 18:41). Jesus encouraged us to “ask and it will be given to you…” (Matt 7:7), promised that “if two of you on earth agree about anything you ask for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven.” (Matt 18:19), and committed still further that “whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” (Mark 11:22-25).  

Could all of these biblical examples and promises be nothing more than condescensions to our finitude—a type of accommodated language for readers not yet prepared to accept that our petitions never influence God or change His intentions for this world? “Is not the blessing of prayer simply the influence it exercises upon ourselves?” asks Dutch Reformed theologian Andrew Murray, echoing that popular but deeply unsatisfying evangelical truism.  

I want to suggest that the answer is “no.” Christians have reason to believe that “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.” (James 5:16). Prayer changes the world, bringing about providential blessings, miracles, and even salvation. It does this as one of God’s chief means for realizing His will in time, involving us in His own Trinitarian life and work, and teaching us to relate to our Father as Jesus did in His human nature.  

Pascal said that “God instituted prayer in order to lend to His creatures the dignity of causality.” Prayer is among those “second causes” which the Westminster Confession assures us the eternal decree of God does not abolish but rather establishes.    

This accords with how most people naturally read Scripture. It makes little sense for Luke to tell us, for example, that the church was praying fervently for Peter’s release from prison if the prayers of the saints had nothing to do with the miracle that followed! (Acts 12:1-19) There are probably hundreds of such examples in the Bible of what Christians ordinarily call “answered prayer.” But how can God “answer” prayer? How can we speak of prayer causing God to do anything, since He is already infinitely wise, infinitely good, and knows everything?  

The first part of the solution is to realize that our prayers don’t surprise God. “Before a word is on my tongue,” wrote the Psalmist, “you, LORD, know it completely.” (Psalm 139:4) God knows what we are going to ask Him before we ask it. And at least since Augustine, Christians have explained this perfect knowledge by suggesting that God exists outside of time. 

In Mere Christianity, Lewis explains what theologians mean by “outside of time”: God’s life is not a succession of moments, like ours. All moments, past, present, and future are part of His unbounded “now.” God thus has all eternity in which to listen to “the split-second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.”   

But the doctrine of God leads us much “further up and further in.” For the Creator, Sustainer, and First Cause of the universe can’t merely comprehend an event, whether past, present, or future. Everything that occurs necessarily does so by His permission or decree. When we speak of God’s activity in the world, even amazing and life-changing activity, we are very often speaking of Westminster’s “second causes.”  

Prayer is one of those second causes—and therefore a means through which God accomplishes His will in time. Lewis realized this, and compared prayer with the thousands of other ways our creaturely activities fulfill the designs of the Almighty. God could miraculously heal our bodies without food or cell division, feed us without agriculture, support us without income, teach us without professors, and convert us without missionaries. He seldom chooses to do so. God, wrote Lewis in his essay, “On the Efficacy of Prayer, “seems to do nothing of Himself which He can possibly delegate to His creatures.”  

Lewis even ventures to suggest that God’s condescension to ordain, hear, and respond to our prayers may be part of His ongoing act of creation.  Nevertheless, it is an act in which we participate as second causes. Human prayers, writes Fred Sanders in “The Deep Things of God,” “become a real factor in God’s rule of this earth.”  

This realization should move us not only to pray, but to pray with God’s redemptive purposes and promises in mind. “We see nothing is set before us as an object of expectation from the Lord,” writes Calvin, “which we are not enjoined to ask of Him in prayer, so true it is that prayer digs up those treasures which the Gospel of our Lord discovers to the eye of faith.”   

Nevertheless, petitionary prayer can look like a puppet act if God merely uses us to ask Him for things He has already decided to give. Andrew Murray writes that one of the greatest challenges to petitionary prayer is God’s own perfection, independence, and sovereignty: “Is He not the Infinite Being, who owes what He is to Himself alone, who determines Himself, and whose wise and holy will has determined all that is to be? How can prayer influence Him, or He be moved by prayer to do what otherwise would not be done?”  

As with so many other dilemmas in Christian theology, the answer here lies in the Trinity. The New Testament portrays prayer in a starkly Trinitarian light. As Sanders points out, the Father knows what we need before we ask (Matt 6:8), Christ pleads our case before His Father (Heb. 4:15-16), and the Holy Spirit translates our prayers into groanings too deep for words (Rom 8:26).  We pray “along the grain” of the Trinity, even if we don’t realize we’re doing it.  

Far from a puppet master who has crafted creatures to speak His own words back to Him, the three-Personal God welcomes human supplicants into courts already ringing with the words of Father to Son and Son to Father, and with the Holy Spirit in answer from both.  

“When we pray,” writes Sanders, “we are joining that conversation. We have been invited to call on God as Father, invited by a Spirit of sonship that cries out, ‘Abba, Father,’ as the eternal Son does.”  We do this, he is careful to note, “in an appropriately lower, creaturely way.” But even our creaturely prayers mimic those of the Son in His humanity, who prayed almost without ceasing. And just as the Father was pleased to give the Son what he asked (as in John 17), so He is pleased to give us what we ask in the Son. Indeed, Murray ventures to say that “the prayer of man, coming through the Son, can have effect upon God.”  

Nevertheless, in his talk, “Petitionary Prayer: A Problem Without a Solution,” Lewis admits that some of the Bible’s bolder endorsements of asking God for things in prayer are tough to square with our experience. After all, our prayers aren’t always answered in the way we hope. Sometimes it is our most desperate prayers that seem most likely to fall on deaf ears. What bothers us most, Lewis suggests, is not God’s refusal to give us what we ask for, but that He told us to ask for anything and evidently did not mean anything. There is “the faintest suspicion of excess in the advertisement…”  

But Lewis responds with a surprising observation: Even when we believe our prayers have been answered, we cannot strictly prove a causal link between our prayer, and the answer. In “The Screwtape Letters,” he calls this the “heads I win, tails you lose” dilemma. If our prayers are not answered, we think it proves that petitionary prayer doesn’t work. If they are answered, we see the secondary causes that led to the outcome, and assume it would have happened anyway.   

He concludes that prayer must not be the sort of practice we could ever subject to scientific scrutiny. Nor can we conclude, if our prayers go “unanswered,” that there was some moral deficiency in us. Christ Himself met with rejection: “The holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup would pass from Him. It did not.”  Indeed, Jesus foresaw and accepted the possibility that his Father’s will might differ from His own. (Matt. 26:39) 

Lewis doesn’t think this makes petitionary prayer uniquely mysterious. In fact, this is how all interpersonal relationships involving requests work. He cites the example of an employer who gives an asked-for raise, but might have done so without the request, in order to retain a valued employee. Was the request the cause of the raise? The answer becomes murkier the more intimate the relationship: 

“…we ask a woman to marry us. Sometimes we get what we ask for and sometimes not. But when we do, it is not nearly so easy as one might suppose to prove with scientific certainty a causal connection between the asking and the getting. […] are you sure she had not decided to [marry you] already? Your proposal, you know, might have been the result, not the cause, of her decision.”  

In prayer, we partake in the most intimate relationship of all—that of creature to Creator. But Scripture invites us to go still further—to deepen this intimacy in ways we would scarcely dare to without permission. According to Jesus’ own instructions, we are to imitate His prayers and His relationship with the Father. “Christians,” writes Sanders, “are people who talk to God like they are Jesus Christ.”   

When we follow the Son’s example by addressing God as Father, we not only borrow the vocabulary of a Divine Person—in many ways, we take up His cross. 

This seems to have unsettled Lewis. He concludes “The Efficacy of Prayer” by noting that miraculous answers to petitionary prayer seem to grow rarer as Christians mature, and so-called “unanswered prayers” seem to grow more common. No doubt with trembling pen he asks, “Does God then forsake just those who serve Him best?”  

His answer, without flourish, is the fully human Jesus Christ, to whose answered prayers we owe our sonship, and to whose faithfulness in the face of unanswered prayer we owe our salvation. If our fate is to share in our creaturely way in the suffering of Christ, we were told to expect this, and to rejoice. (1 Pet. 4:13) 

The evangelical cliché that “prayer changes you, not God” expresses part of the truth. Prayer certainly changes us, reshaping our affections, teaching us to trust our Father, and conforming us to the image of Jesus. But a half-truth, taught as the whole truth, is a lie. Prayer is powerful and effective. It is a means by which God governs creation, both miraculously and providentially. It draws us into the triune life of God, Himself, allowing us to petition Him with the very same confidence as His only begotten Son. And perhaps most profoundly, it places us in the sandals of Christ, bringing pleas to the Father which we don’t know how He will fulfill. We shouldn’t attempt to relieve this tension by quantifying or measuring the effectiveness of our prayers, for their power lies precisely in the fact that they are requests of children to their Father. And like a good Father, He loves us, and no matter how He answers, He never misses a word.     

Shane welcome philosopher and apologist J. P. Moreland to talk about the nature of miracles and how he believes Christians can and do still experience them. He shares stories from his new book, A Simple Guide to Experiencing Miracles.

Shane welcomes Isaac Horn and Lincoln Mick of the bluegrass/folk band, “The Arcadian Wild” to explore the strange and wonderful power music has to convey truth and remind us who we are as image-bearers. This episode was recorded in-person at the 2021 Wilberforce Weekend in Dallas-Fort Worth.

Shane welcomes singer-songwriter and Anglican priest Josh Bales to chat about how liturgical traditions keep Christmas, the role music plays in celebration, and the longing our secular neighbors have for deeper meaning this time of year. 

This is the darkest week of the year, and I’m not a fan. Cold is no fun for me, either. If given the choice, this Florida man would never live above the Mason-Dixon. Snow lost its appeal for me after the first few times every car in Washington, D.C. simultaneously performed the blacktop ballet, and whatever blood-borne antifreeze my friends from New England enjoy was left out of my makeup. But it’s the darkness that really gets me. Knocking off work and finding that the sun has already vanished is a little disheartening, even for those of us who don’t suffer any clinical effects from it. And this is something everyone who lives anywhere but the equator feels it a little, the Sunshine State included.

There’s more going on in the bleak midwinter than just astronomy. I think the solstice has a symbolic relationship with a kind of twilight of the soul. As daytime reaches its annual minimum, and with it outdoor activity, our worlds shrink, and we become more aware of who we really are in relation to the mirror and to each other. The trees and many of the animals fell asleep months ago. We don’t have that luxury. Winter, with its darkness and cold, is a natural picture of death. And not only a picture, but a countdown for each of us. “I have seen many winters,” goes the arcane euphemism for old age. Each winter marks the passing of another year, bringing each of us closer to our own dormition.

Perhaps that’s why Christmas can throw sorrow into sharper relief. If the poor man is poorest in comparison to the rich, then those who don’t see cause for celebration feel it most keenly when everyone around them is celebrating. I knew about this phenomenon and the statistics on it well before this time in 2018, when someone I dearly love took his own life. But now I really understand it. Something I always felt at the back of my chest in December church services when prayers were lifted up for the broken became real to me in a permanent way. Thirty Christmases from now, if the Lord should tarry and grant me old age, I will remember that unnecessary loss as I sing carols with my grandchildren.

Anyone can hear the solemn notes of Christmas in those carols, no matter who you are or what you’ve lost. The haunting strains of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” echo more than Israel’s long wait for her Messiah. As the people who walked in darkness anticipated the first coming of the Light, we groan with a sharper, more urgent pang for His final revelation. We mourn in lonely exile with God’s people of old, and though that carol’s refrain rightly urges us to rejoice, the darkness doesn’t end on December 24th. It’s there at the manger side, and it follows the God-man to Calvary.

That’s why there is a stillness there at the manger that can only be likened to a funeral—a realization that this Infant greeted by angelic exultation was born to die—that the weight of mankind’s sin and the futility beneath which creation itself groans will fall on His shoulders—that a sword will pierce His mother’s heart as a Roman spear pierces His.

Writing in The New York Times, Tish Harrison Warren urges us to anticipate Christmas by facing this darkness, both natural and supernatural. The fast of Advent, she observes, strikes an instructive contrast not just with the feast to follow, but with America’s over-sugared month of festivities and frivolous spending. Step into a liturgical church, she suggests, and you’ll find something precious that has nearly been forgotten: “a countercultural sparseness” marked by long stretches of silence and hymns played in minor keys.

Hymns like my favorite, “What Child Is This?”—especially the rendition by Norweigian singer, Sissel Kyrkjebø: “Nails, spear shall pierce Him through,” it says, “the cross be borne for me, for you. Hail, hail the Word made flesh, the Babe, the Son of Mary.” You can almost hear the carol’s title as an awed question from a passerby as Mary rocks her Newborn to sleep. The answer, even after He is born, is mingled joy and sorrow, light and darkness. What He has come to do is cause for celebration, but it will be a Passover celebration. We are being purchased out of slavery, but at a terrible price. The Lamb has to be slain.

Through it all, the audible twilight of that minor key reminds us of the paradox at the heart not only of Christmas, but of our place in redemptive history. Christians use the year to commemorate the Lord’s life because it is the pattern for our lives. It’s why our mournful anticipation doesn’t conclude with Advent, nor should our plaintive hymnody. We have not fully come into the life that brave little Boy began winning for us in Bethlehem. So we exult with these somber songs and face the darkness with joy, because He is composing new music for the morning.

Whatever the historical case for His actually having come into the world on December 25th, it is also right that we should mark the year’s darkest days with the reminder of our Savior’s first Advent. This celebration, as all celebrations, brings into sharp focus the paradox of redemption—the “not yet” which tempers the “already” of God becoming man and bearing our sins. There is work left to do, there are tears left to cry, and there is blood left to shed.

Thank God that as His Son joined us at the turning point of history, He joins us again in the longest nights of the year. Even though winter has only begun, every day after His birth is a little brighter--literally. We must still weather the remaining darkness of the Curse, no matter where we live. Death will strip our bones as surely as winter strips the trees. But the light and life of the world has come, and has already broken the power of both death and winter. And that light, just like the light outside, is increasing.