Bock Amok

by HK Flynn

Bob Wilkin has a really excellent podcast on Postmodernism and Evangelicalism. In it, he describes how Darrell Bock (who actually is, despite my goofy title, very reasonable, even if I often disagree with him) has said publicly (but informally, in unprepared remarks), something to the effect of that we may not be able to prove the resurrection but we can show that it is the most plausible event compared to the competing options.

I agree with Bob Wilkin that this is not a wise tact to take the church.

Epistemology—which is the discipline that shows how very wobbly human knowledge is—tends inevitably to be applied selectively to undermine traditional foundations, like NT doctrines, and rarely, if ever, the new doctrines of environmental-religion, and, for that matter, status quo beliefs like philosophic materialism. I think Christians should be very careful not to encourage that pattern by failing to be ultra wary about how they frame ideas related to the NT miracles and promises.

To give you an example, some consider epistemology at its most devious when the issue at hand is something like:

How do I really know I didn't come into being 17 minutes ago? How can I prove that that's not true?

That's a good example of an epistemological concern. And I would add that this example is not devious, but legitimate and even humble, and no disrespect to Dr. Bock, but his comments are the ones that are devious. My point is that even if epistemology sounds like sarcastic nonsense, there's a place for confronting the boundaries of human knowledge, and our ability to prove various things as being either absolutely verifiable or being less than that standard.

I’ve come to the conclusion that passionately believing the Word of God is the only thing that keeps us from being deceived by our senses, which is in concurrence with the epistemological skepticism which I’m (granted) only passing familiar with. If we only tentatively believe God’s promises, as so many seminarians are so conscientious to do, instead of passionately believing them, we remain in constant danger of being forever deceived by what our senses seem to tell us about our life here on Earth, and we still remain poster children naifs epistemologically speaking. Then environmentallism starts making sense to us, and we stop wondering who the antichrist will be, and... and... all is lost! Aaaarrgggghhhh!