The Future of the Unbeliever
The Bible is quite clear that the unbeliever is subject to the wrath of God. Romans 1:18 says, "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth."
The unbeliever is condemned by God for not putting his faith in God’s Son, Jesus Christ. John 3:18 says, "Whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God." It is not a matter of God waiting to see if the unbeliever will do something wrong; rather, he is condemned from the start.
The ultimate fate of the unbeliever will be eternal punishment separated from God. In Revelation 20:11–15, John clearly explains the destiny of the unbeliever.
"Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. From his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire."
The Heart of the Unbeliever
Man is totally depraved. This means that sin has penetrated and corrupted every part of man’s being. Isaiah describes the cancerous effects of sin in Isaiah 1:6, "From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it, but bruises and sores and raw wounds."
- Total depravity does not mean that every human being commits every possible sin or is as bad as he could possibly be. Due to God’s common grace, his gracious restraining of the full effects of sin, man is able to achieve cultural and civic good. It does not mean that all have all made the same progress in sinning (in other words, all are equally dead but not equally corrupt).
- Total depravity does mean that, first, every human being is capable of even the most heinous of sins. Second, the unbeliever only does right for selfish purposes (Rom 3:23). Third, he is completely destitute of God’s love, both the ability to love (1 John 4:8) and he is subject to God’s hatred (Ps 5:5; 11:5). Fourth, he has no hope of saving himself (Eph 2:1, 8). Last, sinful man, apart from God’s grace, will continue to grow worse and worse (2 Tim 3:13).
There is no desire for God within him (Rom 3:10–11). There is no capacity for pleasing God within him (Rom 8:8). He is self-deceived by his own heart (Jer 17:9).
The Mind of the Unbeliever
This is really the key to determining the content of our apologetic. When we communicate the gospel with an unbeliever, primarily we are talking about a mental communication of facts, words, and propositional truths. Is man’s mind "neutrally autonomous," as some have assumed? Can he grasp and accept God's truth if he applies his reasoning powers to it?
The biblical teaching about the unbelieving mind is clear: the mind of the unbeliever is depraved and corrupted by sin. In Ephesians 4:17–19, Paul exhorts the Ephesian believers, "Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity."
Notice the phrases Paul uses to describe the depravity of the Gentile unbelievers. He says they live in the futility of their minds. Their understanding has been darkened. They are ignorant. Their hearts are blinded. This results in an immoral lifestyle. Indeed, the Bible clearly teaches that sin does affect the mind!
The unbeliever’s mind is corrupted by sin. Titus 1:15 tells us that he is defiled and impure, including his mind and conscience. Ephesians 2:3 says that when we were unsaved we lived for "the desires of the body and the mind."
His mind is hostile toward God. Romans 8:7 says that "the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot." There is no unbeliever who is a "seeker" or even "neutral." Rather, his mind is completely opposed to God and God’s Word.
He cannot accept the truth of God. A passage that helps us understand this is 1 Corinthians 2:14: "The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned." This should not be understood to say that the unbeliever cannot understand the Bible; indeed, he can! He can understand the words of the Scripture because the Bible is both a human and a divine book. It employs human language and that is perfectly intelligible to the human mind.
However, he cannot and in fact, refuses to accept the Word of God. He is dead in sin (Eph 2:1), and every unbeliever without exception rejects the Word of God. He has no ability to respond to the truth. He refuses to submit his life to the truth found in it. It is not until the Holy Spirit regenerates him and gives him life that he is able to accept God’s Word as true.
For this reason, it is useless to try to persuade an unbeliever to be saved. He does not need to be persuaded; he needs to be regenerated! For example, it is pointless to attempt to prove the existence of God to an unbeliever. He already knows that God exists and is suppressing that truth (Rom 1:18–19). Psalm 14:1 says that the fool (another name for an unbeliever, not a mental incompetent) has already decided in his heart that God does not exist. It is not necessary to prove that creation is superior to evolution—every man already knows that God exists from the creation that is around him (Rom 1:18). The unbeliever does not require persuasion; he needs life!
Comments
When the Bible says that we are the body of Christ, does that mean we aren't individual parts to be broken down and understood individual and our relations to each considered, thereby having a firmer grasp of the unity of the whole?
I am honestly curious why there is the double standard. Places where the Bible talks about all different kinds of parts of us. Why must we not think of how exactly the mind 'hates' or is 'at emnity with' God?
To equate the bible's use of the term, "mind", with "intellect", and thus conclude that there is no part of our mind that is simply the servant of another part is very imprecise. I know, I'm one to talk about precise thinking. But I think it is a valid concern.
Anyway, no matter how you come down on the issue, I don't think we should reject the quest for understanding how parts of a thing relate to each other, especially when it is something so important as the soul of man.
I hope you talk more about this stuff. Its interesting and I'm just at the beginning of working it out. Please excuse my questioning, but I really am trying to figure it out.
Kidding aside, I guess I don't get it. Maybe somebody can help me out here. Perhaps I don't understand the question. I didn't say that only man's brain was affected by sin or only his heart--- I said that sin had completely corrupted all of man's being, and that no part of him is unaffected by sin. It seems that the burden of proof is on you to show that the Scripture cited above excludes the mind (or brain, or intellect, or anything).
I will say, as Michael has told you at sundry times and in divers manners, noetic sin does not render the unregenerate man an imbecile. We have not made that claim and we deny your implication that we have! An unsaved man can think, and many of them can think more precisely and with greater acumen than I ever will.
However, no unregenerate man, no matter how intelligent, will ever "think" his way to God. He is unable and unwilling to do so. He can parse Hebrew verbs and decline Greek participles with the best of them, he may even be able to write a better commentary than a believer, but he will not and cannot accept the truth of God's revelation into his own life.
If you will, he has a built-in "prejudice" against God and God's revelation that can only be removed supernaturally. So you could come up with an intellectually coherent, appealing, and winsome system of theology, but the unregenerate man will reject it out of hand when it requires him to submit himself to God's will.
I really think you need to start at the very beginning (a very good place to start, I'm told) and think through this exegetically and biblically, and then make your philosophical extrapolations. Or maybe I'm just too simple-minded and not widely-read and I don't have a clue.
What does that mean? Doesn't Paul say "we try to persuade men" with reference to his apostolic ministry? I have the NIV here, but in a quick survey of 20 English translations only the New Jerusalem Bible yielded something different ("we try to win people over"). Obviously there is one sense that the English word "persuasion" does apply to NT ministry.
If apologetics aims to defend Christianity against non-Christian truth claims and to attack non-Christian truth claims from the Christian point of view, then it seems awkward to say that the apologist is to avoid being persuasive.
However, I do mean that we can never bring an unregenerate man to salvation by the sheer winsomeness or cogency of our argumentation. The point of my awkwardly-worded sentence was that we should not be the least bit surprised when our gospel proclamation is deemed "foolish," "circular," or "illogical" by the unregenerate. The message we proclaim is nonsense to the unregenerate mind, but to those who are effectively called, "Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God" (1 Cor 1:23-24).
I am looking forward to the rest of the series.
Good stuff. Thanks.
I'm preaching through Matthew & arrived at chapter 16 today. It is very germane to this discussion, IMO.
In v. 1-4, the Pharisees & Sadducees request a sign from heaven -- proof that Jesus is who He claims to be. Christ refuses, not because He couldn't do it, but because it was futile. They had seen "evidence that demands a verdict" [heh, heh], and yet had rejected Him repeatedly. Why? Verse 4 says that they were wicked and adulterous. They didn't lack information, and no sign or reasoning would convince them. They lacked illumination. (The Gospels are FILLED with examples of this...Luke 16:27-31, etc. Mercy, how many people were eyewitnesses of irrefutable evidence during Christ's ministry, yet rejected Him?)
Jump ahead to verse 16 where Peter makes His wonderful confession of Christ's deity. Christ's response in v. 17? "Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven." It's not about information, but illumination.
GC Morgan's comment: This passage “gives us…the revelation of the absolute inability of man, unaided, to understand the highest and best things of God.” (Matthew, 204)
Call me stupid (no, don't), but I just realized the connection between one's soteriology and his view of apologetics. Cairns doesn't even use the word "presuppositional" in his brief treatment of Apologetics in his theo. dictionary. He just calls it "the Calvinistic approach."
You make a distinction between man's understanding and his acceptance. I think this is the very distinction that Edwards makes. Why is it so distasteful when he says it, but not so when you and other PAs say it? I see no difference here between what you say and what Edwards and Sproul say.
You wanted agreement on the noetic affects of sin. From what you say, I think we agree.
I think our communication is poor because we don't share similar ideas about two things: Culture and the development of most unbelievers' ontology.
I'll post on these two things on my blog soon. Serioualy, I appreciate teh interaction because it has clarified some misconceptions in my mind and strengthened some ideas that I had.
One other thing, I don't want to suggest that I am very good at thinking or that I am very widely read or that I am one of the "Great Cultural Thinkers". I dropped out of highschool after 9th grade, and I lost my hearing midway through my sophomoric year of bible college. I was deaf or nearly so for well over a year and all I could do was read about this stuff. I couldn't really dialogue much, and I wasn't into the blogging scene at that time. The only discussion I had over these things was when I would bother professors or pastors in emails.
I'm simply trying to figure these things out. Sometimes, I think I know alot. But I always come to the conclusion that I know just enough to get myself into trouble:)
Perhaps it is to my detriment that what you guys worked through in the dorm rooms and in class, I'm doing in a more public venue: blogs. But then, I think I'm at an advantage to some degree. I'm talking to Master and Doctoral students and pastors - not fellow cluelessmen.
I have no idea what your mysterious definition of "culture" is, so I can't speak to whether I agree or not.
When I say that man can understand the Word of God, he does so because the Bible is written using human language, part of the image of God in man. His eyes can pass over the written symbols on a page of Scripture, his brain can process those symbols into concepts, and he can put nouns, verbs, and complements together into propositions. However, as he begins to understand what the Bible means, apart from God's regenerating work, he will reject its significance and refuse to apply it to himself.