n the minds of many Christians, logic is somehow thought of with a great deal of suspicion. Logic is considered to be a man-made device for saying new and additional things -- things above and beyond what God has set down for us in His Word. This misconception is a basic example of how much logic is badly understood, not to mention how much Scripture is misunderstood.
When logic is used in the reading of Scripture, the point is not to say anything new; the point is to unfold clearly what has already been said. The premises of an argument contain that which has been said. The conclusion is that which the arguer wishes to say, based upon what is in the premises, and nothing else. He may only say it validly if the conclusion is already contained in his premises. If he says anything "brand new" in the conclusion, then he is guilty of fallacious reasoning. His problem is not logic at all -- quite the reverse.
For example, the Bible is utterly silent on the subject of whether God created skunks. Or is it? We are told in Scripture that God created everything, and that if it exists, then God created it (John 1:3). We are confronted in the world (some of us) with the undeniable existence of skunks. May we conclude that the Bible teaches that God created skunks? Certainly, and the fact that skunk is not in the concordance should not slow us down at all. This is deductive logic.
Not only may we arrive at this conclusion, we are not extending the Scriptures in any way when we do so. We are applying the Scriptures to all of life, and we are doing so according to the laws of logic -- we are reasoning by good and necessary consequence from a biblical premise. The laws of logic simply identify for us the orderly way to unpack a premise.
But logic has a razor edge, and is unkind to those who trifle with it, abuse it, or seek to ignore it. Because of common misunderstandings, it is important to name and identify misapplications of logic, or unnecessary flights from it. The two problems mentioned below can in no way be considered exhaustive; as with math, there are an infinite number of ways to get a problem wrong, and a very limited number of ways to get it right. But these two problems are at the heart of many other mistakes about logic. Let us first address the attempt to avoid logic.
"You are trying to set logic up as a separate authority equal to Scripture." The answer is that this is a complete misunderstanding. Logic is the mental "organ" God has given which enables us to apprehend revelation. Just as the eye receives light, so the mind receives truth. Just as some are blind to the light, so some are blind to the truth. The rods and cones in someone's eye are not a separate authority alongside the light, and equal to it -- they are the mechanism which submits to light. And when the eye rebels against its natural teacher, we call the result blindness.
There would be no revelation of God's mind to us if we had no minds -- and without logic we would have nothing that could be called minds. Without logic we could not be submissive to Him because we could not understand what He said to us.
This charge that logic is being treated as an extrabiblical authority is sometimes brought when people do not see or understand the process by which something unfamiliar to them is brought out of Scripture. Very commonly, this is the result of an unfamiliarity with the premises that are found in Scripture. There is also a widespread confusion about what constitutes a valid inference.
Now this needs to be stated with some emphasis. If the premises are scriptural, and the reasoning is valid, then the conclusion is the Word of God. Objecting to logic as an extrabiblical authority is tantamount to objecting to someone who diagrams a sentence of Scripture, seeking to find out what is the object of the verb. Godly logic is characterized by dutiful and humble submission before the Word of God.
For obvious reasons, we must be careful how we handle the Word -- in fact, this is why training in logic is so useful. It is training in being careful. There are two things which must be checked before any "logical" assertion is rejected or accepted. The first is, are the premises biblical? The second is, was the reasoning valid?
Now logic can be used in such a way that the conclusion is startling -- the bemused listener heads back to the premises, rolling up his shirtsleeves. "Where and how did he get that?" This does not mean that something is wrong. There are many biblical truths which are startling to modern Christians -- whether these truths are bluntly stated in the Word, or derived by good and necessary consequence.
"You don't want to set logic up as a separate authority equal to Scripture." When we have been particularly successful in answering the first objection, our success may be thrown back at us. I have often heard, for example, that the assertion of God's foreordination of all things is "illogical." The confusion here is between that which is a true contradiction and that which is simply beyond our capacity to understand -- beyond our wee brains and tender wits.
In the category of true contradiction would be an assertion like this: "God is not capable of sinning at any time and God is capable of sinning at any time." This involves a true contradiction -- it cannot be so. If this could be true, then we should all throw our Bibles in the trash, and eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. How does this follow? Why should we do that?
It follows because if true contradiction is at the heart of all things, then nothing follows anymore, and if nothing follows any more, then there is no sense in trying to make sense out of anything any more, including this nice valid chain of reasoning here, and so I will therefore try to break free of these modus ponens shackles, and consistently (and therefore inconsistently) assert that ice cream has no bones and the higher they fly the much.
The second category is a necessary (and logical) deduction from the truth that God is infinite and we are finite, and there are therefore many things He has said and done which we do not (and cannot) understand.
Our ability to comprehend is not the court in which the revelations of God to us are to be tried. As was stated earlier, our minds are the means by which His revelations are to be humbly understood and received.
I was once speaking with a woman who was a member of the Jehovah's Witnesses. She was objecting to the doctrine of the Trinity, and she said that she refused to believe in a God she could not understand. I asked her if she believed God to be infinite. When she replied in the affirmative, I asked her to explain infinity to me. Of course she could not. And if she had followed her earlier assertion out and embraced a religion with a finite God, then she could have been asked to explain that.
The end result of accepting a God we could fully understand is rank idolatry. The fact that we have fallen so far as to worship finite mental constructions of finite human minds does not change the nature of the idolatry. Imaginations of a creature are themselves creatures, and to worship them is just as gross as bowing down to blocks of wood or stone.
It is marvelous how Christians who object to predestination as "illogical" can make it through the Christmas season with equanimity when we Christians are so prone to sing those irrational songs of ours -- "Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, Hail the Incarnate Deity . . ." Talk sense, man.
But this raises a question. How are we to tell if we are using logic to receive God's truth (which we have to do in order to understand Him), or whether we are using our ideas about something we call logic to dictate to God what He may and may not reveal to us? Or, put another way, how can we tell whether or not we are sinning in the name of logic?
Because the answer is a biblical one, it will give tremendous satisfaction to those who are in submission to the Word, and exasperate those who are not. We have asked, really, a very simple question -- how can we tell if we are in sin or not? The answer is that every type of sin is defined by the Scriptures and only by the Scriptures. Sin is lack of conformity to the character of God as revealed for us to imitate in the Bible.
This understanding of sin includes sins of the intellect. The Bible does not give us a list of the sins of the flesh, and then tell us to come up with our own list for the realm of the mind. We have a moral duty to love the Lord our God with all our minds. This means we are to listen to Him, and to understand Him, and love Him the way He said to listen, understand, and love.
The process begins with a gift received. God bestows the gift of faith on us, and we believe so that we may be enabled to understand. Believing is not a raw cognitive act, divorced from the lives of those called upon to believe. Believing the truth is an act of intellectual obedience, and unbelief is intellectual rebellion. God requires us to start our thought processes with Him. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge -- not the middle or end. The fear of the Lord is the point of birth.
How do we know if a doctrine is from God or not? How can we have certainty about what we believe? The whole study of epistemology (which asks, "how and what do we know?") turns on this question. Christ approaches it in a truly radical fashion. He teaches that certainty about whether Christ's doctrine is true or not comes from moral submission -- if any wants to do His will, he shall know (Jn. 7:17).
Men have a natural desire to forget that they are sinners, and that investigations concerning the truths of Scriptures are not being conducted by impartial and incorruptible devotees of the Pure. There is no Neutral Logic Room where we can go sit and ponder these things.
This means that we must submit to the Word of God first. We must be willing for God to teach us anything He wants to out of His Word. This is not something we may assume that we have done. We must humble ourselves before our Father, and tell Him we want to understand that the minds of His people were created by Him for His glory, to be filled with His truth. Many Christians will be surprised at how difficult this particular intellectual mortification is.
Once this is done, we are then ready to be taught how to think and reason. This is hard work. Peter warns his readers that the apostle Paul wrote some things hard to understand, which those who are untaught and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures (2 Pet. 3:16).
The word translated twist here is an interesting one. It is a word that means to "torture, put to the rack." It speaks of one who "wrests or tortures language to a false sense." In other words, it is speaking of the sin of being illogical. This is a sin into which untaught and unstable people are prone to fall.
They will say that the Bible teaches that all who desire to live a godly life will be persecuted. They are being persecuted. Therefore they must be godly. But this is a fallacy -- they are unstable in their thoughts.
They will say that logic and "human reason" must be thrown out. But how would their statement of this necessity sound to us if they had obeyed it themselves?
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When we have humbled ourselves, when we have studied, we may then see.
Come, let us reason together, says the
Lord.
