The Seven Deadly Spins--Nominalism

Trying to understand our culture today is a lot like showing up late to a movie—important things happened before you arrived, but since you’re not aware of them, you’re struggling to understand what’s unfolding before you right now. So it is in our present time. Many people are looking at the ideas being embraced in our culture and are asking, “How can my neighbor (or friend or family member) believe THAT!?”

Spiritually, we know that the root of all problems and false ideas in our society is sin. The human race is in rebellion against God; we don’t want to accept things the way He created them. Sin is the problem causing trouble in all societies and yet, societies manifest this struggle with sin in different ways. Differences in the intellectual soil of societies produce different false ideas and thus different problems.

In my next few articles, I’d like to dig down into the intellectual soil of our society to uncover the factors producing false ideas around us today. I hope this project won’t seem out of place—my colleagues who also write in this column do a good job of taking us to the Scriptures, so I’m confident that contribution will continue. Perhaps my short project will simply provide some helpful context for understanding our society today and how to navigate through it in a faithfully Christian manner. I’m calling my little project “The Seven Deadly Spins” in order to refer to spins—or distortions—of what is true.

The idea I’ll mention today is called nominalism. It is the claim that an idea like “human nature” or “humanity” does not come into our minds from the world around us; rather, that idea is just a title or category that we assign to a group of similar but ultimately separate things. For example, when you go downtown to the café, you don’t shake hands with “human nature”—you shake hands with Bob, Steve, Debbie, and Sue. Yet from ancient times, philosophers argued that there was something real that connected Bob, Steve, Debbie, and Sue—something they all shared in common that we could call human nature. These philosophers argued further that this shared thing was not just an invention of our minds, it was something our minds discovered about the real world, and this shared thing was just as real as anything we can see, touch, taste, smell, or hear. Beginning in the Middle Ages however, it started to become more fashionable among philosophers to deny that something like “human nature” existed as anything more than just an idea that our minds created to categorize things around us.

That far-too-brief description is surely still a bit confusing to you, but the significance of nominalism is this—if an idea like human nature is just the product of human minds, then human minds control it. We would get to decide what the boundaries of human nature are and who fits inside those boundaries. Perhaps you can see where this could lead. Combined with another idea or two, nominalism becomes the root of racism—the claim that we can declare other people to be “sub-human” simply because of where we choose to draw the boundaries of humanity. In a similar way, nominalism becomes the root of denying personhood to a baby in the womb—because again, if nominalism is true, human minds become the arbiter of who does and who does not count as a person.

In contrast to nominalism, Christians ought to affirm that a thing like human nature is a real, true, objective feature of the universe. It’s not something we made up and thus it’s not something we control. My shared humanity with another person is a fact imposed upon both of us—I don’t get to decide if humanity applies to him any more than I get to decide if the laws of physics apply to him! And what could make reality be this way? Only our Creator God who conceived of humanity in His mind in the first place.

It's True--Jesus Rose from the Grave

 As you read this column today, we find ourselves in the middle of Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter Sunday when we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Most of you reading this article have grown up in Christianity, so the claim that Jesus came back to life on the third day after he died is second-nature to you; it is old hat; it is so common that it has likely become mundane and ordinary—which is sad, ironic, and spiritually dangerous all at the same time.

 It is hard for us to understand that for many people in this world, the claim that Jesus rose from the grave is utterly ridiculous and silly. To them, the claim is as outrageous and unbelievable as a claim that Elvis Presley stepped out of a UFO in my backyard last night to give me a private concert—with Bigfoot on the bass guitar! To most of these people, the claim that Jesus was resurrected is simply a useful fiction rather than the truth. What’s the difference between a useful fiction and the truth? Consider Santa Claus—telling your children that Santa will reward them for being good might cause them to refrain from hitting their siblings once or twice a year. In that sense, the story could be useful, but of course, it’s not true—and when we all inevitably learn that it’s not true, the story ceases to have any motivating power in our lives.

 It is vital that we understand that our claim that Jesus rose from the grave is not simply a useful fiction. It is the truth, plain and simple. To say that Jesus rose from the grave is simply to state what actually happened one brisk Sunday morning in Jerusalem in the early 30s AD. Why should we think this is so? Because believing this claim is not only agreeable to faith in the God who created us and who spoke to us through the Bible—it is also agreeable to reason because it is the best explanation of the facts of the matter. Consider just four facts, facts that are affirmed by even the most vocal critics of Christianity:

 1. Jesus died by crucifixion at Jerusalem during the governorship of Pontius Pilate

2. Jesus’ disciples sincerely believed that Jesus came back to life and visited them

3. James, the biological half-brother of Jesus, suddenly converted to faith in Jesus after Jesus had died

4. Saul of Tarsus suddenly converted to faith in Jesus after Jesus had died

 What is the best explanation of just these four facts—the explanation that can account for all of them in the most convincing way? The most common explanation from critics has been that the disciples made up the whole story of the resurrection to gain a following for themselves—and perhaps fame and fortune with it. But this explanation struggles to explain why James converted to faith. Why would he have wanted to go along with such a scheme? Why would the disciples have invited him into their scheme and taken the risk that he would expose them? Furthermore, this explanation utterly fails in explaining why Saul of Tarsus was converted. He was doing quite well in his life as a Pharisee by persecuting Christians. Why would he have become one if the Christian faith was just a story made up by the disciples? He had nothing to gain by converting and everything to lose. Moreover, we must remember that the disciples all went to their graves proclaiming that the Resurrection was true—and nearly all of them were ushered to their graves by violent hands that made martyrs out of them. It’s outlandish to think that not one of them would have come clean about a hoax in the face of such a fate.

 Other explanations have been suggested which we cannot consider here for lack of space, but the most reasonable explanation is simply that Jesus died and then came back to life. It explains the facts of the matter perfectly. And when we remember that these facts came to be in a world created by the God who had already revealed himself through all of His dealings with the people of Israel as recorded in the Old Testament, it is no surprise at all that God raised Jesus from the dead. It is simply the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth!