Dr Greg Bahnsen - Introduction to Apologetics: Methods X Hinduism (Part 20)

Start out with the theme passage that I've been using for the last month or so found in 2 Timothy 2, and I'll read at the 23rd verse to the end of the chapter, 2nd Timothy 2:23. But foolish and ignorant questions refuse, knowing that they engender strife, and the Lord's servant must not strive, but be gentle towards all apt to teach, forbearing in meekness, correcting them that oppose themselves, if peradventure God may give them repentance unto the knowledge of the truth, and they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil, having been taken captive by him unto his will. Let's pray. Our Heavenly Father, we thank you today that you have delivered us from the snare of the devil, that you have set us free and liberated us not only from Satan himself, but also from the penalty of our sins and liberated us from a character which is prone to rebel against you, a character that is blind and foolish and disbelieving. We thank you that you've brought us into the glorious liberty of our Savior Jesus Christ. How we thank you have given us new lives and you have enlightened our minds by your spirit and taught us by your Word. And we do pray that you would help us in this class period to draw closer to you and to understand you better and to be better equipped to represent you and the truth of your word to others who need to hear it so desperately. For we pray in Jesus name, Amen. I have been arguing in this apologetics class that those who reject the gospel of Jesus Christ are committed to a worldview because everyone has a worldview, and obviously this one will not be the Christian worldview then to a worldview which will be philosophically self destructive. They will not be able to make sense out of the most basic things that people take for granted, like the uniformity of nature or the dignity of man, or the fact that there is more to us than just brain tissue, that there is freedom and dignity to us. They will not be able to make sense out of the absoluteness and universality of the laws of logic. They will not be able to make sense even out of our use of class categories, terms like warts and dogs and ducks and so forth. However, in the presentation of that, in order to make the case very clear and to help those of you who are like at the bottom rungs, as it were, picking up on this way of thinking, I took the most extreme example. I took the example of the atheist who was materialistic, naturalistic, who doesn't believe in any Spiritual beings, qualities, attributes, whatever. And we saw the difficulties that he had. And then last week I turned to those who are not strictly materialistic and began looking at worldviews, which I'm going to continue today, that would want to incorporate some spiritual dimension in their outlook. And my goal here is to demonstrate that these worldviews make out no better philosophically, are no more cogent or clear or consistent than is the materialist, though the particular illustrations of inconsistency and lack of cogency may change. And last week we looked at Plato. Plato is the best that the philosophical world has to offer if you want to get ethical absolutes, if you want to get a basis for the universality of logic, if you want to believe that there are classes and categories of things we can talk about. But then Plato had his own problems, didn't he? Not the least of which is, and I wasn't just being tongue in cheek when I brought this to your attention, is that when Plato had to account for how the intellectual world of reason or the spiritual domain comes in contact with the realm of matter, he resorted to myth and said as much. He said, I don't know how this can be, but let's go to the myth of the demiurge. Well then that provoked me to ask questions about whether Plato was being consistent with his own theory. Is there a form or an idea of the demiurge as well as the demiurge? Is there a form or idea of the soul in addition to the soul? How is it that souls exist in the realm of ideas and they are plural, but all the ideas of ducks and dogs and giraffes are singular? What do we do with that? What's the relationship of the soul to the demiurge or the soul to the ideas? And then what is the relationship of ideas or forms or categories to the particulars that we run into in our day to day experience? Plato had the grand embarrassment of having his best student turn against him. Aristotle, as Aristotle said, this world of ideas is no practical good Plato, because you can't bring it into contact with the day to day stuff of experience. And so here we have Plato on one end, if you will, and the atheist materialist on the other end. And what we found is they share common philosophical problems, lack of cogency, not able to account for the things we take for granted in life. They can't bring the parts of their philosophy or their worldview together. Well, now someone might be thinking, Dr. Bronson, you haven't played fair. You picked on the easy Guys, the atheists, of course, they're the ones who think that they've got it all over us. I don't think I picked on easy people, but so it's easy to shoot at those guys. And Plato, of course, he was a philosopher. Those of us who are Christians defending the Christian faith are religious people. And there are other religious faiths, and there are other religions with holy books. We have a Bible, they have a holy book. We have a chief person, we follow Jesus Christ. They have a chief person they follow, be it Confucius or Gautama or some bodhisattva in Hinduism or whatever it may be. And so why don't you deal with the people that are closest to us in terms of having the very things we do? And so I will. I'd like to talk about those people today. I have from time to time, taught a course on comparative religion from an apologetical standpoint. Not just a descriptive course, a course that analyzes the religions of the world. And in that course, I don't know, we must go through, like, 35 different, you know, possibilities. I'm not going to make it through 35 in 20 minutes. I know that. But, you know, when I taught the course, I didn't try to do equal justice to all 35 either. In fact, in order to organize your thinking about such a matter as comparative religion, you need to be able to see how to put things in categories. What religions have common basic themes, because after all, we're thinking in terms of a worldview approach to our defense of the faith. And for convenience, then I'm going to today suggest that all of the religions of the world and all of the cults will fall into one of three categories. Okay, you may have a different way of cutting the cake, and that's fine, but this is the way I do it. I would suggest that all the religions of the world are either religions of transcendent mysticism or religions of eminent moralism, or are counterfeits of Christianity. Three categories again. Transcendent mysticism, eminent moralism and counterfeit Christianity or counterfeits of Christianity. Religions that ape Christianity imitate Christianity in one way or another. Let me start with the third category, because that's what I'm going to get to eventually. Because I think many of you think that something like Islam is a real challenge to us apologetically. I don't, although I used to. I used to think, well, boy, you know, they've got their God and they've got their Bible, the Koran, and so forth, and we'll deal with them eventually. But I put the Muslims in that third category. Not because they claim to be Christians like some of the cults do, but because their religion apes Christianity. Most of you are not aware of the fact the Quran was not written until what, 700 years after the completion of the New Testament and so forth. The Koran is an imitation of and in fact draws on the Bible. The Koran claims to acknowledge Moses as a prophet and Jesus as a prophet. So in that situation, Mohammed was aping Judaism and Christianity and having a personal God who is sovereign and who reveals himself. And though a Muslim would not want to hear, and I'm not suggesting you should start out by saying he just borrowed those ideas from Christianity, the fact that it comes 700 years later tells you something, right? It's in the same mode of religion as Christianity. So are the Moonies. Okay. Christianity has a personal savior. Sun Young Moon presents himself as a personal savior. Jesus failed in his endeavor to redeem the human race. And Sun Young Moon, though he's presently, I think still in prison. So he's suffering. Well, remember there was humiliation and suffering for Jesus too. They have an answer for some of these things. I didn't mean that as a put down. Although anyway, he's going to succeed where Jesus failed. Okay, so there's another aping of Christianity in the sense that it's a redemptive type religion with a personal savior of sorts of. The Mormons are counterfeit Christians. Okay? Because they claim the Bible, but then obviously I don't believe they interpret it correctly. Jehovah's Witnesses are counterfeit Christians, not counterfeit Christians, but they're counterfeiting Christianity in terms of understanding that kind of religion. So that's category three. Let's go back to the first two, which is my point. Today. Religions of transcendent mysticism and eminent moralism. In those two categories, the words, two words that contrast with each other are transcendent and eminent. Transcendent means that which goes beyond man's experience. It transcends man's experience. All right? We as Christians believe in the transcendent. We believe that God does not originate in our experience and he certainly exceeds goes beyond our experience. Okay? God is the Creator. That makes him transcendent. God cannot be perfectly known. That makes him transcendent. God is sovereign and has supernatural powers that are not available in the natural world. He is transcendent. But the transcendent is also the realm of the mysterious. The transcendent is the realm of that which goes beyond our ability to Understand that which is not part of our ordinary life, our day to day experience. Some religions are characterized by an emphasis upon the transcendent. Hinduism is the leading illustration of that. And I'll tell you why in a moment. On the other hand, you have the word immanent, not imminent like some rising movie star is, you know, eminent, but emmanent with an A instead of an I in the middle there, which means near at hand. Part of my experience, transcendent goes beyond my experience, eminent. Part of my experience originating in, characterized by or limited by man's own experience. And so there are religions that are more eminent in their focus. Let me put it to you, in other words, there are some religions that are very otherworldly and some religions that are very this worldly, okay? Transcendent, eminent. Hinduism emphasizes transcendent mysticism for reasons that will be evident soon. And Buddhism emphasizes eminent moralism instead of a mystical approach to religion, though there is mystical parts to Buddhism. Buddhism is more or less a moralistic faith, a matter of clean living, do the right thing, get rid of suffering, okay? Another good example of imminent moralism is Confucianism. Confucianism is not really interested in what is true of that which goes beyond this world. Though there is a doctrine of tn, the heavens and so forth. Confucianism focuses upon. You all know this. She said it as kids. Confucius says, you know, you live your life like this, you do these sorts of things. It's a moralistic faith. So let's start with the first one, transcendent mysticism. And I said a good illustration of that is Hinduism. How could I possibly summarize Hinduism for you? First of all, you need to know that Hinduism teaches that our experience in this world is all illusion. That we live in the realm of what's called Maya illusion. And the main reason why there are illusions that we are living with right now is because we are thinking in terms of differences and distinctions. We are thinking in terms of things being isolated from one another and separate from each other. When in reality, the transcendent reality is that all is one, all is one. Yet I think that I'm different from Jeff, and I think Jeff is different from the chair and that all three of us are different from the piano. As a matter of fact, that's all one reality. But in my experience, I experience myself as different from him and from the chair and so forth. Some of you may pick up, if you're Beatles fans, you pick up, of course, on the middle phase, Beatles from basically Revolver on really preaching A gospel of you really need to turn off your mind and float downstream. You know, everything is one. We're all part of the river of life. That's Hindu thought, pure and simple. Hindu thought says that you are the drop, the teardrop. Perhaps if you want to be literary about this, that falls into the shoreless ocean of being. You do not have separate existence. And to the degree that you think you do, then of course that causes problems in this world, causes you to think a certain way and to live a certain way to make you greedy, maybe, whatever it may be. So you need to think of all the world being one and all of reality being one. However, as long as we are caught up on the wheel of life and believe everything that we experience and don't understand the underlying unity of things, we will continue to be reincarnated. After we live our life, we're going to come back in another form, in another life, until we are finally so enlightened and we have practiced the yoga so perfectly that we will then be merged into that shoreless ocean. How will you be reincarnated? Well, it all depends on your karma. Some people have better karma than others. I kind of like my car. I don't like, I mean, my karma don't like your karma. But if I have bad karma, I may come back as an aardvark, or worse, a worm, you know. But if I have good karma, then I may come back, you know, in terms of a better human life. And eventually I will not come back at all. I will be liberated from the wheel of life, from the wheel of reincarnation. And when I am liberated, then I will be absorbed into Brahma. I will then be part of what we might call God, the whole of reality. Well, what are we going to make of this worldview? It certainly is transcendent. The stress is upon a mystical merging into the whole of reality which is beyond our experience. In fact, it says that our whole experience right now is illusion because we're trusting in differences and so forth. Well, let's imagine that I'm in an airport and somebody that has Hindu type tendencies in their religion. Who might we have? Maybe the Hare Krishnas are in the airport and they want to have a talk with me. And I'm waiting for my airplane and I have time. And so I say, okay, let's sit down and talk religion here. What do you got? The Hare Krishna says, well, of course the problem with your life is that you haven't reached nirvana. And you want nirvana, you want happiness, you want all the problems to go away. And for you to do that, you're going to have to give up your thinking in terms of distinctions and separation. You have to think in terms of oneness, because we're all one. And you're going to have to practice the right kind of yoga, that sort of thing, and then eventually you will be liberated. And so I'm struggling with this now, trying to be philosophical and all I say, but what you're saying is where I am now is not Nirvana. Oh, exactly. That's why we're having this talk. And so I'm not now in Nirvana, but if I do what you tell me to do and I have the right kind of enlightenment and experience, I will then eventually reach Nirvana. Exactly. So there is a difference between where I am now and where Nirvana is. Ah, yes. But what you told me is that all distinctions are illusion. What you told me is that all thoughts of separation and a lack of unity are not to be trusted. In fact, that's the reason why I've got bad karma, because I keep thinking in those kinds of thoughts. I try to be logical and think in discrete terms and so forth. And so if I were to follow your instructions, I'd have to say the distinction between not being in Nirvana and reaching Nirvana is illusion. In which case I am in Nirvana even though you said I wasn't. Are you stunned? Hinduism is dead right now. I mean, that's it. Boom, gone. Why not? Because I'm a clever debater. This is not just a little ploy. Hinduism writes its own destruction into its worldview. When it says you cannot think in logical terms. When you think logically, you're thinking discreetly. A not a premise, premise, conclusion. When you start thinking in those terms, then you don't have the unity of life, you don't have the unity of reality. But you see, if you give up those terms, then the Hindu can't argue anymore. And I just use the example of Nirvana because it's so convenient. The Hindu is assuming that I'm not a nirvana, in which case he's not following his own worldview. What did Paul say to Timothy? They oppose themselves. They write, as it were, a worldview have an outlook on life which has its own internal tension and problems. But I'm going to pursue this further because you need to see how deep the problem is. I'm talking to the Hare Krishna. And the Hare Krishna, you know, is kind of taken by this and goes, oh, you must be a philosophy student. You're one of these Western mongrel dog philosophy students. Thinking in terms of logic and consistency. And you're trying to trap me in your little debate game. And I say, no, no, no, I was just trying to follow out what you told me. Answer a fool according to his folly. You told me there were no distinctions. And so I'm not buying the distinction that I'm not nirvana. You gave me the tools for this. So if I didn't understand you, correct me. No, I'm not going to be trapped by you, Mr. Debater, because the whole problem with your mentality is you want to think in terms of logic. You see how deep the problem is? By the way, at this point, the same light should be going off in the back of your head as when Plato said, I don't understand how to bring these together. So I think I'll appeal to myth. You go, oh, I'm supposed to be impressed with a worldview that appeals to myth to bring things together? Oh, you've got a worldview that renounces logic. When people say that sort of thing, I usually say, speak right up. I want the whole world to hear this. Our religion renounces logic. That's what's so great about us. That's why we're right. You're wrong. Because we renounce logic. I say, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. If you renounce logic, if you renounce logic, then you can't be upset with logical contradictions. In fact, your whole religion's made up of them. In fact, certain forms of Eastern religion now in changing categories, like Zen Buddhism, but other forms of Hindu type religions too. Glory and aphorisms that test our logical ability. Riddles, as it were. You love that kind of thing. And so your religion doesn't want logic, but you want to assert that your religion is true and mine is false. I'd like to follow your lead here. I will now renounce logic. If your religion is true, then I profess that your religion is false. You understand how we just pulled the plug on them? Because the minute they give up logic, then everything they assert the opposite can be asserted. And you say, well, you can't rule out the opposite of that because you've already said logic is not to be followed. And so if you are right, then you are wrong. And if logic is renounced, you can't say you're right and I am wrong. I mean, look at all the discrete categories that you're using. True and false, right and wrong, you and me, Christianity, Hinduism can't do that. If you renounce logic because you are me and we're all together, right? So what am I getting at here? Hinduism is not going to be able to put together a worldview that salvages logic, science, ethics, human dignity, any of those things that we were talking about earlier. It's not just the evolutionist, materialist, atheist worldview that has trouble with that. You also have that problem on the other end, the Platonic worldview, the Hindu worldview. And if you come back next week, Lord willing, I'll tell you about religions of eminent moralism, how they have even more problems. Think about this during the week. Why should I listen to Gautama even if you wrote down what he said in a book? Okay, do you have any questions about today's lesson? Kareem, doesn't the New Testament mention incarnations? Like they've got John Baptist incarnate of Isaac? Well, it was supposed to be that John the Baptist would be Elijah come back, but the fact of the matter is that Jesus saw John the Baptist as teaching in the spirit and character of Elijah and identified him not as a reincarnation, but as having that, you know, that very character. Some Jews expected Elijah to be resurrected. That's different than reincarnation. Okay. Resurrection assumes continuity of identity. Reincarnation assumes change of identity, which is real strange within a system that says everything is one, how there can be any changes between identity. We're going to have even more fun with Buddhism because Buddhism wants to teach something similar to that, but doesn't believe the soul carries on from one life to another. In what sense? That's reincarnation is philosophically obscure to me. Do they teach a distinction between illusion and reality? And if so, how do they define reality? Reality is all as one. So there's this between God and an illusion. Yeah. My experience of things being discrete and different is illusion because if I experience reality in its wholeness, I wouldn't have anything to experience the difference between you and me or chairs or anything. So all of my experience is illusion. So another thing you could say to a Hindu is, well, why are we talking with one? Or we're really the same, aren't we? And what you say and what I say are the same because you renounce logic. We're really saying the same thing. But then again, saying the same thing assumes that that's different from not saying something. So we're not really saying the same thing because saying would be not not saying something. And there can't be that logical distinction. So I can't even say that we're saying something. And it's not like we, because that assumes that you and me against the rest of the world. So all of us are not saying or we're not saying and we are saying the same thing, which is the different thing. It all becomes a mishmash. You can't put together a worldview if you believe a Hindu type religion. Oh, now we got hands. I thought I was suddenly Penny. Oh, there is no creation because reality is eternal. Now I think what you may want to ask is, well, if reality was one, how did things get all messed up? I mean, why did people start thinking this? Where did people come from, you know, that sort of thing. And you'll get different views, usually mythological views, you know, in Hinduism, rather gross stories of how the gods did such and such, you know, and they were cooking one day and they spilled and well, there's the world for you and that sort of thing. Oh, I'm not kidding you. I'm not kidding you. I mean, it's amazing to me that in the 60s, you know, where eastern religions became the rave among my generation, you know, that was also the time we prided ourselves in terms of our technological expertise and our rationality and, and all these things we knew. Hinduism is a renunciation of everything Western culture represents. It would be impossible. And it is so crude of religion as to incorporate creation stories like I just told you, stories which cannot be told if you believe the philosophical worldview. Because if all is one, nothing should have ever changed. Ma', am, then. Baha' I is in the hindu mode. Yes. And Jesus said I'm the door. So I guess he meant he was claiming to be wooden. I mean that's just, I, I, I don't wish to be demeaning, but, but that's just an inability to read literature as literature. That's a figure of speech. Oh, that's true. Yes, yes, exactly. And they're not the only ones who will do it. They'll pick up bits and pieces of biblical expressions or even some biblical doctrines and incorporate them and therefore claim to be the perfection of Christianity. Isn't that right? Yeah. Okay. I, I told you it was only Lord willing we'd end at 12. My prediction was wrong. Do you have any questions on today's sermon? And so we need to. Yeah, we do. Because there's subtly, especially in a lot of corporate businesses now that this whole idea of behavior, how do approach a problem, it's really being incorporated in the minds of young executive. There is no spiritual detente. There isn't, you know, and if we are not a spirit asserting and protecting our religious outlook, if not promoting it, you can be sure the others are going to either subtly or explicitly do so. That's true throughout society. It always bothers me when this, you know, we are all one kind of thing comes out when this guy's got his hand on my wallet. You know, speaking metaphorically, it's always when what I would have thought are my rights and property and prerogatives are being violated, that all of a sudden, hey, we're in this together, right? Well, maybe they're not living purely in terms of their religion, so that's an unfair criticism. But, you know, if you're going to do this all as one, you better do it consistently, not pick and choose.