The Incredible Strange Thing

By J. Michael Strawn
(Transcribed from tape)

The title of this study is built on the word translated in the New International Version, a STRANGE THING, in the book of Acts, chapter 26 and verse 8, where Paul is making his defense before Agrippa. He says in that particular citation: “O king, it is because of this hope that the Jews are accusing me. Why should any of you consider it incredible that God raises the dead?” That word we might call strange is built around the idea of something being incredible, unbelievable or beyond the pale of possibilities. Certainly beyond the capacity of physics and physiology to be able to account for.

To begin with, let us take into consideration the reality and the nature of some Old Testament biblical examples. We are going to refer to these as biblical pragmatic exemplars because we take these examples, or these exemplars, these individuals in their very circumstances, and we begin to see the nature of faith as it is depicted in these circumstances and the way in which God relates to these people in their real life circumstances. For instance, we can see Noah as a pragmatic exemplar since he faced a global catastrophe: the destruction of the human race and other life forms on the surface of the earth by this universal, global flood that God brought about. Now that exemplar occurred one time and never recurred again. We do not have regular global catastrophes of such a nature.

Another example is the life of David who faces a giant in the valley of Elah. Again this occurred once and we do not have another example of such a conflict, of such an encounter in the rest of the Bible. And yet the example of David is used and referred to repeatedly. Thus, man is supposed to draw something from that period of time, from that set of circumstances about the nature of faith.

Another well known pragmatic exemplar is that of Job. He lost his health, his family, his material possessions and yet was restored. The book of Job declares that he was the greatest man in the East. He looses all these things and then eventually through a series of events, the Lord brings him back to a preferred status again. One does not see recorded in revelation the case of Job recurring time and time and time again.

Another biblical pragmatic exemplar is the father of the faithful, Abraham. He is a man advanced in years unto whom God makes a promise in the latter part of his life. He is married to a woman, Sarai, who is also advanced in age. Furthermore she is considered to be physiologically incapable of bearing children. And yet in the middle of those circumstances, God makes certain promises that He swears will come about. And in fact they do. We do not have another recurrence of a type of Abraham in revelation.

Rahab, a woman who was certainly of less than desirable qualities, living within the city of Jericho—who when she hears about the advance of the people of God—turns to God. She has a rudimentary faith and yet that faith is sufficient for her to save the spies and to be redeemed in the middle of this catastrophic, apocalyptic set of circumstances that developed in her world.

Moses serves as another biblical pragmatic exemplar. He is picked by God, spared from death from infancy by God, is led through a series of stages in life by God only to be prepared in the latter part of his life by God to lead the people of Israel out of Egyptian captivity. Moses becomes a kind of faithfulness for us. We are supposed to learn from him.

Joseph, who through multiple improbabilities—though it would seem on the surface—is sold into slavery by his brothers and unjustly treated by them, is brought into the life of Potipher only to be unjustly accused of a crime he did not commit. Furthermore he is cast into prisons, into dungeons, is abused and finally is brought through a series of divinely inspired stages into the very presence of Pharaoh where he is elevated to the second position of the kingdom. And in more than one way, he is to be seen as the savior of all the people. Not only did he save the Israelite people from famine and sure death but also he saved the Egyptian empire because a famine covering seven years, where no food was available and nothing could be produced, certainly would have brought an empire like that to its knees. Thus one sees that the Almighty God had a kind of compassion on the Egyptian empire.

Sodom and Gomorrah serve as another set of pragmatic exemplars. We learn something about the nature of evil; that is, how God pictures evil and sin. Finally revelation records how He moves against it to ultimately destroy it.

One might think of the example of Jonah, a man swallowed by a huge fish and is spared only to carry out his mission of redeeming from destruction the city of Niniva. Now these events occurred and they did not recur again. They are one time non-repeatable events. Yet these one time events become the basis for the formulation of our faith. We are supposed to develop our understanding of reality, our understanding of God, our understanding of the nature of faith and physical realities on the basis of these events instead of that which occurs around us routinely. In other words, the believer is to derive his understanding of the aforementioned things not on the basis of physics and physiology but on the basis of these kind of biblical pragmatic exemplars. Of course we have merely scratched the surface when it comes to the number of biblical pragmatic exemplars found in both the Old and New Testament.

Now, what would that mean to the contemporary man? It would mean that he could only use such examples in a deductive way. What we mean by that is one is to begin with a set of given premises and then he is to extrapolate the generalization that is drawn from that particular example of faith to all other subsequent cases. It is an act of deduction. So the believer is to deduct from these one time, non-repeatable events.

In Acts 26, Paul makes his defense before men of imminence, who apparently, although not actually, have something to say about his destiny; that is, whether he lives or dies, or whether he is chained or goes as a free man. These men are going to look upon the claims that he makes as strange or as one reads in Acts 26:8 as incredible, radical, perhaps even insane because later on in this text, Festus will say, “Paul, your great learning has driven you mad.” When one takes such examples that occurred only once and one then ignores all the routine things—all those things built on statistical regularity—when one ignores those things and build his life on the nature of these one time, non-repeatable, biblical pragmatic exemplars, it will seem strange to many, many people. Of course, when we discuss the idea of the representational nature of the revelation and the role of Scripture over life, it very frequently sounds very strange and perhaps very radical and it is not inconceivable that some people may think it is quiet insane to think some of the things that a believer is capable of thinking when he takes into consideration the representational nature of Scripture.

This means that revelation itself prohibits believers from using these biblical pragmatic exemplars in an inductive way. Induction, as we pointed out earlier, is built on statistical regularity and is in contradiction to faith. We also discussed this in great detail in the previous chapter under the title of how the universe collapses into a consciousness. Induction is the act of taking many kinds of cases, sorting, or kind of distilling a central message, and then applying it to all other individual cases or to a particular case. So induction is the exact opposite, the polar opposite of the practice of deduction. We do not have any biblical pragmatic cases wherein we see statistical regularity as the basis for faith: not with Noah, nor David, nor Joel, nor Abraham, nor Rahab, nor Joseph, nor Moses, nor Sodom and Gomorrah, nor Jonah. These things, therefore, do not present themselves to us in a kind of statistical, regular way. We are talking about a grammar that is very distinct, very worldly and very much a part of human consciousness. The grammar of human consciousness, that is, the rules that govern human consciousness, or that are imbedded in human consciousness, want to act inductively. But biblical grammar, quiet to the polar opposite, is deductive. This means that we take these cases—for example, the individual case of Abraham—and we will apply it to all subsequent cases to which it would rightfully belong or could be compared. The difference between these cases of deduction and induction would be the difference between normal and abnormal, between what we think of as socialization and what education actually is, the process of socialization.

If one can imagine a circle of X’s and another X wants to come in and be a part of that circle. In order for X to be acceptable they have to socialize him. In other words that X, he or she, has to be brought into and accepted into this collectivity on the basis of how it reacts and intermingles with all the other X’s in the circle. That is what all education is about. It is about socialization and about becoming a part of the group. It is about accepting the way the group thinks or, we may say, about accepting the controlling and majority philosophies of the group. One is not born with assumptions. One has to be given those through a process of socialization, or a word that is synonymous with it, is the process of education. In higher education people are talking today about the nine cultures of inquiry. Nine areas into which all human knowledge can be divided. Such things as history, scientific inquiry, ethnography, psychology, sociology, phenomenology, biology and other such fields. Consequently in graduate school, one finds that upon taking a course on research and inquiry that the beginning point is human knowledge and from the professor’s point of view all knowledge can be broken down into these nine areas. The point to remember here is that human knowledge begins with self and is inductive and therefore is built on human experience. Human lived experience takes all the multiple cases that it knows and then tries to apply them to particular kinds of circumstances. This is the mental act of induction. Let us illustrate this most important idea. An individual comes home from the office one afternoon and says that he has just taken the opportunity to move with his company to Hartford, Connecticut. When his wife asks him why he wants to make that decision, he says it is because there were six other men in the office who also moved to Hartford and the move turned out to be a very positive thing for them. So, consequently, he assumed that it should be an equally positive move.

This is a classic illustration of the whole idea of induction. Now when we think about James 4:13-17, when these men decided that they would go over to a specific place and spend a year and make money, we see that they were operating inductively. They were operating on statistical regularity. They were looking at things that they had seen routinely practiced and that they thought would yield specific, desirable results. But they are cautioned by James in that passage, in that they should have sought the will of God first. In other words, they should have found His premise for their lives. They have considered first and foremost His premise for what they should do in the immediate upcoming days and then act on that. Thus there is a difference between deduction and induction.

If one uses the idea of deduction or induction to come to the Scripture, one is going to shut the other out. If one approaches the Bible from an inductive point of view, he really does not know how to use it. He really cannot find a way that such one time non-repeatable events really fit in with contemporary existence. How do we deal with the father of the faithful, Abraham? How is Abraham’s experience somehow analogous to mine? How can I use it? One cannot resort to statistical regularity because it is not in the offing. I think what we are going to have to conclude is that Scripture intends for man to operate on it in a mental operation that we call deduction. If one operates deductively, then it shuts off the idea of induction, statistical regularity and consequently on operating on the grammar of human consciousness. I am afraid that in our history of churches or as churches, we have operated with a strong inclination toward inductive procedures instead of operating deductively and saying, “Now let us go to the life of Noah or to the life of David or Abraham or Moses or Rahab and let us find out the nature of faith and let us take that generalization and apply it to all subsequent cases to which those generalizations would logically apply. That is the way Scripture is supposed to be used. If we were to say that we can find the truth in Scripture only through command, necessary inference and example, then we would be shutting ourselves off from the greater way of trying to find generalizations that we can extract as freed abstractions from the text and then apply to all subsequent cases. Indeed it would seem obvious that we have sanctified the mental operation called induction, and if we are right about this, it means that we are in essence worshiping human consciousness. Of course that would make us idolaters. This is a very strong statement and one to be careful studied. Notice that it was always human consciousness that devised the idol. So anyone who worships an idol is worshiping the designer of an idol and, of course, that goes back to human consciousness.

Now the question is what has that to do with the statements that are made in Acts 26? Hopefully the reader has read the entirety of that chapter and has understood what is occurring during the life of Paul. He has been arrested. As you recall from earlier chapters, Paul had been sent by the Holy Spirit to the city of Jerusalem and he had been warned as he made various stops on the way to the city of Jerusalem that imprisonment and distress were waiting him. He decided to obey anyway and he went. Well, true to form, the Lord told him exactly what was going to happen. He was into he city of Jerusalem and almost immediately he was arrested and brought into custody and he had been in Roman custody ever since. And now, also, true to the prophetic nature of his ministry—that the Lord told him about—he was going to stand before kings. That means that they cannot kill him, they cannot take his life, they cannot do anything to him unless the Lord allows this kind of thing to occur. Now he finds himself standing before Festus and Agrippa and certainly he had stood before Felix as well. When we think about the nature of the defense of Paul, we have to consider what was taking place in the minds of everybody gathered in that audience room the day that Paul was brought forth to make his defense. It would be more precise to state that he was not only defending himself but also the gospel. This seems to be the most interesting thing that comes out of this context.

Let us begin by going back to the verse that we wanted to isolate that begins the whole thought process that we want to consider in this particular chapter, Acts 26:8. As Paul stands before these men of imminence, and all of these accusers who have come forward and whoever else is gathered there that day to hear this verbal defense, he says, “Why should any of you consider it incredible that God raises the dead?” This is a significant question. It is no small question. It is a rather engulfing question and we want to try extracting the centrality of its meaning. What is it that Paul is trying to state? When Paul says that he believes in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, he is talking about something that is very unusual. He is talking about something that has no statistical regularity behind it. We do not have statistical regularity governing the resurrection of people from the dead. Routinely, statistically speaking, people who are dead and who are entombed do not rise to live again. And yet, now this man standing before these people, on trial for his life and for his freedom, plainly states that his faith is irrevocably centered in this historical fact: that Jesus did come to earth, that He was the incarnate Son of God, that He was abused, misused, and was unjustly crucified, and that on the third day He was resurrected from the dead. And that is the hope for which Paul stands in judgement. And that is the reason why he is making his defense and the nature of his defense is governed, in fact, by that central reality. That would sound like an inductive impossibility to the people gathered there on that day. What is going through the mind of Agrippa? What went through the mind of Felix? What was going through the mind of Festus? What was going through the minds of those people who were listening to Paul say, “I believe in an incredible thing…I believe in a strange thing.”? That strange thing can only be understood deductively, that is, that this instance, this man raising from the dead, was brought about by the expressed will of the unseen God. Therefore, it is not a strange thing. Paul has a long history, does he not, behind him, in the Old Testament that would underscore the plausibility of his argument…of Noah, David, Joel, Abraham, Rahab…now these are not resurrections from the dead, but certainly these are biblical pragmatic exemplars that show that it is the consciousness of the Creator that runs the universe, and that if the Lord says that He is going to resurrect the dead, then He does. We are told in Hebrews 11 that when Abraham took his son Isaac to the top of Mount Moriah to offer him as a sacrifice, that he, in a figurative way, received his son back from the dead. He said God has made promises to me and has also given me instructions to sacrifice this boy. I am going to do both. I believe God will resurrect my son back from the dead. He believed that because he was a deductive thinker. Now he was not always one who was able to believe in these strange things. He was not always one who had this ability, in such a noteworthy way, to believe in these incredible things. But he came to develop his faith to such an extent that when this major test came of sacrificing Isaac, he was ready to do so, because he did believe in a strange thing. He had no statistical regularity behind him of dead boys being burned to a crisp on an altar and then rising to go home with their fathers who had just sacrificed them. There is no statistical regularity governing that. It is not normal. It is considered to be a strange thing, a radical thing, and perhaps in the minds of some an insane thing. But God has called us to look at things from another point of view. Now if we look at certain things that are expressed in the Bible, as strange or improbable, or implausible or even impossible, or perhaps insane, or strange, or radical, or abnormal would it not be because we are prone to thinking inductively about these things instead of thinking through the means of the mental operation we call deduction. That is why Paul would say in verse 8, why do you think it a strange thing that God can resurrect the dead? It is strange only from their point of view. It is not strange when we begin to think deductively from the point of view of the consciousness of the creator as it is expressed in the written revelation. Therefore, Paul is going to make his defense in this chapter built on this principle.

Now let us take a look at some of the more salient statements that are made here and try to draw out their significance. If the reader will look at verse 15 and the verses following, Paul would continue his defense and he is reiterating the episode that occurred to him on the road to Damascus, the day when the Lord appeared to him. He affirms that Jesus says to him,

I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. Now get up and stand on your feet. I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant, as a witness of what you have seen of me and what I will show you. I will rescue you from your own people and from the gentiles. I am sending you to them to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.

Notice that biblical faith is built upon non-repeatable deductive thinking. That is, believers, in order to be followers of Christ, must operate on these non-repeatable events and the mental operation called deduction. In other words, belief, and thus faith, is not inductive because an inductive faith (which is no faith at all) is based on the recognition of patterns, symmetry and statistical regularity. Belief, as a matter of course, as a matter of fact, as a matter of principle, as a matter of necessity even, is deductive. We are going to take these New Testament and Old Testament biblical examples and we are going to draw generalizations from them, then we are going to apply them to all cases where they belong. That very act is the mental operation of deduction. That is a legitimate use of Scripture. He says, go and teach these Gentiles and these Jews who will listen to you these truths. They will sound strange to the ears of people who are inductive thinkers. But, if they are deductive thinkers, if they are willing to take the authority of Scripture and deduct from it, then they will not think it strange at all that God can raise someone from the dead. They will not think it an incredible thing at all.

Therefore, what is the nature of faith? It is believing in this incredible thing, believing in this strange thing. We can extrapolate that to all kinds of circumstances. Suppose we were to talk in terms of James 5, where he speaks of those who are sick, or those who are in trouble or of those who are enjoying good blessings from the Lord. And then to those who are in trouble, he talks in terms of praying and anointing with oil and that God can resurrect these people from their circumstances and redeem them from their situations. He uses a pragmatic biblical exemplar, Elijah, as found in the writings of the Kings, about the great events associated with Elijah’s confrontation on Mount Carmel. He refers to how he had prayed earlier that it would not rain for 3 and one half years and the passage states that it did not rain. Then after the repentance of the people and the turning away from the god Baal, whom they worshiped as the god of fertility, he asked for it to rain again, and it did. He asked for it to stop raining because they were worshiping Baal—their rain god—who they saw as the sufficient cause or the prime mover behind their well being. They had turned their backs to God. Now he uses that example in James 5 and he says, now is it a strange thing, in other words, using the same kind of mentality that we have been discussing in Acts 6 that God can exert His power over matter in motion? Is it a strange thing that God can exert His power over what appear to be invariant structures in the universe? Now if it is a strange thing, if it seems strange, if it seems radical, if it seems abnormal, it is because of an inductive attitude. The truth of the matter is that there is an ability to define faith through one or both of these two kinds of mental operations. We could come up with a type of inductive faith. I suspect that the majority, with our brethren and perhaps ourselves, when we use the word faith we may be thinking of that inductive faith where if one has something written in the text, but it violates routine or what we think of as laws of physics, laws of physiology, then the statements of the text have to be understood against this larger framework of reality. That is induction.

But if on the other hand, we take these biblical examples and say that they become the premise in the mind of God for the governance of the material world, and that it has to be applied to all subsequent cases where it logically fits then we are describing a kind of deductive practice. But the inductive definition of faith limits us. Now I would suspect that the reason why earlier students of Scripture came up with the idea of command, necessary inference and approved example is that they were thinking inductively. They never questioned the central dependability of human consciousness. And yet when one reads Scripture it becomes very clear and very early on that one cannot depend on human consciousness. Furthermore, it should be obvious that human consciousness is not reliable and that it is not a reliable basis upon which we can draw truth. So if we start deductively, then it is going to bring into sharp question the ability of human consciousness to derive things that are true. In fact, human consciousness is going to rely on a kind of statistical regularity.

Certainly it was true in the days of which Paul is speaking, they did not have in their minds the technological definition of statistical regularity but they did understand the routine and what they thought of as the normal. Certainly Felix believed that. Festus agreed with that and so did Agrippa. They had no recollection and no listing of repeatable events where dead people were resurrected from the dead. So, to them all, it was a strange thing since they were inductive thinkers. Paul is coming into that room as a deductive thinker presenting truths to all of these inductive types who simply cannot understand where he is coming from. Now that is a significant point. Paul’s tries to express this in specific language, and thus he regurgitates for the benefit of those who are in the room to hear him that day, what occurred on the road to Damascus. “I am sending you to them,” he says in the latter part of verse 17, “to open their eyes and to turn them from darkness to light.” Now that is a significant statement. We could trivialize this statement by simply saying, well, they are going to be turned from ignorance to the gospel. But you really have not said very much. Not until we get behind the definitions that we use for these terms. Obviously if people think it is incredible that God can resurrect someone from the dead, then they are not ever going to have the capacity to turn from darkness to light. That is simply not possible. It is not possible because their mental operations will not allow them to do so. They will not allow Scripture to operate deductively. They will not build their faith on this revelation, on these instances where God reveals Himself in a powerful way in the lives of certain individuals. And then believers must take these illustrations and make them the primary source, as non-repeatable as they are, without benefit of statistical regularity, allowing them to become the prime lenses, shall we say, through which they see reality. And if one did that then one would think certainly that it is not strange that God could resurrect the dead.

Now in order to extend that principle a little bit further, let us read verse 19 and the verses following to capture the flavor of what Paul is trying to communicate to these people. He has the benefit, of course, of a somewhat sophisticated audience and he is going to milk this for all it is worth. I think it is very interesting to consider that as he is under the direction of the Holy Spirit here, the Holy Spirit directs him to take a particular path in defending what God is doing. We have a unique window here through which we might peer into this unseen dimension in the mind of Paul, as he works with the Holy Spirit, as God directs him how to speak and what to say. This has to be included, certainly, in this package that we think of as Paul, and of his ministry. He has been selected to do this very thing. Now he is in the very circumstances that God always knew were going to occur. What is he going to do? He is going to say something beyond credibility in the minds of so many people. One has to think deductively. One must deduct from that which has been revealed by God to man.

Beginning with the revelation that was made to the Jews, and is now been extended and terminated through the work of Christ as it is extended in the ministry of the apostles, a very unique opportunity presents itself here. I say unique in that we have this ability to see in not only into the mind of Paul, but into the mind of the Spirit, into the mind of Christ, into the mind of the Father.

In Chapter 26 and in verse 19 the reading continues,

So then King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven. First to those in Damascus and then to those in Jerusalem and in all Judea and to the Gentiles, also I preached that they should repent and turn to God and prove their repentance by their deeds. That is why the Jews seized me in the temple courts and tried to kill me. But I have had God’s help to this very day and so I stand here and testify to small and great alike. I am saying nothing beyond what the prophets and Moses said would happen. And is that the Christ would suffer and as the first to rise from the dead would proclaim light to His own people and to the Gentiles.

Now if we look at the top left-hand portion of the thematic, you will notice that there is a bridge that we are trying to construct. Let us start on the right-hand side of this bridge and there is a square there with the words the grammar of human consciousness. Let us refresh our minds with the definitions that we are using. A grammar is a kind of a rule. It is a set of rules. When we were in our formal education and we were learning about the nature of grammar it was almost exclusively associated with our English courses, wasn’t it? Grammar is applied to linguistics like it can be applied to other things. There’s a grammar that governs the operations of an internal combustion engine. The car that you drive has a grammar. There’s a set of rules that are unwritten that a car follows and that’s why the syntax, or the number of temporal arrangements that occur one right after another in that car, take place. That is why the pistons fire in a certain order. That is a syntax. Or why certain things put in their contribution into the running of that engine at different times. The fuel pump, the cam, the oil pump, the spark plugs, all have their play in this extended syntax. Now something governs the way in which all of those things occur at specific intervals at specific points in the entire process of the firing of this engine. That thing which governs it is a grammar. For all practical purposes it’s an unwritten grammar. But we begin with grammar. We can also speak in terms of the wonderful game of basketball. We are looking at several people out on a court. We see actions taking place. But every action that occurs must occur according to a grammar. Now we can find that grammar in the textbooks or in the rule books that are written regarding the game of basketball. But that’s really a manifestation, an encoding of something and it’s unwritten and unseen. Purely an abstract kind of thing. It is a grammar. It’s a set of rules. Now if somebody grabs a ball and says he is going to punt the ball on the basketball court, now the grammar of the game of basketball, will not allow for that kind of language and will certainly disallow that kind of action. We are talking about rules. Now in this kind of parlance, we are discussing the grammar of human consciousness. There are rules that govern our consciousness. What God has asked is that His rules govern our consciousness. Not the rules that are going to be built on our observational skills or our own capacity to think inductively. We are going to have to get beyond that. Now the other side of the coin, the other side of the gulf here, we have Scripture. Now that is the mind of God. That is the grammar of the Lord and it will determine the lives of people. When the world was created there was a grammar in the mind of the Creator, in the mind of God, and that grammar determined why a bird looks like a bird, why a human being comes to look like a human being, why trees look like trees, and why water behaves the way it behaves. There is a grammar, and that grammar still enforces itself on the rules of physics in the material world in which we live. Scripture is a grammar. It is not everything in that grammar. God has revealed to us only what he wants us to know, and we presume that there is much more about him that we don’t know than that we do. But he does assure us that what we have been told is sufficient in his point of view. So we act on that statement.

Now Paul in the passage that we have discussed talks about the moving between these two polar opposites. That is, the grammar of human consciousness and the grammar of God as it is congealed in the revelation, in scripture. When he says that wherever he went (vs. 20) that he preached that they should repent and turn to God and prove their repentance by their deeds. This is the idea that is embedded there. If we start on the right hand side, it was expected that the grammar of consciousness would yield, would be overcome or overwhelmed by the mentality of God. That it would be overtaken by the revelation of God. That is why he says everywhere I go I preach that they should repent (that’s metanoia, which means a change of our attitudes, a change in the way we think), and turn (epistrepheo, a turning) to God. Earlier we noticed, that in vs. 18 that Jesus in his commission to Paul said, I want you to go and open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light. What is the nature of that turning? We find that it is a metanoia, it is an epistrepheo. (You can consult your lexical aids to discuss for yourselves a little more in-depth the nature of these two words and what they mean). But is a turning from human consciousness from those things that people think make for normalcy, for routineness, and for statistical regularity to that which is revealed by scripture. Moving from darkness to light, or from light to darkness is moving between these two poles—either the grammar in the mind of God or the grammar of human consciousness.

Now when Paul comes to preach what he says is this: The Lord has required that you move, that you make a basic change from an inductive, mental understanding of the universe based on statistical regularity, built on what you think of as the laws of physics and physiology, to something else. What that something else is is the mind of the God. The deduction process that is built on these one-time, non-repeatable events. Paul goes everywhere preaching such things, as he knew God had been doing in the past. The one-time event of the flood is like the one-time event of the resurrection of Christ from the dead—they are both one-time events. We are not going to try to compare them in terms of magnitude, but they are of the same variety. Facing the giant, Goliath, by this young man, David, is like what God is doing in Christ resurrected and him from the dead, and making the same offer, same promise and commitment to all people who turn to him in faith.

Now what is this nature of faith? It is moving from a dependence upon the grammar of human consciousness to the grammar of the mind of God. It is moving, therefore, as well from an inductive mental operation to a set of mental operations that we now see as deduction. If you are preaching somewhere, you can almost nail it down as a foregone conclusion that people are thinking inductively. When we preach these one-time, non-repeatable events and say this is supposed to be the basis of our faith, it is very common that people say that is very true, and then not have the slightest idea of how that is to be done. How do we employ the illustration of Elijah, for instance, in James 5 relative to certain health issues or are those things incredible for us today? Now I submit, that if they are incredible, or unbelievable, or strange things in our language, it is because we think inductively built on the basis of statistical regularity and not deductively, developing our faith from the raw statements contained in the grammar of God that has now been congealed in the scripture. So in order to get from one of those to the other, a metanoia, a repentance is necessarily involved. And an epistrepheo (a turning, a gyration, a rotation on an axis) from one point of view to another point of view, is 180 degree shift.

That is what Paul is staying, everywhere I go, I say that you must repent and you must turn. What does he mean by that statement all-inclusively? Does he mean that they are going to have to stop being Gentiles and are going to have to start being Christians in the sense they must be baptized, attend church, and uphold the validity of certain doctrinal awareness. Is that what makes the church the church? If that is the case, we have to have a basis for that, and there simply is no basis for that if we think in terms of this mental operation called deduction. And if we think deductively, it is only because we allow the scripture the role that it demands for itself as the number one source of representations for life on the biosphere. The word “biosphere” is a very common term used today regarding the nature of earth and all that is included in the earth system. Paul says you have to have metanoia, you have to have epistrepheo. How does one become aware of the necessity of repenting and of turning from the grammar of human consciousness to the scripture? That is brought to our attention through the art, practice, reality or the substance of preaching. Paul went to these places, and he invaded their world space in order to bring that particular message to bear on who they were, what they were, and where they were. It was always the same message. Now, of course, different people responded to it in very different ways.

Originally, Paul was building himself on the grammar of human consciousness. He had been handed all of the traditions that had been developed around Old Testament theology. He was a rabbi, he was a trained theologian, and he was an intellectual. But all of that was built on the grammar of human consciousness. The same is true today. In order for Paul to get over here to the revelation of God, he had to go through this repentance, this metanoia, this change of mind, and this epistrepheo, this turning from one thing to another. Once he got over there, he was then in a position to do what God has instructed him to do, which was to preach—to come back across that gulf that separated his mind (the way he saw reality, and what was going on in his life) and the truth of the gospel that he embraced—to the lives of those people to whom he had been called to preach.

We have polar opposites here. On the side of the grammar of human consciousness, we have Agrippa, Felix, Festus and this group of Jewish accusers who have come forward to try and destroy Paul. He is, of course on the far side of the fence trying to talk to them about the need to looking in an authoritative way to that that has been revealed. These things are not strange things. They should not be viewed as strange or incredible. There are so many promises found in the Bible, both in the Old Testament and in the New that sound absolutely impossible, improbable, insane, and abnormal if we are going to cling to the grammar of human consciousness which operates inductively.

Now I submit that we can go into all different cultures in the world and preach “baptism” and “repentance” in a sense, turning from one set of doctrinal errors to some doctrinal truths and still not witness the change the metanoia and the epistrepheo that are embedded in these verses. People will still think of the promises in scripture, and therefore the use of scripture and these pragmatic exemplars, as a very strange thing. In other words, we could go into places in Latin America, Eastern Europe, or anywhere in the Orient and really not see the turning, the repentance, the changing of the minds of people from one mindset to the other. I know this is the case because of a statement that is made a little further on after Paul has been well into his explanation of who he is and what he is about. If you will look at vs. 24, as Paul makes his defense, he is interrupted. At this point, Festus interrupted Paul’s defense by telling him “you are out of your mind, Paul. Your great learning is driving you insane.” Very interesting case.

What he is talking about is this shift from the grammar of human consciousness, where everything is built on induction and built on statistical regularity, to scripture. He is talking about that kind of a change. Paul is using the words metanoia and epistrepheo. Now here is another word (peritrepo)—you will find it embedded here—and it means a kind of change of condition. You can consult your lexical aids to study it a little bit more in depth. But clearly what is taking place here in the mind of Festus as he considers the implications, the incredible implications of Paul’s statements, in trying to convert Festus, trying to convert Agrippa, trying to convert all those who are present to Christ. He says I want to convert you all. I would like for all of you to be like me, except for being in these chains. He is talking about some kind of shift.

The words, “Paul, your great learning is driving you insane” are talking about a different kind of shift than what Paul has preached and proclaimed (metanoia and epistrepheo). It means a debilitating move from one condition to another. Paul is seen by Festus as someone who has moved from a normal range of considerations to an abnormal range of considerations. By what plight of fantasy, Festus thinks can this man seriously believe that dead people can be resurrected from the dead and that they will on the promise of a Jew who was executed some years earlier for seditious acts. Or at least, viewed by his peers of that day, was ver suspicious. How could be believe that? That is not normal, that is abnormal. So he thinks from his point of view, operating out of the grammar of human consciousness that what Paul is saying built on the revelation of God is absolutely lunacy, insanity, abnormal. Would it not equally apply to us that if we take the great promises that God gives us, both in the Old Testament and the New, and we generalize those to the whole of life because we are acting deductively; and we say the only invariant structure in the universe; the only invariant reality in the universe is the consciousness of the creator, and live on that basis, that we would be inviting the same kind of response? That individuals who believe this way, who have this kind of deductive faith, would be seen by others who are operating from the grammar of statistical regularity as those who are insane. We have jumped off the deep end. We have gone too far. We have crossed boundaries and it is just incredible, or strange, as Paul described in vs. 8.

Or perhaps it is seen as a shift from reason to religion. Today, in technical literature, in philosophy, and in physics, there is the constant put down of the idea of metaphysics. What they mean by that, of course, is a kind of religious pre-assumption or precommitment. A moving from rationality to the radical. You’ve gone too far, you are off the deep end. That is exactly the way saw Paul. Why? They saw him that way because there was a conflict of mindsets.

When we operate on the grammar of human consciousness and the mental operation that by necessity must accompany that, which is induction, we will always think of the statements of scripture as abnormal. For instance in the face of serious illness, are we abnormal to think that what the Lord has promised in the text could come about? That it is true that his consciousness can raise the sick person from off of his bed of illness without benefit of the intervention of the medical arts. Is that a reasonable explanation? Of course, it is not considered reasonable because we don’t have a statistical regularity governing those kinds of things. Now, of course, if we went into the room of sick people and routinely prayed, and then they just got up and walked home, that would be a different matter. I think the reason why we do not have the routine thing occurring there is because God does not honor inductive faith. He honors those who operate deductively. Certainly there are different definitions and different ways in which faith can be defined and can be devised. Paul is discussing the conflict of those faiths.

Or perhaps they say of Paul that he has moved from fact to myth. All of this is included in this phrase, “Paul you are being driven mad by all that you have learned.” Now this brings it down to the real meat of the issue. Are we insane? Are we radical? Are we strange? Are we abnormal? Are we just immature, thoughtless religionists because we want to deductively apply the statements of God embedded in the revelation to all the phases of life?

In the very next verse, Paul makes a strongly formulated reaction or response to the accusation that Festus has made for believing what he is believing, for putting his trust in these things. No statistical regularity can bear this out. By what rationality does Paul believe these things? He says in vs. 25, “I am not insane most excellent Festus. What I am saying is true and reasonable.” That is a reaction that is inspired by the Holy Spirit here. Paul’s belief is that it is true. Belief in what? Belief that what he said, that men must move by means of this metanoia, this epistrepheo, this shift from dependence upon the grammar of human consciousness to the grammar of the consciousness of the creator. He believes that to be true. Now the terminology that he uses here would indicate that Paul believes there is a correspondence. There is an exact fit, if you will, between the words that he has used and the realities with which he deals. That the reason why he is not insane is because the verbal representations that he has made, have a corresponding, tight, and exact fit with the way God governs the universe. It fits, in other words, with the actual facts, with the actual concrete realities.

So one who takes that position does so because he believes in that correspondence. So when we think in terms of the wonderful promises of God and the statements that are made in so many places in the Old Testament and the new, we take them to be true. True in the sense that they correspond, that there is an exact fit between the words and the concrete realities. That creates this triadic structure that we emphasize so often in our taped discussions. Without that correspondence, then there is no truth because truth ultimately becomes a relationship between the representations (the verbal statements that are made) and how they are linked to the world of concrete realities. And he says they are not only truth, they are reasonable. Reasonable in what sense? How could Paul make that statement in the fact of what they are defining as rationality, in fact, in the face of what they think of as true? When someone says this individual was resurrected from the dead, and he is the king of kings and lord of lords, even though he was executed by the Romans at the behest of the Jews and was put to death, has risen to become all powerful in the universe, that is lunacy and something that is just too far for most people to believe. They could not accept the authority of the text. They could not think deductively. But they had to build everything on the basis of human experience. And, correspondingly, human experience is always inductively based.

Paul doesn’t think that so he says it’s quite reasonable. What he means to say is that in the public domain, if people were to think about this and investigate this, it would become imminently understandable, imminently reasonable, if they wanted to consider it from the deductive point of view. Of course, they are not going to do that. His offense is a rather interesting manifestation of the working of the mind of God through the mind of Paul as God defends himself, so to speak, before these men of eminence. The reason that he does this and the reason why Paul has been selected to do this is because God is interested in the salvation and redemption of all men. This is how it must be done. People, who are going to be saved, have to repent. But they don’t just stop doing sinful acts and start doing good deeds, and then consider that to be a completion of the idea of metamoia. It is a change of mindset.

Acts 26 would have a lot of strong implications to offer for such passages that have been elicited from the book of Acts regarding the cases of conversion. Let’s take some of those into consideration. If we were to go to the book of Acts, Chapter 2, then let’s ask ourselves, what was occurring there? When these men, who had been inspired by the Holy Spirit, these apostles, stand up to preach and they do so in all these various languages, this did not make sense, it was not reasonable, it was not a normal kind of manifestation for these people to see. So they said, on the basis of human consciousness and the inductive act, they said well these men are drunk. Now why did they say that? They say that because they had seen other people who had been drunk, so they had a number of cases upon which they might induct. So they took all of the cases that they knew anything about, or had experience of about drunkenness, and they applied it to that particular set of circumstances. That is the inductive act.

Peter says that quite the contrary. This is the fruition of the promise that had been made by God to send the Holy Spirit. Now at that particular point, these people made a shift. Now what accounts for the fact that as this discussion wore on between Peter, the apostles and the crowds gathered there on the day of Pentecost—what leads them—to the conclusion that they need to be baptized when Peter says well this is what you can do in order to escape the retribution of God for your sins. You can be baptized and turn to him.

There is more taking place here. And it is not just below the surface. It is very close to the surface. There is more taking place in Acts 2 than simply a decision to be immersed in water and to join the local congregational apparatus. There is more than that. In order for these people to say yes, I am willing to be baptized, I’m willing to accept Christ at savior, in order for them to do that, they had to go through that same kind of change and turn that Paul himself went through. They had to make the shift from induction (that mental operation) to deduction, which gives the revelation, the scripture, its due. They believed a strange, radical, insane, unreasonable kind of fact. And that was the resurrection of Christ from the dead.

Now one wonders if this is true, (if this bears itself out, and I don’t see why it can’t) what that implies for people who desire to be baptized. Do those who find themselves candidates for baptism, are they the ones who are willing to make this shift. It is often stated that we don’t have to be neither intellectual giants nor theological experts in order to obey the gospel. That is true. But it would also seem obvious from looking at these verses, these chapters, these experiences of others, that the Holy Spirit has deemed fit to record for us, that they had to make a fundamental and basic shift from dependence upon the grammar of human consciousness to the consciousness of the Creator as it is embedded in scripture. I would think that routinely that kind of shift does not occur, when what passes for evangelism among us takes place. We are not interested in challenging the basis of human consciousness, the inductive rationalities that go along with it. We are interested in the confirmation of the prospects to the doctrinal structure that we have outlined for them. Therefore, this shift, I doubt, never takes place. Not in every case, not in every place. But for the most part, I’m tempted to think that that probably is what occurs. And then it doesn’t seem to be an unpredictable or strange thing that in mission churches, we go through the same routine and repeated errors, mistakes, and circumstances. It is because they never escape human consciousness. There were still some things in scripture that they thought very strange and so they were not living with the whole deductive idea of faith.

Another illustration of that would be the agent/patient relationship that we will discuss in an upcoming series or two of tapes from the book of Deuteronomy regarding how it is that scripture relates to us. Now if we operate from the basis of human consciousness with its deductive mental operations upon the scripture, we are letting human consciousness act as the agent upon the scripture as patient. And the patient is always that upon which some force is exerted. What we need to do is to reverse the roles and make scripture the agent (which means deductive mental operates must set in judgment upon human consciousness and inductive operations). That is exactly what occurred in Acts 2 that is exactly what occurred in the case of Paul when he was confronted by the Lord, in the case of Cornelius and certainly the case of the Philippian jailer. So there is a very different picture that is occurring here. Well we’ll leave our study at that particular point. We hope that all of you who are engaged in the pursuit of biblical study are doing well. It is our privilege to be able to bring this tape to you. We certainly purpose ourselves to an extension of these ideas. If there are questions that you have regarding the studies that we have made (and, of course, we cannot answer every question on a tape; or even be able to answer the ones that we think would be most readily occurring in the minds of our hearers. But we try to take some of the objections and bents as much as we can. If we don’t answer a question or if it would be helpful for you to get more input from us, then please let us know. Write back, and we’ll be glad to address ourselves to some of those interesting questions that you may have. That is all for this tape, and we thank you for the time it takes to sit down and listen and mentally run these things through and to think deductively; and to consider the difference between induction and deduction. God bless you and, as always we say, Deo volente, God willing.