Does God Slam Doors Shut?

Transcript Does God Slam Doors Shut?

[Before the discussion starts, details about Reasonable Faith chapters are discussed. The actual podcast discussion, and this transcript, picks up at the 4 minute 34 second mark.]

Kevin Harris: Let’s continue with some questions, Dr. Craig. We get lots of them at ReasonableFaith.org. We like to take some podcast time to answer some of these questions that we don’t get a chance to answer online. This is a good personal question. It says,

Dr. Craig: This is a good personal question, as you say, Kevin. I enjoy talking about these. [1]

I had been teaching seminary at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School for seven years, between 1980 and 1986, in the Philosophy of Religion department. But during my sabbaticals, and during the summers, Jan and I would go back to Europe where we had lived for many years while I was doing my graduate studies to be involved in Christian ministry there. We had learned two European languages as well as English and were equipped with two European doctorates to minister on university campuses in Europe that the normal missionary wouldn’t be able to get as a venue. So we were oddly and unusually equipped, I think, to minster in a European context and were anxious to do so whenever we could. While we were in Europe on sabbatical, the head of Greater Europe Mission and his wife met with us and said, “Bill and Jan, why don’t you leave seminary teaching and come to Europe full time and work with us in ministering on university campuses here?” This really appealed to me, Kevin. It was where my heart lay, and I wanted to do it, but I knew what it meant. It meant I would have to quit teaching seminary and raise literally tens of thousands of dollars in support to move to Europe and maintain a family there. Jan and I had started our family while we were living in Deerfield. Charity and John had come along. I just couldn’t believe God for this. I thought I can’t – I’ve got a family.

Kevin Harris: I can’t get the money.

Dr. Craig: No, I can’t quit teaching and try to raise tens of thousands of dollars every month to go to Europe. I remember Alise Johnson, who was the wife of the head of Greater Europe Mission at that time, looked at me and said, “Bill, if the only reason you are staying at Trinity is financial, why, that’s no reason at all.” That really cut me to the quick, Kevin, because it reminded me of the question that God had used so often in the past to guide Jan and me, namely, if money were no object, what would you really like to do? The Lord had taken us to Birmingham, England, to German to do doctorates there, based upon that kind of radical faith – faith to believe God for his calling and for his provision even though there were no material means of support. I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to go to Europe and to minister in that way. But I just didn’t have the faith to do so.

Well, we went back to Trinity that fall, after my sabbatical, only to discover that the dean of the seminary had decided to close the Philosophy of Religion department. He had terminated the M.A. in Philosophy of Religion degree at Trinity. He felt that this sort of program didn’t really lie at the center of the calling of a seminary and that even apologetics was no longer a useful disciple for the church. So he proposed to shut down the Philosophy of Religion department, and that way save two faculty salaries – Stuart Hackett’s and mine. So I suddenly found myself out of a job. And I felt as though God had just slammed the door shut in our face at Trinity even as he had opened this door in Europe. So I said to Jan, “That’s it. We are going to Europe. This is the leading of God.”

So what we did was the next year we raised support for an entire year while I taught at Westmont College. On our weekends and whenever we could we’d go out and do deputation in churches, interviewing with missions committees and so forth, presenting the vision. In the space of that year we raised the money to go to Europe and to be involved in campus ministry there.

It was so interesting how this finally happened. It was just again divine vindication. We were scheduled to leave for Europe in July of 1987. The school year at Westmont had ended in May. I had exhausted all of my contacts for support raising and we still needed about 300 dollars more per month. And I didn’t know where to turn. Kevin, I was reduced to calling churches in the Yellow Pages and asking them cold turkey if I could have an interview with their missions committee, which proved absolutely fruitless as you can imagine. I didn’t know where we were going to get the remaining money we needed to go to Europe. [2] One day in our house in Santa Barbara, we got a phone call. It was someone from one of the churches at which we interviewed in Ventura, California who had declined to support us. This person was calling to say, “We’ve changed our minds. We decided we do want to support you after all.” I just smiled to myself and I said, “How much?” And he said, “300 dollars a month.”

Kevin Harris: How about that!

Dr. Craig: [laughter] I thought, “Praise you Lord!” This is so much the way God has worked in our lives. As Jan has said, God is always almost late. That has been the recurring pattern in our lives. So with that divine ratification of our calling, we moved in July of 1987 from Westmont and Santa Barbara to Brussels, Belgium where I took up a visiting researcher position at the University of Leuven in Belgium, and began to do my work on divine foreknowledge and human freedom and God and time, and to speak on university campuses all around Western and Eastern Europe as well. So that was the story of how the Lord took us out of full time seminary teaching into the ministry that we, in fact, have today.

If I might just add, I think there is a profound lesson in all of this, Kevin. I would never have moved out of my comfort zone on my own. We were comfortable at Trinity. If they hadn’t closed the department, I would have accepted tenure and gone on teaching there. It was only by being kicked out of the little evangelical pond that we were catapulted into this broader world of scholarship and ministry that we have enjoyed since then and that we continue today through Reasonable Faith. It started because of a seeming disaster.

Kevin Harris: Because it hurts when it happens and you are thinking “God, why me?”

Dr. Craig: Oh, it was very difficult, Kevin. I don’t know how my wife and I would have made it through those trying times if it hadn’t been for Stu Hackett and his wife, Joan. They were just such a comfort to us as we had lost our job and were just sort of thrown out. We felt, of course, rejected by the seminary. We had been there seven years.

Kevin Harris: It is certainly disappointing they would do something so lacking in foresight saying “We don’t need to have a philosophy department in apologetics.”

Dr. Craig: Well, that’s a whole different issue that I don’t want to get into. I think it was shortsighted and a mistake. But from our point of view, it was the left hand of God’s providence, so to speak, taking us through difficult waters, slamming a door in our face, and opening another door that I would not have gone through had not this first door been closed. So as I look back I can thank God for his direction in our lives even though it was through one of the most difficult times we’d been through as a couple.

Kevin Harris: One more thing here. I see what you did as well. You were depending on and believing God for his support and for his provision, yet you were also doing something very depressing. You were going through the Yellow Pages and trying to raise support. You do what my grandfather always said – putting feet to your faith. In other words, you weren’t sitting on the sofa saying “God will provide, God will provide.” There is also an element of work that was going on there.

Dr. Craig: Absolutely. It is not passivity. That is not what trusting the Lord means. It means you trust God to guide you as you step out actively to try to accomplish the goals that he’s called you to. So that was the way in which he provided for us as we aggressively stepped out.

Kevin Harris: Here’s another question – in fact, two questions:

Let me go and answer that – that would be your book Reasonable Faith, the third edition.

Dr. Craig: Well, I’m prejudiced. I think that it is a good place to answer that question. But I would say it is not for the beginner. It is an intermediate level book. I wrote that initially as a seminary textbook. So I don’t recommend Reasonable Faith to beginners. I would say that if someone is just getting started, I would say look at Paul Little’s book Know Why You Believe or Lee Strobel’s books Case for Creator and Case for Christ. These are intro level books for the beginner and yet they are substantive books, too. They are good books. They’ve got good quality material in them. But that would be a good place for the beginner to start. Then he can graduate to an intermediate level book like Reasonable Faith.

Kevin Harris: This second question is: how do you do your quiet times? I want to give some insight on why I think so many of us ask this question. I’ve asked you this question. Other people have asked you this question. How do you do your devotions, Bill? I think, first of all, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to do what we know is expected of us, and that is to be spending time with the Lord in our quiet times – our Q. T. And also we get a lot of pressure from our church leadership and everything to have that quiet time. [3]  So people want to know, “OK, well, how do you do it? How should I do it?”

Dr. Craig: I try to make it a regularly scheduled part of my day that I begin the day with. I find that if I don’t do it first, it just gets squeezed out later on. So I typically will have my devotional time from 5:30 in the morning until 6:30. I get up and for an hour I will first have a time of prayer in which I will pray for myself, and then for Jan, and our children, and then for various needs that we are aware of and for projects or ministries, speaking engagements that are upcoming, and so forth.

Then after that time of prayer, I will read a page from the church fathers. Over the last several years, I have been reading the Anti-Nicene church fathers. I was challenged to do this by reading a sermon by John Wesley, An Address to the Clergy, that he gave where he said that all minsters of the Gospel need to have been familiar with the writings of the church fathers. [4] And I thought I need to do this. So I got this massive multi-volume series called The Anti-Nicene/Nicene/Post-Nicene Fathers. That is to say these are the church fathers that wrote before, during, and after the Council of Nicaea. All I do is read two pages a day. It is not an extraordinary amount. But I just worked through these huge volumes two pages a day. And I’ve completed now something like ten volumes. I’ve done all of the anti-Nicene fathers now and I’m on the volumes of the Nicene fathers. I just started Eusebius’ Church History. Just two pages a day. This is another lesson. Jan and I call this the turtle method, after the famous fable of the tortoise and the hare where you remember the tortoise just plods along, little by little, slowly and steadily, and in the end it’s the tortoise who wins the race rather than the hare who goes in fits and starts. So this turtle method of working, as we call it, is what I’m using in reading the church fathers. Just two pages per day. So I do that after my prayer time.

Then I open the New Testament, and I read a paragraph from the New Testament. I am currently doing it in Greek, to keep up the Greek. I’ll read a paragraph from the New Testament, and then I will read a commentary on that passage. I would recommend for someone who wants to start, take, say, the Gospel of Mark and the commentary on the Gospel of Mark that is written by William Lane – a very similar name to my own, a man with whom I have been confused. William Lane was a wonderful New Testament scholar who wrote a commentary on the Gospel of Mark. It is a wonderful experience to read just a paragraph from Mark and then to read Lane’s commentary on that paragraph. So I will read the Scripture and a commentary.

Then the final thing that I’ll do is to read a page from Operation World about a certain country for that calendar day. Operation World is a missions handbook which has for each calendar day a different country of the world in which the demographics of that country are described, its political system, its economy, and then the state of the church in that country and the needs for that country spiritually. I will pray for the needs of the country of that day. That helps one to have a world consciousness of what God is doing throughout the entire globe.

That will take me very easily an hour of time to do all of that. So that is what I try to do each weekday.

Kevin Harris: Reading the early church fathers has been rewarding to you. The average person maybe who doesn’t have a lot of college or education – are they going to get a lot out of it, some insights there?

Dr. Craig: Maybe not as much. I think it really helps if you’ve had theology courses so that when you come to Tertullian and you read his essay Ad Praxean (Against Praxeas) you really begin to see, “Ah! Here are the first glimmerings of the doctrine of the two natures of Christ – that Christ is truly man and truly God – and how this would eventually become enshrined in the Council of Chalcedon.” So it does really help to have had some theological background so that you appreciate what you are reading.

Kevin Harris: But we really ought to know what they were teaching early, early in church history – all of us. [5]

Dr. Craig: Oh, I think it is very helpful to read these early authors and to understand the development of doctrine. It’s part of understanding the history of doctrine, and it can be very, very rewarding reading people like Tertullian, Athanasius, Origen, and so forth. [6]