Does God Still Speak To Us?

KEVIN HARRIS: Dr. Craig, she later apologized, but The View co-host Joy Behar really stirred up a dustbin when she said that Mike Pence, the Vice President, implied that he was not all there. She says it is okay to talk to Jesus, but if Jesus talks back then that is the definition of insanity. Obviously this blew up, and the media are making a big deal of this. She apologized to him; she called. And, as I understand, she has made a public apology as well. The View is watched by millions of people. It is quite influential, and it is quite liberal, I would say. They try to balance it out between the conservatives and the liberals. For her to say this brings up theological and biblical questions.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, I think you are right. Even though Vice President Pence is a fellow Christian like myself, my sympathies here are with Joy Behar. I think she has been really misrepresented in the media as to what she said, and I don't think Pence's response to her was at all to the point. In fact, I find Pence's response to be the sort of typical politician’s statement where you misrepresent what your opponent said and then you get your back up and get all huffy and offended about what was said when in fact the original statement wasn't at all what it was represented as being.

KEVIN HARRIS: This is what she said. It is one thing to talk to Jesus. It is another thing when Jesus talks to you. That is called mental illness if I am not correct. Hearing voices.

DR. CRAIG: Right. So what she was complaining about was Pence's claim that Christ told him to do something or that God told him to do something. She says he is hearing voices and that is like mental illness. So Pence responds by saying, To have ABC maintain a broadcast forum that compared Christianity to mental illness is just wrong. Did she compare Christianity to mental illness? Of course not. Not at all. What she compared to mental illness was hearing voices, hearing God talk to you. Pence didn't respond to that criticism. I was waiting to hear him say something about what he really meant when he said that God spoke to him and told him to do this or that. I was waiting for a relevant response. He didn't give it. Instead what he did was simply exploit the situation politically to make her look bad and to get all huffy about it and make it look like Christians were under attack in the media. Frankly, I am surprised that she apologized for her comments because her comments were not at all an attack upon Christianity or even insulting to Christians. I am not insulted by what she said. I think that what is going on here is that she misunderstood Christian lingo. You and I both know that there is a kind of Christian-speak where people say things like, The Lord told me that I really need to share Christ with my neighbor. Or, The Lord told me that I should go on this mission trip. He spoke to me in my devotional reading this morning and told me that I should give to this particular Christian cause. What Christians mean by that is not that they heard voices in their head like some sort of schizophrenic. That would be like mental illness. But rather that they had a kind of deep impression that this is what they ought to do, an impression that they think God had given them. That is what Pence should have explained – that this is just an idiom. It is a way that Christians often talk that isn't meant to be construed literally as hearing voices. That would have completely defused the controversy.[1] Instead he chose to inflame it by saying that she compared Christianity to mental illness. I tell you, I am so discouraged when I hear this kind of political speech going on and this sort of misrepresentation in the media. It just makes me despair of the media ever getting things accurate instead of spinning them and twisting things around to put them in a particular direction.

KEVIN HARRIS: I really agree. We ought to be a little more sophisticated in our theology on what we mean when we say God spoke to me. I have always complained about that because it is so fuzzy in so many ways. It means, generally, I think God may be indicating something here, but not this divine revelation and not special revelation that would probably put you on the floor if you received it.

DR. CRAIG: This isn't to deny that there may be extraordinary occasions where someone does hear a sort of audible voice in his head and says this is from God. But for the most part, I mean the vast, vast majority of the cases, this is just Christian-speak.

KEVIN HARRIS: We don't want to limit God, but there is what? What would you say? Would you say there is a kind of normative way of dealing with God's guidance and the impressions of the Holy Spirit? There is a normative way, but then there would also be . . . there has been interventions in history. God can certainly do what he wants.

DR. CRAIG: Right, I agree with you. It is precisely for this reason I don't use this kind of language because I think it is so misleading and is apt to be misunderstood. It is better to say something like this. I feel that God is leading me to do this.

KEVIN HARRIS: Or, I think this is what I'm supposed to do.

DR. CRAIG: So Pence could have, if he wanted to, criticized Behar by saying this shows how out of touch these media elite are with the average Christian. They don't understand the Christian subculture and the way Christians talk. This shows simply how out of touch they are with where the average Christian is. That would be a significant critique in and of itself, that she misunderstood this idiom. But instead of defending his expression, he launches this other attack on her as though they were anti-Christian.

KEVIN HARRIS: Obviously non-Christians, and even probably most Christians, would blanche at someone saying in public office, God has told me that we need to cut taxes or something along the lines of that. When you start saying, I am going to legislate by divine revelation . . . Now, every President has prayed for guidance, prayed for wisdom, which the Bible says seek time and time again, but we are not in a theocracy where you are getting this direct revelation from God. I wouldn't want anybody saying that.

DR. CRAIG: No! I wouldn't either.

KEVIN HARRIS: If Trump came on TV right now and said that I would say, No!

DR. CRAIG: I would feel pretty uncomfortable. That's right. I thought it was ironic that shortly after this brouhaha Oprah goes on television saying something about she is listening to whether God is going to tell her to run for President or not, speaking in exactly the same way that was so criticized by her cohorts on the left.

KEVIN HARRIS: Oprah, this is the Lord – no!  [laughter]

We throw you a curve ball. This just happened in Texas, January 19th. The Austin-American-Statesman reporting[2] that a Texas judge who is a district judge in Comal County down in the Austin area said God told him to intervene in jury deliberations that the woman on trial was innocent. He sent a message. He interrupted the jury and sent a message: God just told me that she is innocent. The jury rejected this and found her guilty.

DR. CRAIG: Really?[3]

KEVIN HARRIS: “Judge Jack Robison apologized to jurors for the interruption, but defended his actions by telling them ‘when God tells me I gotta do something, I gotta do it.’” You see the precedent being set here.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, indeed!

KEVIN HARRIS: He eventually recused himself from the sentencing aspect of it. This is a woman who was on trial accused of trafficking a teen girl for sex. This may bring up disciplinary action from the State Commission on Judicial Conduct to him. It hasn't happened yet as of this podcast but he certainly may have gotten himself in trouble even with the commission on ethics. You see how problematic that is?

DR. CRAIG: The dangers here are just manifest.

KEVIN HARRIS: It is so unwise to say that even if you thought it. Don't you see how it could be misunderstood?

DR. CRAIG: You would think so. How could he be so stupid as to say that rather than simply saying, Given my authority as the presiding judge I intervene in this situation and I think she is innocent. Judges can annul jury verdicts when they think that the jury has made a wrong decision but he ought not to list that as his means of knowing it or the basis of his decision.

KEVIN HARRIS: There could have been a mistrial here. In fact, the defendant's attorney asked for one but that was denied. I thought I would combine those two together to show that we need to be precise in our language and present what we mean in a more intelligent way.

DR. CRAIG: That's right. And to represent fairly those that we criticize rather than exploiting the situation in an effort simply to gain points and make them look bad.[4]