Howard C. Wilkinson - "The Existence of a Personal God" (March 3, 1968)

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-	I would like to make it clear	0:20
	in the beginning of this sermon,	0:22
	that I am not planning	0:26
	for this sermon to go into triple overtime.	0:28
	In fact, because I more or less lived through,	0:36
	triple overtime yesterday,	0:42
	I'm not sure that I shall have voice enough left	0:46
	to go through even the regulation length sermon here today.	0:50
	I do not know which way you will hope about that,	0:56
	but we will leave it uncertain at the moment.	1:00
	On this same theme,	1:04
	let me say that Steve Vandenberg	1:06
	has a wit that is as sharp	1:09
	as his basketball shooting.	1:13
	At a luncheon day before yesterday on Friday,	1:17
	Steve handed me $4 for his membership	1:22
	in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.	1:27
	And you will recall that yesterday afternoon,	1:31
	it was his basket,	1:33
	which put the duke score	1:35
	out of Carolina's reach in the	1:38
	closing seconds of the third overtime.	1:40
	On Steve's way out of the stadium,	1:45
	he spotted me in the crowd,	1:47
	cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled at me,	1:49
	"That's the best $4 I ever spent."	1:53
	(laughing)	1:55
	I would like now to shift from basketball to track	2:02
	for a starting point in the sermon,	2:06
	Joel McClure was a broad jumper and he was a good one.	2:10
	He selected his track shoes with extreme care.	2:15
	The pair he chose this particular year served him well	2:21
	through the winter and the spring practice.	2:25
	They gave him unfailing sure footage security	2:28
	through the dual track meets,	2:33
	through the preliminaries of the conference track meet	2:35
	and even through two of the three final jumps	2:40
	of the championship contention.	2:43
	He was within striking distance of the championship.	2:48
	He made his final run and had measured his stride perfectly.	2:54
	He felt that with one last burst of energy,	3:00
	he could make the winning jump.	3:06
	But on the step before his leap,	3:10
	the string of his jumping shoe broke.	3:15
	At a very crucial moment,	3:21
	a very essential piece of equipment failed.	3:24
	That track shoe string can be a symbol	3:30
	of the clarity of our concept of God	3:35
	and the sign of our relationship to God.	3:40
	Because the time in which we live	3:45
	is crucial and the extreme.	3:48
	Our cities have been torn with riots,	3:52
	and we have just been told	3:55
	that there may very likely be more to come.	3:56
	Our nation is engaged	4:02
	in a fantastically expensive war in Vietnam,	4:04
	which is killing off our sons	4:09
	and dividing the sentiment of America	4:11
	as it has never been divided	4:14
	over a foreign conflict before.	4:16
	Inflation is robbing the savings of our retired people,	4:20
	taking food out of the mouths of the poor.	4:26
	Nuclear weapons are spreading	4:30
	from the United States and Russia to other nations.	4:32
	And mankind stands at the edge of possibly total catastrophe	4:37
	for the first time in history.	4:42
	Just at the moment,	4:46
	when a great forward leap of faith is needed	4:50
	to rescue man from the perils which beset him,	4:56
	the shoestring of faith has broken.	5:01
	Western man has become more confused	5:07
	in his thinking about God	5:11
	than at any previous time in history.	5:15
	And yet his sureness of God	5:18
	is the center of reference.	5:21
	Western civilization today lacks the firmness	5:26
	of theological footing,	5:29
	which is needed to support	5:32
	a mighty forward leap of faith.	5:34
	Now perhaps this morning,	5:38
	we can sketch the dimensions of this confusion	5:40
	and point to some ways by which	5:44
	we can in the coming months work our way	5:47
	to a clear and meaningful faith in God.	5:49
	At this point, let us remind ourselves	5:55
	of what it was at Western civilized man	5:58
	believed about the nature of God	6:03
	before the erosion set in.	6:05
	There've always been a minority of classical atheists,	6:09
	agnostics, DS, pantheists,	6:13
	but the overwhelming majority of Christian man	6:17
	in Western civilization have believed in	6:20
	a divine creator who is personal.	6:24
	Who continues to be active in the universe,	6:29
	which he brought into being.	6:33
	And whose character and whose purpose	6:36
	were revealed by any in Jesus of Nazareth,	6:40
	who is called Christ.	6:44
	Without laboring the point,	6:47
	I should simply mention	6:49
	that until this present generation,	6:51
	it was taken for granted that	6:54
	members and ministers	6:57
	of all churches held to this belief.	6:59
	And that most people outside the church	7:03
	had such an intellectual belief as this as well.	7:07
	Whether their intellectual belief	7:12
	was taken seriously in their lives or not.	7:13
	In the United States for instance,	7:18
	Gallup polls have shown in the past that as high as 97%	7:20
	of the American population acknowledged	7:25
	such a God to exist.	7:28
	However, no honest student of the contemporary scene	7:31
	can say that this situation exists today.	7:38
	In addition to the old line atheist outside the church,	7:43
	we now have new line atheists inside the church	7:48
	who call themselves Christian atheists.	7:52
	In addition to the familiar non-Christian agnostic,	7:57
	we today have a variety of agnostics in the church	8:01
	and some of them are among its leaders.	8:06
	It was reported that at the recent meeting	8:10
	of the national council of the churches of Christ	8:12
	held in Miami beach,	8:15
	a third of the delegates present	8:18
	were unwilling to affirm unqualified belief	8:21
	in a personal God.	8:26
	A Bishop of the church of England,	8:29
	J.T Robinson feels it is time to uproot the notion	8:31
	of a personal God.	8:36
	Other prominent theologians	8:39
	such as Tillich, Van Buren,	8:41
	all Tiser boatmen have dismissed from their thinking	8:42
	the reality of a supernatural God.	8:47
	Well now it would be confusing enough,	8:52
	define church leaders and theologians denying	8:55
	the existence of a personal God	8:58
	If this were the full extent of the confusion.	9:00
	But unhappily it is not.	9:03
	Many of those who reject the notion of God	9:06
	as a divine person nevertheless use the term God,	9:08
	and even spell it with a capital G.	9:13
	What is God?	9:17
	For some of them God is the ground of all being.	9:20
	He is the life force that runs through everything,	9:23
	et cetera, et cetera.	9:27
	For others God is the hungry masses longing for bread.	9:30
	A recent edition of a publication distributed	9:37
	by the ecumenical Institute in Chicago,	9:39
	quoted with approval,	9:43
	a piece written in 1925 by a Marxist	9:44
	could defined God	9:49
	as the rioting looting and burning mops.	9:51
	He did not write that God was at work in that mob	9:59
	or that service to such a mob	10:05
	would be equivalent to serving God.	10:07
	Rather he wrote God, is that mob.	10:11
	No more no less.	10:16
	Well the same thing has happened	10:20
	to our word for God,	10:23
	that has happened to the word barbecue.	10:27
	The word barbecue originally referred to the process	10:31
	of cooking meat in which the entire animal	10:34
	was cooked at once over an open fire.	10:39
	That's what it meant.	10:45
	The word barbecue referred to that and to that alone.	10:48
	However, because certain sauces and spices	10:54
	were sometimes applied to the meat	10:58
	while it was being barbecued	11:01
	and because this meat has	11:04
	sometimes been served in drive in restaurants,	11:06
	one may today find about any kind of meat offering	11:09
	that you can imagine being called barbecue	11:14
	provided it has been artificially flavored,	11:18
	or if it is served out of doors	11:21
	or you may buy it at a drive in restaurant,	11:24
	regardless of how the meat was cooked.	11:27
	So we often find the word barbecue	11:32
	applied to the incidentals rather than	11:35
	to that widget originally described.	11:39
	Same is true of our name	11:44
	for the personal being who created	11:46
	and who creates today.	11:48
	The father of our Lord, Jesus Christ.	11:50
	The name of God is applied to everything	11:53
	all the way from the creator of the universe,	11:55
	to the kitchen sink.	11:57
	It is important that we seek	12:01
	to clarify the meaning of the word. I think.	12:03
	Is it important that we determined whether faith	12:08
	in a personal God is viable today?	12:11
	I believe it is.	12:16
	And I believe that we can see how it is	12:17
	by turning Tennyson's prayer lines around 180 degrees.	12:20
	You will recall that in Marty the author, he wrote	12:29
	"for what are men are men better than sheep or goats	12:33
	that nourish a blind life within the brain	12:37
	If knowing God, they left not hands of prayer."	12:40
	Now, if we were to turn Tennyson's thought	12:50
	exactly around it would read this way	12:55
	"for what are men better than sheep or goats	13:00
	that nourish a blind life within the brain.	13:02
	If lifting hands of prayer, they know not God."	13:05
	Or in other words,	13:14
	when non-theistic theologians	13:17
	and other church leaders conduct	13:20
	services of worship in the church,	13:21
	why do they call the congregation to prayer	13:24
	If they believe there is no God	13:29
	in existence to hear the prayer.	13:32
	And yet we find that strange phenomenon happening.	13:36
	Is not such a procedure in very truth,	13:42
	that nourishing of a blind life within the brain?	13:46
	Without spending more time on those considerations,	13:52
	let us now move to a consideration of the idea	13:55
	of the existence of a personal God.	13:59
	How do we know God is a person?	14:02
	Well, perhaps in a certain sense,	14:07
	we do not know it.	14:09
	However we can infer	14:13
	the person who'd have got	14:16
	in the same way we infer the personhood of man.	14:18
	That is by what he does.	14:22
	If we were to find ourselves shipwrecked	14:26
	on a small island in the south Pacific,	14:28
	not a bad idea these cold days.	14:32
	And if we were to set out	14:36
	to discover whether the island	14:37
	were inhabited by persons,	14:38
	we would look for telltale evidences	14:42
	of activities which only man could enterprise.	14:46
	If on the beach we came upon the skeleton	14:53
	of a partially devoured fish,	14:56
	this could be the work either	14:58
	of an animal or a man.	15:00
	So this would not be conclusive evidence	15:03
	of man on the island.	15:06
	But if we were to come up on a thatched hut	15:11
	with a rack of fish meat drying in the sun	15:14
	and with cold smoldering, underneath a pot,	15:17
	most of us would conclude	15:21
	that human intelligence was at work on the island.	15:23
	While this would perhaps not constitute positive proof	15:29
	of man's inhabitants of the island,	15:32
	we could reasonably infer it.	15:35
	The exact same situation prevails in the universe	15:40
	while there will never be positive proof	15:46
	for a man who refuses to be convinced	15:49
	until he has seen a bearded Santa Claus type	15:53
	fleshly figure arresting one foot on Mars	15:56
	and the other on Jupiter.	15:59
	Those who can appreciate the signs of intelligence	16:01
	at work in a vast universe and in the world,	16:03
	will believe there is reasonable evidence	16:08
	for faith to build an assurance of things hoped for	16:10
	and to proceed from a conviction of things not seen.	16:14
	While of course we humans are in some	16:20
	significant sense flesh.	16:22
	We can believe that as persons,	16:25
	we are also demonstrably spiritual as well.	16:26
	Therefore it seems in escapable	16:30
	that the atheist who insists	16:33
	there cannot be a personal God	16:35
	because we have not caught	16:37
	his physical body in any of our telescopes,	16:39
	he is raising an unnecessary barrier in his logic	16:43
	and he's reasoning in contradiction	16:48
	to our experience with the personal existence of man.	16:50
	Of course it's understandably difficult for some	16:56
	to comprehend how God can exist as a person	17:00
	without a physical body.	17:03
	That's granted.	17:06
	Some do not have the ability	17:08
	or the imagination to visualize	17:10
	what Jesus meant	17:12
	when he declared that God is a spirit.	17:13
	And there's a real sense	17:17
	in which I am not able completely	17:18
	to conceptualize or visualize this.	17:19
	'Cause when you visualize something,	17:22
	you're visualizing things in the material world.	17:24
	And by definition, Jesus said,	17:27
	God is not the material world. He is spirit.	17:29
	But perhaps one way to conceptualize	17:33
	what admittedly is a mystery,	17:35
	is to commence with the hypothesis	17:37
	that man too is a spirit.	17:40
	Indeed this is clearly the teaching	17:46
	of the new Testament and of all	17:48
	the central theological thought	17:49
	of the Christian Church.	17:51
	From new Testament times until our own time.	17:54
	Assuming that man is in his deepest	17:59
	and most personal sense of spirit,	18:03
	how can we conceptualize this?	18:06
	Okay, one way is to show	18:11
	that the person hood of the man	18:16
	is something which transcends his physical body.	18:19
	A few years ago,	18:27
	the president of the Duke Chapel Choir	18:28
	was a young student	18:30
	by the name of checked Mater's head	18:32
	Some of you will remember him.	18:34
	After he graduated from Duke,	18:37
	he went into the armed forces	18:40
	and while he was overseas,	18:42
	there was a horrible accident,	18:45
	which resulted in the necessity	18:48
	of both of Chet's legs,	18:51
	being amputated as high as possible on his body.	18:54
	But the personality and the personhood	19:03
	of Chet Mottershead I know by personal experience	19:08
	is as fully intact as when he had two good legs	19:14
	and saying in this choir.	19:21
	He is the same person.	19:24
	Though much of his physical body has been cut away.	19:27
	Two months ago in South Africa,	19:32
	Dr. Christian Barnard transplanted	19:35
	the blood pumping organ from	19:39
	a dead man into the body of a dying man.	19:41
	The dying man lived.	19:45
	And now, two months later, members of the family	19:48
	of the patient Philip Boulevard has been unable	19:52
	to detect any change at all	19:56
	in the person of the man with a new heart.	19:59
	Without legs, with a different heart,	20:07
	with all kinds of physical changes, the same person.	20:13
	So, that even in the case of finite personhood,	20:18
	when we can see a physical body through	20:22
	which the spiritual person functions,	20:25
	it is possible to conceptualize a real person	20:27
	who is not dependent for his personhood	20:33
	upon the various organs of the body	20:35
	and who has a personhood which transcends them.	20:39
	How much more possible is it therefore,	20:45
	for a divine person of infinite spirit	20:48
	to exist without a physical body	20:50
	that can be seen in a telescope.	20:52
	On the Russian cosmonaut	20:56
	God in his spaceship and circled the earth,	20:58
	he returned to earth and announced	21:00
	that he found it just as he expected to find it.	21:03
	A universe empty of God.	21:06
	The Christian could agree that he found it just	21:10
	as he the Christian would have expected also.	21:15
	Well during the past 1900 years,	21:19
	Christians have understood that God is spirit	21:21
	and theistic Christians would have	21:25
	been as surprised as the Russian cosmonaut.	21:27
	Had he found a visible god out there.	21:32
	Well, next,	21:40
	some people have argued that it is meaningless	21:41
	to talk about a personal God on account of the fact,	21:44
	we're not even sure what human personality is	21:50
	\|granted or not.	21:54
	But to raise this objection from a parallel	21:58
	is to ignore the implications of the parallel itself.	22:00
	True, we are not certain exactly what human personality is,	22:05
	but does that keep us from talking	22:08
	meaningfully about it and from relating	22:11
	to other personalities,	22:13
	the essence of which we are unable to define.	22:16
	Most of us simply agree with the cart that (indistinct).	22:20
	I think therefore, I exist	22:27
	and proceeded to describe	22:31
	the ways in which human personality functions,	22:33
	whatever the essence of it may turn out to be.	22:35
	And a man of Christian faith applies	22:39
	the Cartesian formula to God	22:41
	and assumes that since God has revealed	22:43
	his thoughts to man, he exists.	22:45
	Moreover, even as psychology delineates	22:49
	the ways by which human personality functions.	22:51
	So theology,	22:55
	delineates the ways by which the man of faith	22:56
	has observed the divine person to function.	22:58
	Therefore, unless we are simply predetermined	23:02
	to be permanently uptight with epistemology	23:08
	and semantics in our thought about God	23:11
	when we are not this way about anything else,	23:13
	there is no reason why an open-minded individual	23:17
	may not legitimately and logically entertain	23:21
	the possibility of a personal relationship	23:24
	between a human person and a divine person.	23:28
	Well, to say just one short word	23:34
	about the use of the term God,	23:36
	to apply to the foundation of life,	23:38
	the ground of being and all that,	23:40
	let me express the belief that both clarity of thought	23:43
	and the interests of faith are better served	23:48
	when we use words in the sense	23:52
	they have always been understood	23:54
	rather than using them in such a way	23:58
	as to spread confusion of meaning.	24:00
	Any day,	24:04
	I would rather talk with an honest atheist	24:05
	than with a man who uses the word God	24:08
	to mean only what he himself is willing	24:10
	for that word privately to mean.	24:13
	Picture a house if you will.	24:18
	There's two young sisters in bed,	24:21
	in their bedroom at 10 o'clock at night.	24:24
	One of them asks the other,	24:28
	If there is a father in the master bedroom of the home,	24:31
	she replies that she doesn't know for certain.	24:36
	And they discuss the matter back and forth	24:38
	and finally they agree	24:40
	that since neither one of them had seen him	24:42
	before they went to bed,	24:44
	they won't assume that they have a father.	24:45
	That's all right.	24:50
	One of them finally volunteers,	24:51
	we do indeed have a father, the floor of the house,	24:53
	the foundation underneath it and the roof overhead.	24:56
	These are our father.	24:58
	Well, one might raise questions	25:03
	about the confusion which such talk creates	25:06
	in the realm of semantics.	25:09
	One could even question the honesty	25:11
	of the use of words which have a clear meaning	25:13
	being applied to realities with a different meaning.	25:16
	But the point which would tower above every	25:19
	other consideration in that situation,	25:21
	would be that the very effort	25:26
	of those children to assign the term father	25:27
	to something in their universe,	25:30
	eloquently proclaims their empirical hunger	25:33
	for a personal father.	25:37
	"As the deer pants for the water brook," said the Psalmist,	25:39
	"So my soul cries out for Thee, O God."	25:44
	The attempts which have been made	25:49
	in the current generation to assign the term God,	25:50
	to everything from the ring around Saturn	25:54
	to the basement furnace,	25:56
	do indeed be speak man's need for the living God.	25:58
	Augustine's famous words take on a new significance	26:03
	in the letter, "Half of the 20th Century"	26:07
	"Thou hast made us for thyself,	26:10
	and our hearts are restless until	26:13
	they finds their rest in thee."	26:15
	Fritz Buri has recently written a monograph entitled,	26:20
	"How Can We Still Speak Responsibly of God?"	26:23
	He concludes that very interesting monograph	26:28
	published in one of our seminary journals,	26:31
	by saying that,	26:34
	"Responsible discourse about God	26:35
	is a discourse about God which arises in	26:40
	and gives evidence of a discourse with God."	26:44
	This leads us to a fresh understanding	26:51
	of the high priestly prayer of Jesus.	26:53
	A portion of which was read	26:55
	as our scripture lesson this morning.	26:57
	"Christ argued no doctrine of a personal God	27:00
	rather he prayed a doctrine of a personal God."	27:03
	Read again,	27:07
	the entirety of John 17	27:08
	from that standpoint and watch the wording.	27:10
	You will be impressed with the intentionally	27:13
	personal element in Christ talk about God.	27:17
	Perhaps, if we will think carefully	27:23
	and clearly about God	27:25
	and if we will have discourse with God,	27:29
	we can recapture a firmness in our spiritual footing,	27:32
	which will enable us to make the great leap of faith,	27:37
	which are times demand of us.	27:42
	Let us pray.	27:46
	Oh God, our personal heavenly father,	27:48
	some of us in this chapel	27:52
	have our earthly fathers seated beside us.	27:53
	And we are aware of them and we know them as persons	27:57
	and we have a relationship to them.	28:00
	Sometimes there is tension between us.	28:03
	Sometimes there is judgment and at other times,	28:06
	forgiveness and love	28:09
	and understanding and acceptance,	28:10
	but always we have this relationship.	28:13
	All of us,	28:18
	whether our human fathers are here with us or not,	28:19
	look to Thee now as our heavenly father to be beside us.	28:24
	Sometimes we are under the eye judgment.	28:28
	Sometimes we are judged harshly and sternly and rightly.	28:31
	Then in contrition, we come to Thee and ask	28:37
	for the relationship to be restored.	28:40
	And that us forgive us.	28:43
	Help us to be more sure of thy presence,	28:45
	to be more clear in our thinking about Thee	28:49
	and more responsive to thy I approach to us.	28:51
	We asked this in the name of Him	28:57
	who has said to us that when we have seen him,	28:59
	we have seen the even Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.	29:03
	(piano music)	29:11

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Title:

Howard C. Wilkinson - "The Existence of a Personal God" (March 3, 1968)

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https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4g15zc43

Date:

March 3, 1968

Speaker:

Wilkinson, Howard C.

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Duke University. Chapel

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UA.17.01.0003 RR-0420
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duke:628335
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ark:/87924/r4g15zc43
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Howard C. Wilkinson - "The Existence of a Personal God" (March 3, 1968)

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