Why I Believe (A Psychologists Thoughts On Suffering, Miracles, Science, And Faith) Order Printed Copy

Author: Dr. Henry Cloud
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About the Book

In "Why I Believe," Dr. Henry Cloud, a psychologist, explores his beliefs in suffering, miracles, science, and faith. He examines how his experiences and teachings in psychology have shaped his understanding of these topics and why he ultimately chooses to believe in them. This book offers a unique perspective on faith and spirituality from a psychological point of view.

David Livingstone

"[I am] serving Christ when shooting a buffalo for my men or taking an observation, [even if some] will consider it not sufficiently or even at all missionary." With four theatrical words, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"—words journalist Henry Morton Stanley rehearsed in advance—David Livingstone became immortal. Stanley stayed with Livingstone for five months and then went off to England to write his bestseller, How I Found Livingstone. Livingstone, in the meantime, got lost again—in a swamp literally up to his neck. Within a year and a half, he died in a mud hut, kneeling beside his cot in prayer. Berlin Congress spurs African independent churches The whole civilized world wept. They gave him a 21-gun salute and a hero's funeral among the saints in Westminster Abbey. "Brought by faithful hands over land and sea," his tombstone reads, "David Livingstone: missionary, traveler, philanthropist. For 30 years his life was spent in an unwearied effort to evangelize the native races, to explore the undiscovered secrets, and to abolish the slave trade." He was Mother Teresa, Neil Armstrong, and Abraham Lincoln rolled into one. Highway man At age 25, after a childhood spent working 14 hours a day in a cotton mill, followed by learning in class and on his own, Livingstone was captivated by an appeal for medical missionaries to China. As he trained, however, the door to China was slammed shut by the Opium War. Within six months, he met Robert Moffat, a veteran missionary of southern Africa, who enchanted him with tales of his remote station, glowing in the morning sun with "the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary had been before." For ten years, Livingstone tried to be a conventional missionary in southern Africa. He opened a string of stations in "the regions beyond," where he settled down to station life, teaching school and superintending the garden. After four years of bachelor life, he married his "boss's" daughter, Mary Moffat. From the beginning, Livingstone showed signs of restlessness. After his only convert decided to return to polygamy, Livingstone felt more called than ever to explore. During his first term in South Africa, Livingstone made some of the most prodigious—and most dangerous—explorations of the nineteenth century. His object was to open a "Missionary Road"—"God's Highway," he also called it—1,500 miles north into the interior to bring "Christianity and civilization" to unreached peoples. Explorer for Christ On these early journeys, Livingstone's interpersonal quirks were already apparent. He had the singular inability to get along with other Westerners. He fought with missionaries, fellow explorers, assistants, and (later) his brother Charles. He held grudges for years. He had the temperament of a book-reading loner, emotionally inarticulate except when he exploded with Scottish rage. He held little patience for the attitudes of missionaries with "miserably contracted minds" who had absorbed "the colonial mentality" regarding the natives. When Livingstone spoke out against racial intolerance, white Afrikaners tried to drive him out, burning his station and stealing his animals. He also had problems with the London Missionary Society, who felt that his explorations were distracting him from his missionary work. Throughout his life, however, Livingstone always thought of himself as primarily a missionary, "not a dumpy sort of person with a Bible under his arms, [but someone] serving Christ when shooting a buffalo for my men or taking an observation, [even if some] will consider it not sufficiently or even at all missionary." Though alienated from the whites, the natives loved his common touch, his rough paternalism, and his curiosity. They also thought he might protect them or supply them with guns. More than most Europeans, Livingstone talked to them with respect, Scottish laird to African chief. Some explorers took as many as 150 porters when they traveled; Livingstone traveled with 30 or fewer. On an epic, three-year trip from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean (reputedly the first by a European) Livingstone was introduced to the 1,700-mile-long Zambezi. The river was also home to Victoria Falls, Livingstone's most awe-inspiring discovery. The scene was "so lovely," he later wrote, that it "must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight." Despite its beauty, the Zambezi was a river of human misery. It linked the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, the main suppliers of slaves for Brazil, who in turn sold to Cuba and the United States. Though Livingstone was partially driven by a desire to create a British colony, his primary ambition was to expose the slave trade and cut it off at the source. The strongest weapon in this task, he believed, was Christian commercial civilization. He hoped to replace the "inefficient" slave economy with a capitalist economy: buying and selling goods instead of people. The ill-fated Zambezi expedition After a brief heroic return to England, Livingstone returned to Africa, this time to navigate 1,000 miles up the Zambezi in a brass-and-mahogany steamboat to establish a mission near Victoria Falls. The boat was state-of-the-art technology but proved too frail for the expedition. It leaked horribly after repeatedly running aground on sandbars. Livingstone pushed his men beyond human endurance. When they reached a 30-foot waterfall, he waved his hand, as if to wish it away, and said, "That's not supposed to be there." His wife, who had just given birth to her sixth child, died in 1862 beside the river, only one of several lives claimed on the voyage. Two years later, the British government, which had no interest in "forcing steamers up cataracts," recalled Livingstone and his mission party. A year later, he was on his way back to Africa again, this time leading an expedition sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society and wealthy friends. "I would not consent to go simply as a geographer," he emphasized, but as biographer Tim Jeal wrote, "It would be hard to judge whether the search for the Nile's source or his desire to expose the slave trade was his dominant motive." The source of the Nile was the great geographical puzzle of the day. But more important to Livingstone was the possibility of proving that the Bible was true by tracing the African roots of Judaism and Christianity. For two years he simply disappeared, without a letter or scrap of information. He reported later that he had been so ill he could not even lift a pen, but he was able to read the Bible straight through four times. Livingstone's disappearance fascinated the public as much as Amelia Earhart's a few generations later. When American journalist Henry Stanley found Livingstone, the news exploded in England and America. Papers carried special editions devoted to the famous meeting. In August 1872, in precarious health, Livingstone shook Stanley's hand and set out on his final journey. When Livingstone had arrived in Africa in 1841, it was as exotic as outer space, called the "Dark Continent" and the "White Man's Graveyard." although the Portuguese, Dutch, and English were pushing into the interior, African maps had blank unexplored areas—no roads, no countries, no landmarks. Livingstone helped redraw the maps, exploring what are now a dozen countries, including South Africa, Rwanda, Angola, and the Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire). And he made the West aware of the continuing evil of African slavery, which led to its being eventually outlawed.

God, Make Us Bold About Jesus

It’s been said that the content of a prayer shapes the one who prays it, because we tend to pray what we love, and what we love makes us who we are. And this is not only true of individuals, but of churches too. Like when the early church once prayed, Now, Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus. (Acts 4:29–30) Of all the things they might have prayed — and of all things churches should pray at various times — the fledging church in the early pages of Acts wanted God to give them boldness: “Grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness.” We as twenty-first-century pastors and churches can learn from this first-century prayer, but to do so, we need to first go back one chapter. Words Filled with Jesus The apostles Peter and John were walking to the temple one afternoon when they encountered a lame man. He had been lame from birth. The man was doing what he was always doing: asking for money from people passing by. But on this particular day, something unexpected happened. The man passing by responded, “I have no silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!” (Acts 3:6). In an instant, the man was healed. He leapt up and began to walk. He entered the temple “walking, leaping, and praising God” (Acts 3:8). The scene drew a crowd, so Peter did what Peter was always doing. He preached. His sermon was full of crystal-clear witness to the person and purpose of Jesus. He is the Holy and Righteous One (verse 14), the Author of Life and the one whom God has raised from the dead (verse 15). Jesus is the reason, the only reason, why the lame man was healed (verse 17). Then Peter proceeds to show that the Hebrew Scriptures had long foretold Jesus, from Moses in Deuteronomy and God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis, to all the prophets “from Samuel and those who came after him” (Acts 3:24). It has always been about Jesus, and people’s response, now, must unequivocally be to repent (Acts 3:19, 26). New World Breaking In These Jewish leaders were “greatly annoyed because [Peter and John] were teaching the people and proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection from the dead” (Acts 4:2). The problem wasn’t only that Peter and John were witnessing to Jesus’s own resurrection, but that they were saying Jesus’s resurrection has led to the inbreaking of the resurrection age. As Alan Thompson writes, “In the context of Acts 3–4, Jesus’s resurrection anticipates the general resurrection at the end of the age and makes available now, for all those who place their faith in him, the blessings of the ‘last days’” (The Acts of the Risen Lord Jesus, 79). That, in fact, was what the healing of the lame man was declaring. The new creation had invaded the old. “Jesus is the climax of all of God’s saving purposes, and we cannot ignore this without eternal consequences.” In the resurrection of Jesus, everything has changed. He is the climax of all of God’s saving purposes, and we cannot ignore this without eternal consequences. This message ruffled the feathers of the Jewish leaders, and so they arrested Peter and John and put them on trial for all that happened that day. “By what power or by what name did you do this?” they demanded (Acts 4:7). Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, and again with a crystal-clear witness, says the lame man was healed because of Jesus. Jesus is the Messiah who was crucified and raised, and who was foretold in the Hebrew Scriptures. Specifically, Peter says that Jesus is the stone mentioned in Psalm 118:22, the stone that would be rejected by the builders but then become the cornerstone. The stakes could not be higher. Only in Jesus could one be saved (Acts 4:12). Outdone by Fishermen The Jewish leaders were astonished. They could not reconcile Peter and John’s boldness with the fact that they were “uneducated, common men” (Acts 4:13). These were neither teachers nor even pupils, but fishermen. Fishermen. That agitated the Jewish leaders all the more. These unskilled regular Joes, as it were, had been teaching the people! And now they ventured to interpret the Hebrew Scriptures before these skilled Jewish interpreters, telling them who Jesus was, according to the Scriptures, and who they were, according to the Scriptures. These Jewish leaders saw their “boldness” (Acts 4:13), but this wasn’t merely a reference to their emotional tone. Peter and John’s boldness wasn’t mainly about their zeal or behavior — it was about what they had to say. This kind of boldness is repeatedly connected to speech in Acts, so much so that another way to render “boldness” in many passages would be “to speak freely or openly.” That’s what Peter and John had done. They had spoken clearly, freely, openly, boldly about Jesus from the Hebrew Scriptures — and they had done so under intense intimidation. As they watched this unfold, even the Jewish leaders began to connect some dots. “They recognized that they had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13). So how did these untrained fishermen learn to interpret the Scriptures like that? How could they speak so confidently about the meaning of Scripture when they had never been taught? Well, because they had been taught — by Jesus himself. They had been with Jesus, and so they were unusually bold. They spoke of Jesus clearly, both of his person and work, on the grounds of what the Scriptures say, even when it might have cost them their lives. Voices Lifted Together This is the boldness the church pleads for in Acts 4:29–30. The Jewish leaders had warned and threatened Peter and John to stop talking about Jesus, but eventually they had to release the men from custody. Peter and John went straight to their friends to report what happened. These friends of Peter and John, the nascent church in Jerusalem, “lifted their voices together to God” (Acts 4:24). Their corporate prayer was as rich with the Old Testament’s witness to Jesus as Peter’s sermon was. They knew the person of Jesus. They knew why he had come. And they knew how unpopular this message would be. And what did they pray? They did not pray for articulate positions on the current cultural issues, nor for increased dialogue with those of other faiths, nor for the ability to refute this or that ism, nor for the development of a particularly Christian philosophy or culture (all things we might pray for at certain times in the church). None of these are part of the church’s prayer in Acts 4. Rather, they prayed for boldness to speak the word of God. They asked God to give them the kind of speech Peter and John had modeled — to testify clearly about who Jesus is from the word of God, no matter the cost, as the new creation continues to invade the old. Do our churches ever pray like this today? Do we lack a similar heart? A similar perspective? Or both? And yet our cities need our boldness every bit as much as Jerusalem did in Peter and John’s day. They need the crystal-clear witness of who Jesus is and what he has come to do. Praying for Revival What if the church of Jesus Christ, in all her local manifestations, was marked by a singular passion to know Jesus and make him known? This is the true priority of the church in every age and culture. “The best, most important thing we ever have to say is what we have to say about Jesus.” We are all about Jesus, and the best, most important thing we ever have to say is what we have to say about him. Our failures to live up to this calling are reminders of our need for revival — of our need to plead with God for boldness. Like the early church, may our heart continually beat to testify to Jesus’s glory and to what he demands of the world. Church, this is who we are. Recover it, as needed, and live it out — even though it’s the last thing our society wants to hear from us. Our society wants the church to be “helpful” on society’s terms — what J.I. Packer called the “new gospel,” a substitute for the biblical gospel, in his introduction to Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ. Whereas the chief aim of the biblical gospel is to teach people to worship God, Packer explains, the concern of the substitute only wants to make people feel better. The subject of the biblical gospel is God and his ways; the subject of the substitute is man and the help God offers him. The market demands the substitute, and those who refuse to cater to it are at the risk of being considered irrelevant or worse. Against that mounting pressure, we should pray that we would speak clearly, freely, openly, boldly about Jesus from the Bible, no matter the cost. Would this not be the sign of revival? Would God not answer our prayers like he did for that first church? When they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness. (Acts 4:31) Article by Jonathan Parnell Pastor, Minneapolis, Minnesota