Some years ago, Dr. Gordon Marino, the ethicist, wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Before Teaching Ethics, Stop Kidding Yourself”.
In this article, Marino complained of the cottage industry of posers and pseudo-experts we have today who dispense advice to us about how we ought to conduct our moral lives. Ethics, he argued, are not so much a matter of specialized knowledge as of ordinary people doing what they already knew to do.
If you’ve been involved in many home Bible studies over the years, you have probably noticed that no two Christians read a verse or passage of scripture precisely the same way, draw the same conclusions from it, or see the same significance to it. The worst ideas you’ll hear are way out in left field or obviously wrong, pulled out of the air by people who likely haven’t read the passage more than once. The best of them correct you where you may have erred, or supplement your own understanding with nuances you may have missed.
Maturity, experience, gift, intellect and Bible study habits all factor into the differences. Whenever you ask folks what they think about a scripture, be prepared for an earful.
Men and women discuss their differences of opinion … well, differently.
Unless a woman is completely out of control, she will generally pepper her assertions with endless qualifications, disclaimers and occasional flattery. These allow her to walk back any criticism not well received. Men frequently just go at it hammer and tongs with little concern whether the other party finds it hurtful or offensive. We are trying to get at the truth, and we are often too careless of both feelings and fine detail in the process.
In our favor, we are not generally mealy mouthed.
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“Should Christians spank their children?”
I have experienced spanking from both ends. (Sorry.)
I have regularly spanked three children throughout their formative years, and maintain loving and mutually-beneficial relationships with each one to this day. I have also received the occasional judicious and quite necessary whack from a loving and reluctant parent during the lengthy period it took me to grow to maturity.
Both ways, spanking worked. I regret nothing.
“I went up … in order to make sure I was not running or had not run in vain.”
In the first two chapters of his earliest letter, the apostle Paul is concerned to establish the credentials of his gospel. The background: in Paul’s absence, religious Jews were encouraging the young Christians from the churches in Galatia to supplement their faith with vestiges of the now-obsolete Law of Moses. Paul recounts how, fourteen years after his first and only post-conversion visit to the birthplace of the Christian faith, he had chosen to return to Jerusalem once again. He also tells them why.
He wanted to make sure he “had not run in vain”.
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We have been examining the third and final appearance of the angel of the Lord in the book of Judges. In chapter 2, he rebuked Israel for its disobedience, setting the stage for both the judgments he would inflict on the nation throughout the book and the repeated miraculous deliverances these punishments would necessitate. In chapter 6, he appeared to Gideon, causing him to fear for his life. In this chapter, he appears to the woman who would shortly become Samson’s mother, and to her husband Manoah.
Manoah’s wife described the angel of the Lord as “very awesome”. She and her husband were shortly to discover he was much more than that.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
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Increasingly, studies like this one point to the strong possibility that a strictly vegan diet might actually be the healthiest for human beings, and that even consuming a small amount of meat in our diet is sufficient to increase our chances of diabetes, among other things.
These studies may well be accurate (though, as with all assertions of the scientific community these days, I tend to reserve judgment until we see all the consequences of a purely vegan diet in a representative sample of the human population over a generation or two). But for the sake of argument, let’s give these studies the benefit of the doubt and assume they represent truth and not simply another scientific boondoggle.
Tom: So, the obvious question ...
If you pop around on the Internet for very long, you’ll find that one of the most common screeds against Christians is that we hate science.
I don’t think it’s true, of course, but it does seem a rather general perception among our detractors. They think we see in science a direct threat to our beliefs; and since science undeniably does many good things for us, secularists of various kinds have a duty to deprive us of our illusions in this regard. We will thank them later: or if we do not, it will only be because we couldn’t be helped.
Doug Wilson is currently working his way through the book of Acts every Saturday on his blog. This week he’s in chapter 21, noting that as the apostle Paul made his way toward Jerusalem, he received prophetic warnings in every city to which he traveled concerning what would happen to him there.
That sort of thing happened often in the first century. If it happens at all in the twenty-first, it does so almost exclusively in Charismatic circles.
“He also measured its wall, 144 cubits by human measurement, which is also an angel’s measurement.”
John makes this observation in the second-last chapter of our Bibles, amidst visions of a new heaven and new earth, complete with the holy city coming down out of heaven from God. This is where we find the famous line about how God will wipe away every tear from the eyes of his people, and there will be no mourning, crying or pain. Believers all long to realize these visions of the future; they really, really matter, and the chapter contains many more statements equally significant to the remedy of the human condition and our final destination.
In such a context, why would we care if human beings and angels use the same measurement system? Can such an observation be anything more than comparative trivia?
Perhaps. Indulge me, if you will.
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“What does the command to ‘fill the earth and subdue it’ entail?”
Today’s question is a reference to Genesis 1:28, in which God told our distant ancestors, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” He gave Noah and his sons a similar mandate after the flood: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered.”
Relatively mature Christians have absorbed an abundance of important principles from scripture. Sadly, we don’t always apply them as effectively or comprehensively as we might. At least, I don’t.
The limitations of human memory in a fallen world are such that we are constantly relearning things we already know. For me, this week’s “Oh yeah” moment was a conversation with my brother about our dad, and a reminder that the Lord put us together in one Body by his Spirit for many reasons.
One good reason: iron sharpens iron. We help each other understand the Bible. You will always see things I don’t, and vice versa.
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Judges is a grim book. It shows fallen man the way he truly is, even when favored with a level of access to divine revelation that many nations never experienced. Few of its chapters are consistently uplifting or their positive aspects unmitigated by reminders of human wickedness and fallibility. Jephthah’s story, which we have just finished, mingled God-given victory with bad judgment, betrayal and brother-against-brother violence. Our final judge’s life was a notorious mess, and the book gets even bleaker from there.
In between, chapter 13 is a brief, cheery respite from the darkness. From verse 2 on, it’s all wonderful, including a rare pre-incarnate glimpse of Christ himself.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tom: Clint Bryan at Christianity Today has a post up about something called the Hillsong Church. I’ve heard the name and vaguely associate it with religious music and the “worship team”-style presentation, but I know very little about the Hillsong phenomenon, and I don’t think I could hum even a single one of what Mr. Bryan says are very hummable tunes. If you tell me that’s a not-very-subtle indication I’m not exactly at the nexus of mainstream evangelicalism, IC, I suppose I’ll have to take the rebuke with grace, but I thought maybe we could talk about Mr. Bryan’s article since it touches on a subject you’ve written about a fair bit.
Immanuel Can: Yep, okay. Where do you want to start, Tom?