Anonymous Asks (361)

“Does marriage hinder your relationship with God?”

Hmm, I suspect somebody has been reading 1 Corinthians 7. “Those who marry will have worldly troubles.” “The married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided.” “The married woman is anxious about worldly things, how to please her husband.” “I want you to be free from anxieties.”

If the apostle Paul is correct — and several decades of observation strongly suggest to me that he is — then, yes, it’s certainly possible that any given marriage can become an impediment to one’s service for the Lord, peppering life with distractions and putting you in the position of trying to serve two masters, which we know is impossible. I don’t believe it has to, but it can.

Milking a Metaphor

I wrapped up Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections the day before yesterday, and I should probably comment on its final few chapters while they are still fresh in my mind.

This book has been a stimulating read from many different angles. The posts it has generated vary as wildly in subject matter — eschatology, authenticity, assurance, the witness of the Holy Spirit and the distinction between natural and moral perfections — as they vary in my level of agreement with Edwards’ observations and assertions.

I’m fine with that. A good, solid, biblical disagreement concentrates the mind better than indifferent assent.

No King in Israel (14)

The angel of the Lord called Gideon a mighty man of valor. Considering that he said it to a man hiding from the Midianites in a winepress, perhaps he meant it tongue in cheek. Then again, many centuries later he would make Simon the coward into a rock and Saul the persecutor of Christians into the foremost teacher and prophet in Christian history. The Lord’s choices invariably appear counterintuitive by human standards.

But even mighty men of valor are not invulnerable. Many have fallen before their time. The key to Gideon’s success was this: the Lord sent him, and the Lord promised to be with him. That’s all God’s servants ever need.

Too Hot to Handle: Religious Freedom, Limited

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

The Independent reports that Belgium’s Walloon region is the latest territory to ban kosher and halal meats. Denmark, Switzerland and New Zealand all got there first, in each case turning a deaf ear to the protests of Jewish and Islamic minorities.

Tom: That’s fine with me. We’ve already established in the U.S. and Canada that there are reasonable limits on religious freedoms, though these have been applied more frequently (and certainly more visibly) against Christians than against religious minorities recently.

Relativism: Facts, Foolishness and Faith

“Philip found Nathanael and said to him, ‘We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and also the Prophets wrote — Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.’ Nathanael said to him, ‘Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’ ”

In my last post, I talked about relativism. I pointed out that there are two kinds — epistemic relativism and moral relativism — and that they need separate treatment, because they deal with very different issues. Then I started with epistemic relativism, the doubting of the existence of any facts, and showed how it is completely irrational.

The New Testament Church

Thanks to the minor miracle of digitization, I have been listening to a series of 40-plus year old sermons my father preached to a congregation that had just moved into its own building, and in which there were at least a dozen recent converts to the faith. Also present were no small number of believers whose church experiences had been defined by the traditions of several different denominational backgrounds.

A disparate bunch indeed.

All Heat No Light

Sometimes the difference between making yourself clearly understood and leaving yourself open to wild misinterpretation can be measured in minutes.

Picture this. You’re on social media last week checking out the feeds of a couple of evangelicals you follow, and you come across this exchange:

Do you assume Doug Wilson is urging Americans to go to war with Iran in solidarity with Israel? Maybe.

Anonymous Asks (360)

“Should Bible translations use gender-inclusive language?”

It’s axiomatic that God has poured out his love to both sexes. He sent his Son into the world to die for men and women alike. Women were prominent in serving and caring for the Lord Jesus. They were prominent at the cross, when many of the Lord’s male disciples ran away. They were certainly visible and active at the tomb of the Lord Jesus, and were first to declare he had risen from the dead.

Still, the Bible is written in the language of its time, and the pronouns and nouns in our English translations do not always reflect the theological realities behind them.

Natural and Moral

I usually blow through books like the west wind. Not so with Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections, which I began back in February of this year, and which I continue to labor with. Four months later, I’m not even halfway through it. For me, that’s an appalling performance.

That confessed, I simply can’t go any faster. I keep running into ideas I have to stop, meditate on, and (often) write about. Here’s another I think is worthwhile.

A Sharp Distinction

Edwards draws a sharp distinction between what he calls God’s “natural perfections” and his “moral perfections”. In the former category, he includes power, knowledge, eternity and immutability, among others; in the latter, justice, righteousness, truth, goodness, grace, and the like, which he sums up in the word “holiness”. He then observes that unregenerate men and women may be able to appreciate the former divine perfections but not the latter. He concludes that a love for the divine due to its moral beauty and sweetness is the starting point and source of all holy emotions.

No King in Israel (13)

How would you feel if you had just seen God and escaped alive?

The modern believer has difficulty putting himself in the sandals of an oppressed Israelite whose family worshiped Baal, and whose only impressions of the God of Israel came from oral history: of his nation’s deliverance from Egyptian slavery, its sojourn in the wilderness and its miraculous conquest of Canaan. Gideon had stories of wonderful deeds recounted by the elders of his people. Meanwhile, Christians thousands of years later are habituated to platform messages in which the word “Abba” is alleged to give us license to crawl into Daddy’s lap for a good cuddle.

Ugh. It’s a frivolous and childish view of God, and it’s not the least bit like what Gideon experienced when the angel of the Lord appeared to him.

Too Hot to Handle: The Unfair Advantage of a Loving Family

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Yes, Leftism is just plain goofy.

Philosophers Adam Swift and Harry Brighouse are deeply concerned about the nuclear family.

What happens, worries Swift, when loving your child makes for an uneven playing field for those without equally devoted parents?

The difference between the solution you or I might propose and the one the political Left proposes is that Adam and Harry would prefer to bring us all down to the lowest common denominator rather than aspire to anything inherently more desirable.

Tolerance and Relativism

“What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.”

So wrote Sir Francis Bacon, the father of the scientific method. The man was not just a scientist, but a devout Christian as well. For him, the two were of a piece — truth in scientific inquiry was a road to knowledge of the Creator. So he wrote as much theology as science, and he stands as but one evidence of the long interaction between Christianity and scientific advancement.

In his 1601 essay “Of Truth”, he pointed out the embarrassing relativism of Pilate’s attitude. Pontius Pilate was standing next to the very One who could tell him definitively any truth he wished to know. He could have asked how planetary motion worked. He could have asked about the origins of life. He could have asked the meaning of our existence. And obviously, he could have asked what God required of him personally. He could have had forgiveness. He could have had salvation. He could have had life. And yet he walked away. And so he is remembered as one of history’s great fools.

He Said She Said, Then They All Said (2)

A post from August 2023 generated a record number of responses, many of them intense. I thought it was time to share the entire comment string, which would otherwise go largely unnoticed by our readers, since many were written long after the post’s original publication date. This is the second of two posts.

Many of the commenters are writing in a second language, so some comments are more comprehensible than others. I have cleared up a few typographic errors and inconsistencies in the interest of clarity, which I trust their authors will forgive.

He Said She Said, Then They All Said (1)

Back in August of 2023, in the context of a study on the doctrine of sinless perfectionism, I wrote a post about the Brunstad Christian Church (BCC), a century-old Norwegian denomination that has grown to over 200 churches in 54 countries, with perhaps 1,700 members in North America. The gist of what I had to say was that finding the truth online is a tremendously difficult task these days. Certainly, opinions vary wildly about the BCC and its leadership. I opted to reserve judgment.

The post is called “He Said She Said”, and the response to it has been unusual, intense and exceedingly polarized. If anything, the reaction proves my point: it’s awfully hard to find the truth online these days.