“God, having raised up his servant, sent him to you first, to bless you by turning every one of you from your wickedness.”
Dear readers, if you will indulge me, let me tell you a parable just a very little bit like the one Nathan told David. I trust you may not have cause to be as stricken as David was when the prophet’s point went home into his soul, but if you need it, you need it, just like David did.
If you are not “the man”, all the better, not just for you but for us all.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
This is an interesting take. The Independent brings us the story of Joseph Atwill, who has written a book entitled Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus.
Atwill says Christianity is actually a “system of mind control” developed by the Romans to “produce slaves that believe God actually decreed their slavery”.
Tom: Who knew, Immanuel Can? Our whole faith is nothing more than the product of a first century propaganda campaign. Fortunately someone finally figured that out for us. Or not.
“The unexamined life,” said Socrates, “is not worth living.”
Well, he didn’t actually use those precise words, but that’s
how it’s been quoted since — in books, on coffee mugs and
How seriously ought we to take that? True, he’s called the Father of Philosophy, and he was notoriously smart. But the guy wore bedsheets, and died a long while ago. How seriously can you take a guy dressed in bedsheets?
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A developing trend in his local congregation troubles a regular Blog & Mablog reader named Brian. It’s the sisters. His church leaders have started inviting women to read scripture to their fellow believers and to lead the congregation in public prayer. He inquires:
“Is there an exegetically defensible way to interpret 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Corinthians 14 in such a way as to permit women to [read Scripture and then lead in prayer on Sunday morning during public worship services]?”
I don’t think he’s looking for an end-around these scriptures because he goes on to wonder if this trend is sufficient reason to break fellowship and go elsewhere.
Growing up in a Christian home has a tendency to normalize things some people might consider quite unusual. This is especially true with respect to Bible reading. My parents made it a practice to familiarize all their children with God’s word from cover to cover. Every morning before school, we gathered in the living room for a few minutes of Bible reading, discussion and prayer. This went on well into our teens, so we covered a lot of scriptural territory.
Guess what? The abnormal became normal from simple familiarity.
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“What is apostasy?”
The word “apostasy” comes from the Greek ἀποστασία, transliterated apostasia. Very few English translations of the Bible use it much. Strong’s defines it as falling away or defection. It’s closely related to the word commonly translated “divorce” in the New Testament. One place we do find it is in 2 Thessalonians 2:3, where it refers to a major future event in which the “man of sin” is revealed to the world.
A reader writes, “Jew does not mean Israelite and not one verse in scripture says so.”
If you search the words “Israel” or “Israelite” in combination with the word “Jew” in a concordance, you will find no single verse of scripture that contains both. In this, I suppose, our reader is correct when he writes, “Not one verse in scripture says so.”
He’s right: Not one single verse says it. I can absolutely do it in two, though.
When did John write the book of Revelation? Have you ever thought about that? It’s actually a matter of some controversy.
Anyone familiar with the various schools of eschatological interpretation will immediately see why dating Revelation matters, and matters quite a bit to those invested in it. Preterists believe most of John’s visions chronicled in chapters 1 through 19 came to pass not long after he wrote, fulfilled in the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by the Roman army in AD70. Futurists believe little corresponding to most of these events has yet taken place.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
The term “postmodern” is not actually all that modern. John Watkins Chapman used it in the 1880s in relation to art criticism. Umberto Eco has said that postmodernism is less a style or a period than an “attitude”.
The attitude comes out clearly in what is produced by postmodernists in their various fields: postmodern graphic design disdains traditional conventions such as legibility; postmodern music rejects beauty and sometimes structure; postmodern philosophers reject the concepts of subjectivity and objectivity. You get the general idea.
Tom: Immanuel Can, help me nail it down: what is postmodernism?
“Lot raised his eyes and saw all the vicinity of the Jordan, that it was well watered everywhere ... So Lot chose for himself all the vicinity of the Jordan.”
I have a friend.
He and I made our commitment to live for the Lord around the same time. But I stayed in our home area, and he went away to Hollywood to make his fortune.
This post is going to be about Calvinism’s least favorite word.
For those who don’t know, Calvinism is the belief that God is like Fate ... a big, inexorable, controlling force that decides everything in the universe long before you get a chance to, and allows no place for free will. Calvinists talk about “the sovereign decrees of the Almighty”, or just “sovereignty” for short, by which they mean you have no choice. Even your willingness to be saved, they say, has to be irresistibly pressed upon you from above. “Faith”, they say (misreading Ephesians 2:8), is a “gift” — but one like no gift you’ve ever had; it’s crammed down your unwilling throat by an arbitrary God. They even say that regeneration, the new birth, has to be done to you without your agreement, and before salvation — before you can hear and respond to the gospel. God is the puppet master and you’re on the strings.
If I sound lunatic in saying all this, don’t worry; Calvinists stand squarely behind it. Just ask them.
Some proposed solutions to theological problems are a bit too easy. They hold up only so long as you don’t examine them too carefully.
In yesterday’s Anonymous Asks post, I talked about the value of the Law of Moses to Christians. I made the argument that Christian standards come from the apostles and writers of NT scripture, not from the Law of Moses (except, of course, indirectly in many cases). When the Lord Jesus fulfilled the law, he made obsolete the Old Covenant under which Israel had received its law from God.
That fact often confuses Christians. If some parts of the Law of Moses are now obsolete, how can we tell which ones we are no longer to practice and which remain valid?
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“What principles can we put into practice when it comes to Sabbath rest?”
I am finding this question and variations on it increasingly common in online forums with large numbers of younger commenters from theological systems in which Replacement Theology is a major tenet. In a way this makes sense for them. If indeed, as their system teaches, the people of God are a continuum from Abraham (or earlier) to present day — if the Church is Israel and Israel the Church — then why not practice Israel’s Sabbath rest in some form?
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A Christian man looking for a wife thought his Facebook connections might help, so he inquired on the social media site recently about churches in his area where he might find higher than average numbers of single women. As he put it, “Same faith is a priority.” No kidding.
Much to this poor fellow’s surprise, the response to his query was most unfavorable. “Church isn’t for dating!” was the most common reaction.
Really? That’s a new one on me.