Be Careful What You Outgrow

John Pavlovitz has decided he’s outgrown American Christianity.

I am not losing my mind.
I’m not losing my faith.
I’m not failing or falling or backsliding.
I have simply outgrown American Christianity.

Okay. Well then.

To a certain extent I can sympathize with the sentiment, though perhaps the word “outgrown” might not be the one I’d reach for first.

With Best Intentions

Sinners crave validation.

When our consciences trouble us, a common first instinct is to seek out sympathetic ears.

For all but the most morally callused that is usually ineffective: most of us can detect when we are being indulged or patronized; when the person listening isn’t buying our sob story but is too intimidated (or uninterested) to fight about it; when their own judgment is suspect or their own character compromised. The sort of comfort such a person gives is wholly inadequate. The alarm bell of conscience just keeps on ringing.

So it becomes necessary to seek validation from those we know to be opposed to our behaviour. If we can convince them, the logic goes, surely we can quiet the voices in our heads.

If only it were that easy.

Zombie Church

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Not Her Voice

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Nationhood and Angelic Representation

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Too Clever For Their Own Good

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To One and All, A Mary Christmas

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My First and Last Christmas Play

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The Danger of Ordinary

Do you ever find yourself doing essentially the same thing day after day, year after year, and wondering if this is all there is to the Christian life? Sure, you pray, you read your Bible, you spend time with other believers and with the Lord. Most of us look for and find a way to serve God at various times in our lives and plug away at it, sometimes for years. There are precious, encouraging and sometimes exciting moments; there are answers to prayer and things for which we may be very grateful indeed.

But the rest of it? We have to admit it’s usually pretty ordinary.

Throwing Money

My brother once commented (rather perceptively) that I try to solve every problem I encounter by throwing money at it.

He was not wrong. And I’m not the only one.

An elder at one of the local churches in my neighbourhood invited me over for dinner a few weeks ago, and we spent a very enjoyable evening together discussing nearly everything under the sun. One of the subjects he brought up was the regular compensation of pastors.

To his satisfaction, I did the expected double-take.

The Cost of Doing Business

Aids to a very effective
ancient form of censorship.

Internet censorship is coming, and it’s coming fast. Thanks, Mark Zuckerberg.

Numerous media sources reported last week that Facebook, Twitter and Google have all agreed to cooperate with the German government in removing hate speech from the internet. Special teams in each company will determine whether content violates German laws and remove it within 24 hours.

Under German law, “hate speech” is speech that “incites or instigates harmful action”. So a mechanism is now in place where quite literally anything may be censored provided it can be said to potentially cause “harm”, as defined by German lawmakers.

Today, that means anti-immigration sentiment. Tomorrow, it could mean anything perceived as homophobic, misogynist or religious. Effectively for Germans it means an end to whatever level of free speech they may have previously enjoyed.

The Evil Nature of God

What’s the argument inside the argument?

Over at the Friendly Atheist, Michael Runyan, a former Catholic and retired risk analyst lists 40 problems he sees with Christianity, one of which he calls the “evil nature of God”.*

After doing a little Old Testament math with rather broad strokes, he says this:

“The case can be made that God killed or authorized the killings of up to 25,000,000 people. This is the God that Jesus looked up to and of whom he was allegedly an integral part. That is to say: Jesus himself was an accessory to these massacres. Therefore, Christianity cannot extract itself from these atrocities; it must own them and admit that their God is in fact a serial, genocidal, infanticidal, filicidal, and pestilential murderer.”

Hmm. Let’s think about that a little.

Deconstructing the Narrative

Do you ever find yourself telling God stories? I do.

“Lord, you know I did my best, but ...”

Uh, no. Cease narration. Start deconstructing.

Too many words for one thing, all of them unnecessary. It’s one of those “empty phrases” Matthew talks about. The Lord knows whether I did my best or not. Chances are I didn’t. Maybe it was a 50% effort, maybe it was 80 or 95, but there’s always more I could have done. Because he would do more. He did more.

In any case it’s unnecessary. What I’m really doing is writing a sales pitch for the only Person in the universe who already knows the whole truth of the matter. I often don’t.

Too Hot to Handle: The Dwarves are for the Dwarves

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The Greater Sin

Let’s take it as read that all sins are bad by definition. Offensive to God. Destructive to human will, life, character, testimony and interaction. They contaminate the present, give the lie to the past and, even when repented of, may negatively impact the future.

(When considered against the backdrop of the cross of Jesus Christ they’re actually worse than that, but this is intended to be more practical than theological.)

The thing is, not all sins are equally bad.

Quote of the Day (13)

This is so choice that it would be a crime to let it languish in the comments on an older post where few of our readers are likely to notice it.

Immanuel Can writes:

“If you think about it, you’ll recognize what so many of the prophets, from Job to Isaiah to Habakkuk all found: that in this world there’s no straight line between doing the right thing or making the right choice and getting a guaranteed right outcome. The just suffer and the wicked prosper, in many cases.”

Happy (Late) Anniversary to Us

Oops. December 11 has come and gone. Totally escaped me.

I vaguely remember our first post was in the month of December two years ago, but the specific date has never really stuck in my mind. Were I better organized we might have done something more memorable to mark the occasion.

Still, I wouldn’t want to let the date pass without taking the opportunity to say thanks to our readers.

You Are Being Manipulated

Mass immigration might be the single most important political issue being discussed in North America at the moment.

Perhaps you are among the small minority of people who have never given much thought to the question of what sort of people — and how many — ought to be allowed to acquire citizenship in your home country. If so, this will probably not interest you much.

But if, like many, you have very definite answers to those questions in mind, and especially if you are one of a growing number of Christians with the inclination to publicly share your thoughts on the issue, I have a gentle suggestion for you:

Stop and think first. There is a very good chance you are being manipulated.

Inbox: Down the Memory Hole?

Tertius writes:

“Your chat with IC made me think of ‘I will remember their sins and lawless deeds no more.’ ”

Quite so. IC talked a little about the potential dangers of making dogmatic theological statements on the basis of figurative language, or what are sometimes called biblical “anthropomorphisms”. He points out that the writers of scripture use:

“… human-style metaphors, like ‘the hand of God’, because we know what ‘hands’ are ... not because God the Father has a physical body like ours.”

“I will remember” is another of these human-style metaphors.

Just Do It

Everybody knows it. It’s been Nike’s slogan since 1988. It resonates, and that’s why it’s lasted this long. ‘God helps those who help themselves’, people are fond of saying.

Redneck translation: Git ’er done.

But generally speaking, when God sets out to accomplish something significant, he does not “just do it”.

He could, of course. After all, when God created our universe, he did not call upon angelic consultants. He sought nobody’s buy-in. He simply spoke it all into being. He had no need of a second opinion. He never does.

Too Hot to Handle: Open Just A Bit Too Far

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Trinity Matters

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Keeping It In Proportion

The late Richard Feynman was known for his theoretical work in quantum electrodynamics and particle physics. For a scientist, Feynman had an uncharacteristically folksy way of presenting the rationale for his atheistic worldview:

“I can’t believe the special stories that have been made up about our relationship to the universe at large because they seem to be too local, too provincial.

The earth. He came to the earth. One of the aspects of God came to the earth, mind you! And look at what’s out there. It isn’t ... in proportion.”

But the celebrated physicist and reputed genius is far from the first intelligent person to address the pressing issue of disproportionality in the universe.

Heartless

More women are abandoning their children (and their families generally) than ever before. CNN reports it. The Huffington Post, in a piece too appalling to link to, actually defends it. Indiana has decided to enable it, becoming the first state to install “baby boxes” at hospitals, police stations and fire stations as an easy and anonymous way for parents to give up their infants.

Some would say men have always been quick to stampede for the exits when things get tough, but an epidemic of wives and mothers doing likewise is a comparatively new phenomenon. It may be the straw that breaks Western society’s back.

What we might call natural affection is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. The world around us is increasingly heartless.

Close Encounters of the Philosophical Kind

Eric English is emerging. We’re not altogether sure what he’s emerging into, and it actually seems to be kind of intangible. I’m trying to grab onto it, and it’s floating away even as I type. Its essence is something like this:

“The WORD OF GOD is a moment that a human being encounters.”

I hope I’m not misrepresenting Mr. English’s position. He starts from the claim that the Bible is not the word of God, and that to assert that the Bible is God’s word is to diminish what it means to possess the ‘word of God’.

Who Is Being Tested Here?

Carol Delaney, an anthropologist at Stanford who doesn’t believe in God, is trying to analyze the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac.

How might such an endeavour go wrong? Let me count the ways ...

A Prior Note About Motivation

When digging up Delaney’s paper I could not help but notice that nearly everyone else who has published something on this subject starts with the question “Why did God ask Abraham to sacrifice his son?” With all respect, that’s grabbing the wrong end of the stick. Or really, asking the unanswerable.

Below the Surface

A few thoughts for our Christian readers that I’ve condensed (and hopefully not distorted too badly) from R’B’s excellent series on interpreting scripture via the Jewish perspective. The original posts may be found here, here, here and here.

Orthodox Judaism seeks to understand the first five books of our Old Testament (for them, the Torah) on four levels. These principles may also be applied to the rest of the scriptures.

Having read about schools of thought like Kabbalah, which originated in Judaism, I feared rabbinical exegesis might be a bit wacky and mystical. For the most part that does not appear to be the case.

Too Hot to Handle: Five Questions About the Next Generation

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Is Your Faith Boring You?

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Doing It My Way

“For what is a man, what has he got?

If not himself, then he has naught
To say the things he truly feels

And not the words of one who kneels
The record shows I took the blows

And did it my way.”

— Paul Anka

Individualism is the spirit of this present age. And actually, that is not an unmitigated evil.

I used to think it was. When I was young Christian and more inclined to overreact, I found Anka’s lyrics, popularized by Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, more than a little cringe-worthy. I can’t take credit for the impulse since it almost surely came by osmosis from a church environment that tended to read the worst possible motives into every pronouncement of popular culture. Looking back on it, it seems to me the reaction of older Christians to the observations of the pop philosophers of my teen years was generally spot-on, if ever-so-slightly paranoid at times.

But not always.

It Makes A Good Headline, But ...

... that doesn’t make it true.

In a post entitled There Was Room at the Inn, Rachel Held Evans is off and running again, this time about Syrian refugees and how their situation is morally equivalent to that of Mary and Joseph long ago in Bethlehem when a child was born who would change the world forever.

For Evans, saying no to having Syrians resettled in your neighbourhood is like turning away the Lord Jesus.

Could we have another spoonful of cheesy rhetoric, please?

Revisiting Lot’s Wife

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Marcion’s favourite interpretative technique

Marcion of Sinope was quite a character.

Wikipedia calls him “an important leader in early Christianity”; important, I guess, in the sense that his theology got him denounced by the church fathers of his day. Often described as a Gnostic, he is said to have rejected the deity described in the Hebrew scriptures and to have affirmed instead that the true God was the “Father” referred to by the Lord Jesus.

In this he foreshadowed many today who have difficulty reconciling the God of the Old Testament with the God of the New.

Be Who You Are

Charles Paul Landon, 1760-1826

Poor Hagar. Seems like she was everybody’s punching bag, doesn’t it.

When we are introduced to her in Genesis, she is the servant of Abram’s wife. Every modern writer will tell you servitude is the worst of all possible fates, so it must be so. Then Hagar’s mistress, too old to conceive, comes up with the bright idea of using Hagar as a means of perpetuating her own family line.

Despite his years of experience, Abram goes along with Sarai’s plan. After all, he’s a guy, and he’s just been given permission — by his own wife, yet — to have guilt-free sex with a younger woman.

What could possibly go wrong?

Too Hot to Handle: Positively Negative

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Phrases That Jump Out At You

This one did:

“Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.”

The three words that stuck in my head are “for OUR glory”.

Stray Thoughts from Romans 14

I’m struck by my own tendency to read into the text of scripture my current circumstances and the modes of thought that dominate the age in which we live.

It’s a bad habit, but also a hard one to break.

Two weeks ago in Too Hot to Handle, Immanuel Can and I explored the meaning of the word “judge”, as in “judge not lest you be judged”. We did not get into Romans 14, but the entire chapter is about judging and worthy of a few extra moments of consideration.

I’d suggest you cannot properly interpret Romans 14 without trying at least a little to understand the mindset of Jews and Gentiles in the early church and the differences between them.

Quote of the Day (12)

“I invented virtue signalling,” says James Bartholomew of The Spectator.

It may even be true. The online version of Collins Dictionary incorporated the expression earlier this year, defining virtue signalling as “activities intended to indicate a person’s virtuousness”.

In June, Facebook introduced a “Celebrate Pride” function that allowed users all over the world to show support for gay marriage by imposing a transparent LGBT rainbow over their profile picture. Two weeks ago, another group of ideological lock-steppers adopted the colours of the French flag in sympathy with the victims of the Parisian massacres.

That’s virtue signalling: “Look at me! I’m a good person!”

Work Yourself Out of a Job

“I no longer have any room for work in these regions,” said the apostle Paul.

Come again? That’s a perplexing statement.

The regions to which Paul refers are, after all, pretty large. He says he has preached to Gentiles “from Jerusalem and all the way around to Illyricum”. At its widest, Illyricum included all the territory west of Macedonia and east of Italy extending south as far as Epirus and north through the Balkans almost to the Danube (see map).

Coming Up Short

When Abraham left Ur of the Chaldeans, it doesn’t say that he took his father, but that his father Terah took him.

We don’t get an exact age for Terah at the time he and his family left Ur with the intention of moving to Canaan, but he had to be at least 100 years old, and possibly quite a bit older than that. The first leg of the trip was about 600 miles, give or take, starting in what is today Iraq. The family presumably followed the Euphrates north and west up into present-day Turkey about 10 miles north of the Syrian border. They stopped short of their goal in a place called Haran. That wasn’t the original plan, but that’s what happened.

I may have it all wrong, but I suspect the problem was Abraham’s dad.

The Mythical Native

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Too Hot to Handle: I Have My Doubts

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Follow the Evidence

Secular humanists frequently start with an agenda and worry about details later, if at all.

The justification for any course of action is often jerry-rigged into the mission statement after the mission itself is well under way; the why comes after the what has already been decided.

For instance, Alister McGrath points out this interesting fact about Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis:

“Freud’s atheistic view of the origin of religion comes prior to his study of religion; it is not its consequence.”

In other words, Freud first decided on his theory then went about doing the research to back it up, not the other way round. His theory did not arise inductively from his studies but from his own prejudices.

Facebooking from Nazareth

“The worst thing you can do is keep it all inside.” 

“There’s too much inside yourself to keep it all cooped up and restrained.”

This is the sort of advice I encounter daily. You see it too, if you’re looking for it.

Bryant McGill claims 60 million readers and “some of the most shared writings in social media history”. If accurate, that’s a lot of people sharing McGill’s thoughts. A Christian friend of mine passed on one of McGill’s more cringe-worthy bromides on Facebook the other day.

Total Disappearing Act

The limitations of the Blogger platform became evident last week when the comments on IC’s post on the subject of Total Depravity started misbehaving.

Total Depravity ended like this:

I think we need a new term. “Total depravity” is a poor coinage, and terribly misleading, I think. I would opt for a biblical term instead. However, “dead” won’t do, unless we keep remembering that it’s a metaphor, not a total reality. The danger is that we will take that metaphor farther than the Bible takes it — which is an error comparable to adding or subtracting from scripture.

after which IC and Qman got into a lengthy exchange that Blogger truncated for us around the seventh comment. The original post and previous comments may still be read at the link above, but further comments (if there are any) may be made here.

For convenience, here are the portions of the exchange that are missing:

Present Perfect

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Inbox: Breeding Atheism

Mac Pier, head of a parachurch organization in Manhattan called The New York Leadership Center, is calling for unity in the church.

Fox News thinks Pier’s “confessions” on behalf of the church are important enough for Bill O’Reilly to spend five minutes quizzing Charles Krauthammer about the church and how its longstanding divisions are alleged to encourage atheism in the world.

Our reader Qman asks, “What’s your take, is it valid?”

Stray Thoughts from Genesis 7

It’s not a myth. The Genesis flood, I mean.

Yeah, yeah, I know they say it is. Wikipedia does, at least:

“A flood myth or deluge myth is a narrative in which a great flood, usually sent by a deity or deities, destroys civilization, often in an act of divine retribution. Parallels are often drawn between the flood waters of these myths and the primeval waters found in certain creation myths, as the flood waters are described as a measure for the cleansing of humanity, in preparation for rebirth. Most flood myths also contain a culture hero, who ‘represents the human craving for life’.”

Man, is that lame.

Too Hot to Handle: The Discipline of Discipline

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From the Cat’s Perspective

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Quote of the Day (11)

More than 350,000 Syrian refugees have sought refuge in Europe since January.

Nadim Nassar is the only Church of England priest in Syria, and is well positioned to describe what is currently going on there. In this CBC interview earlier this month with Michael Enright in Toronto, he lays out some of the causes behind mass migration. Though many surging through the countries of Europe toward Germany do not originate in Syria, it is the refugee component that gives this “immi-vasion” its media credibility and moral authority.

It’s a complex issue and believers all over the world are interested in what’s happening to their brothers and sisters in Syria, because Syrian Christians are among those most impacted by the civil war in their home country.

Breaks in the Pattern

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Rehabilitating the Proverbs 31 Wife

Poor, much-maligned wife of the last chapter of Proverbs! Google her and see. After you get through the usual commentary citations, much of what you find is Christians complaining:

• Complaining that the woman in King Lemuel’s acrostic poem is an anachronism. (She isn’t.)
• Complaining that the poem should have been about men instead and rewriting it for our benefit. (It wasn’t written about men. Deal with it.)
• Complaining that Proverbs 31 is not about a “real woman”, it’s about “wisdom” as a concept. (Possibly true, but irrelevant: if it’s about wisdom as a concept, it’s about how that concept looks when it is worked out in the life of a married woman.)
• Complaining that single women (like Ruth before she married Boaz) should be considered “Proverbs 31 women” too. (A single women may be all kinds of wonderful things but the one thing she cannot be is an “excellent wife”, which happens to be the subject matter of this chapter.)
• Complaining that the chapter gets used as a checklist by which modern Christian wives are judged by others.

Hmm, that last one may have a grain of truth to it ...

Stray Thoughts from Genesis 2

“Is that ‘Bear’ with a ‘B’, Adam?”

Though the Lord made Adam first, and though he tasked Adam alone with naming all the animals he had created, it seems God always intended that Adam should have a wife. We read that he said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him”.

Now God doesn’t always “say”. Much of the time he simply thinks, and the universe is none the wiser as to what goes on in the recesses of the Infinite. God’s thoughts, one psalmist tells us, are “very deep”. Elsewhere David says God’s thoughts toward us are “incomparable” and “too numerous to count”. He does not share all his thoughts with us. He does not even share them all with the angels.

That should not be a big surprise. He is God, after all.

John Piper Gets Political

In a previous post, I pointed out the various ways John Piper’s supersessionist leanings cause him to read things into Romans 2 that the apostle Paul does not say, largely in aid of convincing Christians that we are “true Jews”. As a result, Piper makes murk of the clear distinction in scripture between Jews, Gentiles and the church of God.

I also pointed out that a preference for a supersessionist reading of the Bible frequently goes hand-in-hand with a very defined political position on the modern nation of Israel and its right to occupy the Holy Land, specifically, that those rights could use some major curtailing.

Too Hot to Handle: Majoring on the Majors

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I Stand Amused

So, you know, Christians have answers to atheist objections.

What’s funny to me is how different those answers may be without being contradictory. God has given different members of the Body of Christ a variety of complementary ways of looking at the world around us, and completely different, often totally unexpected responses to the diverse needs evidenced in that world. An intellectual perceives a need for an intellectual answer. A historian looks for someone who understands his discipline and responds to it credibly. A plumber or carpenter may expect common sense. A stay-at-home mom ... well, we don’t have many of those anymore anyway.

And if anecdotal evidence means anything, any honest seeker may find himself under conviction by means of encountering other kinds of evidence entirely. We don’t always know what we’re looking for after all, and we may not know ourselves as well as we think we do.

Quote of the Day (10)

From David Cambell’s Illustrations of Prophecy, 1839

Students of prophecy make reference to a future geopolitical entity described in detail in both Daniel and Revelation. In scripture it is called the “fourth kingdom”. Some Bible students also refer to it as the “revived Roman empire” because it will be the spiritual and political reanimation of ancient Rome.

Neo-Rome is consistently depicted as being comprised of ten divisions or kingdoms. Nebuchadnezzar’s dream image in Daniel 2 has ten toes. The fourth beast of Daniel 7 has ten horns, as does the seven-headed monstrosity energized by Satan’s power that John saw in Revelation 13, and the beast on which the great prostitute rides in Revelation 17.

This ten nation confederacy is said to “devour the whole earth, and trample it down, and break it to pieces”. So, you know, fairly significant stuff, at least to those of us who believe these things are still to take place in our world.

Turn It Off

The other night I was out with Bernie and one of his neighbours, a man who works in the correctional system. Bernie has his own business to run. His neighbour had a co-worker in crisis. I had just come from work myself. We had a great time and some good, solid conversation, but in the course of a three hour dinner, every one of our cell phones was active between five and twenty times.

You have probably had similar experiences.

A new initiative in my department at work is migrating 90% of company communications to an intranet social media site patterned after Facebook. We are being discouraged from using email and encouraged to access the forum regularly from our phones when not on the job in order to keep abreast of developments and “share information more effectively”.

The Priests Go First

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The Worship of Angels

A more current version of this post is available here.

Cage Match: Zechariah 14 vs Matthew Henry

Matthew Henry’s commentary on the Bible has gained a reputation as the “best and most widely used work of its kind”. I have its three bulky volumes on my own bookshelf and have found it surprisingly useful at times given its age and the limited number of translations and study tools available when it was written in the early decades of the 18th century. Philip Doddridge said, “Henry is, perhaps, the only commentator … that deserves to be entirely and attentively read through”. Evangelist George Whitfield is said to have read Henry’s commentary daily with his devotions.

So this is not me having another “Rachel Held Evans” moment. Critiquing the opinions of a social justice wannabe looking to amp up pageviews, book sales and personal appearance invitations is not in the same league as tackling a respected and serious writer whose work has been influential for almost three centuries.

That said, there here is no better way to highlight the absurdities inherent in some methods of interpretation — even well accepted and venerable methods — than to simply lay a commentary side-by-side with the word of God.

Too Hot to Handle: Making Merchandise

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Whose I Am and Whom I Serve

How do you characterize your relationship with God?

When people ask you, what do you say? How do you describe it?

Anybody can make a list, even a long list, and many have done so. But if you were addressing unbelievers and had to distill the relationship down to one or two very primary, fundamental elements, which aspects would you choose?

Total Depravity: Can’t We Come Up With A New Term?

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Insulting Our Intelligence

Another Stand to Reason atheist challenge, this one plucked out of an article in Salon:

“[I]t insults our intelligence to be enjoined to believe, now that we have split the atom, discovered the Higgs Boson, and sent a probe to Pluto, in the veracity of a supernatural account of the origins of our cosmos.”

There are probably half a dozen ways to approach a statement like this. I’m just going to go with the obvious …

The Fixed Mindset and the “Praise Bell”

You’ve got to know that when you come across an article entitled “Why Do Women Fail?” in a forum that specifically exists to promote women, somebody is likely to be unhappy with whatever conclusions may be drawn.

Unless the answer is “men”, I suspect.

The fact that the piece is credited to two credentialed women (one a Stanford University professor of psychology, the other the co-founder of the Girl’s Leadership Institute) and flagged with an uncharacteristic editorial disclaimer declaring, “The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the authors” just serves to make it more interesting.

I’m hooked.

A Work in Progress

My clumsy attempt to visually represent the relationships between the various biblical spiritual domains that impact on the afterlife:

Doesn’t Always Mean What We Think It Means (3)

Yahweh’s Restoration Ministry (let’s call them YRM for the sake of brevity) says the Bible is “the most misunderstood book of all time”.

That’s a provocative statement, and not one that’s easy to prove. But given the ubiquity of Bibles in our times, the number of years most of its books have been circulated, and the diversity of interpretations some derive from it, I suppose it may be correct.

Of course, the question that almost asks itself after such a declaration is “If so, then whose understanding of the Bible is correct?” And we can probably guess how YRM would answer that one.

Too Hot to Handle: Immasculate Conception

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John Piper’s Exploding Cigar

Not John Piper

Do you want to be a Jew? John Piper thinks every Christian should:

“God is at pains to explain to you that you are a true Jew. It is a great gift to us that he should tell us that an essential part of our identity is that we are true Jews if we fulfil the obedience of faith. Don’t reject God’s good gift.”

Why does it matter if a Gentile thinks of himself as a Jew or not? It seems like a trivial issue to debate, doesn’t it? Why would anyone go to as much trouble as Piper goes to in this sermon from 1999 just to convince Christians to get excited about being “Jewish”?

I sure don’t want to reject any of God’s good gifts. But this particular “gift” is more like the proverbial exploding cigar: it comes with more than you bargain for when you take it.

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“Eclectic and intriguing” might be my best crack at describing Morally Contextualized Romance ... a fancy way to say ‘marriage’.

Scott and Mychael Klajic are the duo behind the blog, with the experience of eight years together and four children to show for it. The pair previously wrote about Christian marriage at the now-defunct Courtship Pledge website, abandoned after a major technical glitch erased two years of work. The new site is nominally about “God’s hierarchy for marriage” but though nearly every post intersects in some way with the topic, relationships do not seem to be the site’s only (or even its primary) focus.

Not by a long shot.

Doesn’t Always Mean What We Think It Means (2)

What is a Jew anyway?

Specifically, does a Gentile who converts to Judaism become a “Jew”? Many people today say so, and quite a few religious Jews agree with them. There is even a Judaic ritual called giyyur by which, it is alleged, a Gentile becomes Jewish.

Tracey R. Rich says, “A Jew is any person whose mother was a Jew or any person who has gone through the formal process of conversion to Judaism.

Now, if that’s a scriptural answer, there are an awful lot of Jews out there. But the Bible does not appear to use the word “Jew” that way. There is considerable elasticity in the term, but in neither Testament does it dovetail perfectly with the modern, secular usage or even the definition of many Orthodox Jews.

Curious? Let’s have a look at some history.

The Inside Scoop

Those in the news business are forever occupied with beating one another to a story. Old media or new, success is measured in the ability to get the inside scoop.

God, on the other hand, is not in the business of broadcasting his secrets. Communicating is something in which he takes great pleasure, but not something he does casually. His truth is for those who value it and understand its worth, not for those who dismiss or trivialize it.

The value of God’s word is one of its repeated themes.

Of All the Things I’ve Lost, I Miss Myself the Most

The most recent version of this post is available here.

The Institutional Fix

Government should do something. That seems to be the consensus.

Never mind what the issue is. Could be the economy. Could be women’s wages. Maybe aboriginal affairs. Certainly immigration. Definitely climate change. But if only those people we elected would just get to it, things would be better.

People love the institutional fix. Specifically, they love identifying a problem and ranting about it. These days, personal responsibility begins and ends with firing off a critical blog post, Facebook screed or nuclear Tweet. Whatever the problem may be, with any luck someone else will deal with it. Hopefully they’ll start a program.