The Commentariat Speaks (34)

The subject of faith has been on my mind this week, and we’ll revisit it tomorrow in our usual Monday “Anonymous Asks” post. Faith does not come easily to many, and even those of us habituated to trusting in Christ to meet our physical and spiritual needs on a daily basis find occasions when we too struggle to believe the Lord will do the things he has promised.

Far more important in the long run is faith that saves. One man’s honesty about his personal struggle to find it touched me the other day, and I’d like to share it with you.

The Commentariat Speaks (33)

A Bible student on Reddit inquires, “Why does the Apostle Paul write in such long sentences?”

This reader is obviously paying attention when he gets into the word of God, and good for him. My brother and I were discussing this issue only a few weeks back, as it’s something we too have noticed over the years. Some of Paul’s sentences are absolutely legendary. They go on for days.

The Commentariat Speaks (31)

Over at Doug Wilson’s place, Levi inquires, “What is your position on Satan being released at the end of this millennium? If the nations truly come to Christ, how can they be deceived when Satan is loosed?”

Doug responds, “Levi, I don’t believe that the elect will be deceived, but I do believe that there will still be non-elect individuals at that time who would be vulnerable. But then again, the revolt will be very short-lived.”

The postmillennial view of prophetic scripture has its difficulties. To me, Satan’s rebellion is one of its most substantial.

The Commentariat Speaks (30)

One of the most common errors Christians make in interpreting the word of God is failing to distinguish between literal and figurative language. The Lord’s disciples were notorious in this area, and their Master patiently corrected them time and time again.

“How is it that you fail to understand that I did not speak about bread?” he asked them. “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” Again, Peter, James and John, privileged above the others to see the Lord transfigured, came down the mountain “questioning what this rising from the dead might mean”.

They got the figurative literal and the literal figurative.

The Commentariat Speaks (29)

Doug Wilson gets the best letters from readers. This week, an anonymous twenty-something man is hunting for sound advice about a prospective girlfriend with baggage from her teen years. He figured Doug was a better choice than Dear Abby, whose daughter Jeanne writes her column these days. (I wondered how she was still going after all these years; I used to read her when I was about ten.) The new Abby’s readers have just as many problems as Doug’s (more and worse, actually), but Abby can’t give you a biblical take on your issues.

In this case, Doug’s answer is more than adequate. I quote: “If you are going to behave that way, then do her a big favor and break up now.” Now THAT’s telling it like it is.

The Commentariat Speaks (28)

Over at Blog & Mablog, Justin has a question about a difficult passage at the end of James:

“What is the purpose of anointing with oil [James 5:14]? Does it make our prayers extra powerful? Is that for us in this day and age?

I am genuinely curious due to the fact that in our church there is a sister that has just been diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. We do pray and have been praying for her, her husband, and their children.

This past Sunday during our announcements after the service our pastor stated that he and another elder were going to fulfill the James 5 principle and personally go and anoint her head with oil for healing.”

Oddly enough, we just discussed this passage in our weekly Bible study.

The Commentariat Speaks (27)

Over at Doug Wilson’s place, Jackson asks:

“Why are pastors so terrible at political philosophy? It seems to me that most pastors just assume a modern political theory of democracy, constitutionalism, liberalism, or republicanism and then read it into the Bible.”

Good question, and an observation that is largely true.

The Commentariat Speaks (26)

Talk show host David Pakman comments on Twitter about the recent spree shooting at a Nashville Christian school:

“Very surprising that there would be a mass shooting at a Christian school, given that lack of prayer is often blamed for these horrible events. Is it possible they weren’t praying enough, or correctly, despite being a Christian school?”

If you guessed that a tidal wave of negative feedback prompted Pakman to quickly delete his tweet, points for getting used to the drill.

The Commentariat Speaks (25)

The White House recently announced a debt relief program for lower income students who are having difficulty repaying government loans taken to obtain their college degrees. Qualifying debtors may be forgiven up to $20,000 in unpaid student loans, and undergraduates may have their monthly loan repayments cut in half. Higher income college graduates will not qualify for debt relief.

I was surprised to find many Christians opposed to this move.

The Commentariat Speaks More Clearly

For ease of reference, the links page for our ongoing feature The Commentariat Speaks now displays the topic of each post, something I probably should have done from the beginning. You can find it here.

The Commentariat Speaks (24)

Social media platforms are apparently now engaging in crosstalk. This recent exchange on Twitter prompted a few responses on Gab concerning a familiar expression:

Nick writes, “America is a Judeo-Christian nation, period.”

Erin responds, “Dear Christians: Jews have absolutely no desire whatsoever to be co‑opted and absorbed into your religion. Judeo-Christian is not a thing that exists. Your attempt to erase us is blatant. Bonus education for you: Jewish beliefs require access to abortion.”

Ah yes. Well, that definitely distinguishes Christians from self-described Jews of this sort at least.

The Commentariat Speaks (23)

In a post last week entitled “A Contradiction in the Church”, the Antemodernist observed that when the Christian community at large is clear and succinct in its condemnation, it is always against a sin that is convenient to hate. As he puts it, “Christians deal with the easy and convenient things, and so leave the important and difficult things growing like cancer.”

Publicly condemning masculine sins — foreign invasions, lust, violence — is the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel, he suggests. Nobody minds and everybody cheers. But feminine sins — things like cross dressing or the homosexual mimicry of family life — have become virtually untouchable subjects.

I’ll grant him all that and go a step further.

The Commentariat Speaks (22)

“Have you seen this opinion piece on how the Federal government engaged evangelicals on Covid?”

So inquires a commenter named Ted at Blog & Mablog.

Thanks for passing that on, Ted. But let’s get a couple of preliminary observations out of the way before we parse the article by Megan Basham for DailyWire.com.

The Commentariat Speaks (21)

A letter to Doug Wilson from an Australian named Ben poses a familiar question:

“Since I, like everyone else (except Adam and Eve), am born into this sinful state, how can God truly be just in judging me for committing sins I was destined to commit?

Our ‘free-will’ is not really free at all. I think our will is like a set of old-fashioned scales, then our scales are definitely not on the level. They are heavily weighed down towards the selfish side, causing most, if not all, of our choices to be made with a selfish heart; a heart I didn’t ask for or have any say in receiving. I was just dumped into this wretched state, into a wretched life, and then at the end destined to be judged by The Most High, for breaking laws I had no chance of keeping.”

Bound to get interesting, wouldn’t you say?

The Commentariat Speaks (20)

Owen Cyclops is tweeting about Kirk Cameron’s cheesy Christian Christmas movie:

“At the end there’s like a 3-4 minute hip hop breakdancing ... thing, that’s the worst thing in the movie by far. I found this symbolically perfect because, if every worldview has its strengths and weaknesses, the weakness for American evangelical Christianity, speaking as an outsider friend rather than an overly critical foe, is that it has no ‘fence’ or ‘barrier’ to keep stuff like that out, which I suppose is part of the function of tradition in other manifestations of Christianity.”

I know nothing about Owen beyond what I’ve read in a single Twitter thread, but one may reasonably infer that he hails from one of these “other manifestations” of Christianity he refers to, one which offers believers the fence-like protection of tradition.

The Commentariat Speaks (19)

Moscow, Idaho is home to Christ Church, a conservative reformed evangelical gathering of about 900 people that has produced an unusual number of what Wikipedia calls “institutional projects”, including New Saint Andrews College, the Logos School, a Christian book publisher, a scripture translation group, a three-year ministerial training program and four spin-off churches in Montana, California and Myanmar.

Christ Church congregants form an active community of homeschoolers and Christian businesspeople within Moscow.

The Commentariat Speaks (18)

Once in a while the commentariat speaks directly to me:

“Are you one of those people who say that there are actually two different Gog and Magog events?”

Good question. I may have looked into it before, but my last serious attempt to unpack Bible prophecy in detail was way back in the nineties. I wouldn’t attempt to answer a question like that without going back to the scriptures and refreshing my memory. So I begged off answering until I had time to take a more careful look at the text.

This week I had plenty.

The Commentariat Speaks (17)

A Baptist pastor weighs in on the question of when the church began:

“The church didn’t begin at Pentecost, it began when God called Abram out of Ur of the Chaldees. All who believe are descendants of his promise. Nothing has stopped his church for over 4000 years and nothing can.”

Reply to this sort of thing in 180 characters? You have to be kidding. It’s one reason certain social media platforms are inferior places for Christian discussion. They foster snappy rhetorical flourishes, but discourage nuanced analysis. That doesn’t make them useless, but it certainly limits their usefulness.

I suppose one might reply, “It depends how you define ‘church’.” That may get the attentive reader thinking. Or not. So let’s try something a little longer-form.

The Commentariat Speaks (16)

Done properly, Bible translation is really just the search for truth. It attempts to represent the original text in another language to the very best of expert ability to reconstruct it from the available manuscript evidence.

Some English versions are painstakingly literal, attempting as closely as possible to represent each original Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic word with an English equivalent (an impossible task, if you know anything about syntax and semantics). Others are more dynamic and literary, attempting to convey the overall feel and sense of the original as the translators understand it, rather than trying to force the receptor language to awkwardly mimic the sentence structure of the original language. Some Bible versions are based on a single, familiar text tradition. Others synthesize multiple traditions in an attempt to get at the most precise possible reading.

Either way, truth is usually the governing standard. It is rare that anyone deliberately sets out to produce a #fakebible.

The Commentariat Speaks (15)

From Doug Wilson’s comment section at Blog & Mablog. S writes:

“Why is there not an option to fully bow out? Neither Heaven or Hell, just non-existence?”

Doug’s own response is brief and related to the need for God’s holy justice to be displayed. I agree, and I’m not sure I can offer anything more profound in terms of an answer, but I was sufficiently taken with the question that I felt the need to explore it a little here.

It’s my observation that the sorts of questions we ask about God often say more about us than they say about him.