What’s the argument inside the argument? |
“I don’t think that I’m a good Christian. I know I’m not. But even if I’m a bad one, I am one.” — Vox Day
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Sunday, December 20, 2015
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.
Labels:
Atheism
/
Character of God
Saturday, December 19, 2015
Deconstructing the Narrative
“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.
Friday, December 18, 2015
Too Hot to Handle: The Dwarves are for the Dwarves
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Postmodernism
/
Too Hot to Handle
/
Worldviews
Thursday, December 17, 2015
The Greater Sin
(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.
Wednesday, December 16, 2015
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:
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.”
Labels:
Free Will
/
Quote of the Day
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Happy (Late) Anniversary to Us
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.
Labels:
Thanksgiving
Monday, December 14, 2015
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.
Labels:
Immigration
/
Interpretation
Sunday, December 13, 2015
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.
Saturday, December 12, 2015
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.
Labels:
Prayer
Friday, December 11, 2015
Too Hot to Handle: Open Just A Bit Too Far
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Greg Boyd
/
Neo-Calvinism
/
Open Theism
/
Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, December 10, 2015
Wednesday, December 09, 2015
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.
Labels:
Christ
/
Glory
/
Richard Feynman
Tuesday, December 08, 2015
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.
Monday, December 07, 2015
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’.
Labels:
Christ
/
Inspiration
/
Recycling
/
Scripture
Sunday, December 06, 2015
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.
Saturday, December 05, 2015
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.
Labels:
Hebrew
/
Interpretation
/
Judaism
/
Scripture
Friday, December 04, 2015
Too Hot to Handle: Five Questions About the Next Generation
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Discipleship
/
Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, December 03, 2015
Is Your Faith Boring You?
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Luke
/
Meditation
/
Psalms
Wednesday, December 02, 2015
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
To say the things he truly feels
And
not the words of one who kneels
The record shows I took the blows
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.
Labels:
David
/
Individualism
/
Jonathan
/
Ruth
Tuesday, December 01, 2015
It Makes A Good Headline, But ...
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?
Labels:
Christ
/
Immigration
/
Luke
/
Matthew
/
Rachel Held Evans
Monday, November 30, 2015
Sunday, November 29, 2015
Recommend-a-blog (15)
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.
Labels:
Interpretation
/
Marcion
/
Midrash
/
Recommend-a-blog
Saturday, November 28, 2015
Be Who You Are
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?
Friday, November 27, 2015
Too Hot to Handle: Positively Negative
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Negativity
/
Positivity
/
Rejoicing
/
Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, November 26, 2015
Phrases That Jump Out At You
“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”.
Labels:
Corinthians
/
Glory
/
Resurrection
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
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.
Labels:
Apostle Paul
/
Discernment
/
Judging
/
Romans
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
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!”
Labels:
Pharisees
/
Quote of the Day
/
Virtue Signalling
Monday, November 23, 2015
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).
Labels:
Apostle Paul
/
Church
/
Service
Sunday, November 22, 2015
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.
Saturday, November 21, 2015
Friday, November 20, 2015
Too Hot to Handle: I Have My Doubts
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Doubt
/
Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, November 19, 2015
Follow the Evidence
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.
Labels:
Disciples
/
Peter
/
Recycling
/
Secular Humanism
/
Sigmund Freud
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
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.”
“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.
Labels:
Christ
/
Humility
/
Social Media
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
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:
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:
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:
Labels:
Calvinism
/
Total Depravity
Monday, November 16, 2015
Present Perfect
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Apostle Paul
/
Christ
/
Law
/
Salvation
Sunday, November 15, 2015
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.
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?”
Labels:
Atheism
/
Church
/
Denominationalism
/
Inbox
/
Unity
Saturday, November 14, 2015
Stray Thoughts from Genesis 7
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.
Friday, November 13, 2015
Too Hot to Handle: The Discipline of Discipline
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Discipline
/
Judgment
/
Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Quote of the Day (11)
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.
Labels:
Quote of the Day
/
Syria
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Monday, November 09, 2015
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 ...
Labels:
Proverbs
/
Rachel Held Evans
/
Relationships
/
Women's Role
Sunday, November 08, 2015
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.
Labels:
Adam
/
Foreknowledge
/
Genesis
/
Prayer
Saturday, November 07, 2015
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.
Labels:
Israel
/
John Piper
/
Romans
/
Supersessionism
Friday, November 06, 2015
Too Hot to Handle: Majoring on the Majors
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Tolerance
/
Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, November 05, 2015
I Stand Amused
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.
Labels:
Faith vs Science
/
Science
/
Worldviews
Wednesday, November 04, 2015
Quote of the Day (10)
From David Cambell’s Illustrations of Prophecy, 1839 |
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.
Labels:
Daniel
/
Fourth Beast
/
Prophecy
/
Quote of the Day
/
Revelation
/
Sir Robert Anderson
Tuesday, November 03, 2015
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”.
Labels:
Fellowship
/
Meditation
/
Prayer
/
Technology
Monday, November 02, 2015
The Priests Go First
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Malachi
/
Priesthood
/
Responsibility
Sunday, November 01, 2015
Saturday, October 31, 2015
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.
Labels:
Interpretation
/
Literalism
/
Matthew Henry
/
Prophecy
/
Zechariah
Friday, October 30, 2015
Too Hot to Handle: Making Merchandise
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Church
/
Discernment
/
Spiritual Abuse
/
Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Whose I Am and Whom I Serve
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?
Labels:
Acts
/
Apostle Paul
/
Fellowship
/
Service
/
Worship
Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Total Depravity: Can’t We Come Up With A New Term?
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Neo-Calvinism
/
Sin
/
The Fall
/
Total Depravity
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
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 …
Labels:
Faith
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Faith vs Science
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Science
Monday, October 26, 2015
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.
Sunday, October 25, 2015
A Work in Progress
My clumsy attempt to visually represent the relationships
between the various biblical spiritual domains that impact on the afterlife:
Labels:
Abraham's Bosom
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Gehenna
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Hades
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Heaven
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Hell
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Paradise
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Sheol
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Third Heaven
Saturday, October 24, 2015
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.
Labels:
Doesn't Always Mean What We Think It Means
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Heaven
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Paradise
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Terminology
Friday, October 23, 2015
Too Hot to Handle: Immasculate Conception
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Church
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Single Motherhood
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Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, October 22, 2015
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.
Labels:
Apostle Paul
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John Piper
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Reform Theology
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Replacement Theology
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Romans
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Supersessionism
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Recommend-a-blog (14)
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.
Labels:
Marriage
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Recommend-a-blog
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Relationships
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
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.
Monday, October 19, 2015
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.
Labels:
Fellowship
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Proverbs
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Recycling
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Solomon
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Word of God
Sunday, October 18, 2015
Of All the Things I’ve Lost, I Miss Myself the Most
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Authenticity
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Christ
Saturday, October 17, 2015
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.
Labels:
Government
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Responsibility
Friday, October 16, 2015
Too Hot to Handle: Faith and the Fatherless
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Church
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Parenting
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Single Motherhood
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Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, October 15, 2015
“In the Church” and In the Body
Let me say that again:
the church meeting is not the church.
You would think that
Christians who have already succeeded in grasping the biblical distinction
between “church” and “church building” would grasp this further distinction intuitively, and it may
be that on some level we get it. But if we measure knowledge of any truth by
the number of Christians who are living it out daily in a practical way, my
suspicion is that some of us have missed the boat.
Labels:
Body of Christ
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Church
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Spiritual Gifts
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Doesn’t Always Mean What We Think It Means (1)
I like etymology.
Once in a while I encounter
a word I would have difficulty defining precisely if anyone asked me to. Sometimes
I’ll look up such terms and add them to my own vocabulary if they
seem likely to be useful. The process is almost always of some benefit, as you
get to see how words originate and what happens to them over time. It’s a
good feeling to be able to use words confidently and correctly.
But from a communication
perspective, there is no value in being technically correct about what a word
means when everyone around you thinks it means something else. And nobody should
want to be willfully ignorant. Somewhere in between technical accuracy and oblivion is a sweet spot
where we actually understand each other.
Labels:
Doesn't Always Mean What We Think It Means
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Hebrew
/
Israelite
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Terminology
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
What Is Job One?
An atheist who calls
himself “Pointman” is infuriated that Christians do not make it our first order
of business to take a public stand against the devastating effects of climate
change activism in third world countries.
He provides considerable evidence that the efforts of environmental extremists, far from helping, are actually hurting the poorest of
the poor. Western nations threaten to withhold foreign aid from countries that
permit the use of DDT, so millions in those countries die of malaria. Changes in North American laws under pressure from
environmental lobbyists incent farmers in developing nations to grow profitable
biofuel crops rather than food staples, leading to price increases of up to 75% in basic foods, and resulting in food riots, starvation, malnutrition and death.
Notwithstanding his penchant for hyperbole,
Pointman may well be right.
Labels:
Environmentalism
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Great Commission
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Priorities
Monday, October 12, 2015
That Was Then, This Is Now
The translators of our Bibles tell us that
the thing for which Esau traded his birthright to his brother Jacob was a bowl of lentil soup. The King
James that I grew up with reads “a mess of pottage”, and I still get a kick from that
now-anachronistic and quirky turn of phrase.
Oddly, there is even a Wikipedia entry for “mess of pottage” that nails the concept perfectly:
“A mess of pottage is something
immediately attractive but of little value taken foolishly and carelessly in
exchange for something more distant and perhaps less tangible but immensely
more valuable.”
Those followers of
Christ who look primarily for blessing in this world are making the same sort
of trade Esau did.
Sunday, October 11, 2015
The Dating Scene
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Haggai
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Prophecy
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Zerubbabel
Saturday, October 10, 2015
Unleash the Monsters
What happens when you
turn scientists loose to solve the problems of humanity in a moral vacuum? You
get New York University ‘bioethicist’ Professor Matthew Liao.
Don’t take my word for
it:
What strikes me is how
perfectly reasonable a monster may appear when you don’t think too closely about
what it’s actually suggesting.
Labels:
Bioengineering
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C.S. Lewis
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Climate Change
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Ethics
/
Genetics
Friday, October 09, 2015
Too Hot to Handle: Ending the Gender War
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Donald Trump
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Gender War
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Masculinity
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Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, October 08, 2015
The Sub-Prime Mortgage From Heaven
Christians are used to
getting blamed for a lot of things. Imprisoning Galileo. The Inquisition. The
Crusades. But this is a new one.
Hanna Rosin at The Atlantic theorizes that Christians tanked the American economy:
“There is one explanation [for the 2007-2009
recession] that speaks to a lasting and fundamental shift in American culture —
a shift in the American conception of divine Providence and its relationship to wealth.”
Wow.
Labels:
Economics
/
Prosperity Gospel
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