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

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Too Hot to Handle: I Have My Doubts

The most recent version of this post is available here.

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

The most recent version of this post is available here.

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

The most recent version of this post is available here.

From the Cat’s Perspective

The most recent version of this post is available here.

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

The most recent version of this post is available here.

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

The most recent version of this post is available here.

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

The most recent version of this post is available here.

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

The most recent version of this post is available here.

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?

The most recent version of this post is available here.

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

The most recent version of this post is available here.

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.

Recommend-a-blog (14)

“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.

Too Hot to Handle: Faith and the Fatherless

The most recent version of this post is available here.

“In the Church” and In the Body

The church meeting is not the church.

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.

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.

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.

That Was Then, This Is Now

Sometimes Wikipedia has a gem or two.

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.

The Dating Scene

The most recent version of this post is available here.

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.

Too Hot to Handle: Ending the Gender War

The most recent version of this post is available here.

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.

Quote of the Day (9)

Youth work is a juggling act.

I haven’t done it in a few years. The cultural distance between me and the current generation is significant enough that I can’t imagine the sort of effort required to properly bridge it, and the opportunity is not there in any case. Others are doing the job, and God bless ’em.

But I’ve put in the better part of a decade leading youth groups and/or teaching Sunday School and I well remember the juggling act that comes from trying to please everyone with an opinion about what you’re doing.

Your Alms Have Ascended

The things you do for me stand a good chance of being forgotten.

I may not appreciate them the way I should. That Christmas sweater was a little too red and a little too heavy for me, so I never wore it. The gift card was for a shop I never go to, and it’s still sitting on my shelf. The DVD was something I already had, but I didn’t want to mention it.

I didn’t need what you gave me, so I said a quick thank you and forgot about you.

Sorry.

Where Are The Results?

In business, success is quantifiable. Or at least it should be.

At the beginning of the fiscal year, or more likely prior, you set a series of targets to be met or exceeded and, come year-end, you stack up the goals alongside the actual results and … then you figure out how to fudge the numbers for the shareholders.

Too honest. Sorry.

But somewhere between the delivery of the actual numbers from the accounting department and the creation of the largely-fictional version that ends up in the annual report, the truth about the current state of your company is known, if only by a small group of men gathered in a boardroom.

Success — or horrible failure — is quantifiable.

Not really so in the church, is it? Not the way we’d like.

I am the One

The most recent version of this post is available here.

From Safety to Where?

Christian Mingle takes your safety very seriously. Good to know.

But we all take our safety seriously. Some of us are too immature, unwary or inexperienced to recognize potential dangers when we encounter them, but that’s more a matter of failing to apply a principle than failing to believe it. If you ask a group of average folk how important their safety is to them, you’ll find most answer “Very”.

Drug safety, food safety, bike helmets, pre-nuptial agreements, fine print, motorcycle leathers, sunscreen, shark cages, air bags, seatbelts, life preservers, parachutes, fire alarms, escapes and extinguishers … everybody wants to be safe. Nothing intrinsically wicked about that.

Except when you do it at someone else’s expense.

Too Hot to Handle: Biocentrism and Reality

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Has Science Buried God?

Mathematician Dr. John Lennox addressed the question at Rice University Monday night, and his answer is well worth the time:

Don’t be put off by the length of the video (1 hr 53 min). Lennox is not introduced until 00:13:20 and does not address his subject until around the 26 minute mark. He winds up by approximately 01:12:00, so the actual speech is only about 45 minutes. Everything after that is simply Dr. Lennox answering questions posed by the audience.

Cultural Heritage and Faith

The lines are getting blurrier and blurrier.

The U.S. Constitution codified an Americanized version of British Common Law tradition that went all the way back to the 11th century and became the basis for the American identity and a culture that, for good or ill, has been unique in human history.

Now that identity is disappearing in America; drowning under wave after wave of unassimilated immigrants. This is not a new development. It has been going on for decades but has been steadfastly ignored by the political class. Republicans are happy because their corporate benefactors profit from cheap labour and continue to prop up their fading political hopes. Democrats are happy because immigrants and welfare dependents swell the ranks of potential Democrat voters.

Everyone (except perhaps the American middle class) benefits, so it is thought. Why rock the boat?

Well, the boat is rocking now. And we might wonder what the attitude of the American Christian caught in the middle of the culture wars really ought to be.

Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition

Like many statements about the Spanish Inquisition, that one’s not quite true.

Initially, at least, everyone expected the Spanish Inquisition. When the Inquisition rolled up on your city, the Inquisitor would publicly read out the Edict of Grace after Sunday mass, after which those who presented themselves within the next 30 to 40 days were able to reconcile with the state church without severe consequences.

So much for the cliché. Still, some people have a view of history that’s about as accurate as Michael Palin’s opening salvo from the famous Monty Python skit.

Clickbait and Maturity

We get what we ask for.

In economics, it’s the law of supply and demand, really. On the internet, it’s number of clicks. Generally speaking, if you read several pages on the same websites every day, you click a lot. If thousands or hundreds of thousands of others do the same, that’s virtual boatloads of clicks. On the Web, clicks = success.

So if Christians visit websites that offer feel-good fluff, it’s logical to expect that bloggers will write more fluff. If Christians visit websites that offer substantive cultural analysis and reasoned biblical responses, bloggers will write more of that. If Christians visit websites that carefully analyze scripture and teach it, bloggers will offer more careful scripture analysis.

It’s not rocket science. Basically, if you come they will build it, or build more of it. We get what we ask for.

Quote of the Day (8)

You can probably find every subject in the world being discussed somewhere in the blogosphere, along with just about every aspect of Christian living.

But my favourite exchange of the day? Haus Frau has a legitimate question about how best to respond to advocates of Christian homosexuality who seek to disqualify Paul on the subject.

Build a New One

So your testimony is blown to smithereens.

It might have been temper. It might have been unchecked desire. Maybe you were seriously provoked. Or maybe you had the bad judgment to get involved with dishonest business partners and let things slide rather than stand up. You look back on it and say, “How did I miss that?” or “I should’ve known that was over the line”. It might be something in which you were minimally at fault but — as they say in politics these days — the optics are terrible.

The point is, you did something no Christian should do, and it’s gone really, really public.

Too Hot to Handle: What’s the Point?

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Inbox: Things That Don’t Hold Together

My previous post addressed a question raised by Immanuel Can about the use of the term “bride” in scripture as a metaphor for the Church. Examining the subject raised a number of issues best explained in this Infogalactic blurb:

“The Bride of Christ or bride, the Lamb’s wife is a term used in reference to a group of related verses in the Bible — in the Gospels, Revelation, the Epistles and related verses in the Old Testament. Sometimes the Bride is implied through calling Jesus a Bridegroom. For over fifteen hundred years the Church was identified as the bride betrothed to Christ. However, there are instances where the interpretation of the usage of bride varies from Church to Church. The majority believe it always refers to the Church.”

Another thing we call “groups of related verses” is systematic theology. 

Inbox: Who’s Getting Married?

The “Bride of Christ” is not a term found in the Bible.

There, I said it.

Someone is bound to take umbrage, because it’s an expression very commonly heard in Christendom. Even the very useful GotQuestions.org assumes its validity in asking the question “What does it mean that the church is the bride of Christ?” and in going on to note that “In the New Testament, Christ, the Bridegroom, has sacrificially and lovingly chosen the church to be His bride”.

Is that quite right? Let’s have a look.

The Bible Study Troll

Where there is open participation, there will be trolls.

I don’t mean the fairy tale creatures that live under bridges. “Troll” is slang for someone inclined to stir up Internet drama by starting arguments or upsetting people by posting inflammatory, extraneous or off-topic messages. The disruption may be very calculated or completely unintentional: Howard Fosdick says, “Motivations differ but the results are the same”.

Troll-types didn’t originate with the Web and they don’t restrict themselves to it. Trolls have been around as long as there have been opportunities to get attention. The Internet Troll has a genial cousin I call the “Bible Study Troll”. He’s not malicious and he doesn’t mean to be inflammatory, but his contributions are just as likely to lead to drama and discord as those of his better-known relative.

Walking in Lockstep

Some people feel the inability of Christians to agree is a fatal flaw in our faith. The fact that believers understand the word of God differently and apply it differently is, to them, evidence that there is something wrong with the scripture itself, or that Christians are deluded about it, or that perhaps God does not really exist at all.

On the contrary, I believe it is evidence of precisely the opposite. It is exactly what we ought to expect.

To Kendall Hobbs, the inability of Christians to agree about either the will of God or the content of scripture and how it ought to be applied constitutes a valid reason to abandon Christianity. So he did.

Recommend-a-blog (13)

Sure, they have a few more bodies involved. And the occasional video.

But for the most part, the Stand To Reason blog is trying something not unlike what we’re attempting here: to reach out generally to the evangelical community by encouraging biblical solutions to modern issues with a focus on the person of Jesus Christ.

Not to mention that they probably do it a little more graciously than we do.

Not surprising I would like them then, is it?

Disqualify!!

People whose foremost desire is to disqualify the word of God from application to the human experience start with a set of baseline assumptions that cannot help being wrong.

One is that the world has always operated exactly the way they have personally experienced it to operate. Another is that every difference in eyewitness testimony amounts to a contradiction.

Neither is remotely true.

Too Hot to Handle: The Palestinian Question and the Christian

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

Editor’s Note: More and more I realize that a large number of Christians have strange ideas about the nation of Israel today. Some see them as God’s chosen people who can do no wrong. Some see them as entirely outside the scope of God’s blessing now and forever, and view all the promises to national Israel as being fulfilled in the Church. Where a Christian stands on Bible prophecy and Dispensationalism will likely be a factor in his or her position on Israel, but geopolitics often plays an even bigger role.

This is our first ever Too Hot to Handle discussion from the summer of 2014. IC and I don’t hit every possible facet of the topic, but maybe it’s a helpful opening salvo:

Alex Awad is a professing Christian who leads a Bible school in the town of Bethlehem and wrote 2008’s Palestinian Memories: The Story of a Palestinian Mother and her People. 

Ya Really Oughta Know …

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Into the Mystical Abyss

How does God communicate with you?

No, really, it’s a serious question.

People who call themselves Christians have vastly different ideas about how God speaks and how the Holy Spirit leads the believer. As a direct consequence, they also have vastly different ways of living their lives.

I keep coming across things like this:

“Six children’s lives and mine were forever changed when I filed for divorce last November. It was the hardest decision I have had to make. In fact, I didn’t want to make that decision. I pleaded with God for a very long time.”

And yet, strangely, God “led” this evangelical woman to divorce her husband.

Those Ten Lost Tribes (Or Is It Twelve?)

There are few prophetic subjects more hotly contested than the Ten “Lost” Tribes. Maybe the doctrine of the Rapture. Maybe the Pre-/ Post-/ Amillennial divide.

But the folks who get agitated about those issues can’t possibly compete with Alex Christopher. Alex asks “Who Are the Real Israelites?” His answer? Almost every white person on the planet EXCEPT the ones currently living in Israel.

How important is the issue to Alex? “IT IS TIME FOR THE COMMON AMERICAN TO GET UPSET AND INVOLVED,” he shouts [the caps are his, not mine]. Fair warning: Alex actually employs the word “dastardly” to describe the quasi-Jewish conspiracy he is convinced exists, so … you know … judge for yourselves and all that.

The Motive That Matters

Yesterday we looked a little at the difference between rhetoric and lies. Some Christians can’t see that there’s a difference, and that’s okay.

Sure, almost everyone uses rhetoric regularly, so these folks are in for a tough time communicating with others if they eschew it. And I suppose they may struggle to grasp the meaning of the many rhetorical statements found in scripture. Not to mention that they’re going to suffer from epic verbosity, given the necessity of qualifying and contextualizing every statement they make.

Still, if someone wants to hold his speech to a higher standard of accuracy and explicitness, I won’t fight with him. It may be that he’ll manage to successfully communicate with people that you and I could not. And good for him if that’s the case.

So live and let live, I say, at least where the use of rhetoric is concerned.

Whatever Drives the Nail

You really have to watch yourself when you get into a debate in the comments section of your favourite blog.

There’s a certain beauty in being able to engage a large number of people at once. But a line of thought being developed between hundreds of individuals twists and turns and takes on a life of its own. In order to respond to any specific facet of the argument, you have to be quick off the mark or you may wind up saying something redundant. That, or your comment may appear so far from the things it references that it gets lost entirely. 

Thus a fair bit of kneejerking is common among commenters, which on occasion leads to making an idiot of oneself, like I did last night when I briefly found myself arguing something I don’t believe at all.