The Author of Confusion

Paul Mizzi is an evangelical pastor on the largely-Catholic island of Malta. His essays on various aspects of the Christian faith may be found on the website Truth for Today.

Malta got a visit from the apostle Paul in the first century that included a number of miracles of healing (and undoubtedly the preaching of the gospel to go with them). But despite the fact that Malta has had apostolic testimony for two thousand years, the structure and function of their evangelical churches today seems to have more in common with that of North American denominational Protestantism than with that of the church of the New Testament.

In Paul Mizzi’s church the distinction between clergy and laity is very well defined.

The Myth of Ideological Neutrality

Hmm ... which one is neutral?

I remember a time very, very long ago when this sort of thing may actually have gotten traction between my ears:

“As an open-minded nonreligious parent, it’s important to me that my daughter make up her own mind about what to believe — independent of me, independent of her grandparents, independent of her friends and neighbors. I want her to learn about various systems of belief, and about science and evidence, and then decide what seems right to her. If she changes her mind along the way, that’s fine! As long as it’s her own inquisitiveness and independent thought that prompts each change of heart.

You’re with me on this, right?”

No, but Wendy Thomas Russell is not alone in her desire to step back and avoid unduly influencing the way her child forms her beliefs about religion.

When Life Really Hurts

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Too Hot to Handle: Keeping It Controversial

The most recent version of this post is available here.

A Better Second Fiddle

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Look At Those Goalposts Move!

In addition to constantly meeting facts with feelings, you may have noticed that the religious left tries to avoid addressing opposing arguments directly — a canny strategy when one has little of substance to put forward.

Instead, by moving the goalposts, they reframe the question under discussion so that the other side finds itself inadvertently giving up intellectual or spiritual ground without ever having really lost it. The issue, or at least part of it, is conceded without any discussion at all.

The trick is to recognize goalpost shifting when you see it and refuse to reframe.

The Twitterized Bible

How about that morning verse, eh?

Ben Irwin dislikes the ‘Twitterized’ Bible.

You know, the way Christians tend to quote scripture in tiny fragments. He’s concerned that in doing so we’ll lose the Author’s original meaning and not even realize it’s gone. Twitterizing is only one name for it. Others call it “using the Bible as a medicine cabinet” or “prooftexting”.

For the most part I agree with Ben, so I’m going to tread carefully here.

After all, I have harped here about context as the most critically important interpretive tool in the Bible student’s tool kit so many times I’ve lost track. Taken out of their original context, verses of holy writ may be misunderstood or have their meanings entirely inverted.

But not always.

Communicable Defilement

Yesterday I shared some thoughts about the Levitical laws having to do with uncleanness and ritual defilement, and I applied them to the subject of mankind’s relationship to its Creator.

Since nothing happened to Israel in a vacuum and precious few of their laws are without some practical application to the Christian life, today I’d like to look at the issue of ongoing defilement and uncleanness in the era beyond the Law of Moses.

But before we do that, we need to take one last look back at Leviticus.

The Twelve-Year Illustration

The first two gospels tell the story of an unnamed woman who suffered from a discharge of blood for twelve years.

Believing even the briefest, most ephemeral contact with Jesus would heal her of her condition, she crept up behind the Lord to touch the fringe of his robe. And we all know the rest of the story, including the “your faith has made you well” part.

Mark records that the woman had “suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse”. Having spent some time in the care of doctors, I can relate. I can more or less imagine what that might have meant for her medically.

The part of the story I never really thought about before is what it meant for a Jewish woman socially and religiously to be declared ritually “unclean”.

Inbox: The Worst Possible Answer

Bernie continues to muse about suffering from a biblical perspective:

“Some other things to consider:

• Of the four identified types of suffering [see previous post], Christians get all four (yay!), non-Christians only get the first two.
• Suffering of types two and three is not the mark of a failing Christian, it is the mark of a succeeding one. The more we do for God and the more we get serious about bringing Christ-likeness out fully, the more we will feel the knife — or, a better image — feel the weight of the cross. Opposition grows as we mature and become productive. This is (I think) why the people closest to God seem to suffer the most and endure the greatest hardships.

Too Hot to Handle: Rules of Combat

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Inbox: Applied Grace and the Smoking Ruins of My Life

Bernie holds forth about four causes of suffering:

“I suggest the source of suffering is four-fold in a mature Christian view:

1. Sin in me (bad choices I make to my own detriment) — God’s purpose is discipline and correction.
2. Sin around me (sins of others / fallen environment) — God’s purpose is to produce a stronger faith and, in our dissatisfaction here, a longing for our true home.
3. Satan against me (the opposition made to those who are seeking to be productive for God) — “all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus ...” You know the rest. If you’re going to be productive for God, you’re going to get hit often and painfully.
4. God for me (a loving Father conforming me — through suffering — to produce Christlikeness: “The fellowship of his suffering”).

I’ve Got What It Takes — Relatively Speaking

I can’t tell you what sort of ideological programming a child in Ukrainian or Polish or Argentinean or Nigerian society may be exposed to, but for years kids growing up in the Western world have been hearing that we can do or be anything we want.

“If you can dream it, you can do it,” Walt Disney is purported to have said. “If you think you can do it, you can,” confirms John Burroughs. “I don't think anything is unrealistic if you believe you can do it,” agrees Richard Evans.

In the absence of a plausible counter-narrative, children bombarded with such sentiments may absorb them uncritically.

Don’t Forget What You Never Knew

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Quote of the Day (20)

For anyone who missed it, after being waylaid by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, presidential candidate Donald Trump mused briefly about criminalizing the choice to abort a child last week, before doing an abrupt about-face once it became clear he’d stepped into a minefield and had, at least temporarily, united the pro- and anti-abortion crowd against himself.

Dalrock’s is the only explanation I’ve read so far that makes perfect sense.

Too Convenient

I was out last night with an unsaved friend.

I’ve written about him before. Like many others, he knows just enough about Christianity to think he understands it; just enough to think the decision that faith in Jesus Christ is not for him is a choice he has made intelligently on the basis of years of shrewd observation of Christians and our various failings. And believing his understanding adequate, he has little interest in hearing any more. He’s reluctant to get into the subject with me because he has a fairly good idea where I’ll be going.

He believes in God, he tells me, and I have no reason to doubt it. But his version of God is vastly different from the God of the Bible.

Punishment and Deterrence

 The most recent version of this post is available here.

Too Hot to Handle: To Debate or Not to Debate

The most recent version of this post is available here.

One Corporate Setting

What is the “whole church” anyway?

Crawford Paul says, “Home studies, conversation studies, group prayer times etc. do not fall under that condition [the instructions of 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2 about church order in which women are silent and men teach and lead, Ed.] as long as the whole church is not expected to attend or be gathered in one corporate setting. In these cases, men and women are free to participate in those activities.”

But what scriptural authority does Crawford have for this freedom of audible participation for both sexes in situations in which the “whole church” is not expected to be present but any combination of its members may be? If he has any, he does not cite it.

This may be because such authority does not exist.

Culture Creep

Early this year, Crawford Paul wrote about how local churches can change to promote growth. One commenter gently took him to task:

“Post what changes you want, and what it means to open discussions (women speaking?) and be more specific.”

Short version: I jumped all over the commenter, who seemed generally opposed to change in the church and suggested Mr. Paul’s posts were fostering discontent. It seemed to me he was reading things into Crawford’s appeals for change that simply weren’t there (the subject of women speaking was never addressed in the post). I even suggested the commenter might be jumping at shadows.

Now I’m wondering if maybe I owe the poor guy an apology. He may not be so paranoid after all.