Too Hot to Handle: The Greatest Threat

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

Immanuel Can: Wow. Brian McLaren. I’m not the biggest fan of his work, to be sure. I read his book A New Kind of Christian, and thought it touched on quite a few important issues, but made the most unfortunate hash of them imaginable. But for charity’s sake, let’s assume that’s the ancient past, so full steam ahead.

“The greatest threat to Christianity is ... misguided Christians, just as the greatest threat to Islam is misguided Muslims and the greatest threat to Judaism is misguided Jews. Religious insiders can do harm to their religion in ways that outsiders never could. This is especially true in a pluralistic world, where religions are credible to the degree they bring benefits to outsiders.”

— Brian McLaren

What does he mean?

Brains With Feet

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Baiting and Switching

J.T. Wynn’s debut column at Stand to Reason certainly doesn’t waste any time getting around to the really big questions; in this case, What is Truth?

Strictly speaking, I suppose Wynn doesn’t answer the question, but that’s not really the point of his post. In any case, his account of two teachers who conflated truth with perception will definitely ring a bell with recent university or college grads, and with anyone who has watched more than a few minutes of Jordan Peterson on YouTube.

Redefining common words is a useful way to skew an argument, muddle an otherwise simple issue, or advance an agenda. Thus Christians need to be able to identify and counter the ol’ bait-and-switch when we run into it.

Quote of the Day (39)

In his book Do We Need God to be Good? anthropologist C.R. Hallpike quotes mathematician Kevin Devlin:

“Whatever features of our brain enable (some of) us to do mathematics must have been present long before we had any mathematics. Those crucial features, therefore, must have evolved to fulfil some other purpose.”

This sort of statement is incredibly common among evolutionary psychologists and biologists, but “some other [undefined] purpose” is pretty much the best they have to offer the world. The gaping holes in their theoretical framework are orders of magnitude larger than the frame itself, calling their entire dubious intellectual structure into question.

Achan and Eve

The most recent version of this post is available here.

On the Mount (30)

The way is hard that leads to life. Ain’t that the truth. Maybe in more ways than we are usually inclined to consider.

Matthew 7:13 is generally read as having to do with a man or woman’s ultimate fate: eternity in hell on the one hand; eternal life in fellowship with God on the other. These are the highest and most personal stakes for which human beings have ever played. In the face of everlasting separation from God and all that is good, it should be obvious that the horrors of war, the nuclear arms race and our current inability to cure cancer pale into comparative insignificance.

Understandably, we will wish to choose carefully.

How Not to Crash and Burn (6)

David Gooding has a knack for taking great wedges of ancient text and breaking them down into manageable chunks of related material, then dissecting those pieces line by line until we are able to think clearly about them. That’s not unique to Gooding of course — all decent Bible teachers do it — but I especially appreciate his sensitivity to the natural flow of poetry, narrative or argument. I have yet to find him analyzing a passage and think Boy, that structure he’s describing looks awfully artificial.

To the extent we are up to the job, it’s a useful trick to imitate.

Too Hot to Handle: Poisoning the Well

The most recent version of this post is available here.

The End of the Family Line

“With no complications,
  fifteen generations of mine
  all honoring nature.
  Until I arrived with incredible style.
  I’m the end of the line;
  the end of the family line.”

— Morrissey

“And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth …”

Relax, I’m probably not going where you think I am.

Semi-Random Musings (7)

Growing up in a Christian home, I was occasionally chastened for misbehavior with the words “Be sure your sin will find you out.” Or I heard other Christian parents using it. Or my irate Sunday School teacher. Or somebody. The memory’s a bit fuzzy, to be honest.

In any case, the line was very familiar, though for some reason I wrongly associated it with Saul and Samuel rather than Moses, who actually said it to the emissaries from the tribes of Reuben and Gad who had proposed to settle their people in the land beyond the Jordan. They solemnly promised to first fight alongside the other men of Israel in order to bring God’s people into their inheritance.

Children, Fathers and Hearts

Concerning New Jersey’s largest city, Steven Malanga says, “An astonishing 60 percent of the city’s kids are growing up without fathers.” According to a recent UNICEF report, “Britain is the worst country in the Western world in which to be a child.” Theodore Dalrymple writes of a British woman with nine children by five different fathers, none of whom contribute consistently to their children’s upkeep.

How Not to Crash and Burn (5)

Dictionary.com says a proverb is a “short pithy saying”. Most familiar Bible proverbs are no more than one or two lines.

A proverb communicates a great deal in the fewest possible words, presumably as an aid to memory, and the reader is usually left to meditate on how best to apply it. The vast majority of biblical proverbs are universally relatable. Even the more obscure sayings ring with plausibility, though they may express truths unfelt or unexperienced.

Or so we might argue. But there are some people to whom the offer of objective truth holds no interest at all.

On the Mount (29)

The so-called Golden Rule is not a new thing.

Infogalactic says, “The Golden Rule or ethic of reciprocity is a moral maxim or principle of altruism found in nearly every human culture and religion,” whether in its positive or negative form. From this ubiquity, one might reasonably conclude that the principle is inherently logical, intuitive or fundamental to human society; perhaps all of these.

Thus when the Lord Jesus laid out his own version in the Sermon on the Mount, it seems unlikely his audience had never heard this particular ethical statement — or at least something very much like it — before. History suggests it was a familiar concept.

Let the Others Weigh

Not too long ago, a grand old Bible teacher I remember fondly from my youth posted a rare thought on Facebook about teaching scripture on the Web. His concern: that the haphazard slinging of tangentially Bible-related opinion is a potential threat to the unity of local churches. Some form of oversight by seasoned teachers of the word of God is preferable. He cited Paul’s command to the Corinthian church: “Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said” in support of the principle.

Now, he’s not wrong here, and he’s not the first to note the problem.

Too Hot to Handle: Debby Boone Theology

The most recent version of this post is available here.

The Era of the Gentle and Reverent Lie

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Agents of Change

Are you an agent of change in your local church? Maybe you should be — of a certain very specific sort, of course.

Several recent studies in other areas of the Bible have led me back into Revelation 2 and 3, the letters to the seven churches. And one thing we see the Head of the Church saying repeatedly to those he loves is that they need change of one sort or another: to Ephesus, get back to the first works; to Pergamum, stop subscribing to false teaching; to Thyatira, stop tolerating it; to Sardis, finish the job you started; and to Laodicea, be zealous and repent.

Change, change, change.

Recommend-a-blog (27)

The internet is a big place, and it’s easy to overlook efforts that are very profitable indeed. In fact, given the lame ways some Christians self-promote, you might never hear about most of us.

This is certainly a problem we’ve run into here at ComingUntrue. I’ve always had an aversion to Facebook and Twitter, the two easiest ways to draw attention to what you are doing online. But while they certainly enable a new initiative to reach out to the largest possible audience, they also data mine you to death and routinely suppress conservative news and expressions of opinion. Thus we have never bothered to set up ComingUntrue Facebook or Twitter accounts. Over the years, I’m sure we’ve lost tens of thousands of pageviews because of it.

Too bad. Oh well. Not a policy I’m likely to consider changing anytime soon.

What Does Your Proof Text Prove? (9)

It is never a good thing to be on the wrong side of a theological question. Sometimes it’s disastrous.

But it’s also possible to be on the right side of a question while making the wrong sort of argument: one that cannot be substantiated or does not prove your point.

Kent Rieske is trying to make the case that the Calvinistic definition of “election” is not a biblical one. I’d argue his basic thesis is correct.

On the Mount (28)

As I mentioned in a couple of recent posts, we cannot be 100% sure which of Jesus’ various references to God specifically as Father to those who believe in him came first chronologically. This is because not all the gospel writers present the events of the Lord’s life in the order they occurred. Some writers, as Luke often does, group them thematically.

In Mark, the first “your Father” doesn’t appear until chapter 11, in the context of forgiveness. In Luke it is chapter 6, and the statement, “your Father also is merciful.” In John, the expression “your Father” does not appear until after his resurrection*, when he says it to Mary Magdalene. Prior to that point, the Lord speaks exclusively of “my Father” or “the Father”.

If I had to guess, I’d go with Matthew.