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“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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Friday, July 12, 2019
Thursday, July 11, 2019
I Want to Die
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Baptism
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Christian Testimony
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Salvation
Wednesday, July 10, 2019
That Wacky Old Testament (14)
Yesterday we looked at
the sometimes-controversial fifth chapter of Numbers, in which God gives
instructions about how a jealous husband should deal with a wife thought to
have committed adultery.
The confusion this chapter produces in modern women reading it for the first time is really quite
entertaining. Brought up to believe unquestioningly in “equality” of every
possible sort, they quickly look around for the parallel chapter in which a
wife could take her husband to the priest and have him tested for adultery. The
less-experienced Bible students are shocked to find it doesn’t exist.
The world was a different place in those days, especially in the nation of Israel. Some things
have changed. Some have not.
Labels:
Adultery
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Marriage
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Numbers
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That Wacky Old Testament
Tuesday, July 09, 2019
That Wacky Old Testament (13)
The “bitter water”
test found in the fifth chapter of Numbers is the source of a fair bit of
confusion and debate.
There are arguments that it
legitimizes abortion, arguments that the test
couldn’t possibly work, and of course we can’t forget the obligatory fussing that the test was
unegalitarian because it was not applied to men.
That makes the chapter worth a little more attention, surely.
Labels:
Adultery
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Marriage
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Numbers
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That Wacky Old Testament
Monday, July 08, 2019
Anonymous Asks (48)
It is important to notice that God did not always interact with
men and women in exactly the same way over the periods covered in the Old and
New Testaments. In fact, he revealed himself
at many different times and in many different ways. There were also long periods in between these self-revelations — sometimes ten
generations or more — during which God appears to have been silent, and no
new word from heaven was forthcoming.
All the same, I think we have a good idea what’s being asked
here, and that is this: Why does it appear there is no longer any absolutely categorical,
personal, undeniable, back-and-forth interaction with God available to us?
Labels:
Anonymous Asks
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Christ
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Hebrews
Sunday, July 07, 2019
A Closer Look
I did not grow up with liturgy. The closest thing was probably the occasional corporate reading of
scripture from the back of a beat-up hymnbook with a busted spine, where at
least you could be sure everyone was looking at the same translation for once.
Agreed, that’s not very close.
The Upper and Nether Millstones
Of course there were always very sincere, older, conservative Christians around who prayed out loud in
religious clichés so hackneyed and distinctive you could see them coming
several sentences in advance. But that’s not really liturgy either; it’s more
like chronic failure of imagination. My brothers and I would mouth these pieties
to one another as they rolled off the speaker’s tongue in amusement at our own
rather profane cleverness in anticipating them.
Labels:
Liturgy
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Old Testament
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Ritual
Saturday, July 06, 2019
How Not to Crash and Burn (66)
Ask any sports fan. We are always delighted to cheer the overcomer, the up-and-comer, and the
unexpected victory from the team that wasn’t expected to get it done. It’s
called bandwagoneering, and it happens regularly in cities whose teams haven’t
won in years. People with no previous interest in basketball, baseball or football suddenly start talking
about the home squad as if they are family members.
But underdogs are not just a regular feature of professional sports. Creation has plenty of them on
display. The best thing is that these natural examples of overcoming were not
cobbled together at last minute with millions of dollars at the trade deadline;
rather, they were designed by God to teach us all lessons of enduring value.
Labels:
Agur
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Creation
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How Not to Crash and Burn
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Proverbs
Friday, July 05, 2019
Too Hot to Handle: Those Pesky Evangelicals
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Babel
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Ecumenicalism
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Globalism
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Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, July 04, 2019
Straight Talk
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Conscience
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John the Baptist
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Judgment
Wednesday, July 03, 2019
Conspiracy Theory
I’ve been enjoying the account of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, who became the apostle Paul, the writer of many books in the New Testament. The book of Acts tells Paul’s story several times, each version bringing out new details not recorded in the others.
Atheists and detractors like to point out alleged contradictions in scripture; anything that might be interpreted, however implausibly, with sufficient elasticity as to make less than perfect, logical sense of the biblical narrative. Such things are accounted for variously as factual mistakes, copyist’s errors or conspiracies among believers to commit pious fraud.
TheThinkingAtheist.com is a great place to go if you want to see the sort of thing that passes for Bible criticism among those who have already made up their minds before reading a single verse.
Labels:
Acts
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Apostle Paul
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Contradictions in Scripture
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Recycling
Tuesday, July 02, 2019
Quote of the Day (41)
In a week when the usual suspects have been howling for a “disproportionate response” to the downing
of a U.S. navy spy drone, it’s refreshing to find a commentator who prefers violent
provocations be met with no response at all.
Don’t worry, this is not about the Strait of Hormuz or what constitutes Iranian airspace. The
provocation is storyline-only, and the response to it is disproportionate only
if you fail to consider the circumstances in which it occurs.
Labels:
Kingdom
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Matthew
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Parables
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Quote of the Day
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William MacDonald
Monday, July 01, 2019
Anonymous Asks (47)
If we are going to consider how it was that people were able
to live to exceptional ages in the early chapters of Genesis (930 years
for Adam, 912 for Seth, 969 for Methuselah, which is the highest recorded, and
so on), we had better first ask the question, “Did they really?”
After all, some Bible students believe they did not.
I think they’re wrong, but we should at least let them weigh in.
Labels:
Anonymous Asks
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Genealogies
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Genesis
Sunday, June 30, 2019
Immanentizing the Eschaton
Let’s get this out of the way right up front: when you hear that someone is trying to “immanentize
the eschaton”, it’s simply educated jargon. It’s a more confusing way of claiming
they are trying to bring on the end times. I expect it’s intended to leave
us midwits scratching our heads in perplexity, but who knows? The accusation
has been leveled against utopian secularists and evangelical Christians alike.
Most recently I found it in Infogalactic’s entry on
Postmillennialism, which I was discussing in
this space just the other day: “It [postmillennialism, especially reconstructionist postmillennialism] has been criticized by 20th
century religious conservatives as an attempt to immanentize the eschaton.”
Labels:
Gospel
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Politics
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Postmillennialism
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Prophecy
Saturday, June 29, 2019
How Not to Crash and Burn (65)
As we have noted in previous installments, there are different kinds of proverbs. One very common
sort is the command. An example: “Do
not add to his words lest he rebuke you.” Another is the warning: “The eye that mocks a father ... will be eaten by
vultures.” A third is the appeal: “Give me neither poverty nor
riches.” All these teach us in different ways.
Agur’s favorite type of proverb was none of
the above. More than anything else, Agur was a keen student of the natural
world. His proverbs are primarily observational.
He may draw the occasional moral conclusion explicitly, but for the most part
he simply tells us how things are and lets us chew on that for a bit.
It’s not a bad strategy. I’ve been enjoying it.
Labels:
Agur
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How Not to Crash and Burn
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Proverbs
Friday, June 28, 2019
Too Hot to Handle: The Whole of the Law
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Aleister Crowley
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Law
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Love
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Occultism
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Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, June 27, 2019
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
Unhobbling Don Quixote’s Horse
In a couple of earlier posts this week I looked at some of the differences between the premillennial and
amillennial schools of thought about Bible prophecy. You can find them here
and here if you’re interested.
All beliefs about prophecy have practical
implications of one sort or another, but the one most likely to ruffle feathers
in the here-and-now, I think, is postmillennialism. That makes it worth
chewing over a little.
Labels:
Douglas Wilson
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Islam
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Politics
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Polygamy
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Postmillennialism
Tuesday, June 25, 2019
A Cup of Weak Tea
“Facts don’t care
about your feelings,” Ben Shapiro is fond of saying. Unlike much of his recent book
The Right Side of History, that
statement is fairly accurate.
But facts also don’t
care about your eschatology. Not a bit. Premillennialist Bible teachers and
popular writers who make careers out of dogmatically applying specific prophecies
to current events tend to find this to their chagrin — well-known date-setter
Harold Camping being one recent example.
Facts take no joy in embarrassing the likes of Camping. They are not mean-spirited. They simply are
what they are.
Labels:
Amillennialism
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Book Reviews
/
Kim Riddlebarger
/
Revelation
Monday, June 24, 2019
Anonymous Asks (46)
No ghosts, but if you’re not familiar with
the concept of worshiping God in spirit, maybe it can be a bit confusing.
Jesus said God the Father is looking for people who will worship him
“in spirit and in truth”. That became possible when the Father sent the Son into the world to
reveal God to mankind.
To understand the meaning of worshiping in
spirit, we need to understand a little bit about the alternative.
Labels:
Anonymous Asks
/
Spirit
/
Worship
Sunday, June 23, 2019
Don’t Stop Now, You’re Almost There
The devil may be in the details, but far-reaching doctrinal errors are all in the broad strokes and
almost never in the minutia. I’m becoming convinced of it.
My test case at the moment is the expanded edition of Kim Riddlebarger’s A Case for
Amillennialism: Understanding the End Times (2013), in the
event you’re wondering. But I have found the same thing with several books I’ve
read recently: they advance a fundamentally flawed major premise. Once you’ve
done that, you can pile up the proof texts to highest heaven without
successfully proving anything. Your original, glaring defect of thought makes
them all irrelevant to the greater argument.
Labels:
Amillennialism
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Book Reviews
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Kim Riddlebarger
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Premillennialism
/
Prophecy
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