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Friday, September 20, 2019
Thursday, September 19, 2019
Wednesday, September 18, 2019
State o’ the Blog 2019
I was surprised to find that it’s only been about nine months since
our last “State of the Blog” post. Seems like longer somehow. 2019 has been a busy year to date, with lots of
changes in my own routine, and a few in IC’s as well.
It’s been a while since IC, Bernie and I could all be
in the same room to chat about where we think we should be going with ComingUntrue. The most obvious issue
that presents itself when we manage some phone time is that coming up on
six years of daily blogging, we cannot help but notice our viewing stats
are pretty flat over the last 12 months. Not tailing off, happily, but
definitely not spiraling into the stratosphere either. Part of this may be down
to my reluctance to pitch the blog on social media, part of it may be the
esoteric nature of more than a few of our posts, and part of it may be — if
we want to be honest with ourselves — stagnation.
Better to burn out than to fade away, said one of the prophets. Or maybe it was just Neil Young.
Anyway, none of us voted for working harder at stagnating,
so that’s off the table.
Labels:
Coming Untrue
Tuesday, September 17, 2019
Christ Where He Doesn’t Belong
Back in the days when my brothers and I were happily
misbehaving in the back row of open Sunday School, we quickly learned how to
answer questions for treats. Like performing seals, we tried to outdo one
another for a pencil, badge or snack.
Horrible, really, when you think about it.
The idea was that when the superintendent asked a question,
the kid who got his or her hand up first won the prize, which naturally
encouraged all kinds of cheating. The most effective way to cheat was to stab
your arm up into the stratosphere long before the question was finished, and
sometimes before it started. The downside was that you really
didn’t have a clue what you were supposed to be responding to.
Monday, September 16, 2019
Anonymous Asks (58)
At some point we all hit the upper end of our capacity to
effectively persuade others with dialectical arguments. Education, IQ, maturity, grasp of relevant facts, logical mindset, time spent in the word of God and life experience are all “ceilings” of a sort. Limitations in these areas, understandable or otherwise, create a barrier beyond which we become significantly less persuasive when we try to make the case for
the gospel to people on the higher end of each spectrum.
Some of these barriers may be hurdled with sufficient time,
prayer and hard work; others, like IQ, are pretty much hardwired whether we
like it or not.
Labels:
Anonymous Asks
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Apologetics
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Witnessing
Sunday, September 15, 2019
It Ain’t All About You Either
Continuing an overview of the Song of Songs that is more about what the book is not rather
than what it is. I’m looking for ways to interpret a rather unusual portion of
scripture that do not result in an excess of speculation. Such esoterica finds its way into public teaching more than it ought to.
Wednesday’s post looked at four more-or-less traditional
interpretations of the book. Today’s explores a fifth.
Labels:
Marian Berry
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Prophecy
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Recycling
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Solomon
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Song of Solomon
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Song of Songs
Saturday, September 14, 2019
Time and Chance (1)
Ecclesiastes is a difficult book. Still, in my early
twenties I kept coming back to it despite its apparent bleakness — or
perhaps because of it. Its relentlessly frank take on the unhappy business of
living in a fallen world was (and remains) refreshing, not in comparison to the
rest of scripture, I now realize, but set against the bland and near-insensate
Churchian conformity of post-hippie ’70s evangelicalism in which I was
inadvertently immersed as a teen, and which had regrettably permeated my
understanding of most of the New Testament and deadened my enthusiasm for its
truths.
Happily, nobody in that crowd taught Ecclesiastes the way they taught Ephesians. Perhaps they forgot it was there.
Labels:
Ecclesiastes
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Preacher
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Solomon
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Time and Chance
Friday, September 13, 2019
Too Hot to Handle: These Things Break Bones
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Agnosticism
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David Berlinski
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Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, September 12, 2019
Mismeetings of the Christian Church
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Church
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Fellowship
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Love
Wednesday, September 11, 2019
It Ain’t All About Me
“All the Scriptures, indeed, are holy ... but the Song of
Songs is the Holy of Holies.”
— Rabbi Aqiba
“If a manuscript of this little book were found alone,
detached from the biblical context and tradition, it undoubtedly would be
viewed as secular. The book has no obvious religious content.”
— Dennis F. Kinlaw
While every part of scripture has given rise to some level
of disagreement as to its meaning and value over the years, it would be
difficult to find two such extreme statements about many other books of the Bible.
Of course Kinlaw doesn’t say the book has no religious
content, but that such content is not obvious. And he’s right.
Perhaps so is Rabbi Aqiba.
Labels:
Matthew Henry
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Recycling
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Solomon
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Song of Solomon
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Song of Songs
Tuesday, September 10, 2019
From One End of Heaven
“He will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will
gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.”
There are various schools of thought about what the Lord
Jesus meant with this rather difficult statement. The phrase “from one end
of heaven to the other” is admittedly an unusual one. A literal reading may
lead us to think of people being plucked out of the skies all over the world
and gathered to one place. For what reason, we wonder? And who exactly is this “elect”
of which the Lord is speaking?
Labels:
Deuteronomy
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Israel
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Matthew
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Prophecy
Monday, September 09, 2019
Anonymous Asks (57)
“Isn’t hell an unreasonable punishment for not believing in a specific
set of truth claims?”
If not believing a specific set of truth claims is all there
is to it, perhaps our questioner has a point. But is that really what the Bible
teaches: that the ‘idealogically unsound’ will be banished from the presence of
God for eternity?
Let’s consider ...
Labels:
Anonymous Asks
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Belief
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Judgment
Sunday, September 08, 2019
Stepping Up
“Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them …”
“Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this
question.”
It doesn’t always work this way in church. There are no guarantees. Sometimes the person who has done the hard work of
contending for the faith in a particular area steps aside or is overshadowed by
others who come along at the right time with the right gifts, experience and
skill sets to be involved in the next step of any particular initiative.
And that’s okay when it happens. “I planted, Apollos watered, but
God gave the growth,” says the apostle. That’s the right perspective to keep about such things.
Saturday, September 07, 2019
How Not to Crash and Burn (75)
A 2009 University of Canterbury psychological study of long-term couples turned up an interesting fact: ‘marriage goggles’ are every bit as real as ‘beer goggles’. On average, men in
happy marriages rated their wives as notably more attractive than their wives
rated themselves. (If you’ve ever gone dress shopping with your wife, that will
probably not surprise you.) Furthermore, notwithstanding the ravages of age, men
in happy marriages consistently rated their wives more attractive than third
parties rated them.
This may help explain why women who abandon their partners in their forties and fifties for
an internet fling often wind up alone. Nobody will ever find them quite so
attractive as their former husbands will. Even if they would like a do-over, there simply isn’t enough time left to them to build that sort of bond all over again.
Labels:
How Not to Crash and Burn
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Lemuel
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Proverbs
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Wives
Friday, September 06, 2019
Too Hot to Handle: A Sticky Situation
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Labels:
Ethics
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Joseph Fletcher
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Situation Ethics
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Too Hot to Handle
Thursday, September 05, 2019
College / University Survival Guide [Part 3]
The most recent version of this post is available here.
Wednesday, September 04, 2019
That Wacky Old Testament (15)
“If ... the guilty man deserves to be beaten, the judge shall cause him
to lie down and be beaten in his presence with a number of stripes in
proportion to his offense. Forty stripes may be given him, but not more, lest,
if one should go on to beat him with more stripes than these, your brother be degraded in your sight.”
Flogging is a barbaric practice, or at least so goes the
conventional wisdom. It has been officially abolished for almost a century in most Western countries. Yet, as the above-quoted
passage shows, public flogging was at very least passively sanctioned under the
Law of Moses, a fact that may cause the occasional squawk of disbelieving protest
from well-meaning liberal Christians.
Do they have a point? Let’s consider.
Labels:
Flogging
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Israel
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Punishment
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That Wacky Old Testament
Tuesday, September 03, 2019
Semi-Random Musings (15)
In the first century it was said without exaggeration that “from
ancient generations Moses has had in every city those who proclaim him.” If you were interested in what Moses had to say, you
could find out all about it in any city among the nations. Judaism was not some
obscure cult religion. Its influence on the world was inversely proportionate
to the relative insignificance of the Jewish people.
For the most part, it was not the conduct of the Jews among
the nations that gave the Law its broad appeal and drew Gentile proselytes to
it. In fact, Jews were often disliked and not infrequently persecuted.
Labels:
Acts
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Deuteronomy
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Semi-Random Musings
Monday, September 02, 2019
Anonymous Asks (56)
There are at least three different reasons a question like
this gets asked. One is very Catholic, a second very Protestant, and the
third ... well ... universal.
The Catholic might best have his question paraphrased as
something like “Is there a purgatory, and do we get to go to heaven at the end
of it?” The Protestant is really asking “Is this ‘rapture’ thing I’ve heard
about really in the Bible, and if I get left behind, do I get another
shot?” The universalist is asking some version of “Surely hell cannot last
forever, can it?”
But if you’re looking for an excuse to put off becoming a Christian so you can do it at a more convenient time, the answer to the question is going to be the same no matter what theological presuppositions underlie it.
Labels:
Anonymous Asks
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Purgatory
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Rapture
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Universalism
Sunday, September 01, 2019
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