Time and Chance (3)

The book of Ecclesiastes is often referred to as poetry. In a general sense I suppose this is true: there are numerous poetic passages within Ecclesiastes.

But if the inclusion of Ecclesiastes in the “poetic books” of scripture leads us to expect another Psalms, we will probably be disappointed. The majority of the book is made up of prose (usually arguments and observations of one sort or another) and proverbial sayings of various lengths that do not conform to any standard poetic structure even in the original Hebrew.

Modern English versions distinguish the obviously poetic passages for us by indenting them. We are going to look at one today.

Too Hot to Handle: The Emperor’s New Clothes

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Tracking True

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Which Sense Makes the Most Sense?

In my internet wanderings, I frequently come across believers who are utterly convinced that the spiritual not only trumps the natural but invalidates it entirely.

There is indeed something to the first part of that: the spiritual is bound to be more important to the Christian than that which is merely natural. If we must choose, for instance, between responding to the promptings of flesh or Spirit, of course Spirit wins every time ... or ought to.

Laying a Conspiracy to Rest

Aaron Brake at Stand to Reason doesn’t like conspiracy theories. He thinks most of them are false and that acknowledging we believe them may damage our Christian testimony.

In the process of trying to make his case, Brake quotes at length from homicide detective J. Warner Wallace’s book Cold-Case Christianity. Wallace argues that successful conspiracy theories are very difficult to execute and maintain.

Anonymous Asks (59)

“Is suicide a mortal sin?”

Some people — Christians included — are going through incredibly tough times; emotionally, physically or both. For a person in unrelenting pain, the temptation to take a pass on more of the same when there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel is very real indeed.

So since “mortal sin” is technically a Roman Catholic term, let’s ask them, at least for starters. I’ve always vaguely wondered what the official RC position was, but suicide is one of those issues I haven’t personally contemplated for almost forty years, and even when I did, I can’t say I was terribly serious about it.

A good long look at the tarmac from the top of a highway overpass will tend to dissuade all but the most committed. Turned out I was a dilettante.

Conspirators and Theorists

In a post entitled “Why You Should Resist Conspiracy Theories”, Stand to Reason’s Aaron Brake warns his fellow Christians about the dangers of falling for the counternarrative. Conspiracy theories, Brake says, are rarely true. If you believe them, you undermine your own witness, not to mention the case for the resurrection of Christ.

That’s a powerful statement to make, and it probably shouldn’t stand without a little closer examination.

I found Brake’s article extraordinary on a number of levels, so much so that I wandered around stewing about it for a couple of days before deciding to hazard a response. Oddly, I find that I mostly agree with his conclusions while disagreeing with almost everything he says on the way to getting there. More on that later.

Time and Chance (2)

More often than not, the Bible teacher who tells you the thing you are reading does not mean what it says in plain English is telling you sanctified fibs. Odds are he is explaining away the text rather than explaining it.

With a few notable exceptions (by which I mean the hacks who lend their expertise to Bible versions created specifically to push ideological agendas), translators are apolitical, honest and usually quite competent.

Too Hot to Handle: Nothing to Complain About

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Are We Teaching or Just Speeching?

The most recent version of this post is available here.

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.

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.

Anonymous Asks (58)

“How can I witness to peers who have intelligent answers to all my arguments for Christianity?”

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.

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.

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.

Too Hot to Handle: These Things Break Bones

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Mismeetings of the Christian Church

The most recent version of this post is available here.

It Ain’t All About Me

Let me start with a couple of quotes that intrigue me. They may even be true:

“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.

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?

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 ...