Too Close to Home

Robert Barron comments on the parable of the wedding feast in Matthew:

“Many devout believers find the brutality and violence of the story hard to take. In a very secularized society where people have lost the sense of God, you have to shake them into awareness with a shocking story with very exaggeratedly-drawn characters, with macabre and violent shocking action.”

Barron goes on to tell his listeners not to interpret the parable in a straightforward, literal way, or to compare this “crazy king” directly to God in every respect. He suggests the Lord was just using strong language to get our attention, to “grab us by the shoulders and shake us awake”.

Semi-Random Musings (22)

You really can’t make this stuff up.

As you have probably read or heard elsewhere by now, the 117th Congress got off to a rocky start January 3 with an opening prayer that concluded with the words “amen and awoman”. Naturally the video went viral.

Of course it did. In this emotionally-charged and hyper-politicized environment, how could it not?

Anonymous Asks (127)

“Do illegitimate children go to heaven?”

A child is called illegitimate when born to a woman not legally married to the father. He or she may be the product of any of a variety of circumstances: a one night stand, a brief, broken or casual ongoing sexual relationship, prostitution, adultery or even incest. Artificial insemination has also made it possible for a woman to bring a child into the world without committing to a relationship with the donor, and this option is becoming increasingly popular in some demographics.

The Language of the Debate (3)

You have three seconds to answer: What’s the opposite of egalitarianism?

Three ... two ... one ... okay, all guesses should be in now. If your answer was “complementarianism”, my first thought is that maybe you’ve been spending too much time in the Recently Released section of your local LifeWay or Family Christian Bookstore — except both those chains went belly-up in the last four years and it doesn’t look like anyone is stepping up to fill their shoes. I guess maybe you could be Reformed ...

Here’s a crazy thought: the opposite of egalitarianism just might be biblical headship. Now there’s a dusty old concept.

Mining the Minors: Jonah (16)

There is a little bit of numeric symmetry in this last chapter of Jonah: God asks three questions, and because Jonah’s animosity toward the people of Nineveh and his disappointment at God’s delay in judging them are so intense, the prophet three times asks God to allow him to die. There are also three things in chapter 4 that God is said to have “appointed”, so there are three sets of three. Perhaps the symmetry is not so accidental.

Needless to say, it is fairly obvious Jonah’s request to die went ungranted, or else his story would never have been written.

Too Hot to Handle: Heretics Aplenty

The most recent version of this post is available here.

What Are We Waiting For?

The most recent version of this post is available here.

A Second Opinion

One of Stand to Reason’s most popular posts last year was a Tim Barnett article entitled “What Must Ben Shapiro Do to Be Saved?” Barnett had been watching a 2018 YouTube interview in which the conservative pundit Shapiro got into a lengthy discussion with Roman Catholic bishop Robert Barron.

Shapiro and Barron found plenty of common ground, as one might expect. Then things got interesting.

Top 10 Posts of 2020

Trying to determine which ten of our 368 blog posts in 2020 drew the most eyes is not as straightforward a task as it might seem.

A post may have low numbers in its first week of publication, then catch fire later in the year when somebody links to it on Facebook or Twitter, or because it has a unique term in it that is being repeatedly entered into search engines. Totaling up pageviews only tells us a post is really popular when a few months have passed, meaning that articles written in the last quarter of any given calendar year are hard pressed to crack a Top 10 compiled purely by the numbers.

Sometimes, frankly, figuring out why any particular post drew so much attention is simply impossible even when you happen to be its author. (#6 comes to mind.)

Anonymous Asks (126)

“Did God create a second Adam?”

This is one of those questions that presumes familiarity with a particular New Testament passage. In this case the passage is 1 Corinthians 15, the subject of which is resurrection. It is there that the apostle Paul writes, “The first man Adam became a living being” (referring to a statement made way back in Genesis 2). Then he adds this: “the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.” Paul then goes on to contrast this “last Adam”, who is clearly Jesus Christ, the “second man”, with the first man, Adam, in that “The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven.”

That’s where the language of our anonymous questioner is coming from, and that’s our starting point. Paul calls Jesus at various times in the passage the “last Adam”, the “second man” and the “man from heaven”.

Saying Goodbye to 2020 (and my Career as a Prophet)

Last year around this time I decided to test whether I have the gift of prophecy, so instead of making the usual New Year’s resolutions, I reeled off a number of what I thought were really obvious predictions for the then-upcoming year, the vast majority of which have been (or will shortly be) proven correct.

As I write these words, my prophetic pitch with respect to the U.S. election is still hanging in the air over the plate, and January looks to be a very interesting month. As to my other four predictions, in all honesty I can hardly claim much prophetic acumen: it turns out I was shooting fish in a barrel.

Mining the Minors: Jonah (15)

In the last few decades, those of us who live in multicultural societies have been thoroughly propagandized against any visible display of racial animus. The social project of stigmatizing Western “racists” — to the point where even inadvertently acknowledging obvious differences between people groups commonly results in social shaming and summary disemployment — has been a great success among liberal whites, though notably less transformative across other demographics.

Having grown up in an era largely free of war, half-lobotomized by the steadily-mounting pressure of political correctness, more than a few of us may have difficulty imagining a time in which intense race-consciousness might have served the occasional useful purpose.

That would be most of the rest of human history.

Too Hot to Handle: Biden Our Time

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

Tom: My co-writer Immanuel Can was exchanging opinions online the other day about the prospect of a Joe Biden presidency. One commenter wrote: “You have mentioned a day of judgment; perhaps this is how it starts.”

IC’s response: “That thought has occurred to me more than once.”

Since the prospect of a Biden presidency (or really a Harris presidency) has been looming over us during this Christmas season, and since the legacy media is determined to convince us the November election is a done deal, I’m okay with talking about what that might mean for believers, for the U.S., and for the world ... provided I get to say two things first about all the white flag-waving currently going on in the conservative and Christian media.

Protecting People from Truth

The most recent version of this post is available here. 

Non-Canonical Episodes

Did Jude have the gift of prophecy?

I wonder. It certainly seems a strong possibility. Prophecy is not merely a feature of the Old Testament, but is also numbered with the gifts given by the Holy Spirit to the New Testament church.

Prophecy was a practical gift. In the early church it also appears to have been a fairly common one. It did not manifest itself in the expected esoteric, oddball mutterings but rather in “upbuilding and encouragement and consolation”. In this the prophet functioned similarly to the teacher in today’s church.

Balancing Act

“A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight.”

False balances are generally associated with weights and scales. The idea is that there is an established price quoted per pound, ounce or liter, but when it comes time to measure out the product, the merchant has rigged his scales so that the balance shown does not reflect the quantity being measured, and the purchaser ends up paying for something he is not receiving. He is being ripped off.

We may come to view being fleeced as the cost of doing business, but the Lord loathes such practices. He calls them an abomination.

Anonymous Asks (125)

“Did Lot really have sex with his daughters?”

It may surprise you to find that Abraham’s nephew Lot is mentioned a grand total of 111 times in the Bible. That’s not a lot compared to David’s 1,100 or Abraham’s 293, but it’s considerably more than Elijah, Elisha or Daniel, all of whom have major Old Testament roles.

All the same, Lot is more of what we might call a “supporting actor” than a main character. He is best known for following his uncle Abraham on his quest for a city with foundations whose designer and builder is God. But if Lot is known more for being a follower than a leader, at least he was following a spiritual giant on a God-directed mission.

So did this godly man have sex with his daughters? Well, yes, he did.

The Commentariat Speaks (20)

Owen Cyclops is tweeting about Kirk Cameron’s cheesy Christian Christmas movie:

“At the end there’s like a 3-4 minute hip hop breakdancing ... thing, that’s the worst thing in the movie by far. I found this symbolically perfect because, if every worldview has its strengths and weaknesses, the weakness for American evangelical Christianity, speaking as an outsider friend rather than an overly critical foe, is that it has no ‘fence’ or ‘barrier’ to keep stuff like that out, which I suppose is part of the function of tradition in other manifestations of Christianity.”

I know nothing about Owen beyond what I’ve read in a single Twitter thread, but one may reasonably infer that he hails from one of these “other manifestations” of Christianity he refers to, one which offers believers the fence-like protection of tradition.

Mining the Minors: Jonah (14)

As finite beings of time and space, we cannot really know what God’s emotional life is like, or understand the way in which the Divine Mind makes choices. To imagine we can is simply projection.

In describing these incomprehensible things for us, the writers of the Bible have painted their picture with the very limited palette of human language. Moreover, the Spirit of God chose ways of expressing God’s feelings and actions that would communicate effectively to men and women of widely different cultures across a period of thousands of years.

I think the result is marvelous. Still, there are passages with which we struggle. The final verse of Jonah 3 may be one of them.

Is There Any Joy?

It is often said that joy is different from happiness. Happiness is a thing based on “hap” (which means chance), or one based on circumstances going well — on “good happenings”. By contrast, joy is an abiding sense of fulfillment and well-being, a disposition not based on circumstances, but one that is durable in the face of change. Something like that must be what RZIM spokesperson Max Jeganathan has in mind in this video, for example.

That distinction's good to note  — and true, so far as it goes. But we might press the issue further: What accounts for the quality of joy that enables it to endure when mere happiness is taken away from us?