Too Hot to Handle: Church of the Revolving Door

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Mean Girls and Mean Theology

The teen film Mean Girls (2004) is sort of a cult classic with the kids at the school where I teach. Everyone knows the story, even though the film is getting a bit old now. The star (Lindsay Lohan) is certainly no teenager anymore, as any number of her recent escapades in the press will attest. But somehow the plot line still works. On April 28th, the anniversary of its release, the Toronto Sun, that bastion of fine journalism, proudly proclaimed it “still the ultimate teen movie”.

I sure hope not.

Religion and Worldview

I rarely agree completely with anyone, and I doubt anyone ever completely agrees with me. Moreover, the longer we go on talking, the more likely we are to find points of disagreement with one another.

When IC and I comment here on what others have written, we usually try to quote just enough to allow the writer to fully and clearly make his point in his own words. The goal is to find the sweet spot between unfairly representing an argument and letting it overwhelm our commentary on it; after all, they have their platforms and we have ours.

On the Subject of Being Subject

As this world moves deeper into secular materialism and post-rationality with each passing year, the tremendous practical and material benefits of the Christian faith become increasingly evident in contrast to the chaos, confusion and despair that follow logically from any worldview in which God is absent or unknowable.

One nine year study of over 21,000 believers showed we live on average seven years longer than those who do not know Christ. To quote the Handbook of Religion and Health (2001), faith has been correlated with “well-being, happiness and life satisfaction; hope and optimism; purpose and meaning in life; higher self-esteem; better adaptation to bereavement; greater social support and less loneliness; lower rates of depression and faster recovery from depression; lower rates of suicide and fewer positive attitudes towards suicide; less anxiety; less psychosis and fewer psychotic tendencies; lower rates of alcohol and drug abuse; less delinquency and criminal activity; greater marital stability and satisfaction.”

Sounds like great advertising, right? Wrong. Definitely wrong.

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“Are people born good?”

Aristotle argued that men are born amoral and morality is learned, while Rousseau insisted men would be gentle and pure without the greed and inequality promoted by the class system. The philosophical debate has gone on for centuries, and “science” has contributed little to finding an answer.

So then, expert opinion on the question averages out to something like “We’re not really sure.”

The Distance Between

IC’s post on immanence/transcendence last week got to me for a number of reasons. (If you haven’t read it, what are you reading this for? Go. Now.)

When I was a little boy, our family crossed the ocean on a liner sizable for its day. I don’t remember much of the journey; I suppose most of it was fairly uneventful. What I do remember vividly is coming up on deck with my father one bright day when the sea was slightly turbulent. It wasn’t stormy, but it was far from calm. Great swells repeatedly arose to starboard, higher (I thought at the time) than the ship itself, gradually dipping and moving slowly and methodically under us. The horizon seemed to disappear and I found myself convinced the deck had tilted at some sort of incredible angle (though I suspect that was only my disconcerted, childish impression).

It was my first experience of “big”, and it stuck.

Mining the Minors: Amos (36)

How many titles are given to God in the Old Testament? Much depends on whether you count slight variations as completely different names or group them together as essentially teaching the same truths about the Almighty. Three attempts to put a hard number on the total got me 14, 17 and 21, which was enough to discourage me from the effort for the time being.

Let’s just say there are many: some that encourage (The Lord My Banner), some that comfort (The Lord My Shepherd), some that reassure (The Lord Will Provide) and some that awe (Jealous, The Most High God).

One of the more intimidating titles is found in the next two verses in Amos.

Too Hot to Handle: How I Didn’t Meet Your Mother

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Hooray for the Hypocrites

One of my Neo-Calvinist friends wrote to me yesterday. He said that I should like a favorite preacher of his (David Platt). He said that this preacher “holds to the Reformed theology”. Then he added, “People who truly understand the Reformed theology have a passion for lost souls.”

His first statement is probably true.

If the second one is true, the first one is certainly false.

If a Calvinist loves the salvation message it might make him a nice person but it also makes him a bad Calvinist.

Not Exactly Synonyms

“I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people ...”

Sometimes the lists we find in scripture consist largely of different words that mean essentially the same thing; synonyms multiplied for the purpose of reinforcing the author’s intended meaning through repetition. Other times they do not. This is one of those cases: the four words are not exactly synonyms. While there is some overlap, each word Paul uses to describe types of prayer has a different shade of meaning and each conveys a new thought.

It’s probably a worthwhile exercise to re-examine each of these terms to make sure they really mean precisely what we think they do. I find studies of this sort produce the occasional surprise.

Making It ‘Moral’

Well, that certainly didn’t take long.

Less than two weeks back I observed that people are getting vaccinated for all sorts of reasons, the vast majority of which are pragmatic rather than moral or religious.

The difference is easy to illustrate. Pragmatic arguments for vaccination include “If you don’t get vaccinated, you may lose your job”, “If you don’t get vaccinated, you won’t be able to go to a restaurant or a football game”, or even “If you don’t get vaccinated, you won’t be welcome in my home for Christmas.”

Contrast that with my favorite strained and unconvincing recent attempt at making the issue moral: “If you don’t get vaccinated, you’ll kill your grandmother.”

Okay then ...

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“What does it mean that God is able to keep us from stumbling?”

You are probably thinking of the last two verses of Jude: “Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever.”

Common Sense and Spiritual Discernment

Moments before taking my daily stroll through what turned out this morning to be a dark, rainy neighborhood, I happened to come across a question on social media about the relationship of spiritual discernment to common sense.

The writer got me thinking. Obviously both are means by which human beings gain competence in navigating the world, but they are quite different from one another, though common sense and spiritual discernment may occasionally lead us to similar conclusions.

The distinctions may become clearer if we add a third factor to the mix. For the sake of brevity, let’s just refer to this third thing as knowledge, but what I mean by knowledge in this context is information received second-hand, whether from books, media or other people.

The natural man has common sense, the learned man adds to it knowledge, but only the regenerate man has spiritual discernment.

Mining the Minors: Amos (35)

We have come to the final chapter of Amos, and to the seer’s final vision, this time of the Lord and the altar.

As in previous passages in Amos, the altar in question is not the altar in Jerusalem, in the true temple of the Lord, but rather the altar of the facsimile-temple in Bethel, home of one of King Jeroboam I’s two golden calves, variously referred to as “the guilt of Samaria” and, more often, “the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, which he made Israel to sin.”

That last bit is important. Jeroboam “made Israel to sin”.

Too Hot to Handle: The “Divinity” of Christ

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Finally! An Elected Official We Can Believe In

When I was a little kid, I have to admit I wasn’t much of an athlete. Having been raised with different games and sports than were popular in the country to which my family had returned, I had only opaque knowledge of the rules, and little practice at executing the conventional skills. So I was equally lousy at football, baseball, basketball, soccer and even volleyball, and only marginally competent at hockey.

It would be years before I caught up to my peers who had been raised with those games. Nevertheless, I tried. And I played, whether I was good or not.

Flyover Country: Philemon

As someone who does a fair bit of writing, one of the features of the Bible that most persuades me of its authenticity is the staunch refusal of its writers to satisfy our curiosity about details.

An authentic historical account written for people familiar with the relevant culture and events naturally leaves out all sorts of facts its original audience would be expected to already know and understand. It cuts directly to the chase. This is what we find in scripture’s books of history. Likewise, an authentic letter does not read like a narrative or polemic conveniently disguised in another literary form. It is not an info dump. It is marked as much by what it doesn’t include as by what it does.

In short, each genre of scripture reads just as we might expect it to. Philemon is a fine example of this.

Thought Experiment #5: Praying for Personal Safety

Once or twice in the last year and a half I’ve heard a Christian say something to the effect that they are trusting the Lord to keep them safe from the coronavirus. I suppose that is true of all of us to one degree or another, but the comment got me thinking: How high a priority should our physical safety have in our prayers?

Let’s dismiss binary thinking on this subject right at the front door. I cannot see how praying for better circumstances can ever be categorically wrong when it is accompanied by a heartfelt “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours.” It not a question of good vs. bad use of prayer time, but a question concerning degrees of good. We are looking to have the very best priorities in prayer, right? Ideally, we should be asking for the things Christ himself would have asked of his Father under the same circumstances.

That’s a very high bar, and we will not reach it all the time in prayer, but it should certainly be our goal in coming into the presence of God.

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“Is is possible to be born again without knowing when it happened?”

I was once confronted by an older Christian who wanted to know the exact time and circumstances of my salvation. Apparently he asked many others the same thing. He was convinced the experience of becoming a believer only comes about in one way, and that it is impossible not to know how and when it occurred. If you can’t tell people when it happened, he insisted, it’s because you’re not saved.

That is not what Jesus taught.

Does the Church Really Have to be Israel?

A recent YouTube video from Australian pastor Matt Littlefield is introduced with this statement:

“Since the middle of the 19th century there has been a large movement in the Church to make a distinction between Israel and the Church, as two separate peoples. This distinction is unbiblical. The Church has to be Israel, otherwise the New Testament makes no sense.”

Can we amend this to “makes no sense to me”? Those are two very different claims.