God-Shaped Heart Surgery [Part 1]

Timothy Jennings is a Tennessee-based psychiatrist who is convinced Christians don’t really know God as they should. His 2017 book The God-Shaped Heart is perhaps best described as a minor controversy: minor because it failed to crack ECPA’s Top 100 bestseller list in any of its first five years of publication; controversial because Jennings takes a view of substitutionary atonement that rubs a fair number of his critics the wrong way, this reader among them.

If you read the reviews, it’s evident those who love the book really love it. And to be fair, there are some useful thoughts amidst the yawning mineshafts. You just don’t necessarily want to recommend it to anyone who doesn’t have his or her feet firmly planted on solid rock.

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“What do you think of this app?”

In case any of our older readers have eyesight as dodgy as mine, I’d better describe what this inquisitive young fellow has sent me. We are looking at a small computer program you can download to your cell phone called Bible Study for your Mood.

The app consists of a series of black or gray buttons, each with a one-word emotional state on them: Anger, Anxiety, Depression, Faith, Courageous, Tired, Confidence, Hopeful, Peaceful, Helpless, Forgiven, Strong, Afraid, Love, Worry ... and so on. Pushing a button takes you to a Bible verse that corresponds with your current mood, and gives the relevant book/chapter so you can look it up and keep reading.

That last part is important.

The Coming Kingdom

The little band of Jewish disciples who followed the Messiah in “the days of his flesh” asked to be taught to pray. The Lord’s answer was in the form of a pattern prayer, one that was appropriate at that time while the kingdom of God was being announced as “at hand”.

But repentance was required of those who would be the King’s subjects and, for the most part, that was not forthcoming.

Mining the Minors: Hosea (17)

There is a point when national decline accelerates to such an extent that even those most in denial about it cannot ignore it anymore. I suspect we have arrived at it in Canada in the last few weeks.

Everybody knows something is disastrously wrong. Due process, the law and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms are all being ignored. Thousands have taken to the streets to express their unhappiness with the choices made for them by their government. Nobody knows what will happen next. In this recent video, Jordan Peterson and writer Rex Murphy call it “The Catastrophe of Canada”. Canadians who are not still getting their news from the CBC would agree that “catastrophe” is no exaggeration.

Back in Hosea, the same sudden awareness of impending disaster had come for Israel: “Ephraim saw his sickness.”

Too Hot to Handle: How Do You Read It? (2)

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

We had a good time with this last week, so Immanuel Can and I have agreed to revisit our growing list of commonly misinterpreted Bible verses and discuss three more examples.

Tom: How about this one?

“For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.”

How do you read that, IC?

Two or Three

Immanuel Can: I think the first question has to be “two or three whats”, or “two or three of whom”?

Why Your Pastor Won’t Help You Now

Michael O’Fallon, host of the very worthwhile Sovereign Nations podcast, says he’s perplexed.

Some time ago he discovered a very nasty kind of false teaching was creeping into the churches in his denomination, a false teaching prepared in the fires of Marxism but now channeled by respected evangelical sources. It seemed obvious to O’Fallon that the first people who would be concerned and who would have a stake in understanding the danger would be those charged with maintaining sound doctrine on behalf of the church.

Two Central Facts

“If righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.”

“If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.”

Back in 1993, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope gave astronomers their first glimpse of what appeared to be a distant galaxy with a double nucleus. That just doesn’t happen, so a number of possible theories were immediately floated. To the best of my knowledge, no definitive explanation for this anomaly has ever been found.

Sticky Situations

I have used the expression “tar baby” in a couple of posts here over the years.

A tar baby is a wonderful old metaphor for a sticky situation, and particularly a sticky situation that never needed to happen. But its age and origin make it an obscure figure of speech — so obscure I later discovered even my own mother had never heard of it.

Well, that’s a situation that cannot go uncorrected!

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“Do Christians in today’s working world ever find themselves confronted by issues not directly addressed in the Bible?”

This may sound off-topic, but work with me here. I have never been a fan of applying the slave/master verses of the New Testament to modern employment arrangements. The two situations are simply not analogous. I have known people who felt trapped in dead-end jobs, but even in the worst modern employment situations, the employee is legally free to take his leave any time he chooses on a mere two weeks notice. It’s not the law of the land or the middle manager he reports to that make him feel trapped, but rather his personal financial situation.

That’s not to say there is nothing in the New Testament to address the issues faced by Christians in today’s working world, but let’s be careful what we do with those slave and master passages.

Same Spirit, Different Display

“I’ll believe that when I see it” is an often-heard doubter’s response to an account or prediction he does not choose to accept. If we take his words literally, he limits certainty to what can be verified by one of his senses, in this case sight.

Some people are prepared to step beyond that if they consider their instructor or source to be reliable. In doing so they exercise faith in the source.

Mining the Minors: Hosea (16)

I grew up believing that my parents owned the house we lived in and the property on which it was built. But I did not keep my illusions for long.

Shortly I discovered there was a third party involved in this arrangement, and a great big interest-bearing loan with a 20 year term that enabled Mom and Dad to keep a roof over our heads. In the early-to-mid-80s, those interest rates were often in excess of 15% for months on end.

Back then, there appeared no prospect that I would be able to do what my parents had done in the first few years of my own marriage. For me, property ownership was right out of reach.

Anyway, enough of my problems; we have plenty of Israel’s to consider in Hosea 5.

Too Hot to Handle: How Do You Read It? (1)

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

We’ve done maybe seventy of these exchanges now on various subjects, Immanuel Can. But what we’ve never done is a post on commonly misunderstood scriptures. Everybody does those. I’m feeling left out.

So why don’t we just do it like the Lord Jesus did with the lawyer and ask the questions, “What is written? How do you read it?” That’s a pretty solid precedent to work from.

Tom: I’ll start. Let me lob you a softball here, IC.

Theism and the Skeptics [Part 2]

“For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”

“I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.”

Have you noticed that our age is great for pretending not to know what the Bible says it could and should know?

Honestly, it’s enough to make one cynical.

Getting to the Good

“To this end we always pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling and may fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by his power.”

The word “resolve” in my ESV translates a Hebrew noun that shows up elsewhere in Paul’s writings as “desire”, “good pleasure” and sometimes even “good will”. So the phrase “resolve for good” is not so much concerned with cultivating a steely determination as it is with the orientation of a believer’s desires.

I mean, how exactly do we arrive at an understanding of what “good” means in the first place?

Some Unsolicited Advice

Several years ago I was walking downtown with a friend when some teenagers outside the grand old institutional church building on the corner enthusiastically accosted us to take some Christian literature from them and read it. After we politely extricated ourselves, my friend asked me “Why do they do that?”

Her thought was that this was a little bit inappropriate for members of our once-polite society, as if the act of sharing a gospel tract on the street were more than a minor intrusion.

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“What are the pros and cons of getting a formal Christian education?”

In one sense I’m the wrong guy to ask. I never felt the need to go out and get one. Blame my parents for a Christian upbringing that went heavy on familiarity with the Bible. My father also spent a short time in a U.S. Bible school but did not finish his program. The lack of accreditation had no measurable impact on his ability to serve the Lord. I never heard him express a single regret about the decision.

My own feeling is that there is nothing you can learn in a classroom that you can’t learn from reading the same material for yourself, but then I felt the same way about university and still do.

What to Do with a Fruitless Branch?

I was baptized in Wynburg, South Africa just before reaching my 20th year. My counselor put a card in my hand after the service. It read “Kept by the power of God.”

I wondered whether that would really be true of me. Was I not responsible to abide in Christ according to his word? If I didn’t, would I not be cast forth like a fruitless branch? So I set 1 Peter 1:5 and John 15 at war with each other in my mind. I tried to soften the force of the Savior’s warning, but his word stayed firm and demanding: I must abide in Christ. That made me responsible, didn’t it? But Peter said I was kept by God’s power; clearly that made him responsible.

Mining the Minors: Hosea (15)

“Bad company corrupts good morals.”

When the apostle Paul wrote it, he was probably quoting Menander, a Greek dramatist and popular writer of antiquity who had lived some 300 years prior, and it served his purposes just fine. But he could as easily have pulled half a dozen quotes from the Old Testament out of his sleeve to confirm the same truth.

Here are just two: Solomon wrote, “The companion of fools will suffer harm” and “Make no friendship with a man given to anger, nor go with a wrathful man, lest you learn his ways and entangle yourself in a snare.”

Make no mistake, wickedness is infectious in a way goodness is not.

Too Hot to Handle: Atheists in Foxholes

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

David Rönnegard is 37. He has a PhD in philosophy from the London School of Economics, and is a researcher and teacher in corporate social responsibility in Stockholm. But far too soon David’s friends and family will be using “had” and “was” rather than “has” and “is” to describe him.

Dr. Rönnegard has stage four lung cancer.

Theism and the Skeptics [Part 1]

In two previous posts (The Atheist’s New Clothes and What You Don’t Know Can Kill You), I pointed out that Christianity’s two skeptical critics, atheism and agnosticism, are essentially irrational and explained why they just cannot be taken seriously.

In this post and the next one, I’m answering the obvious first comebacks. These are what I get from the atheists and agnostics themselves, or from those who have been trusting in them. Theism, they say, must surely be susceptible to exactly the same criticisms I have raised against atheism and agnosticism — and perhaps, they venture, even more susceptible: for their supposition is that if their own positions are weak, then surely anything “religious” must be even less well thought out.

Sorry. Not so.

I can show them, but they usually don’t like it much when I do.