Apologists gotta apologize.
You can’t blame them, really. It’s how apologists are made, and the body of Christ would not be complete or anywhere near so well defended if we didn’t have them. But sometimes, no matter how hard we want to demonstrate that some assertion we disagree about in scripture is intellectually, historically, scientifically or factually defensible, we are going to hit a wall.
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Lee Child writes about two fictional Colorado towns called Hope and Despair, both established by settlers on their way west to California. In his story, the Rockies are visible from the flatlands around Hope, blue and dominating, tantalizingly close. However, the territory west of Hope is mildly elevated, providing a clearer picture of the real distances. Only a few miles further west, the wagon trainers in Child’s story come to realize their earlier optimism was the product of an optical illusion, and that they are still hundreds of miles from their goal. Hence the name Despair for the second town.
Prophetic distances are equally hard to estimate from afar.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Plato is among the most influential figures in philosophical thought. He is an absolute giant, and it would difficult to overestimate the extent to which his writing has shaped the Western mindset.
That being understood, unless you have studied theology or philosophy, you may find it hard to understand how a 2,400-year-old dialogue has any relevance at all to the question of whether God exists. And yet one question posed by Socrates in Plato’s Euthyphro is still bandied about online regularly.
Last week we were talking about the charge made by so many non-Christians today that we are guilty of forcing our views on them.
At first blush, the charge seemed ridiculous. After all, Christians represent absolutely no threat of physical or political violence: even to imagine that is just paranoid, and completely misunderstands the fundamental necessity of faith. Moreover, Christians may sometimes choose to absent themselves from participating in or approving of worldly values, activities or lifestyles because of conscience, but that represents no threat of force: it’s simply a matter of personal conscience — the very thing that world is at pains to affirm.
So where does the charge of “force” come from?
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Over at Doug Wilson’s place, Jackson asks:
“Why are pastors so terrible at political philosophy? It seems to me that most pastors just assume a modern political theory of democracy, constitutionalism, liberalism, or republicanism and then read it into the Bible.”
Good question, and an observation that is largely true.
Back in April, Greg Koukl at Stand to Reason wrote a helpful post about the Old Testament law. Koukl says critics accuse Christians of picking and choosing from Old Testament laws. They claim we apply some and not others, and do so at our own convenience.
So how should we answer people who object to the use of a verse from Leviticus to condemn, say, homosexuality, because “Christians are no longer under law”?
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“Why is fellowship so important for Christians?”
The early church devoted itself to four things: the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread and prayers. The critical importance of three of these to church life should be obvious to anyone. However, the unique role fellowship plays in the life of Christ’s body may not leap out to the uninitiated reader of the book of Acts in quite the same way.
I remember making a choice that would significantly affect the rest of my life.
I won’t claim I made the best possible decision. It was painful, emotional, and the exact circumstances of making it remain pleasantly hazy in memory today. One of the falsities with which I comforted myself at the time was this: If you don’t go down this road, you’ll never know what might have happened if you did, and the uncertainty about what might have been will eat you alive.
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“In the hand of the Lord there is a cup with foaming wine, well mixed, and he pours out from it, and all the wicked of the earth shall drain it down to the dregs.”
There are banquets where we’d all appreciate a place at the table — the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, the Lord’s Supper. In scripture, there are also meals to which nobody in his right mind would want an invitation. Nobody covets a seat at the dinner served during the “day of the Lord”.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Oliver Scott Curry, senior researcher at Oxford’s Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, believes morality evolved.
Tom: I don’t, and neither does Immanuel Can, which means we probably won’t be doing a lot of haggling with each other about this subject. For those interested, Curry’s seven “universal rules of morality” are: (1) help your family; (2) help your group; (3) return favors; (4) be brave; (5) defer to superiors; (6) divide resources fairly; and (7) respect others’ property. While we might all agree that life generally goes better within families and societies when these rules are observed, it is not at all obvious that they evolved.
“Stop forcing your beliefs on me!”
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that cry when debating with unbelievers. In fact, I’ve heard it so much that I’ve begun to think there might be something behind it. After all, when many kinds of people from many kinds of backgrounds and situations seem to be arriving at the same kind of sentiment, there must be some cause for it, right?
But for a long time I haven’t been able to figure out exactly what it is. The problem is the wording: “You’re forcing …”
Am I? Really? How is that?
“Pick out from among you seven men of good repute …”
When was the last time your local church “read out” or excommunicated someone?
I know some churches that have never done it. Even in churches that have, for most it’s been a very long time, to almost nobody’s regret. In these litigious days, telling a brother or sister they are no longer welcome in the fellowship of the saints is not an action in which anybody is particularly enthusiastic about participating. Nor should it be: there is plenty of financial risk involved, as well as the potential risk to testimony if a person so excluded elects to push back in a public way and the church’s version of the excommunication narrative is called into question by people incapable of understanding its purpose.
Who jumps at handling a hot potato like that? Nobody with a keen sense of self-preservation, that’s for sure.
Taken in isolation or viewed from a distance of several thousand years and from a completely different cultural setting, almost any Bible instruction may initially seem a little alien.
Out there on the internet, people are generally uninterested in doing historical research or establishing cultural context before they start forming opinions. It’s a whole lot of work … and, let’s face it, it’s fun to mock things — it makes us feel intelligent or morally superior. So taking a poke at certain of the Old Testament commands that God gave through Moses to the people of Israel as — to say the least — “weird”, is becoming increasingly trendy.
Compared to what the critics say about these commands, “wacky” might actually be a compliment.
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“Is there a biblical distinction between sex and gender?”
Despite the insistence of the trans lobby that sex and gender identity are two different things, nobody in the history of the world ever thought this until around 1950.
In 2021, journalist Tal Bachman wrote a powerful and well-researched 25-part series called “We Have Met the Enemy” (index here, trans expose commences with Part XIII) that laid bare the origins of this semantic fraud perpetrated by a failed musician from New Zealand who reinvented himself as a psychologist and “sexologist”.
His name was John Money.
Henry Giroux wrote that a utopia is “an imaginary community or society that possesses highly desirable or near-perfect qualities for its members”. He was generalizing based on the way the concept has been used (and misused) for over five centuries, trying to distill a jumble of ideas down to a basic concept everyone can agree about. The word itself comes from a 1516 book of the same name written by Sir Thomas More, but Plato’s Republic took a crack at the same ideas almost 2,000 years earlier, and it may be argued that even the Tower of Babel was an early, misguided stab in that direction. It would be hard to find a time when men have not dreamed of and yearned for social perfection, though always on their own terms and by their own standards.
Literally, utopia means “no place”. You would think more people might take More’s not-too-subtle hint.
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In studying the Minor Prophets we run into one difficult question repeatedly. The answer to it significantly affects our understanding of the intended scope of a particular prophecy. Wherever we come across Hebrew words that describe geography ['ăḏāmâ, 'ereṣ or 'î], there is considerable ambiguity about what they are intended to denote. Scholars tell us both 'ăḏāmâ and 'ereṣ may legitimately be translated as either “earth” or “land”. Further, the word 'î may refer to an actual island, or to a larger region far away that is approached (naturally) from the coast. Where “land” is the better translation, the intent is usually (but not universally) to refer to the land of Israel.
So then, a prophet may be predicting something that will affect the entire planet or something that will affect only Israel. Global or local, and context is the only way to determine which is which. Sometimes there simply isn’t enough information in the context to know with certainty.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
A few weeks back, the United Methodist Church voted to maintain its traditional stance against same-sex marriage and
Tom: Now I’m not big on tradition for tradition’s sake, but I think this decision is probably worth remarking on just because it is so unusual for a large denomination these days. The progressives in every sizable group of Christians are always hard at work moving the window of acceptable discourse, faith and practice to the left, and have experienced great success over the last century or so. By way of contrast, “conservative” Christians have reliably failed to conserve very much at all. You’ve seen it, Immanuel Can, and I’ve seen it too.
Did you notice what made the difference this time?
In one of his messages, a self-styled philosopher sent this line:
“Conservatives are monsters.”
I’m not really sure what he means by “conservatives”. In the context of the discussion, he meant anti-abortionists, definitely.
Oh, believe me: the irony’s not lost on me.
But I think he meant to speak more broadly, as well. I think he also meant social conservatives like Libertarians, Republicans and Brexiters, and maybe even Christians. Anyway, he gets them all with one broad brush: “conservatives”.
It’s obviously rhetoric. But let’s take him seriously.
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“When iniquities prevail against me, you atone for our transgressions.”
This first phrase nicely encapsulates the condition of the believer. Iniquities do not characterize him. Iniquities do not magnetically draw him the way they once did. Iniquities are not his goal or the meaning of his life. Iniquities are an enemy with which he is perpetually in contention.
Occasionally iniquities even prevail. For a moment only.
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Elie Wiesel was a Holocaust survivor, a Romanian-born Jewish political activist who authored over fifty books and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He died in 2016. In January 1968, he published a memoir in which he shared memorable encounters with “sages, mystics, teachers, and dreamers”.
Wiesel was not the earliest media figure to water down the concept of truth and make redundancies like “objective truth” an unfortunate necessity, but if you thought the problem originated with Jordan Peterson and his ilk, this 55-year old excerpt from Legends of Our Time may serve as a wake-up call. Satan has been working away at the meaning of words since the beginning of human history, and he has his cat’s-paws in every generation. Elie Wiesel, for all his creditable moments, was one of these.