The Author of Confusion

Paul Mizzi is an evangelical pastor on the largely-Catholic island of Malta. His essays on various aspects of the Christian faith may be found on the website Truth for Today.

Malta got a visit from the apostle Paul in the first century that included a number of miracles of healing (and undoubtedly the preaching of the gospel to go with them). But despite the fact that Malta has had apostolic testimony for two thousand years, the structure and function of their evangelical churches today seems to have more in common with that of North American denominational Protestantism than with that of the church of the New Testament.

In Paul Mizzi’s church the distinction between clergy and laity is very well defined.

The Myth of Ideological Neutrality

Hmm ... which one is neutral?

I remember a time very, very long ago when this sort of thing may actually have gotten traction between my ears:

“As an open-minded nonreligious parent, it’s important to me that my daughter make up her own mind about what to believe — independent of me, independent of her grandparents, independent of her friends and neighbors. I want her to learn about various systems of belief, and about science and evidence, and then decide what seems right to her. If she changes her mind along the way, that’s fine! As long as it’s her own inquisitiveness and independent thought that prompts each change of heart.

You’re with me on this, right?”

No, but Wendy Thomas Russell is not alone in her desire to step back and avoid unduly influencing the way her child forms her beliefs about religion.

When Life Really Hurts

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Too Hot to Handle: Keeping It Controversial

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A Better Second Fiddle

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Look At Those Goalposts Move!

In addition to constantly meeting facts with feelings, you may have noticed that the religious left tries to avoid addressing opposing arguments directly — a canny strategy when one has little of substance to put forward.

Instead, by moving the goalposts, they reframe the question under discussion so that the other side finds itself inadvertently giving up intellectual or spiritual ground without ever having really lost it. The issue, or at least part of it, is conceded without any discussion at all.

The trick is to recognize goalpost shifting when you see it and refuse to reframe.

The Twitterized Bible

How about that morning verse, eh?

Ben Irwin dislikes the ‘Twitterized’ Bible.

You know, the way Christians tend to quote scripture in tiny fragments. He’s concerned that in doing so we’ll lose the Author’s original meaning and not even realize it’s gone. Twitterizing is only one name for it. Others call it “using the Bible as a medicine cabinet” or “prooftexting”.

For the most part I agree with Ben, so I’m going to tread carefully here.

After all, I have harped here about context as the most critically important interpretive tool in the Bible student’s tool kit so many times I’ve lost track. Taken out of their original context, verses of holy writ may be misunderstood or have their meanings entirely inverted.

But not always.

Communicable Defilement

Yesterday I shared some thoughts about the Levitical laws having to do with uncleanness and ritual defilement, and I applied them to the subject of mankind’s relationship to its Creator.

Since nothing happened to Israel in a vacuum and precious few of their laws are without some practical application to the Christian life, today I’d like to look at the issue of ongoing defilement and uncleanness in the era beyond the Law of Moses.

But before we do that, we need to take one last look back at Leviticus.

The Twelve-Year Illustration

The first two gospels tell the story of an unnamed woman who suffered from a discharge of blood for twelve years.

Believing even the briefest, most ephemeral contact with Jesus would heal her of her condition, she crept up behind the Lord to touch the fringe of his robe. And we all know the rest of the story, including the “your faith has made you well” part.

Mark records that the woman had “suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse”. Having spent some time in the care of doctors, I can relate. I can more or less imagine what that might have meant for her medically.

The part of the story I never really thought about before is what it meant for a Jewish woman socially and religiously to be declared ritually “unclean”.

Inbox: The Worst Possible Answer

Bernie continues to muse about suffering from a biblical perspective:

“Some other things to consider:

• Of the four identified types of suffering [see previous post], Christians get all four (yay!), non-Christians only get the first two.
• Suffering of types two and three is not the mark of a failing Christian, it is the mark of a succeeding one. The more we do for God and the more we get serious about bringing Christ-likeness out fully, the more we will feel the knife — or, a better image — feel the weight of the cross. Opposition grows as we mature and become productive. This is (I think) why the people closest to God seem to suffer the most and endure the greatest hardships.

Too Hot to Handle: Rules of Combat

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Inbox: Applied Grace and the Smoking Ruins of My Life

Bernie holds forth about four causes of suffering:

“I suggest the source of suffering is four-fold in a mature Christian view:

1. Sin in me (bad choices I make to my own detriment) — God’s purpose is discipline and correction.
2. Sin around me (sins of others / fallen environment) — God’s purpose is to produce a stronger faith and, in our dissatisfaction here, a longing for our true home.
3. Satan against me (the opposition made to those who are seeking to be productive for God) — “all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus ...” You know the rest. If you’re going to be productive for God, you’re going to get hit often and painfully.
4. God for me (a loving Father conforming me — through suffering — to produce Christlikeness: “The fellowship of his suffering”).

I’ve Got What It Takes — Relatively Speaking

I can’t tell you what sort of ideological programming a child in Ukrainian or Polish or Argentinean or Nigerian society may be exposed to, but for years kids growing up in the Western world have been hearing that we can do or be anything we want.

“If you can dream it, you can do it,” Walt Disney is purported to have said. “If you think you can do it, you can,” confirms John Burroughs. “I don't think anything is unrealistic if you believe you can do it,” agrees Richard Evans.

In the absence of a plausible counter-narrative, children bombarded with such sentiments may absorb them uncritically.

Don’t Forget What You Never Knew

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Quote of the Day (20)

For anyone who missed it, after being waylaid by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, presidential candidate Donald Trump mused briefly about criminalizing the choice to abort a child last week, before doing an abrupt about-face once it became clear he’d stepped into a minefield and had, at least temporarily, united the pro- and anti-abortion crowd against himself.

Dalrock’s is the only explanation I’ve read so far that makes perfect sense.

Too Convenient

I was out last night with an unsaved friend.

I’ve written about him before. Like many others, he knows just enough about Christianity to think he understands it; just enough to think the decision that faith in Jesus Christ is not for him is a choice he has made intelligently on the basis of years of shrewd observation of Christians and our various failings. And believing his understanding adequate, he has little interest in hearing any more. He’s reluctant to get into the subject with me because he has a fairly good idea where I’ll be going.

He believes in God, he tells me, and I have no reason to doubt it. But his version of God is vastly different from the God of the Bible.

Punishment and Deterrence

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Too Hot to Handle: To Debate or Not to Debate

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One Corporate Setting

What is the “whole church” anyway?

Crawford Paul says, “Home studies, conversation studies, group prayer times etc. do not fall under that condition [the instructions of 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2 about church order in which women are silent and men teach and lead, Ed.] as long as the whole church is not expected to attend or be gathered in one corporate setting. In these cases, men and women are free to participate in those activities.”

But what scriptural authority does Crawford have for this freedom of audible participation for both sexes in situations in which the “whole church” is not expected to be present but any combination of its members may be? If he has any, he does not cite it.

This may be because such authority does not exist.

Culture Creep

Early this year, Crawford Paul wrote about how local churches can change to promote growth. One commenter gently took him to task:

“Post what changes you want, and what it means to open discussions (women speaking?) and be more specific.”

Short version: I jumped all over the commenter, who seemed generally opposed to change in the church and suggested Mr. Paul’s posts were fostering discontent. It seemed to me he was reading things into Crawford’s appeals for change that simply weren’t there (the subject of women speaking was never addressed in the post). I even suggested the commenter might be jumping at shadows.

Now I’m wondering if maybe I owe the poor guy an apology. He may not be so paranoid after all.

The Sincerest Form

Imitation ... or caricature?

My uncle, having lived in England all his life, has an accent. It is strong and distinctive.

On occasion, my brother deliberately imitates him to humorous effect. You might think his version of my uncle exaggerated until you hear the real thing, when it becomes clear my brother’s homage may well not go far enough. Other times, in conversation with my uncle, one or another of his Canadian relatives finds himself unconsciously picking up and mimicking my uncle’s speech patterns.

Imitation may be conscious or unconscious, but it is always an action (as opposed to a state of mind). It is something you have to DO. Thinking about imitating someone is not imitation.

I Found God in a Hallmark Card

Three unfortunate Will Bowen readers commiserate ...

Or not. Maybe you saw this on Facebook yesterday:

“EASTER symbolizes our own capacity to transform. Our ability to die to our former selves and awaken to a whole new life. Your ideal self lies dormant within you now ready to be called forth, ready to shine, ready to bless your world.”

— Will Bowen

Uh, well ... not exactly.

Quote of the Day (19)

I find the following paragraph from C.R. Hallpike’s Do We Need God to be Good? An Anthropologist Considers the Evidence rather striking:

“This powerful and important doctrine for right living was worked out in great philosophical detail in Greece, India, and China; we do not find it in explicit form in the Old Testament which was not philosophically minded, but in the New Testament St. Paul added the religious virtues of faith, hope, and charity to the classical virtues of justice, reasonableness, courage, and self-control.”

I’m far from agreeing with Hallpike on everything, but he’s got me thinking with that line. The Old Testament, he says, was “not philosophically minded”.

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Larry Taunton is the author of 2011’s well-reviewed The Grace Effect: How the Power of One Life Can Reverse the Corruption of Unbelief and the author of the forthcoming The Faith of Christopher Hitchens, which I will probably have to purchase on the basis of the title alone.

Taunton is a Christian columnist and cultural commentator primarily known for organizing “The God Delusion Debate” with Richard Dawkins in 2007, a discussion to which at least a million people tuned in. He was friendly with the late Christopher Hitchens (hence the book, presumably).

He has also recently taken up blogging.

Too Hot to Handle: Getting Relevant

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Who Reads Anymore?

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Cognitive Dissonance

In my neighbourhood it has become trendy to post a blue sign on your front lawn, one that reads, “Leave fossil fuels IN THE GROUND”. I walk by several of these each morning.

These messages adorn the snow-covered lawns of $800,000+ homes with their natural gas furnaces blasting away in the face of our Canadian winter, their driveways filled with SUVs and other premium fossil fuel-consuming vehicles.

Such cries for change are eminently dismissable, their transparent virtue-signaling drowning in cognitive dissonance and unintended irony.

No Getting Around That

Rachel Held Evans vs. John Piper? Who could resist weighing in? Not me.

Some background: My favorite popular Christian blogger Rachel Held Evans has been sharing with her readers how well ditching “strict gender roles promoted by conservative evangelical culture” in favor of “a relationship characterized by mutuality and flexibility” is working for her and her husband Dan as they welcome their new baby into the world.

Yes, Dan is helping Rachel out by changing diapers, doing laundry, rocking the baby and making pot after pot of coffee.

Bravo, Dan.

Tender Sentiments and Easy Living

How delicate can we get?

God, we are reliably informed, is eternal. He is also unchanging.

Oh, things certainly happen where God dwells; events on a scale we can hardly imagine. Think of passages like “there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord”, or “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” or, best of all, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you”. Momentous events indeed.

Still, if it is possible to speak of a heavenly culture (or perhaps atmosphere), that culture must, like the unchanging character of God, be impervious to trends.

True Revolutionaries

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The Trouble with the Truth

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Too Hot to Handle: A Change in the Whether

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Dial It Back A Notch

Marketing is an appalling thing.

My favorite sales technique is something called puffery, which is just what it sounds like: a whole lot of hot air. Okay, maybe “favorite” is the wrong word: it’s merely the technique easiest to identify, the one that, even to the uninitiated, screams ‘Marketing!’ at the top of its wheezy, overinflated little lungs. Once stung by the puffery-fish, you recognize it forever by any name.

Sadly, marketing to Christians has become just as fishy as marketing to secular rubes.

Inbox: Things Jesus Did for Women

Martin van Creveld is an Israeli military historian and theorist who, oddly enough, has written perhaps the best and most all-encompassing book I’ve ever found on the subject of equality. Equality: The Impossible Quest is not a theological book and van Creveld is not, to my knowledge, a Christian, but his diligent retracing of the historical development of the equality myth as it relates to all aspects of human interaction is well worth the few hours it takes to digest.

If equality was the original order of mankind (and it wasn’t, as demonstrated in an earlier post on this subject), something has gone very, very wrong.

Inbox: Taking the Curse Away from Women

A commenter who uses the name Unknown takes issue with this two-year old post on the subject of the equality of the sexes in the New Creation.

This is a blog about growing in the Christian faith. IC reminded me last week that since December 2013, the CU staff has published well over 700 posts on various subjects or passages. Since there is no statute of limitations on comments here, we often have reactions submitted to older posts. One caution about that: there is no guarantee that something I wrote two years ago was expressed precisely the way I would express it today. While my convictions about the fundamental doctrines of scripture have remained consistent over the years, study and discussion with fellow believers often lead me to work through the occasional untested assumption and fine-tune my thoughts. When that happens, I’ll usually post something new about the subject or passage to clarify my current thinking.

That’s as it should be, I hope. The day we stop growing in understanding is a sad day indeed.

Two Can Play That Game

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Where Did the Sabbath Go?

Doug Batchelor’s sermons on YouTube begin with the words “Happy Sabbath”.

Batchelor is a Seventh-Day Adventist, so this should not surprise anyone. Wikipedia calls Seventh-Day Adventism “a Protestant Christian denomination distinguished by its observance of Saturday ... as the Sabbath”.

Batchelor says:

“Very few people, after accepting Christ, dispute nine of the Ten Commandments, but the fourth they often see as a ‘personal preference’ or optional commandment. But it’s not just a recommendation from Moses; it’s the law of the Almighty.

The devil doesn’t care whether your sin is adultery or murder or Sabbath breaking, just as long as he can get you to sin and separate you from God.”

That sounds serious. So how come so many evangelicals don’t keep the Sabbath? Are we all casual about obeying God’s commands, as Batchelor suggests? Are we perhaps misinterpreting scripture?

I don’t think so.

Inbox: The Original Order Was Equality

One of the great joys of blogging is receiving feedback from our readers. I mean that sincerely.

We love comments: wildly enthusiastic comments, bitterly hostile comments or comments anywhere on the continuum between them. The readers I enjoy engaging with most make an effort to moderate my views or qualify my interpretations with other scriptures. Right or wrong, that’s always welcome. If something I’ve written strikes you as goofy, ill-considered or off base, chances are there are ten other people (at least) out there reading the same post and thinking exactly the same thing.

An unknown commenter is looking to modify my views on equality, so let’s revisit the subject.

Too Hot to Handle: Stinkin’ Selfish

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Inbox: Poor Image Management

One possible reaction to Exodus 32

Qman wonders how we can answer Bible students who find that reading about the judgments of God described in the Old Testament leaves a bad taste in their mouths and inclines them to think unfavorably of God.

It’s a good question and a common problem.

The more I read my Bible (and the older and crustier I get), the more tempting I find it to respond to questions about God’s character dismissively.

Not constructive. Got to work on that.

Testimony in the Twilight Zone

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How Saved Are You?

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Amiable Hedonism

Not every hedonist is stretched out in the sun, skin as orange as Hulk Hogan’s, quaffing endless daiquiris and enjoying the unwavering attention of blondes in bikinis. Not at all.

The red-eyed, coke-nosed, nightclubbing roué is always easy to pick out of a crowd. Blatant dissipation has a certain look to it. It’s a look often accompanied by pickled livers, deteriorated septa and a pressing need for drugs with names that end in -cillin.

But there is a less-talked-about and much more amiable variety of hedonism that often goes undetected. The neighbour who just shoveled your driveway may have hedonistic leanings. Your hard-working best friend might be a closet hedonist too.

That lady who’s always fundraising for the church down the street? A total hedonist.

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Tim Barnett at Stand to Reason tells us why Christianity with a mythical Adam and Eve simply doesn’t work:

“Imagine a young boy sits next to his grandfather, and a large scar across his grandfather’s cheek catches the boy’s attention. The boy asks, ‘Grandpa, how did you get that scar on your face?’ The grandfather replies, ‘Well, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away ...’ Immediately the boy interrupts his grandfather, ‘No, Grandpa, I don’t want a fairy tale, I want to know how you got that real scar on your face.’

The problem of sin is real. We experience it every day. A fictional tale does not explain the fall of humanity into sin.”

On Being Distinct

The golden calf episode at Mount Sinai was a moral disaster for Israel.

Idolatry was bad enough, but national idolatry on such a scale so soon after formally accepting the privileges and responsibilities of being called by Jehovah to be a people uniquely his own gave the lie to everything Israel was supposed to stand for. It made a mockery of Israel’s promises and a joke of its testimony to the nations around it. God struck the people with a plague, and Moses struck them with the sword of the House of Levi, killing three thousand.

Basically, a disaster.

Calf Exercises

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Too Hot to Handle: Collision Impending

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Somewhere Under the Rainbow

It appears some people have been doing a lot more thinking about gay marriage than I have.

Which is not to say it’s an unimportant issue in the Christian community. The number of people potentially impacted by the change in law, directly or indirectly, is significant. But my concern to date has revolved around the very real potential for government enforcement of ‘tolerance legislation’, something that could easily impact the self-determination of local churches. To me, that’s a major problem. Any thoughts about division within churches over the issue or about the impact of legalization on Christians with sexual orientation issues who might want to marry have been very, VERY secondary.

That’s because I don’t know any.

Answering a Skeptic

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Quote of the Day (18)

JR sends this gem along:

“As far as the leading of the Spirit, we only need Him to show up for 45 minutes at the breaking of bread to arrange the hymns and, after that, we’re pretty much good to go on our own.”

— Jabe Nicholson

No smart remarks from me today.

I figure I’ll just let that one sit there and burn for a bit.

Beyond Baseline Obedience

The specs for the Ark are so clear
even Hasbro made a model of it.

Words on paper are rarely enough.

Hey, there’s nothing wrong with the written word. I wouldn’t be blogging daily if I thought written communication isn’t effective and meaningful. It’s a tremendous blessing, and one for which we should always be thankful.

Still, when the original communicator is no longer on the scene, the limitations of words alone start to become evident.

Only One Son

Genesis 22 provides the account of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac. In just nineteen short verses we are given the simple outline of a story that leaves us with a multitude of unanswered questions about such a profound event.

Still, despite the scant detail provided, some things can be discerned:

The Anticipation

Abraham loved his son Isaac deeply and the journey to Moriah that would apparently end with the sacrifice of Isaac must have been filled with sorrow that was most uncommonly deep.

Brains With Feet

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Too Hot to Handle: Break Out the Marshmallows

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Inbox: Truth Leaves the Stage Entirely

A friend from up north forwards a few thoughts from 1 Timothy 3 well worth considering.

The apostle Paul, he says, is concerned that Timothy would know how to conduct himself in the church:

“In encouraging Timothy in this regard, Paul has three phrases to describe the church that bear consideration:

Try Reading It First

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I’m Not Sorry

Elton John sang that “Sorry seems to be the hardest word”, which is quite untrue.

We hear the word “sorry” dozens of times a day, usually about something entirely trivial. For those of us who are by nature conciliatory, “sorry” is actually a very easy word, one we bandy about reflexively the moment anyone near us starts to look tense. Even those who are dispositionally dominant and ordinarily insensitive to others learn quickly that faking regret can be useful in forging alliances and spreading influence, provided you don’t overdo it and come off looking weak.

Most of the time we say sorry, we are not sorry at all.

Quote of the Day (17)

This summary of a recent series of Twitter exchanges reminds us the claims of scientists are frequently overstated:

“To put it in context, some scientists and science fetishists on Twitter were in an uproar over my assertion that scientific peer review was not only unreliable, but was nothing more than glorified proofreading. They argued that scientific peer review was all about replicating experiments and testing conclusions, not merely reading over the material in order to make sure the author wasn’t smoking crack.”

Fair enough. The Russian proverb, Doveryai no proveryai (“Trust, but verify”) remains sound advice. Except it doesn’t seem there’s much actual verifying going on.

If There Were No Christians

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Redefining the Language

Nicked from the comments on another website:

“What is incredible is how many churches pay people full time to be ‘worship music leaders’. They are given status equal to the pastor.”

What is appalling here is not so much that “worship music leaders” are given any status at all in modern Christian thinking, nor is it that they are paid a salary to do a job in today’s evangelical churches that has no precedent in the New Testament church and no authority from scripture, though both of these facts are certainly regrettable.

No, it’s that the accepted term of comparison is “the pastor”. The status of that equally modern and unbiblical role is assumed uncritically, entirely by default, and near-universally.

In other words, the people who see clergy in the Bible where it doesn’t exist have successfully redefined the language we use about servants of God.

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

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Thought Experiment #2: Light Momentary Affliction

Paul was, in his own words, a former blasphemer, persecutor and ignorant opponent of Jesus Christ.

That’s not Paul being humble. That’s simply factual.

Acts 8 tells us that before his encounter on the road to Damascus with the One he was persecuting, Saul ravaged the church, entering house after house, dragging off men and women to have them imprisoned.

Leave Scripture Out of It

In 2013’s Pauline Paradoxes Decoded, a self-described “world famous cryptographer” named Michael Wood — whose Wikipedia entry remains surprisingly perfunctory for someone “world famous” — announced his discovery that “When his writings are properly translated, it’s clear that Apostle Paul not only did not condemn homosexuals, but he openly defended them against the religious views of his day”.

How did Wood do it? He “clarified” the “meanings” of “key words”.

Translation: He rewrote the verses that offended him.

The Priests Are In The Pews

The concept of priesthood did not originate with the Bible. That may be where most of us first encounter priests, but priesthood has existed in many other cultures throughout history.

Canaanite culture, for instance.

Abram met Melchizedek, king of Salem (later called Jerusalem). Melchizedek was not only a priest; he was also likely a citizen of one of the nations that several hundred years later God would instruct Israel to exterminate from the face of the earth. That’s unless Chazalic literature is correct in asserting that Melchizedek was actually a nickname for Shem, son of Noah, who we know outlived Abram. We have no scriptural evidence Shem was Melchizedek, but his exceptional age would certainly explain the respect Abram extended to the “first priest”.

And this is the very first reference to a priest in scripture.

Life and Godliness

To whom much was given ...

What is really necessary to please God?

I’m not thinking of salvation here but of service.

The fundamental “work” God requires is “to believe in him whom he has sent”. Faith is foundational to pleasing God, but the faith that pleases God has always historically manifested itself in works. It can be no other way. Leaving aside the thief on the cross, it is pretty clear that love displays itself in obedience.

So faith precedes all works that matter to God, of course.

A Profound Apology

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Division and the Preservation of the Bible

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

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Poetry and Practice

The apostle Paul is not primarily known as a poet.

Still, even translated into English, 1 Corinthians 13 is poetic enough to have been set to music or read at millions of weddings all over the world, religious and secular.

So much so that Mark Woods at Christian Today wishes we’d use something else instead. He says, “Paul’s sublime, God-breathed words in 1 Corinthians have been co-opted and corrupted by a wedding industry that celebrates romantic love, which is all about hormones, at the expense of Christian love, which is all about commitment”.

Not wrong.

Witnessing to Witnesses [Part 5]

Jehovah’s Witnesses acknowledge the Bible’s inspiration and accuracy but not its testimony about the deity of Jesus Christ.

That’s both intellectually vacuous and spiritually dangerous.

You may or may not encounter JWs in your travels, but the scriptural parallels between Jesus and Jehovah are worth considering regardless. John wrote that the Father has given all judgment to the Son in order that “all may honor the Son, just as they honor the Father”.

That’s the aim of this series.

Complements of John Piper

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Three Songs of Moses

I’m not sure I can easily picture the Moses of this 1861 Ivan Kramskoy painting “Prayer of Moses” breaking into song.

Can you?

Some Bibles, including my ESV, give Exodus 15 the title “Song of Moses”. Technically this is true, because we read that Moses and the people of Israel sang the words that follow to Jehovah after the crossing of the Red Sea and the destruction of the Egyptians. We don’t actually read that Moses was the one who wrote it, though most scholars assume it and it seems likely.

But there are three “songs” in scripture attributed to Moses, and he may well have written more.

Orderly Meditation

Have you ever thought about why the books of our New Testament are ordered the way they are?

They’re not alphabetical, like a reference work. We can see that right away.

They’re definitely not completely chronological, like most novels or histories. Read the NT through a few times and that will certainly become evident. There is some evidence of chronology, certainly, in the sense that the four gospels come first, but Acts is a history that spans a period of decades during which most of Paul’s epistles were written. If we were able to determine precisely when each epistle was written, we might try to slot them in between chapters of Acts, but that would make for an awkward read.

Some have argued that the order is providential (in fact, in 1864, Thomas D. Bernard did that precisely), but good luck trying to make that case. You’d pretty much have to take that on faith.

Too Hot to Handle: What Is Progress?

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

Donald Trump’s popularity is hugely alarming to the political left, whose agenda is often called “progressive”.

In the last couple of years Democrats have had much of their policy wish list implemented by presidential fiat to almost no resistance from the largest Republican majority in Congress since the late 1920s. Crickets.

All this social “progress” is rendered precarious by the specter of a Trump presidency. Trump has tweeted things like, “If elected, I will undo all of Obama’s executive orders”, posing an existential threat to the dream of the “just society” that lies at the heart of progressivism. Thus Carlos Lozada of The Washington Post can argue that Trump is a throwback; that he appeals to what Lozada calls the “stone-age brain”.

The Greatest Enemy

What is the greatest enemy of mankind?

Basil says it’s got to be corporations: “They have enormous power, and their priorities and objectives are seriously at odds with the greatest good / greatest number goal.”

Videsh says it’s greed: “So many wars were fought ’cos of greed.”

Mikael says disease, because it “destroys morale”, “does not discriminate” and “will never be stopped”.

Not a bad selection so far.

Witnessing to Witnesses [Part 4]

Jehovah’s Witnesses say the Bible is inspired and accurate but don’t accept its testimony about the deity of Jesus Christ.

That combination doesn’t work. It’s intellectually vacuous and spiritually dangerous.

The extent to which scripture parallels Jesus with Jehovah is a subject worth considering for all believers, whether or not you regularly encounter JWs in your travels. John wrote that the Father has given all judgment to the Son in order that “all may honor the Son, just as they honor the Father”.

That’s the aim of this series.

Vashti as Role Model

I deal with legalese every day.

Our company has lawyers for clients, often dozens at a time. We also have templates that enable us to produce a lot of legal documentation very quickly. Sometimes the language in these templates differs from the instructions provided by our clients.

To deal with these apparent conflicts in authorial intent, the company has established a very basic principle of interpretation, and it is this: when the lawyers contradict the template, the lawyers always win. Why? Because instructions directed specifically to the current situation always trump instructions of a more general nature, which have often been written with other documents, other readers and different legal situations in view.

There is a similar principle at work in the interpretation of scripture.