The Uncompassionate Christ

“When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”

“… and coming to his hometown he taught them in their synagogue, so that they were astonished, and said, “Where did this man get this wisdom and these mighty works?” … And he did not do many mighty works there.”

You see the problem, of course. A mere four chapters on in our narrative, the “compassionate” Jesus of Matthew 9 by-and-large withholds the benefit of his healing powers from the very people with whom he grew up.

What are we to make of this?

The Blind Spot

What happens when your church is riddled with false teaching and nobody in charge knows it?

If that seems an unlikely scenario, don’t laugh. It can absolutely happen.

It’s next-to-impossible to miss when a speaker goes off the rails doctrinally from the pulpit at 11:30 on a Sunday morning. Whether it’s a pastor, a local Bible teacher or visiting preacher, a public pronouncement that is wildly at odds with a church’s statement of faith will almost always generate serious discussion and immediate blowback. If there’s any question as to what was actually said, your soundman has probably got digital backup or even video. One way or another, error that’s visible and audible to all usually gets addressed.

But modern churches have a huge doctrinal blind spot.

Too Hot to Handle: Woman Overboard

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People Whom One Cannot Instruct

Perhaps if we dropped this on their heads ...

Wayne Grudem devoted years of his life to understanding and expositing a single word in a single verse.

Why, you may ask? Good question.

In an article entitled “Personal Reflections on the History of CBMW and the State of the Gender Debate”, Grudem asks himself the same thing: “Why did I spend so much time on this?”

What he discovered is that nobody’s listening. At least, nobody’s listening that wasn’t listening already.

A Bowl of Fake Rights

Fake rights are all the rage.

Sure, the “right” to almost anything, duly constitutionalized and conferred upon us by government, can be created out of thin air provided there is sufficient public demand. But in the absence of heavenly authority, state-enshrined rights are both morally incoherent and logically inconsistent. In practice they are largely unenforceable.

In short, fake.

The hottest new fake right on the block has to be the “right not to be offended”.

A House In Order

“Thus says the Lord, ‘Set your house in order, for you shall die; you shall not recover.’ ” 

Isaiah’s prophetic directions to Hezekiah were pretty specific to his own situation. Most of us do not get a heavenly heads-up before our final exit from this life (although a few of us get sufficient advance warning from circumstances and surgeons to nearly qualify).

Still, all of us would be well served to apply Isaiah’s instructions to our own situations.

Judeo-Christianity

I once took an inter-cultural understanding class at my local Reformed synagogue.

Now, I should probably explain. For those who don’t know, the Reformed Tradition in Judaism is the most “open” and modern segment of the Community. Quite a number of Reformed Jews are former Gentiles, or married to Gentiles. In fact, you could easily meet, or being going to school with, or working with a Reformed Jew, and never know what his or her religious practices were at all. They’re very well integrated into Western life.

The class was intended to further improve understanding between the most tolerant Jews and the rest of our society. The rabbi who taught the class was charming, intelligent and personable. He was also very helpful in laying out the practices and traditions of modern Judaism to a Gentile audience. He knew his stuff, and I liked him. (I’m sorry to say I hear he’s passed on now.)

The Commentariat Speaks (8)

TechCrunch editor John Biggs mourns the fact that social media is no longer a place where you can air an opinion without fear of adverse consequences:

“Our errant Twitter thoughts can make us targets and we often don’t know we’re being watched. A prominent writer and friend recently mused about what would happen if he posted some political rants. The first thing that leapt to his readers’ minds was the potential for SWATing and doxing and then a visit from the FBI. Then, as evidenced by the above CEO example, you get fired.

Social media has become a very real, very visceral, and very censorial force and it can now only worsen the human condition.”

Now, none of this is news. Ironically, it’s John Biggs’ fellow Democrat voters who fired the opening salvos in the online equivalent of the nuclear arms race.

I Mean It, I Swear

An international team of university researchers concludes that people who curse more are less likely to lie and may possess more integrity than their politer peers.

What fascinates me about the study is not its rather pedestrian conclusions, which are all too predictable given the initial assumptions of psychologist Gilad Feldman and his team. After all, garbage in, garbage out, right?

No, it’s really the assumptions they make about the meaning of honesty that ought to cause Christians to stop and think.

Why? Because apparently the word no longer means what it once did.

Ugh. Not again.

Too Hot to Handle: Abandoning Ship

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That Wacky Old Testament (7)

How would you like to be publicly executed for the sins of your grandfather? Any takers?

There’s nothing particularly “wacky” about the events of 2 Samuel 21, which involve the capital punishment of seven Israelites for nothing more offensive than being blood relatives of the former King Saul. A story like this may raise questions in our minds about the fairness of Israel’s law, and thus the fairness of God himself.

I had two major goals in mind in introducing our irregular but ongoing “Wacky Old Testament” series: (1) to set some of the more perplexing commands and events of the Old Testament in their historical context, thus making them more comprehensible to the modern reader; and (2) to demonstrate the consistency of God’s character from Testament to Testament. It may be trendy to portray Jesus as gentle and loving, and Jehovah (or YHWH) as barbaric and bloody, but neither portrayal is exactly on the nose.

Let’s see if for once I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.

Getting What We Deserve

Poor leaders. First we put them on pedestals. Then we have a go at the pedestals with sledgehammers.

Leaders ride waves of popularity and drown in waves of rejection. Often the trends of public opinion are neither predictable nor rational. I know of exactly three people who, months beforehand, accurately forecast the rise of Donald J. Trump to the presidency. Everybody else just hoped — or much more frequently, snickered.

But when things go wrong, it is not always just bad leadership that is to blame.

Quote of the Day (30)

If you’ve been reading here for any length of time, you’ve almost surely noticed that in attempting to understand the meaning of the any given Bible text, I am reluctant to allow too much weight to the opinion of historians.

This is not because I automatically suspect all historians of having agendas, even though the politicization of history is arguably more pervasive than the politicization of science. Science deals (or ought to deal) in events we can replicate experimentally, and should in theory be far less likely to cede territory to the circumscriptions of PC ideologues than should the humanities.

But practitioners of the hard sciences are now demonstrating almost daily that even they cannot always be trusted to stick to the facts. It would be imprudent for us to exercise greater faith in historians, notwithstanding their relabeling of history as a “social science”.

The Force Farce

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A Disturbance in the Force

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Hobbits In a Land of Dragons

We are hobbits in a land of dragons.

(Properly, I suppose, we should say, “in the land of THE dragon,” but since Satan has innumerable minions doing his bidding, we would not be out of line to assume they are of similar character.)

It’s impossible to know precisely how much of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth was intended to allegorize the Christian experience, and in the end the answer is unimportant. Tolkien’s faith, like that of any believing writer, informed both the plot of his epic fantasy and his imaginary characters, intentionally or otherwise. At least in part he wrote what he knew, and it seems to me that one of the things he knew best was salt-of-the-earth, slightly out-of-touch, decent, ordinary men and women going about their business without ruffling a lot of feathers.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Too Hot to Handle: Performance-Church

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Joy In Action

The precise linguistic distinction between joy and rejoicing is a matter I’ll leave to others, but it is fair to say that joy is most often understood to be an inward response of the spirit, a feeling we may or may not have.

So it is that David can say, “Restore unto me the joy of your salvation.” David rightly recognizes that a full and trusting reliance on God ought to produce an inward joy, a joy which sin mutes. So too in the New Testament we read, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.”

Minding Our Own Business

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Practical Doctrine, and Other Clarifications

The sermon didn’t really go on until 2:00.
It just felt that way.

Growing up in and out of various local churches, I often heard the complaint (usually from women) that certain Bible teachers were hard to sit through because all they did was teach doctrine when what the church really needed was something more practical: the Bible applied to everyday life.

I must confess that at the time I was a little unsympathetic. I figured it was kind of a “girl way” of conceding they weren’t spiritually up to the job of making the effort to decipher what the speaker was saying. You know, like “We don’t do math.” That kind of thing. I thought, “Why don’t you just ask your husbands at home then?”

I wasn’t always as nice as I am today. Hard to believe, I know.

Confounding Expectations

Running gag on conservative social media: “Aaaaaaand ... it’s Muslims.”

The meme tweaks the Powers That Be for their persistent unwillingness to attribute terror attacks throughout the West to their actual cause — Islamic jihad. As each new incident breaks, TradMedia, Lefty virtue signalers and our designated Elected Obscurantists one-up each other in cheerful speculation that THIS TIME it’s one of those dreaded neo-Nazis they’re always carping on about. And each time, greater numbers of perfectly normal news buffs with working memories and the ability to process reality without the aid of a PC filter respond with bemused mockery: “Aaaaaaand ... it’s Muslims.” Which to date it is.

During the reign of King David of Israel, there was probably a similar chorus: “Aaaaaaand ... it’s the Benjaminites.” Because it always was.

Sometimes we develop expectations about others for very good reasons.

Exam Return

I walked by a box in a college foyer last week on which was marked the words “Exam Return”.

A little earlier I had been listening to a meditation on the way the Lord Jesus communicated truth to his disciples. On a number of occasions the speaker recognized in the Lord’s technique what he called the “Teach-Test” method, and gave a few examples that seemed to bear out what he was saying.

Good enough so far.

Ask Not For Whom Rob Bell Tolls

Universalists, as I mentioned in a previous post, are people who wrongly believe everyone, no matter how willfully and determinately wicked, will eventually be saved.

Popular pastor/author Rob Bell has been called a universalist, though I don’t believe he describes himself that way. His book Love Wins is arguably the most well-read recent exploration of the subject, stirring up a fair bit of evangelical dust upon its release in 2011. However, if you want to argue fine points of universalist doctrine (or even broad strokes), Bell’s not your guy. Even his most ardent supporters (like Greg Boyd) admit Bell prefers asking questions to providing stringent proofs, and is more of a “poet/artist/dramatist” with a “fantastic gift for communicating in ways that inspire creativity and provoke thought” than an actual Bible teacher.

Too bad, really. Those of us waiting for a well-reasoned, serious defense of universalism from scripture will continue to keep our eyes peeled.

Too Hot to Handle: He Made Them Male and Female

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Not a Fairy Tale

Comedian Linda Beatty has a weekly atheist comedy web show called The Bible and Other Fairy Tales, from which we may safely conclude Linda, like many other atheists, has never actually read the Old Testament.

The real Bible is full of people displaying contradictory, often self-defeating behavior. There are few squeaky-clean Cinderella types, and few transparently evil stepsisters. Rarely are its characters utterly and irredeemably wicked. Rarely are they entirely faithful, wise and obedient. They are real, flawed human beings, driven by their passions, often displaying surprising decency or brutal inhumanity within a few paragraphs of each other.

Fairy tales these are not.

The Commentariat Speaks (7)

“ ‘The Bible was codified and given to the world by the Catholic Council of Nicaea in the 4th century. It’s indisputable. The Catholic Church gave us the Bible.’

‘Er ... so what? Think God couldn’t have managed if they didn’t?’ ”

— Exchange in a website commentary

Miracles are rare things. If they weren’t, more people would believe in them. How many have there been? Christian Answers lists 124, some of which I think are a little dubious. About Religion lists 37 different miracles attributed to the Lord Jesus, but we know he did many more. When Jesus went through Galilee healing “every disease and every affliction among the people”, that had to seriously bump up the number.

The answer is probably in the tens of thousands.

Lies That Sound Like Truth

It’s getting harder and harder to figure out what’s really going on, isn’t it? This week, I’ve tried to navigate my way through two very different propaganda minefields.

The first is a brief speech from President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin in which he lectures the West on its departure from Christian morality. Pure, ironic gold.

The second is an uncharacteristic opinion piece from the pen of Lefty billionaire and master manipulator George Soros, who usually lurks in the shadows behind paid political operatives when trying to tip the scales of American public opinion. But nobody flushed more money down the drain in November’s election than George Soros, and in this op-ed he purports to tell us why.

Both Putin and Soros assure us they are determined to save Western civilization — by precisely opposite means.

A Dangerously Clear Head

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Forever Doesn’t Mean Forever Anymore

Universalists are a funny bunch. They’d like everyone, no matter how willfully and resolutely horrible, to be saved in the end. Not a bad desire, in one sense. It certainly appears a loving and even-handed approach, provided we don’t apply a microscope to it and examine its implications too carefully.

So universalists read scripture to conform with their fantasy, redefining words as necessary and explaining the meaning of difficult verses in what seem to me to be very unnatural ways.

Thing is, they’re not always wrong.

God Helps Those …

One strategy ...

... or another?

Does he? Really? Does God help those who help themselves? Is the key to spiritual victory simply staying in motion at all times?

Some Christians recoil at the notion. “They that wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,” they reply. Sit tight, pray hard, and all will be well. Or at very least, it will be as God wills it.

Maybe.

At the other end of the spectrum lie those who quote the same adage to justify a flurry of activity for its own sake, with or without God’s involvement. They just can’t bring themselves to sit still, and need a sufficiently spiritual rationalization for their own impatience.

Perhaps neither extreme is quite correct.

Too Hot to Handle: Abandoning Evangelicalism

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No Guarantees

For the Christian, winning is not guaranteed.

Oh, of course it’s guaranteed in the long-term. We’ve read the ending of a story that has already been written, edited and published to the world. It is a done deal. All is to be summed up in Christ, and those of us who belong to him are destined to be glorified with him and united with him for eternity.

That’s definitely what you’d call a win. Might not happen in your lifetime or mine, but our long-term prospects are guaranteed.

Short-term is another story. Today may hold what appears to be a resounding loss.

Tax Collectors Do the Same

Living involves action after action, choice upon choice, day after day.

Those of us who are children of God find ourselves regularly involved in what appear on the surface to be exactly the same kinds of daily interpersonal transactions as everyone else. “Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” the Lord asked his would-be followers. “Do not even the Gentiles do the same?”

Yeah, they do. Thus, when a Christian loves his enemies and prays for his persecutors, he stands out from the crowd. When he simply and normally loves his family and greets his friends, he doesn’t.

Truth by the Bucketload

We have a lot of truth available to us, almost surely more than at any previous period in human history. We certainly have everything we need for the purpose of pleasing God during this present era. We have truth by the bucketload. Truth by the truckload. Torrents of cascading truth.

But we do not have it all. Not by a long shot.

Pseudepi-Whatsit?

Relax, I’m not talking about revisiting the question of inspiration in the Apocrypha or credulously skimming pseudepigraphal volumes in hopes of finding hidden spiritual gems. Some of these ancient sources may indeed preserve words that originated with God, but sifting such gold out of all the inauthentic dross in which they now reside would be a task no scholar, however spiritual, could credibly presume to undertake.

It May Be the Armor

“Then David said to Saul, ‘I cannot go with these, for I have not tested them.’ So David put them off.”

There was nothing wrong with Saul’s helmet and coat of mail; they worked just fine for Saul.

There was nothing wrong with Saul’s intentions; at the time he thought well of David. He had no desire to sabotage David’s efforts and every reason to hope he might succeed against Goliath.

And there was definitely nothing wrong with David; Saul’s armor just didn’t suit him.

Sometimes other people’s methods don’t work for us.

Peace Rules

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Christmas Dreams, White or Otherwise

I had a dream.

No, not like MLK. That’s more of what we call a vision than a dream. Mine was nothing inspiring or quotable. Just a regular dream, the ordinary kind where your mind drifts randomly.

The Grand Entrance

In my dream I went to Hallowby Hall. I had heard that it had the most amazing Christmas decorations on the planet. Everyone said so. And I couldn’t wait to see them.

So I went there. And even as I approached I must say I was impressed. Rich, red carpets led the way up the front stairs. Gold gleamed from towering archways. Tall trees of blue and green framed either side, and from beneath each bough multi-coloured lights winked mischievously. Banners of satin crowned the entranceway, and from underneath gleamed the golden light of a dozen shining chandeliers. Such a glorious sight I had never seen.

Too Hot to Handle: Shut Your Trap

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Did God Invent Slavery?

If the ongoing debate over the appropriate Christian response to the institution of slavery is not the single touchiest subject currently batted around by evangelicals in multicultural societies, it has to be at least Top Five.

Some Christians, perhaps wisely, dodge the issue entirely if at all possible: “Are there slaves today anywhere in the West? Have there been any for over a century? No? Well then, it’s irrelevant what I think about it. Next question!”

Most of us wouldn’t put it that baldly, but we would be just as happy discussing something else.

Visceral Atheism

Atheists contend their position is so intellectually robust as to be unassailable.

In Psychology Today, Satoshi Kanazawa makes the argument that atheists are more intelligent than religious people because “humans are designed by evolution to believe in God”, meaning that those who have become aware of this are smarter than those who have not.

That view makes atheism the red pill and the rest of us benighted Matrix-dwellers, if you’ll excuse the metaphor.

Quote of the Day (29)

Fred Reed is a smart guy. Definitely smarter than me. Closing in on seventy and anticipating the economic, cultural and political disasters looming over the United States, the former journalist bolted to Mexico to write away his retirement, mostly online.

Fred is that special sort of smart that sees the holes in both sides of an argument. The great thing about being alert in that particular way is that it generally means you are humble enough to say “I don’t know” on a regular basis, something you never hear from the majority of scientists, politicians and media pundits.

Why Are We So Easily Shaken?

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Harlequin Romances, Detective Fiction and the Essence of Prophecy

Christendom is packed with a bewildering array of denominations, sects and cults, each with its own emphasis.

God has his own emphasis, and seems to go to great lengths to make it clear. Somehow or other, large segments of Christendom manage to regularly miss it, despite the fact that they have taken the name of Jesus as a fundamental part of claiming to be Christian.

Yes, They Both Start With ‘D’

It occurs to me that — very occasionally, of course — I may have been the tiniest bit more dismissive of other believers than I ought.

Christian X’s wife runs the show, my youthful self noted. Scratch him from my list of potential spiritual advisors. Christian W has three kids who are off the rails, IMHO. Or at least they’re not very friendly in youth group. Christian Y’s car is awfully expensive: obviously too worldly. And Christian Z? Sure, he and his new wife use that cottage for the Lord, but wouldn’t that money be better invested in missions? Not to mention that divorce. Can you even be saved and do that?

Scratch, scratch, scratch.

Too Hot to Handle: I Thought It My Way

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

Tom: Let me set this up for you, IC.

Dr. Jordan Peterson, the University of Toronto professor whose struggle against political correctness we discussed at length here a few weeks ago, gives an extensive interview with two writers for the Winter 2016 edition of C2C Journal about the assault on free speech in Canada.

So one of his interviewers asks him about what it was about his refusal to buckle to the forces of “social justice” at U of T that has set off such a firestorm and his answer is that “There was something I said I wouldn’t do. That took the general and made it specific.”

Falling Down Together

The Battle of Gibeon is a perplexing episode in Israel’s history.

Let me set the stage: Saul, the first king of Israel, is dead. The nation has not formally acknowledged a new king but instead is slipping back into tribalism. David has the anointing of God, but lacks a unanimous mandate from the people. His kinsmen in Judah formally recognize David as rightful king, but that probably says less about their spirituality than it does about their sense of family loyalty.

Of course you’d want your guy at the top of the heap. Everybody does.

Forgiving Jesus

Hope deferred makes the heart sick.

A strong desire that can never be legitimately sated is a huge distraction. This remains true even if we can’t currently explain where the feeling comes from. Whatever its origin, like any other source of intense motivation, same sex-attraction complicates the Christian life and needs to be managed.

For reasons I can’t quite nail down, blaming God for unfulfilled desire is becoming a regular thing in Christendom.

God Made Me This Way

Thomas Nelson publishes a board book promoted on Amazon with this little blurb:

“From a monkey’s swing to a zebra’s stripes, God made all of us just the way we are!

Using adorable animals, this book from Make Believe Ideas explores how fearfully and wonderfully God has made all of His creations. Parents and grandparents will be able to show little ones that God made them just the way they are for a purpose.”

When intended to encourage small children to be thankful for the divine ingenuity of their design, the phrase “God made me the way I am” is quite harmless and even helpful.

On the other hand, when I hear it from adults as an excuse for sin, I cringe.

Lies, Myths and Misinformation: Missionaries Are Destructive

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Show’s Over

It’s the devil’s show I’m talking about, not God’s. I mean this present world.

The fact that it is the devil — Satan, Lucifer, Abaddon, Beelzebub, the Serpent of Old — who is running the show here on earth is not well understood in or outside religious circles, possibly because so many have difficulty with the notion of personal evil. Social evil, sure. Patriarchal evil, definitely. We’ll even maybe sorta kinda acknowledge that once in a while there comes on the scene a man or woman so virulently depraved that even a bad upbringing, lack of education, racism or poor social conditions do not fully account for it. Who would blame Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother, after all?

But an invisible supernatural being pulling the strings behind the scenes? A bit of a stretch. For the source of all the bad news in this world, let’s look elsewhere.

Any Story But Their Own

“ ‘Will any more harm come to her by what I did?’

‘Child,’ said the Lion, ‘I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.’ ”

— C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

I’ve always liked that last line.

Aravis asks the Lion about the fate of the slave she drugged in order to make her escape. Lewis does not tell us whether her question is prompted by guilt, compassion, fear or curiosity. All are possible.

But the Lion’s answer is simply, “No one is told any story but their own”.

Too Hot to Handle: Getting Reoriented

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Quote of the Day (28)

“ ‘Ruff, I talked to a mom in there who is going to give up everything for her kids, even her life. I also talked with a man who did not see the point of keeping one’s word. I want to be in her world, not in his.’

Ruff said, ‘You’d live longer in his.’

Gil said, ‘And be just as dead at the end and be called to account for my life.’ ”

— John C. Wright, Swan Knight’s Sword

See, now THERE’S a sentiment I’d want my kids to read and internalize.

Islands Shouting Lies

“We’re all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.”

— Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed

The public life that we lead is a façade; a mask we wear that is in large measure demonstrably false, primarily because it is an incomplete representation of who we truly are in private.

There are three reasons for this division between the public and the private life.

Don’t Be Outdone

Nowadays we don’t like to hurt anybody’s self-esteem. The solution? Give out prizes, ribbons and accolades just for showing up. My youngest son once brought home a trophy for participation.

“Hey Dad, look, I was there!”

No, actually, he didn’t say that. He rightly recognized even at the age of six or seven that there was little value to an award received for no particular effort. For merely dignifying an event with his illustrious presence. For managing to breathe and stand upright without any unanticipated side-effects.

I don’t know where the trophy is now and I suspect neither does he. If you ask me it was kind of pathetic.

The Commentariat Speaks (6)

“Socialism is basically Christianity without the divine power. Socialism is man’s attempt to bring utopia to reality.”

Uh ... not really. I mean, yes on the utopian bit, no on the comparison to Christianity.

It’s not just the absence of divine power, though that’s certainly one reason socialism reliably fails. As Margaret Thatcher noted, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

Tracking True

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God’s Man of the Hour

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Too Hot to Handle: Will Science Survive Our Politicized Culture?

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Doubling Down

KFC makes the single best sandwich in the history of the world, in my humble opinion.

If you haven’t heard this, prepare to be appalled: A Double Down is 541 calories of pure brilliance: bacon, two different kinds of melted cheese and the Colonel’s secret sauce in between (here’s the best part) two KFC Original Recipe chicken fillets. No bun. Just an artery-clogging, heart-stopping quantity of tasty deep-fried meat.

Fortunately the sandwich only shows up erratically on the KFC menu, usually for four weeks every year-and-a-half or so. If you need to justify consuming one, I recommend fasting the day before. And the day after. Or maybe for a week.

Quote of the Day (27)

It was Epicurus who first posed this famous paradox around 350 BC:

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?”

At least we think it was Epicurus. Some believe the lines were misattributed to him by later philosophers like David Hume. But it hardly matters who said them and when: the fact is that men have struggled to explain suffering as long as men have been thinking about their place in the universe, and this particular formulation is one of the ways they have attempted to deal with the question.

Down the Road

Every day of our lives, by means of the Holy Spirit’s agency, God is steadily working away to achieve in each of us the character of his Son.

Transforming us involves both IN-forming us and RE-forming us — but there is often a fair bit of time that elapses between the two.

Sometimes that means today’s lesson is only understood later this week. And sometimes full understanding of any given piece of spiritual information is years or even decades away.

Are We Teaching or Just Speeching?

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Too Far Gone

Does your church need an ... er ... equalizer?

“You have gone too far! For all in the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them. Why then do you exalt yourselves above the assembly of the Lord?”

— Korah’s Rebellion, Numbers 16

Christian women are priests just as Christian men are priests; therefore Christian women should be able to do everything in the churches that Christian men have traditionally done.

So goes the modern argument, and it’s dead wrong.

Priests and Priesthood

If all believers are really priests, why is it that some churches still don’t allow women to exercise the priestly role of teaching the Bible publicly?

Martin Luther famously referred to a general priesthood in his 1520 tract To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. Luther did not actually coin the phrase “priesthood of all believers”, and the idea itself obviously did not originate with Luther but rather with the writers of the New Testament. Still, the fact remains that the doctrine we know by that name has been a significant feature of Protestantism for almost 500 years.

This being the case, you’d figure any questions about the status of women in a universal priesthood must have been asked and answered hundreds of times.

Too Hot to Handle: E-dification

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Rights and Freedoms

In the wake of the U.S. election, Crawford Paul muses on the role of the church in a democracy. Here’s his setup:

“The dilemma comes when the church, which is NOT a democracy, exists in a nation that IS a democracy. How does the church uphold a democracy that would ensure their right to follow the teachings of the Bible while at the same time grant rights to those who contradict the Scriptures?”

Hmm. I agree with much of what Crawford says in his piece, but I have a very different take on a few of his assumptions.

The Enemy Within

In modern English usage, the difference between jealousy and envy is not clear-cut, as this Merriam-Webster article helpfully points out. In fact, the two terms have become so muddled that three major language guides from the mid-20th century disagree about their respective meanings.

For convenience and to avoid making the confusion worse, I’ll use “jealous” to describe the anticipative emotions that arise over losing something you have, and “envious” to describe the desire to possess what belongs to someone else.

But I won’t pretend to have the final word on the subject.