Local church friends & family Veterans Day slideshow. from Garrette on Vimeo.
This is a video my good cousin Garrette Baird made last year for his church at Veteran’s Day. Our grandfather, Otis Moore, is about halfway through. He served in the US Army in the European Theater, in Patton’s Third Army, of the Second World War from January 1945 to the end of the war.
“At some point in the life of most local churches a critical point is reached when the core fellowship of those committed to gospel vision are outnumbered by a fringe who are there for quite different reasons, be it spiritual comfort, kids activities, personal support, or whatever. Regardless of the particular type of church government, all fellowships struggle to maintain focus around core vision when the fringe, be they believers or not, outnumber the gospel-oriented core. It is very hard to maintain focus, or alter any aspect of church life to reflect the gospel needs of a fresh generation, when the majority are committed to maintaining their comfort. When this happens “Christians” have been replaced with “churchgoers” who assume they are Christians.” – Marcus Honeyset
The last sentence is pretty rough and direct but the danger is real. Why do you go to church? What’s the Gospel mean to you today?
The Monroe County Book Fair ran by the Red Cross starts today and runs through next Tuesday at the Monroe County Fairgrounds. Here’s the link.
Here is an excellent article on spiritual leadership by John Piper. He writes effectively on leadership in a simple but direct way. Piper dividing characteristics of leadership into what he calls the inner circle and the outer circle. Good stuff. Highly recommended.
If you are an iTunes user and seeking good theological resources you may enjoy RC Sproul’s teaching series on Renewing Your Mind. Currently there is a short series on contemporary theology available. It is quite good. However, it is quite dated so that it is not really a survey of current contemporary theological trends but rather trends in 20th century theology. Nevertheless, it surveys liberalism, neo-orthodoxy, Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, process theology, and liberation theology. Useful and recommended.
Why is is that equally brilliant people draw differing conclusions on the same matter? In economics, the capitalist argues with the socialist. In politics, the conservative argues with the liberal. In philosopher, the realist argues with the idealist. In theology, the Catholic argues with the Protestant. And so on and so forth, ad infinitum. Why is this?
R.C. Sproul answers this in his teaching series called The Psychology of Atheism. He gives four basic reasons why bright, intelligent thinkers disagree with one another:
Understanding this is really helpful in dialoguing with people with whom you disagree. Knowing this allows you to zero in on the point of disagreement. Furthermore, it helps you to chill out, understand people better, and listen to what they are saying and carefully analyze it.
Of course, before you turn your guns on someone else you should first take a look at your own position. Is your theory of knowledge valid? Are you making logical errors? Are there errors of fact in what you’re saying? And are you biased one way or the other?
I hope to unpack these a bit more in upcoming posts. Watch out!
A good friend, Jason Dulle, has just posted a wonderful article on a positive understanding of the concept of creeds. We all have them whether we deny it or not. In fact, it is impossible not to have a creed, at least personally. Credo simply means “I believe” in Latin. So start with “I believe” and follow that with whatever you believe. That is your creed. And you do have one! So: what do you believe and why do you believe it?
I really, really like Jason’s short creed, which is just a summary, not a full-orbed reflection of his doctrine.
I believe in one God, eternal and almighty,
creator of heaven and earth,who is one in essence, and one in person
and who for us became one of us, and yet remained God.
I believe in Jesus Christ, the image of the invisible God
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,born of the virgin Mary, and descended from David,
being both true God and true man.
Who was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
died for our sins, was buried, and rose again the third day,
who ascended to heaven, from whence He’ll return in glory
to judge the world, raise the dead,
and inaugurate a kingdom without end.
I believe in salvation through Christ alone,
by grace through faith, and evidenced by good works.
I believe in repentance from sin,
baptism in Jesus’ name, and regeneration of the Spirit.
Amen.
Bloggingheads.tv, a very interesting website for dialogue and discussion, has created quite a stir for simply giving airtime to a couple of Intelligent Design proponents. In a ridiculous reaction, a number of evolutionists and atheists have stated that they will no longer frequent the bloggingheads.tv website (here and here). Which is just silly, and shows how much they too have imbibed the spirit of fundamentalism, of course, a fundamentalism of their stripe. Again, these new atheists need to stop the name calling, names like loon, crackpot, and idiot, you know the sort of names that encourage free exchange of ideas and they need to ask, “why do other equally brilliant people draw such different conclusions about the world than I do?”
Anyway, the dialogues are pretty good and touch on the issues of: what is science? what is intelligent design? the history of science, theistic evolution, and much, much more.
Here they are:
What these show, I think, is that there are a lot more folks (and smart folks too!) out there asking these questions.
Francis Collins, the well-known director of the Human Genome Project and author of The Language of God, has been appointed as head of the National Institute for Health this past July. He is a fascinating figure because he is a conundrum for the atheistic community-a world-class scientist, scholar, and a convinced Christian that does not ignore the bigger questions. What is so interesting is how the hardcore atheist community has reacted to Collins’s book on his faith and his appointment to the NIH. Some did not like this recent development at all and have squarely opposed it, such as Steven Pinker, who faults Collins for publicly advocating his faith! And Pinker’s worst worry is that Collins might strengthen the faith of we blighted fundamentalists:
Collins, in his book, eggs on fellow evangelical Christians in their anti-scientific beliefs. He tells them that they are “right to hold fast to the truths of the Bible” and to “the certainty that the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly resisted.” Granted, he is not a young-earth or intelligent-design creationist. But he has stated that God interacts with creation, in particular, that he designed the evolutionary process to ensure that human intelligence, morality, and Judaeo-Christian religious belief would evolve.
That is far more than just expressing an opinion. That is advocacy, which gives incalculable encouragement the forces that have been hostile to science for the past eight years. And this is not just a theoretical fear: a number of right-wing, religious apologists (e.g., Dennis Praeger, in his debate with Sam Harris) used Collins as a stick to beat secularists: “Here is a famous scientist who takes an interventionist God and the Bible seriously; who are you to contradict him?” This is going to be multiplied if Collins becomes an even more prominent face of science.
And yes, he’s right, it does mean something to me as a believer that an outstanding (and wildly successful) scientist also is a believer in the God of the Bible. May his tribe increase! While it doesn’t prove anything scientifically it does show that compatibility of the Christian faith with science and scientific research.
What seems a bit amazing to me is why do such hardcore atheists never seem to sit down and ask themselves, “why do other equally brilliant minds disagree with me on the question of God?” Instead, most of these hardcore atheists seem quite willing to just call all the rest idiots. How nice, how open-minded, how philosophically fairminded, how scientific!
While Collins was successfully apointed as head of NIH the reaction to his appointment shows what is at stake in the debates with new atheism. The new apologists for atheism are no longer willing to just have the niche carved out in the academic world over the past century and a half by their forebearers, instead they want the whole playground to themselves. If they can they are going to have the authorities send everybody home who won’t play the game by their rules.
Atheism has gone viral these days. The New Atheism is making many headlines and they are selling many books and making a lot of appearances. I certainly am no professional apologist, but I try to read some of their stuff and think through what they are saying. And I have no comprehensive response to offer as so many apologists are doing (see Amazon.com for authors such as David Bentley Hart, Douglas Wilson, Scott Hahn, and many, many others), but what I sometimes hear these professional apologists saying, I tend to agree with: many of the arguments by the “new” atheism are nothing new at all.
Here are a few statements from atheists that show how much they talk right past Christians and their Bibles. Jerry Coyne, from Why Evolution Is True, makes this statement:”here are two more things that can’t happen, given what we know about modern biology: a human female can’t give birth to offspring unless she is inseminated, and people who are dead for three days don’t come back to life.” And his comrade-in-arms, Sean Carroll, makes a similar statement:”We know more about the natural world now than we did two millennia ago, and we know enough to say that people don’t come back from the dead.” Sorry for the sarcasm, but no kidding? Really? We had no idea…
Whatever scientific research is being done by these guys (Coyne is an evolutionary biologist and Carroll is a cosmologist), may be fantastic and all, but these sorts of statements are not arguments at all and sail right past the rest of us quite safely. Why is that? Because we know this already! These facts are thousands of years old. We know and the folks in the first century knew quite well that virgins don’t have babies and dead people don’t sit up. Not normally, often, or regularly.
When Mary had a baby bump before she married Joseph no one suspected the visitation of the Holy Spirit. This is why she fled from home to hide out with her cousin. And when Joseph of Arimathea placed Jesus’s body in his garden tomb no one expected what happened on Sunday morning. This is why all of his disciples went into hiding and few of them believed the reports of the women returning from the tomb. Indeed these events were highly unexpected, even if prophesied, and it is the sheer and absurd unlikelyness of them that makes it so amazing.
Now these events are a matter of historical investigation. They are enshrined in the New Testament witness to Jesus of Nazareth by writers claiming to provide personal eyewitness testimony of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of this most unlikely of Jewish peasant prophets. The historian’s dilemma is manifold. For one, explaining how this came to be believed almost immediately after the crucifixion of Jesus. Two, explaining how the followers of this Jewish Messiah spread His Gospel so quickly and expansively, not by the sword, but, in fact, in spite of the sword, many of them giving their own lives testifying to this Jesus. And three, explaining the amazing impact of the Christian faith on its world. The Christian answer is that God Himself broke into human history in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
Of course Coyne and Carroll and others can respond by simply re-stating that virgins don’t concieve and dead people don’t walk, and they can walk us through the pregnancy wing of the hospital and through every graveyard in the world, and we can agree with them. Yep, that’s not a virgin birth. No, they probably won’t dig themselves out and starting walking tomorrow. And within the totally god-absent universe that their minds inhabit, they are right, we should never expect otherwise. But that’s not the universe we live in. There is a Creator God and Jesus of Nazareth is the one black swan that proves otherwise. And if Jesus of Nazareth did indeed rise from the dead, His one resurrection gives the rest of us cause to rest in hope.
That’s right: “Global warming takes a break.”
Obviously, going to be a lot of questions!
David Goldhill has written this insightful and passionate piece on health care, “How American Health Care Killed My Father,” in the Atlantic Monthly. Check it out. I highly recommend it. If you’re trying to understand why health care and health insurance reform is needed, please read it.
A good piece by Al Mohler concerning the new pictures being taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. And here’s a slideshow of ten new amazing pictures.
President Obama delivered a speech last evening to Congress concerning health care and health insurance reform. I was impressed at how sermon-like his speech was. In effect, he came down from the White House to preach a message. And he’s good at it. He is obviously far more comfortable at the podium than his predecessor and it shows. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can read it here and you can watch it here.
Here are a few thoughts after watching the speech.
By the way, you can read the Republican response here.
I’m no expert, these are just the thoughts of an American citizen and taxpayer. The question is, what do you think?
