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Archive for the ‘Apologetics’ Category

To expand my thoughts at the end of yesterday's post about the slow-moving nature of worldviews, I thought I'd post a piece I wrote a few years ago after reading a chapter called "Trusting the Theology of a Slave Owner" in A God Entranced Vision of All Things: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards. It's a sobering reminder of our limitations as human beings in applying revealed truth to our practices:

Even as Edwards argued against the slave trade, saying it was wrong because we're all of the same human race, made by the same Maker in His image, and we ought not steal human beings and tear them away from their families, nor should we profit from others who do so—even as he argued this, Edwards continued to own slaves.

It's a scary thought that a man who knew God's word far better than I do and who spent far more time in prayer, study, and meditation than I do was blinded enough by his own sin and culture not to see a sin that is now glaringly obvious to us—that a man of such incisive and precise thinking could not see that he condemned himself with his own arguments against the slave trade.

His son, who was able to follow the logic of Edwards's arguments and the implications of his theology to the end, argued eloquently against slavery, not just the trade.  But it took those of that next generation to finally work their way completely out of the blinders of cultural complacency.

It's difficult to see clearly and then fight against a sin you're already participating in.  How much more so if your culture condones it!  Our sin blinds us and distorts our perception (a frightening reality that ought to make us more careful about giving into temptation).  Edwards had slaves, so he was not able to see the wrongness of it, and while he was ahead of his time morally in many ways, including in his arguments against the slave trade, his treatment of his slaves, and his inclusion of slaves as members of his church, we can see now how far he was from God's standard of perfect righteousness.

If this doesn't point out the need of all of us for a savior, I don't know what does!  We are all desperately in the “sinner” category (a category which includes everyone but God) in ways of which we haven't even a clue.  Edwards fought so hard for holiness in himself and mastery over his sin, and people around him would have considered him a very good man.  Some who misunderstood the gospel probably thought he was good enough to get to heaven based on his works.  But they could not even see the sin of slavery.

In the same way, as best as we try to conquer our own sin, there will be sins in our lives that we will never even recognize.  This is a humbling thought to which we are forced to respond like Paul:

Wretched man that I am!  Who will set me free from the body of this death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!... Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus…. For what the Law could not do [i.e., make us righteous], weak as it was through the flesh, God did:  sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

Tomorrow I'll get back to the "Christianity As Science-Starter" series.

In an Unbelievable podcast discussing the question, "What was the primary cause of Nazi ideology—Darwinism or Christian anti-Semitism?" a listener asked, "Has Darwinism become prescriptive? When did this happen?" Here is the argument I have heard many times against the Darwinism-created-eugenics claim: Darwinism is merely descriptive, not prescriptive. Therefore, those who made it prescriptive (i.e., who reasoned natural selection is true, therefore we can create better human beings through careful breeding, therefore we should) were misusing the scientific knowledge. This was not the fault of Darwinism, but merely a misunderstanding of the role of science. Read the rest of this entry »

In Nancy Pearcey’s excellent book, Saving Leonardo, she explains why Greek thought didn't create modern science:

[T]he ancient Greeks are often given credit for the origin of modern science. But that is a mistake. The Greeks locked up mathematical truths in a kind of Platonic heaven of ideal forms—a realm of mental blueprints or templates for all the objects in the material world. The problem was that these blueprints did not match their objects except in a rough and approximate way. Why not? Because the Greeks regarded matter as eternal, not created. Therefore matter had its own inherent, independent properties, which did not necessarily line up with the blueprints in the ideal realm.

It was their view of the nature of the universe that held them back from scientific discovery, and it was Kepler's Christian view of the creation of the universe that drove him on towards science:

[H]ow did Johann Kepler discover that the planetary orbits are ellipses? Ever since antiquity, people had thought the planets moved in circular orbits. The idea went back to Aristotle. He had reasoned that the heavens are “perfect,” and the circle is the “perfect” shape, ergo the heavenly bodies must move in circles. (This was an example of the Greeks’ deductive approach to science.) How did Kepler succeed in breaking through a settled belief in circular orbits that had held sway for two thousand years?

It began when he had difficulty plotting the orbit of Mars. The most accurate circle he could construct based on observations was slightly wobbly. Had Kepler retained the Greek mentality, he would have shrugged off such a minor aberration. His thinking would have been that objects correspond to geometrical ideals, after all, only approximately. But Kepler was a devout Lutheran. He was convinced that if God wanted a line to form a circle, it would be exactly a circle. And if it was not exactly a circle, it must be exactly something else. It would not be merely an arbitrary departure from the ideal. This theological conviction sustained Kepler through six years of intellectual struggle and thousands of pages of scientific calculations before he finally hit upon the idea of ellipses.

Kepler later spoke gratefully of the minor mismatch in Mars’ orbit as a “gift from God” because it spurred his greatest scientific breakthrough. The chief aim of science, he said, is “to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”

One aspect of this I find interesting is the fact that it took so very long for the ideas of Christianity to overcome previously held cultural ideas left over from the Greeks. As was the case in the moral realm (as I discussed yesterday), the Christian worldview in reference to the physical realm was slowly working its way through Western culture. No culture turns quickly, and God has a very long-term view of progress, working within the human limitations that make it difficult for a massive group of people to change an entrenched, accepted paradigm.

I think we underestimate the power culture has over our view of the world, and this often causes unfair scorn of those in the past who couldn't see the applications of truths that we easily see today. This underestimation also leads to accusations against God for not completely remaking human culture when He gave the Israelites the Law. But the truth is, human society can be dangerously fractured by radical, abrupt, imposed change, and God wisely chose to work through the centuries in as stable a way as possible. It's amazing to think how far we must still have to go.

Over the next few days, I'll continue this "Christianity As Science-Starter" series with Galileo and Newton.

Ed Komoszewski of Parchment and Pen reviewed the recent Bart Ehrman/Dan Wallace debate  ("Can we trust the text of the New Testament?"), offering these six points (abridged below) to summarize Wallace's argument: Read the rest of this entry »

Barnabas Piper clarifies the difference between asking questions and being a skeptic:

There’s a fine line, though, between being someone who questions things and being a skeptic. In fact, many people would call someone who questions everything a skeptic. Here’s the thing; I don’t think many skeptics actually question anything. They may phrase their challenges as questions, but their heart is set on rejection and disproving. To truly question something is to pose questions to it and about it for the sake of understanding. This may lead to disproving or rejecting, but the heart behind it is in learning. And in this sense, we ought to question everything…. [W]hat is more important than seeking every ounce of truth in an established reality? And what is more harmful than abiding in that reality if no truth is to be found there? And so we must question.

As part of the Foundations of the Christian Mind Series, T M Stafford of RU Institute, presents that foundational building blocks of the Christian Worldvview in this short presentation and tries to give some context to the kinds of issues that each represents in the thinking and believing life of the Christian. Let us know what you think!

Foundations: Five Marks of the Christian Mind from RU Institute on Vimeo.

I sometimes hear atheists say that as science advances, religion retreats, and soon there will be no need for religion. It's a particularly narrow understanding of our relationship with God (speaking as a Christian here)—as if God's main function in our lives is to provide an explanation for events in nature. Read the rest of this entry »

Russell Moore gives seven reasons why "Judgment Houses" (or "Hell Houses")—haunted-house-type attractions created by churches, depicting sin and judgment for the purpose of evangelism—"often miss the mark." I thought these three points were particularly strong:

They abstract judgment from the love of God. I know most “Judgment Houses” present the gospel at the end. But in the Bible the good news doesn’t come at the end. The prodigal son leaves the father’s house, but the father is eager to receive him back (Luke 16:11-31). The awful news of God’s judgment is always intertwined in Scripture with the message of the gospel of a loving, merciful God. “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17). Read the rest of this entry »

The Bible doesn't ask us to make a leap of faith or have blind faith.  Biblical faith is entrusting ourselves to what we have good reason to believe is true.  God didn't ask for blind faith - He gave reason to believe.  Here are a couple of examples. God makes a covenant with Abraham in Genesis 12, which requires Abraham to exercise faith. God reaffirms it in Genesis 15 and gives Abraham tangible reason to trust Him and the promise.  God literally cuts a contract with Abraham according to the custom of the day.  Abraham could reflect back on this when circumstances required faith.  His faith wasn't blind or wishful, it was based on a contract.  We often do things based on contracts - it's a common occurrence in our world.  It gives us reason to place our faith in someone else to fulfill their end of the agreement and we act accordingly to keep our end.  We invest ourselves, our time, our resources into something because we have faith in the other person due to the contract.  In Abraham's case, the contract was unilateral - it was all God's to keep.  But the contract gave Abraham reason to trust God. Fast forward to Matthew 9.  Jesus tells a paralytic man that his sins are forgiven.  The scribes question Jesus' authority to do this.  Jesus didn't answer that they should just trust Him blindly.  He healed the man to give them reason to believe He had the authority to forgive sins.  Jesus gave a tangible reason to believe what wasn't tangible. Now every time an exercise of faith is called for, we aren't promised some tangible proof.  There's already abundant evidence and reason to place our faith in God.  And these are only two examples.  Jesus rising from the dead and witnessed by literally hundreds was the penultimate evidence that makes it entirely reasonable to place our faith in Him as Savior.