Church Voices

This article from the Sports Economist illustrates at least a little bit of the reason why God’s grace is so much larger than ours.

The author makes this note about the chances of baseball players who used performance enhancing drugs on getting into the hall of fame:

Beyond McGwire, what will be the fate of others caught up in the bad press? A Cincinnati Enquirer piece by John Erardi poses this question for A-Rod along with Bonds, Sosa, McGwire, Clemens and others. In a very small sample (10) of baseball writers who have Hall of Fame votes, 7 came out against any of the players while 2 were willing to consider a partiucular guy from their city

Then, from the general to the specific:

The trouble with that view is that players who did not use such substances stand at a disadvantage, albeit an arguable one. The Astros ace, Roy Oswalt, speaks very forcefully to the views of at least one impacted non-users on MLB.com:

“A-Rod’s numbers shouldn’t count for anything,” Oswalt said in a phone interview with MLB.com. “I feel like he cheated me out of the game.” … “The ones that have come out and admitted it, and are proven guilty, [their numbers] should not count. I’ve been cheated out of the game,” Oswalt continued. “This is my ninth year, and I’ve done nothing to enhance my performance, other than work my butt off to get guys out. These guys [who took PEDs] have all the talent in the world. All-Star talent. And they put times two on it.

Of course, like the writers, Oswalt is more gracious to a former teammate, Roger Clemens, than he is toward others.

So, it looks like whether you’re a baseball writer taking a principled stand against the exploitation of the game by dirty players, or a clean baseball player angry that your ability to earn is being reduced by talented players having an unfair advantage the familiarity with a player will result in having a softened attitude towards him.

Consider, then, that God is intimately familiar with each of us. He is our creator and our sustainer, we’re told he knows us well enough that the hairs of our head are numbered. Could it be that God’s intimate familiarity with us results in a grace towards us that is far greater than the grace we offer each other? The concluding verses of the book of Jonah seem to indicate this is the case:

Then the Lord said, “You feel sorry about the plant, though you did nothing to put it there. It came quickly and died quickly. But Nineveh has more than 120,000 people living in spiritual darkness,[a] not to mention all the animals. Shouldn’t I feel sorry for such a great city?”

If the church is going to be a place where grace is received and given among God’s people, it is necessary that we cultivate relationships with our brothers and sisters. Its easy to condemn unknown baseball players for outrageous sins against the game of baseball, its easy to condemn Christians we have never met for sins that are publicly revealed, it is easy to grow cold hearted towards people who sin against us who we only say hi to once a week before services.

But its very difficult to not offer grace to someone who we are so familiar with that we love.

I recently found out about the wedding of a homosexual friend of mine from High School.  I lost track of her shortly after graduating H.S. and was saddened to hear about it.  Being a minister, I’m often surprised and dissapointed to hear about the choices of other ministers.

Ministers take different approaches to doing weddings.  Some will only marry members of their congregation, some will marry any two Christians, some will marry any male/female couple, and some will marry anybody to anybody else.  Most conservative ministers won’t condemn another minister for their personal marriage policies, as long as that policy excludes the marrying of homosexual couples.  (Depending on where you live, my discussion of homosexual unions includes any kind of ceremony performed by the minister in recognition of the relationship of the couple.)

From Leviticus, we are shown that such relationships are an abomination (detestable).  But there are other things mentioned in Scripture that are equally, if not more detestable.  Deuteronomy 25:16 tells us that a person who uses dishonest weights and measurements is an abomination – “For everyone who does these things, everyone who acts unjustly is an abomination to the LORD your God.”  I find it interesting that the act of a male lying with a male in Leviticus is an abomination but the very person themselves who acts unjustly is an abomination to God.  Ouch.  Would I be willing to marry two people who are dishonest?  Would I care if another minister was willing to do that?  Some might joke that they deserve eachother.

Marriage is important to the family.  Being rooted in Christ is more important.  I think this deals with the issue of correcting behavior of a person who is destined for Hell.  Kind of like standing on land yelling at a person who is drowning that they aren’t treading water properly, instead of swimming out there and helping them to shore.  I am glad when a person chooses not to sin, but it’s irrelevant compared with their relationship to God.  My role is not to help people be better sinners, but to share Christ with them.  So how do you love such a couple without approving or participating in their defiance of God?  How do you be Christ in their lives?

If I was still close to my friend, and she asked me to perform her ceremony, I would think long and hard about it.  A few years ago, I probably would have just said no.  Today, I’m not sure.  If I can marry a man and a woman who do not have Christ as their foundation, who are not in Christ, why draw the line at a homosexual ceremony?

If we don’t do what we are taught in scripture, does it have any value for our lives?  What does it take for us to love our neighbors?

Being in the middle of a high impact natural disaster (I live in a small town on the Mississippi river that will flood most of the buildins on Main St. by next week), I’ve been thinking a lot about questions like the above.  After the second day of sandbagging, I finally had to quit early and so I got some time to finally watch Rambo (the new one) which we’ve had from Netflix for days.  I was surprised at how intensely the film dealt with similar issues and questions I have been thinking on. 

I was surprised to very quickly learn that this Rambo wasn’t really about John Rambo, is about the suffering of the people of Burma.  Stalone often likes to say something meaningful in his films, and for this one he found out about the awful situation (pre-natural disaster, so you can imagine how much worse it is now) of the Burmese under the rule of the military.  Of course, there’s lots of gory action, but I’d still recommend any adult to see it, partly because the gore is not out of place.  In fact, you’ll find some tame pictures on the sites listed below that provide the evidence for the brutatlity visualized for you in Rambo. 

The most convicting part of the film was the dedication to action of the Christians in the film.  One thing that gets me, both locally for our flood, and globally for situations like Burma, is how churches and christians can sit around and do nothing yet people who do not know the grace of God through Jesus Christ do everything from helping to fill sandbags to save a few homes to struggling for the lives of people half a world away.

Father, forgive us for walking on the other side of the street pretending not to see the need of our neighbor.  Create in us a heart of compassion.  Use us in your work to transform us into little Christs.

Watch the movie if you haven’t seen it yet.  In the mean time, check out these websites:

www.uscampaignforburma.org

www.freeburmarangers.org

One of the most important questions a Christian can ask his or herself is “What is God’s will for me?” The number of books written on this subject by popular Christian authors such as Charles Swindoll and John MacArther reveals that the many lay Christians are either asking or interested in the question.¹ The vast majority of self-help style books that fill Christian bookstores to the brim, I’d be willing to bet, are likely to have a chapter devoted to the question. I want to suggest that the answer to the question is painfully clear. “If it is so clear”, you might ask, “then why do so many Christians find themselves at a loss as to how to answer it?” Part of what makes the question so knotty is its ambiguity. What exactly is the question? What do we mean by “God’s will” or “the will of God” when we ask it of our lives? Read the rest of this entry »

Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in My Word, then are ye My disciples indeed; And ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free. – John 8:31-32 (KJV)

Reading the King James Version of the Bible is akin to reading/hearing pirate speech.  Fun and humorous at times, but doesn’t help communicate so well anymore.

Why do we insist on making people learn a new language to know Christ?  Now, I’m fine with learning a new language because we know Christ, such as the desire to learn Greek and Hebrew, or simply the process of learning how to speak in a way that glorifies God, but otherwise we are putting up an unnecessary barrier.  I don’t care what you use for your own devotions (although there will be plenty of words in the KJV that will mislead you if you don’t know better), but to insist that everybody uses that version because it’s the one God ordained is rediculous.

Nothing, apparently.

It’s about time Dawkins had a good exchange with an able defender of Christianity. Claiming a desire “not to further their cause” as his reason for refusing public debate with Christians, Dawkins has remained at a comfortable distance from anyone who could challenge him on equal grounds. He’d much rather verbally harass anyone who doesn’t conform to his own worldview from the podium, a friendly interview, or any other public forum that doesn’t allow attendees to gain any sort of solid ground upon which to make and defend a case. Of course you also have Dawkins being open to the option of confronting Christians who are obviously not prepared to engage him, such as when he randomly showed up at New Life Church and interrogated Ted Haggard.

I am reminded of a video of Dawkins lecturing at RMWC in Lynchburg, VA, during which he was met with several questions from attending theists from Liberty University in the Q&A session. One by one, he made them look like ignorant fools from the stage—not necessarily because their questions weren’t good (some of them weren’t), but because, quite simply, the audience as a whole wasn’t competent enough to identify his shallow responses as such. Rather, they cheered triumphantly during and after each one of his replies. As I watched the video, I was literally convinced that the crowd would have cheered anything Dawkins said, even if it were something like “I’m glad you listeners have no training in formal and informal fallacies.”

It should be no surprise, then, that Dawkins got his foot put in his mouth on Irish radio during his exchange with David Quinn, columnist (and also, as it seems, a fine Christian apologist) at the Irish Independent. The infamous “man of evidence” was reduced to saying “well, I simply deny that” in response to Quinn’s charges. Wow, great response. Without the noise of an audience following his remarks, it’s clear not much noise is coming from Dawkins at all (indeed, the gaps in his arguments are so big that it takes just that to fill them—the mindless ovation of an entire audience). I’m not saying Quinn butchered Dawkins, but had the show lasted any longer than 15 minutes (indeed, it was just getting good) I could very easily see it going that route. You can listen to the recording of the radio talk show featuring Dawkins and Quinn here.

Dawkins is like Britney Spears in the university setting: when you strip him of all the fancy surround sound and digital equipment and backup dancers and voice synthesizers, you have nothing left but a mind-numbing nasal howl. Of course it remains the case that the Dawkins-following atheists play the role of the teeny-bopper drones who actually buy into that studio-produced crap when its Styrofoam infrastructure isn’t exposed, whereas the Christians correctly identified it as crap to begin with.

And before someone tries to charge my thoughts about Dawkins unreasonably biased in lieu of being a Christian theist, consider the testimony of the eminent atheist philosopher Michael Ruse. After reading Dawkins’ latest book, The God Delusion, Ruse comments, “The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist.” The media may be eating Dawkins up right now, but I think they’ll spit him back out soon enough (along with Sam Harris).

As the title suggests, I want to briefly explore the idea of whether or not one can still be a Christian and at the same time reject the Bible. I would answer that question in the positive. But to go any further, I’ll have to unpack what I mean by “reject.”

Reject the Bible as what? Obviously, if one rejects the Bible’s central assumptions as true, such as the existence of God or the deity of Christ, one cannot be a Christian in the Orthodox sense. So I do not think it possible to remain Christian while simultaneously denying such things (despite what the Jesus Seminar, Crossan in particular, will have you believe). I mean to ask whether it is still possible to be a Christian and hold that the Bible isn’t a reliable set of documents or is in some way historically unreliable or untrustworthy.

The question of whether the Bible is historically reliable has been a subject of much research and debate. Here I use the term “historically reliable” to refer to a document which by historical reason can be shown to host information of events that most probably happened at some point in that past. But how much does it really even matter if the Bible is historically reliable on these grounds? It seems to me not much at all, for the central truths of Christianity aren’t contingent on the reliability of scripture. This is why I think one can still be a Christian and reject the Bible as historically reliable—for even if the information in the New Testament, for instance, isn’t or can’t be shown historically reliable, it doesn’t follow that the information therein is not true.

Of course I believe the Bible is and can be shown historically reliable in this sense, but the point is this: the Bible itself is not what warrants Christian belief—rather, the source which warrants Christian belief is the Holy Spirit, who conveys the necessary truths of Christian belief to the subject (the existence of God, the gospel message, the inspiration or even the reliability of the Bible). That’s why I’m not impressed by people like Ken Ham, the die-hard King James users, or anyone else who seemingly condition Christian belief on the basis of one’s particular views on the Bible, who aren’t so much worried about concept as they are construct. That’s also why I find arguing against the reliability of scripture as evidence against Christianity to be moot.

How many times have you heard someone cast skepticism on the Bible as reason not be a Christian? This, if nothing else, would be one way to show how that excuse rings hollow.

Its been proposed, from a blog I enjoy very much, that it can be useful when looking at a thorny issue or situation to ask the question “if I spent three years with Jesus what would I think about this”?

Can this question ever bring clarity? I suppose if someone is acting in a way they know is contrary to the teachings of Christ it could be useful. However, if there is truly a dilemma this question will only re-inforce whatever view was held before. It would only be by going back and re-examining the life of Christ, which in turn would involve turning to scripture (which is what this question was meant to bring clarity to in the first place), that any shift in perception would occur.

How many of you wore the bracelet? You know what I�m talking about. Almost ten years ago you could go anywhere in the country and see anyone from Billy Graham to Dennis Rodman wearing one. Yes, I�m referring to the infamous �What Would Jesus Do� bracelet. I�ll admit, I owned two myself: a green one and a black one. The green one was given to me, but I bought the black one to enhance my rebel without a cause, bad-boy image [you know, �Screw you, Satan, I�m on the other team�].

Derived from the fictional book In His Steps by Charles Sheldon, the entire evangelical nation began asking itself how it would react to certain situations based upon the actions of our Lord and Savior. Now that�s interesting in itself because Jesus was the incarnation of God Almighty and he had this mission to save the world from eternal damnation that had a bit of an effect to his actions. We could debate the theological correctness of even asking WWJD but that�s a swamp that I have no interest in swimin� in. Maybe someone else can do it later.

Anyway, getting to what I really wanted to ask: how true does the American Christian community apply WWJD today?
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Attacks on language…
Without a doubt Christianity depends on revelation. A central belief of Christianity is that God has communicated to mankind. H.G. Wood said, �God would not be God if He could be fully known to us, and God would not be God if He could not be known at all.�

God has to reveal himself to us because…
(1) His transcendance demands it. Because God is transcendent (different from creatures) and thus beyond our knowledge, any knowledge we have of him must depend upon His initiative and disclosure.
(2) Our finitude and sinfulness requires it. Genesis 3:8 tells us that man in his sin tries to hide from God. Therefore revelation from God is crucial to keep the lines of communication open. It is also important to provide truth now that man has a sinful tendency to prefer falsehood (Romans 3:8).

Scripture teaches us that God reveals himself in two ways to mankind. One way is through general revelation, which by nature is limited because its ambigous and non-verbal.

The other way is through special revelation (I prefer specific revelation). Special revelation from God comes in many forms such as historical events, miracles, theophanies, the incarnation. Protestant Christianity has especially favored one type of special revelation over these others: Word revelation.
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