Oct 28, 2020 | Epistemology - Trust, Theology
As I’ve been writing my way through the Bible, I’ve recently been engaging with Paul’s letters, and his focus on knowledge in the life of the Christian has stood out to me. Since the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s, for much of Christianity knowledge has taken a back seat to feelings, emotions, and the human will. In typically American fashion, the focus of much Christian teaching has been on the Christian’s personal choice, both in terms of salvation, and growth in the Christian life. Too many Christians are taught, or pick up from teaching, that what we do or don’t do, can or can’t do, should or shouldn’t do, is what drives the Christian life, instead of what God has done for us in Christ. Big, huge, amazing difference! The former is self-focused, the latter God-focused, and that makes all the difference. Here are some verses that tell us what the Apostle Paul thinks of knowledge, which is fundamentally outside of us: (more…)
Oct 18, 2020 | Culture
I’m not sure the title of a book can better capture our age than Philip Reiff’s 1966 classic The Triumph of the Therapeutic, especially in the tumultuous 2020. The book is Reiff’s take on Sigmund Freud, who he thought a genius, and the response of other psychoanalysts to him, like Carl Jung. It’s a dense book, full of academic-speak, but Reiff seems to lament that human well-being had become the sin qua none of American culture, and that was in 1966! And this turn to self, he predicted, would not bode well for our future. The word Therapeutic technically means of or relating to the treating or curing of disease; curative, but in a cultural sense it means that the most important thing in life is the self, and making one feel happier, more self-fulfilled. The triumph of the therapeutic is seen in the religion of most Americans. Sociologist Christian Smith coined the term for this religion, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD). He describes it in his book Souls in Transition: (more…)
Oct 14, 2020 | Culture
Eddie Van Halen was my sworn enemy when I was a teenager aspiring to be a guitar god. I’m a bit competitive by nature. I’ll never forget a trip I took to the local Guitar Center on Hacienda Boulevard (SoCal) when I was 16 or 17. For some reason driving there I was thinking of Van Halen, and I must haven’t know the band was starting to make it big. I determined then and there that I would beat him and become the greatest guitar player of all time! Delusions of grandeur were one of my favorite pastimes. Needless to say I never made it to guitar god stardom, thankfully. God had different plans, but being a guitarist I couldn’t help being awed by the greatness of Eddie Van Halen. Alas, as you probably know, he recently went the way of all flesh, and reminds us, as if we needed reminding, Momento Mori, we too must die. (more…)
Oct 10, 2020 | Explanatory Power
I don’t know about you, but I find this whole spiritual, Christian, life after death, life is more than matter thing very hard to believe at times. Scripture tells us we live by faith, and not by sight, but I find it so much easier to live by sight and not by faith! This is of course really dumb, because there are all kinds of things I can’t see, or understand, or comprehend, but which I live by all the time. I can’t “see” gravity or wind or logic or love or quarks or smells or my thoughts or any number of other things, but that makes them no less real. In fact, the more we learn about the so called “natural” world, the more inconceivable and incomprehensible it becomes, but we still “believe” in it. It’s impossible to read a book like Michael Denton’s Nature’s Destiny, like I’m currently doing, and find atheism/materialism the least bit plausible. In fact, it is absurd! That everything came from nothing for no reason at all, and that by chance, is truly unbelievable! With all that said, spiritual reality is still hard for me to believe. (more…)
Oct 3, 2020 | Explanatory Power
Given I spend my days in front of two computers, one for work, and one for me, I’ve started listening to Christian conversion testimonies on Youtube when I have busy work to do. For reasons related to my Christian fundamentalist past, I’ve tended to downplay the importance of conversion testimonies. In the early years of my Christian life, experience seemed to take precedence over the objective testimony of God in Scripture. The focus, I felt, was too much on our subjective experience of God to validate the truth claims of Christianity, rather than his revealed truth in Scripture. I now believe that’s wrong, and a false trade-off. God’s truth revealed in the Bible is validated by people’s experience, and of course it would be if the Bible is true! And oh how true it is! Many of the testimonies I’ve heard bring me to tears because of how real God makes himself to all kinds of people in all kinds of ways, to as the Apostle John says, every tribe and peoples and language. If Christianity is true, this is exactly what we would expect, God having a real impact on real people in ways that defy predictable explanations. (more…)
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