Every year our family watches A Charlie Brown Christmas. The show premiered on December 9, 1965, and the most powerful scene almost didn’t make it on air. The CBS honchos were afraid a biblical declaration of the gospel coming from Linus would offend too many people. Needless to say, in 2018 the scene wouldn’t have a chance. Thankfully, every year, or any time we want via this amazing thing called the Internet, we can enjoy it’s profundity again and again:
Charlie Brown: Isn’t there anyone, who knows what Christmas is all about?!
Linus: Sure Charlie Brown, I can tell you what Christmas is all about. Lights please?
8Now there were in the same country shepherds living out in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.9And behold, an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were greatly afraid.10Then the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people.11 “For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.12“And this will be the sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a manger.”13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying:
14“Glory to God in the highest,
And on earth peace, good will toward men!”
Until recently, I had never thought of revelation as a gift. God’s revealing himself and the truth about the nature of reality just was what it was, revelation. I can’t remember now where I’d read this phrase, but it struck me as profound. Humanity without revelation, without something beyond human experience and knowledge, is in every sense benighted. That is, we are “in a state of pitiful or contemptible intellectual or moral ignorance.” In other words, we don’t have a clue! Most Christians, unfortunately, don’t act as if God’s revelation to us is a gift. Our tendency, all of us, is to take it for granted. (more…)
If you’ve ever heard, read, or interacted with an atheist you’ll be familiar with one of their most absurd tropes: there is no evidence for the veracity of Christianity. Thus they define “faith” as a religious term that means believing without evidence, or in spite of the lack thereof. But faith, as I argue in the book, is more accurately defined as trust based on adequate evidence. As such it is not a religious term at all. We use the same faculties of assessment, for instance, to believe in the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, as we do when we fly in an airplane. There is enough evidence for both, so we can trust the former for our salvation, and the latter our safety. Can we have absolute certainty as Descartes? No. Absolute certainty doesn’t exist in anything, but beyond a reasonable doubt does. Being finite creatures our knowledge is always limited, and so some level of trust, or faith, is required in everything we do.
The history of philosophy is a fascinating study, and one Christians need to be familiar with. Most Christians, however, think that philosophy is for “intellectuals,” and not something they would be interested in or could understand. Yes, much philosophy is esoteric and difficult to understand, but the basic ideas really are’t. This is important because history reveals what ideas have given us the world we inhabit, and it’s culture, in the 21st century. In other words, in the title of an influential book by Richard Weaver written in 1948, Ideas Have Consequences. To take the title one step further, and as I’ve heard numerous times from the folks at Breakpoint and the Colson Center, “Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims.” Many of the consequences of the ideas bequeathed to us from Western thinkers have been good, but the bad ones have been really, really bad. In fact, we live with the consequences of both every day. The bloody 20th century, with north of 100 million people killed, was a result of very bad ideas. (more…)
If you have ever had any kind of interaction with an atheist/materialist/skeptic, etc., one of the things they hang their hat on is that evolution is a “fact.” Darwin was a genius, and only a benighted, troglodyte, imbecile would argue with the scientific “consensus.” Funny thing about the “consensus,” though, is that the “science” upon which is hangs is in a shambles. The only place where neo-Darwinian evolution is a “fact” is in the minds of the secular cultural elites who are committed a priori to a worldview that claims the material is all that exists. For Christians, and their children, the most fundamental “fact” of existence is that God is the creator of all that exists. It is affirmed all throughout the Bible from the very fist verse of Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The reason secularists are so passionately committed to neo-Darwinian evolution is because they believe it’s the most effective way to rid the world of the necessity of a creator.
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