Oct 24, 2015 | Culture
Colson’s public-square work offers modern evangelicals a workable model. Initially, Colson considered himself contra mundum, “against the world,” as a believer. He wished to stand against evil. He never lost this vital perspective, but his friend, First Things editor Richard John Neuhaus, suggested Colson tweak the self-descriptor. The Christian, he said, is contra mundum pro mundo, “against the world for the world,” an elegant and accurate summation of evangelical engagement with a fallen order. The believer, and particularly the public-square witness, opposes evil, but does so not to defeat opponents or gobble up cultural territory. We are against the world out of love, seeking always to win lost friends to Christ and usher them into flourishing.
–Owen Strachan. “Chuck Colson Was Not a Culture Warrior: And anyway, he stopped “winning” his battles a long time ago.”
Oct 15, 2015 | Explanatory Power
[T]he disciples of scientism had a material explanation for the universe that they thought was rock solid. Now that explanation has collapsed, and we have the discovery of fine tuning pointing toward intelligent design strongly enough that it has convinced several Nobel laureates in physics. This is just one of the spectacular counterexamples to scientism’s grand progress narrative. The evidence for intelligent design is growing, not shrinking. Believers need not shrink back from the academy, from the sciences, or from the public square. We’re on the side of history and evidence — not to mention the Alpha and the Omega.
–Jonathan Witt, “The Scientific Evidence for God is Growing, Not Shrinking: The atheism that masquerades as science misrepresents the history of science.”
Oct 9, 2015 | Theology
Most Christians know very little in the way of doctrine or theology or church history. For many these seem at best unnecessary, for others they are downright dangerous. I am familiar with such thoughts because I was born-again into the Christian faith among such Christians and such teaching. What really counted, what only counted, was my relationship with Jesus mediated through the Bible. Just me and God’s word supposedly illuminated by the Holy Spirit, and I was good to go. After several years I just could not be held in such a myopic box, and I was exposed to a Christianity that was rooted in history, and thus doctrine and theology took on a whole new meaning.
The term Christology means literally the study of Christ, just like any “ology” means the study of. Theology is the study of God, for example. If you want to know why Christology is so important, this piece by Timothy George at First Things is an excellent historical primer on the the role questions about the nature of Jesus played in early church history. Today we may take it for granted that there is a Trinity, and that Jesus is fully God and fully man, the second person of the Triune God, but in the early church this was no slam dunk. And these issues about the nature of Christ have profound implications for soteriology, or the nature of our salvation, but that is a topic for another blog post.
Every Christian should be familiar with Marcion and Arius because because it was their questions and assertions about the nature of Christ that the Church fathers had to wrestle with. In fact, heresy always forces the Church to grapple with fundamental issues about the nature and content of the Christian faith. We’re going through that today with questions about the nature of marriage. So I don’t think you could get a better, more concise overview of this critical period in Church history that led to a council in Nicea that gave us the creed by the same name we recite in church to this day.
Oct 1, 2015 | Explanatory Power
The Planned Parenthood videos (see a “Quick and Easy Guide” to them at the Federalist) have put the pro-abortion movement on the defensive unlike at any time in the sordid history of legal abortion in America. Of course many abortion defenders have just attacked the messenger, as if Planned Parenthood was not in fact selling baby body parts for a profit. All justified in the name of Science, don’t you know. But one of the most telling and sad responses is by a Lindy West who started something called #ShoutYourAbortion. What stood out to me in an article she penned for The Guardian announcing it was this intro:
Last week I realised that, even among my pro-choice friends, I never, ever talk about my abortion. We need to chip away at stigma, at lies, at the climate of shame.
So we are to believe that any shame a woman feels for killing her child is simply a stigma imposed from a society that doesn’t understand or accept her decision? And what lies? That having an abortion is killing a human being? That is simply an indisputable fact of science. At conception what comes to exist inside the mother is a unique individual completely distinct from the mother and the father with it’s own distinct genetic code. So it is indeed a human being. But according to the Supreme Court these last forty plus years, not a person and thus it’s life can be snuffed out for any and every reason up to birth. That is the law of the land.
Unfortunately for Ms. West, and fortunately for the human race, shame isn’t a matter of climate; you can’t just turn the thermostat down on shame. Nope, the human condition is filled with shame, and thank God for it. The first thing Adam and Eve did after their fall was to hide; they were afraid because they were naked. They had done something wrong by eating what God had told them not to eat, they had disobeyed and were now afraid. Judgment is like that. It doesn’t feel good to know we’ve done wrong and admit it. We prefer to hide. The hiding isn’t necessarily good, but feeling the shame for having done wrong certainly is. We admit there is such a thing as wrong, that God’s law exists, that we live in a moral universe where right and wrong are objectively real, as I argued recently in a post on natural law.
What could be more shameful, more worthy of shame, than a woman purposefully ending a life that grows within her. Here is the bottom line: If there is no God, there are then no objective moral values, no right and wrong that exist outside of our own personal preferences, and thus absolutely nothing inherently wrong with killing unborn babies. If there is a God, then the shame a woman feels for killing her unborn child is sadly deserved, and we don’t do her or anyone else a favor by pretending otherwise.
Sep 27, 2015 | Apologetics
Some time ago listening to an apologetics talk I heard something that was so obvious I wondered why I had never thought of it just that way before. I probably had to some degree, but it never made as much sense in the context of evidence for God’s existence. The statement went something like this: you can no more break God’s moral laws than you can break his physical laws. If you tried to break the law of gravity by jumping out of a building with thoughts of flying, you would shortly surely splatter on the ground. God’s moral laws are just as unforgiving if not just as immediate. Take sex as a ubiquitous example in our culture. If you do it God’s way, man, woman, lifelong commitment in marriage, it is a very good thing, and there is no downside. If pleasure and romance and self-fulfillment are your gods, then misery awaits, whether that is a sexually transmitted disease, or broken hearts, or jealousy, lying, violence, or children growing up without a mother and a father, or killing the “product of conception.” (more…)
Colson’s public-square work offers modern evangelicals a workable model. Initially, Colson considered himself contra mundum, “against the world,” as a believer. He wished to stand against evil. He never lost this vital perspective, but his friend, First Things editor Richard John Neuhaus, suggested Colson tweak the self-descriptor. The Christian, he said, is contra mundum pro mundo, “against the world for the world,” an elegant and accurate summation of evangelical engagement with a fallen order. The believer, and particularly the public-square witness, opposes evil, but does so not to defeat opponents or gobble up cultural territory. We are against the world out of love, seeking always to win lost friends to Christ and usher them into flourishing.
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