Jan 27, 2015 | Uncategorized
The last month or so I’ve been seeing pictures online of what is obviously a man dressed up like a women promoting a TV show called Transparent. Apparently it won some Golden Globe nominations last month. I had an inkling why. Doesn’t it figure that in 21st Century America the first streaming series from Amazon is about a transgendered person. This is obviously the next great wave of cultural transformation brought to us by our secular progressive cultural elites. Obviously we need to become more tolerant and accepting of minorities and those different from us. Notice what this show is about:
“Transparent,” the latest gift from the streaming Gods, is being released in its entirety Friday, the better for binge watching one half-hour episode after another.
The Amazon series, created by “Six Feet Under” and “The United States of Tara” alum Jill Soloway, revolves around an L.A. family that would give Fox News anchors a cow if they stumbled across it: The father (Jeffrey Tambor) has been secretly dressing as a woman for years, and eldest daughter Sarah (Amy Landecker), a stay at home mom with kids, begins screwing around with her lesbian lover from college soon after they meet again. Then there’s music producer Josh (Jay Duplass), who has had a secret affair with the family’s baby sitter, and is carrying on with a young musician client Kaya (Alison Sudol).
Youngest Ali (“Girls” co-star Gaby Hoffmann) has no job and questionable judgment.
The Pfefferman family, is other words, is gloriously unconventional. Even better, it is not studiously so. Family members can’t help but follow their hearts wherever they lead them; they are not trying to create waves.
How quaint. This is quintessential post-modern America, post-Christian in every way. The ethical imperative, what is truly virtuous in our day is to “follow our hearts” because there is nothing more important than self-fulfillment, of being “authentic” to our true selves. This is of course absurd because the writer would never say the rapist or racists or sexist or thief or murderer or bully or any person with any number of such vicious actions or attitudes should “follow their hearts.”
The last thing a fallen sinful human being should do is “follow their heart.” As we’re told in Jeremiah 17:9: “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” Yet American culture is awash in such blather about being true to ourselves. The secularist cannot have it both ways. They claim some kind of objective morality doesn’t actually exist, but themselves impose a moral standard because some moral must be imposed one way or the other; the question is whose or what moral standard.
It will great when some day sophisticated and talented Christians are making TV shows that deal with reality as reality really is. Until then we have to put up with characters like our transgendered hero that “follow their heart” and then be told this is the pinnacle of virtue.
Jan 24, 2015 | Uncategorized
Whenever we come upon these matters in secular writers, let that admirable light of truth shining in them teach us that the mind of man, though fallen and perverted from its wholeness, is nevertheless clothed and ornamented with God’s excellent gifts. If we regard the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of truth, we shall neither reject the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to dishonor the Spirit of God.
–John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (p. 273)
Jan 23, 2015 | Uncategorized
A critical part of Christians effectively engaging the culture is something called apologetics, which simply means defending the veracity of the gospel and Christian worldview. The term comes from I Peter 3:15:
But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.
The Greek word for “to give an answer,” or sometimes translated as a defense is ἀπολογίαν, apologia. Thus the term apologetics. We cannot be effective witnesses for Christ in the culture unless we know what we believe, i.e. theology and doctrine, and why we believe what we believe, and are able to effectively, and winsomely, defend it.
One of the reasons Christians can have confidence in what they believe is that we can be reasonably certain that what we read in our New Testaments is what was actually written by who it was written by. Even when they disagree with the who part, non-believing scholars agree that the text of the New Testament we have comes to us pretty much accurately from the first century. We know this because of a science called textual criticism, which simply means how we handle ancient texts to get as close as possible to the original manuscripts, in our case what was actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, et al.
As new discoveries have been made over the last century the case for the validity of the New Testament text has only grown stronger. Now we have an exciting new discovery that has given us the oldest copy of a gospel text known to exist. This fragment from the gospel of Mark, the earliest written of the four, has been dated to before 90 AD. The implications for our faith are too deep to go into in a blog post, but they are multifaceted and encouraging. You can find out more at this book review of Craig Blomberg’s The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, and if you’re so inclined read the book. It’s on my Wish List.
Jan 22, 2015 | Uncategorized
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a lifelong New Deal liberal and accomplished social scientist, warned that “the issue of welfare is not what it costs those who provide it but what it costs those who receive it.” As a growing portion of the population succumbs to the entitlement state’s ever-expanding menu of temptations, the costs, Eberstadt concludes, include a transformation of the nation’s “political culture, sensibilities, and tradition,” the weakening of America’s distinctive “conceptions of self-reliance, personal responsibility, and self-advancement,” and perhaps a “rending of the national fabric.” As a result, “America today does not look exceptional at all.”
George Will: “The harm incurred by a mushrooming welfare state”
Jan 21, 2015 | Uncategorized
If you are at all familiar with the so called “new atheists” that are not really new, this phrase will sound familiar. To anyone with up to five senses the universe is an amazing, awe inspiring place; so much so that it almost appears as if someone purposefully designed it this way. I say almost because design in nature is something the atheist cannot allow, but since the evidence for design is so overwhelming they will admit that it
appears as if it is designed. They know better of course because evolution is a “fact,” and natural selection and random mutation are unguided processes that somehow for no reason at all “make” things that
appear designed. A title of a book I read recently tells well my response such thinking:
I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist.
For 90 plus percent of the people on earth, what appears to be designed actually is. All the artifacts of human civilization made by human beings also appear to be designed because they actually are designed. From the simplest to the most complex, we all know the inference from design to a designer is just plain old common sense. But when it comes to nature the atheist thinks such an inference is invalid. What this tells us is that the atheist has an a priori commitment to naturalism: there is no God, an unprovable assumption btw, ergo any appearance of design is an illusion.
I thought of all this when I saw an article last week with the title, “The Beautiful Math Inside All Living Things.” This short piece, with no mention of God, shows us the amazing precision of life mathematically considered. It is mind blowing. The rational response should be doxology. How such exquisite beauty would not create a crisis of doubt in the atheist’s faith commitment to naturalism leaves me dumbfounded, but alas we know why this is. We call it the fall. But for those who know better, the fundamental fact of existence is found in the very first words of the Bible: “In the beginning God created . . . “
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