Jordan Peterson Leaves Atheist Sam Harris SPEECHLESS on God!!!

Jordan Peterson Leaves Atheist Sam Harris SPEECHLESS on God!!!

Oct 29, 2022 | Explanatory Power, Uncategorized

Jordan Peterson has become one of the most effective apologists for Christianity in the 21st century. This is quite something to say about a man who has yet to embrace a version of Christianity we might consider orthodox. His wife is a strong Catholic Christian, and his daughter embraced an Evangelical version of Christianity last year. I’m not sure what Peterson would say today about his faith status, but he’s far closer to the Christ of Scripture than he has ever been.

What makes him so effective is his background as a clinical psychologist and scholar. He can see deeply into the nature of things on a psychological level that I have found fascinating and instructive for my own Christian worldview. He’s so attracted to Christianity because of its explanatory power, although I’ve never heard him use this phrase. Simply put, Christianity explains the nature and structure of reality far better than any other faith or worldview, which gives it its psychological power both on an individual as well as a societal level (because societies and cultures are filled with people!). He would probably agree with the ex-atheist CS Lewis who said:

I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not because I see it but becasue by it I see everything else. 

This is wonderfully apparent as he takes down atheist Sam Harris. The lack of explanatory power of the atheistic materialist worldview could not be more apparent in these short exchanges. The juxtaposition is powerfully compelling for the plausibility and power of Christianity. Dr., Steve Turley does a terrific analysis of the interaction between the two, and it is well worth a watch/listen. As my wife tells me, Peterson is not an easy listen, but he’s worth a careful one.

 

Rock of Ages and The Double Cure for Sin

Rock of Ages and The Double Cure for Sin

Oct 28, 2022 | Theology

One reason we’ve always gone to churches where hymns are sung is because the best hymnody is theology in song, meaning the study (ology) of God (theos) set to music. Much modern praise music unfortunately is more anthropology, more about man (anthropos), than God. And for my wife and I, something about two or three hundred year-old music lends itself to the sacred. The theology, though, is what we appreciate most, and I often learn or am reminded of truths about our astonishing faith that allow me to marvel all over again at our great God and Savior.

One recent Sunday we sang the theologically rich old hymn every Christian has heard of, Rock of Ages. The author, with one of the best hymn writer names in history, Augustus Toplady (1740-1778), knew his theology. The theme of the Hymn comes from Exodus 33 where Moses asks the Lord to show him his glory, who he really is. In reply, The Lord declares his name, and adds, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” The Lord alone determines who will receive his mercy, or not. This truth is foundational to the revelation of God to his people about who he is. We can’t earn his mercy, or grace; he alone grants it as he will.

The beauty of the salvation for those to whom he grants it, his people, is that it is a complete and total salvation. Thus, in the first stanza, Toplady writes:

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
let me hide myself in thee;
let the water and the blood,
from thy wounded side which flowed,
be of sin the double cure;
save from wrath and make me pure.

This double cure saves us from God’s wrath, and at the same time makes us pure. In other words, the salvation granted to us in Christ is for sin’s guilt and power. The problem is that sin’s power over us seems, well, powerful. We fight it, but we often feel like a pummeled boxer down for the count.

The Apostle Paul can relate. He confesses in Roman 7, “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.” Who can’t relate to that! In his frustration he cries out:

 24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me out of this body of death?

The English doesn’t do justice to Paul’s emphasis in Greek because emphasis is determined by where words are placed unlike in English. He starts, “Wretched I am man.” In other words, he is emphasizing just how wretched he is. The extended meaning of that word captures well our struggle against sin: (beaten-down) from continued strain, leaving a person literally full of callouses (deep misery) – describing a person with severe side-effects from great, ongoing strain (significant hardships). If we haven’t felt that way about our sin, we haven’t really struggled against it.

I’ve heard it said, any dead fish can float downstream; it’s easy to go with the sinful flow because, well, we’re sinners! It’s really hard to fight against our natural sinful inclinations. As soon as we’re spiritually raised from the dead by the power of the Holy Spirit, however, the fight begins; but we are not in this fight alone. Paul answers his question, and affirms Toplady’s double cure:

 Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Amen!

Most Christians have no problem believing God saves us from the guilt of sin, justification, but we tend to think the pure part, sanctification, is our job. The good news is that Jesus is both! I never really got this until maybe 10 years ago. Deep down I was under the impression my relationship with God was in some way determined by what I did or did not do.

First, I seemed to believe God would like me more if I was a good little boy, and less if I wasn’t. At some point I realized that wasn’t true at all because God’s wrath was fully satisfied in Christ, the whole enchilada. On the cross, Christ paid for the penalty and guilt of my sin, all of it, past, present, and future. In Isaiah 53 we learn he was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; and “the punishment that brought us peace was on him.” So absolutely nothing we do or don’t do can make us any more acceptable to God than we are in Christ, ever.

But Christ is not only our justification, as Paul says in I Cor. 1:30, but he is also our sanctification. We’re not left to deal with the power of sin in us on our own, as if defeating it was up to our choosing, our will, our decisions. It is not!  These are obviously part of the process of our sanctification, but they do not determine it. We tend to think we just need to try harder. Then I can finally live, as it used to be called, the victorious Christian life. Technically we call that hooey.

I want you to chew on something God made apparent to me: we can’t transform ourselves. That’s God’s job. As we read in Zechariah 4:6, “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,” says the Lord Almighty. As Julia Ward Howe wrote in the Battle Hymn of the Republic, Christ “died to make us holy.” The Apostle John tells us how instead of letting sin defeat us, we trust that Christ too is our sanctification:

 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.

This is the double cure! Not only are we forgiven for the guilt, but God promises to purify us from the power of sin. That is his job not ours! It’s even gooder news than I ever thought!

Uninvented: Elijah, Elisha and the Believable Miracles of the Bible

Uninvented: Elijah, Elisha and the Believable Miracles of the Bible

Oct 23, 2022 | Uninvented

Miracles keep many from accepting the historicity of the Bible. As I argue in Uninvented, that is a an unjustified bias. In fact, the rarity of miracles and how they are portrayed lends more credibility to the text and makes the Bible more believable. That’s why if you’re dealing with an open-minded skeptic instead of arguing for miracles philosophically, it’s often best just to get them to read it. Especially the gospels because there they will encounter the most amazing miracle of all, Jesus himself!

The depictions of miracles are so powerful and compelling exactly because they are so muted, so matter of fact, so simple. This combined with the psychology of the those encountering the miraculous lends them a persuasive verisimilitude.

I was initially going to call Uninvented psychological apologetics, but nobody would have known what the heck it was about. Simply put, the people in the text encounter the divine and the miraculous as real people would who encounter what doesn’t make sense to them. Since fiction as a concept was unknown in the ancient world, making miracles appear real (like good fiction would) both in portrayal and psychologically would have been a tough trick to pull off. Not to mention that the portrayals span 1500 years and numerous authors.

Which brings me to the stories we read about these two significant prophets in I and II Kings. In Exodus 4, Moses asks the Lord what he’s to do if the Israelites (let alone Pharaoh and the Egyptians) don’t listen to him. The Lord replies that he’ll do the miraculous “so they may believe that the Lord, the God of their fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has appeared to” to him. The Lord got a lot of mileage out of those miracles. Not only did the he defeat the Egyptian army, which Moses declared repeatedly to the people in their wilderness journeys, but for those 40 years and into the promised land, he supernaturally guided and sustained them.

Once in the land, the overt displays of miracles ended. There is debate about dates (one timeline), but let’s say Joshua leads the Israelites into Canaan around 1400 BC. It isn’t until the late 800s where overt miracles are again seen in Israel with the prophets Elijah and Elisha. Why then and them?

Since the Old Testament is about Jesus, one reason is to introduce the prophetic ministry by God’s miracles through the prophets, as the Lord had done through Moses, so his people may believe. They point forward to the most prodigious miracle worker in history, Jesus of Nazareth, and confirm his prophetic ministry. It would be another 800 years before miracles again become common in Israel.

There had been judges and kings to whom the Lord spoke prior to these two prophets, but we’re not told how, and it’s not something the average Israelite would have experienced or been aware of. When Solomon died, the monarchy started a quick slide downhill to idolatry and rebellion. Someone with the authority of Yahweh needed to call the rebellious kings to account, and the Lord used prophets to do that. The miracles were evidence prophets were from Yahweh, so Elijah and Elisha introduced the prophetic ministry to God’s people. We could say three millennia before “the Sixties” these two prophets were the very first to “speak truth to power.”

Anyway you look at it, being a prophet in ancient Israel was a tough and thankless job. Suffering and death always seemed to be right around the corner because the people in power to whom they were declaring truth didn’t want to hear it. Some things never change.

We’re introduce to “Elijah the Tishbite” in I Kings 17:1, and he makes his big miracle debut in the next chapter when he single handedly takes on 450 prophets of Baal. Evil King Ahab and Queen Jezebel were not happy. I encourage anyone who isn’t familiar with these passages to read them and consider how the miracles are portrayed, and the psychology of those involved.

Elisha is introduced in chapter 19, becomes Elijah’s protégé and successor as a prophet of Israel, and works more miracles than his mentor. I only want to focus on one to make my point, and strangely enough that happened after Elisha died. We read about this bizarre event in 2 Kings 13:

20 Elisha died and was buried.

 

Now Moabite raiders used to enter the country every spring. 21 Once while some Israelites were burying a man, suddenly they saw a band of raiders; so they threw the man’s body into Elisha’s tomb. When the body touched Elisha’s bones, the man came to life and stood up on his feet.

I laugh incredulously to myself when I read this. Really? Why in the heck is this in the Bible? Why did God find it necessary to put such a story in his revelation to his people?

First, Elisha is alive and well doing his prophetic work, then abruptly we’re told he dies, but his miracle working apparently isn’t done. This is the last overt miracle of the Old Testament, and it’d say it’s an 11 on a strangeness scale out of 10. Is that what you would pick for the last miracle for 800 years? Seriously, it has to be real. Why put it in the historical record otherwise. To me it’s perfectly uninvented.

I know the skeptic is going to say, that’s dumb. Maybe they thought the guy they was dead, threw him into the tomb, and he comes back out alive (as if ancient people didn’t know the difference between alive and dead). Then over the years the story, like the ever-growing fish, turns into miraculous bones. Maybe, but why put a story in a book of history that is so on the face of it ridiculous? Even to ancient people. Especially if you want readers to believe it’s history.

If we believe Genesis 1 is true, then this story is credible, and to me the bizarreness makes it even more believable.  Especially because the writer sees no need to explain it. It just happened, let’s move on, a portrayal that lends authenticity to the narrative. This certainly fits under; you just can’t make this stuff up!

 

 

Ubiquitous Homosexuality and The Sinner

Ubiquitous Homosexuality and The Sinner

Oct 18, 2022 | Culture

What percentage of Americans self-identify as gay or lesbian? I asked some friends and family several years ago, and the answers ranged from 25 to 40%. They were surprised when I said the actual number (according to a massive CDC study) is under 2%. Just the other day I asked a young Christian friend, and she said 30%. Whatever the actual number, it’s a small fraction of the population. Why the disconnect? The simple answer is popular culture. What we know as “Hollywood” is relentless in its determination to normalize homosexuality, and I’ll make up a word, ubiquitize it.

My latest encounter with this comes from the Netflix series I recently wrote about, The Sinner. God is pretty much persona non grata, especially in any way it would help the hapless scarred and broken people in the stories. If anything, he lends to the scarring. It’s a secular show written by secular people for a secular audience, thus no positive portrayal of God, but you can be sure we’ll see positive portrayals of homosexuality! In the third episode of season 4, we see two men kiss at the end of the episode. I threw the clicker at the TV, metaphorically. The scene was completely gratuitous. There was nothing, no mention of the two guys whatsoever in the next episode. It was  blatant Hollywood homosexual normalizing. Whether intended for this purpose is irrelevant; it is what they are doing nonetheless.

Does my visceral response mean I’m “homophobic” or hate homosexuals? Moral judgment doesn’t necessarily indicate fear or hatred. In fact, there but for the grace of God . . . . I’ve now had 44(!) years of God helping me (forcing, actually) to take the log out of my own eye, so the specs in others’ eyes are less offensive or threatening to me. So, it’s not homosexuality per se that ticks me off, it’s producers and writers imposing it on every story. Entirely too many shows have an agenda, and it’s exhausting.

As a Christian I believe homosexuality is a moral evil, but in the Apostle Paul’s words it is also unnatural, different from heterosexual sin (Rom. 1):

26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

The word Paul uses in Greek for unnatural is exactly that, what is not according to nature. Back when the Supreme Court was redefining marriage, I had a friend who was convinced the Bible didn’t condemn homosexuality, and no amount of quoting verses would convince him otherwise, so I used a different tack. I asked him if he’d ever heard of the word telos, a word Aristotle uses for the purpose or end of a thing. He said no. After I explained it, I asked him, isn’t it apparent that the particular body part male homosexuals use was designed for the specific purpose of disposing waste from the human body, and not sexual pleasure? He gave me a puzzled look and said, “I never thought of that.” Of course you haven’t.

The Bible couldn’t convince him, but Aristotle did!

God through Scripture doesn’t identify sin whimsically, or arbitrarily, as if the only reason something is wrong is because God says it is. That is true, but it’s also the way he created the structure of reality to work, the way it’s supposed to work, as is the moral order a reflection of his being. Thus homosexuality is a perversion against God’s creation. But from 21st century entertainment we would think it’s not a perversion at all, but every bit as natural and normal as sex between a man and a woman. It is obvious it’s not, and everyone knows it.

We have to be programmed to think perversion is normal, vice a virtue, and that’s been Hollywood’s plan for a long time, at least since the TV show Friends, which started airing in 1994. A culture’s entertainment is a powerful tool to shape a people’s worldview.

When I was writing my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I used homosexuality (along with smoking) to show how the secular culture transforms our plausibility structures about things, or what we see as real and normal and just the way things are. The plausibility structures we get through the culture determine for us what seems normal to us, just the way things are, and more importantly, how they’re supposed to be. When we watch The Sinner, the message we’re supposed to absorb is that homosexuality is normal, good, and common, and Hollywood has been hugely successful in that endeavor. Just ask your friends the question that began this post.

Illustrative of how effective the propaganda is can be seen in Barack Obama. When he ran for president in 2008, he had to lie, claiming he was against same-sex marriage. His left-wing base knew he didn’t believe that, but he had to say it because the American people weren’t ready for the homosexual is normal, good, and common message. Another indication they weren’t ready happened the same year. Voters in the reliably Democrat state of California passed Proposition 8 which defined marriage in the California constitution as between a man and a woman. Yet, by 2015 the American people had been so successfully indoctrinated by Hollywood, among other cultural messaging, that a Supreme Court case giving same-sex couples the “right” to marry was made the law of the land.

Many conservatives and Christians Chicken Littles at the time wailed that the sky was falling, but marriage had been eviscerated decades before with the passing of no-fault divorce laws and the “sexual revolution.” And because homosexuals are in fact a tiny percentage of the population, and very few want to be married, especially men, it’s completely irrelevant to almost all Americans. Unless, of course, you watch TV. Then it’s everywhere.

 NOTE: Picture is from The Sinner

Uninvented: Why Miracles in the Bible Read Real

Uninvented: Why Miracles in the Bible Read Real

Oct 16, 2022 | Uninvented

When I wrote about miracles in Uninvented, I pointed out how rare they are in redemptive history, which might surprise those who have never read the Bible. The basic secular consensus is that the Bible is all myths and fairy tales, so secular people tend to think the Bible is full of miracle stories. Only, it’s not. It starts with the greatest miracle of all, God creating all things out of nothing, creation ex nihilo, by speaking all of it into existence. If you buy that, the rest of the miracles in the Bible are instantly plausible, and easily believable.

The first miracles we encounter surround Moses, the Exodus, and Israel entering the promised land in approximately 1400 BC. Then, after 500 or so years, the prophets Elijah and Elisha perform miracles, and it would be another 800 years until the miracles of Jesus and the Apostles. The Lord spoke to his people, kings and prophets, but we’re not told how that happened. Outright miracles are rare.

Nevertheless, most people being immersed in secularism from birth don’t see miracles, however rare, as the least bit plausible or believable. In time, they develop what I call a question begging anti-supernatural bias. Simply put, they assume materialism or naturalism (matter is all there is, or the “natural” world runs on its own), and thus miracles can’t happen. So, when they read the miracles in the Bible, they conclude they must have been made up, invented by the authors. Since 95% of people believe God exists, it isn’t difficult to get them to believe the miracles in the Bible can be or are real. At the least, they won’t dismiss them out of hand because the existence of God makes them possible.

The most important thing we can encourage a non-Christian to do is read the Bible while being aware of the inherent, and unquestioned, anti-supernatural bias that secularism has programed into their minds. That should be rather simple. If they believe in God, in whatever way they might conceive him, the possibility of miracles naturally flow from that. If they don’t, just having them posit God as a possibility is all they need. Then, they will be more open to see the verisimilitude in the text, the realness in the stories. At the least, they will have to conclude what they’re reading is not myths and fairy tales, and not even close.

As I’ve written here before, I started listening to Christian testimonies some years ago. Something I consistently heard was how simply reading the Bible completely changed their inaccurate conception of Christianity. I believe the Bible is literally the word of God because that’s what it claims to be (chapters 2 and 3 in the book are what make this plausible, the Christian concepts of revelation and inspiration), so what the Lord declares through the prophet Isaiah (55) is true:

10 As the rain and the snow
come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,
11 so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

God’s word, and The Word, are the only things that can open a sinful human being’s heart and mind to saving trust in Christ. In philosophical terms, God is the primary cause, but as we see throughout Scripture, God uses sinful human beings to accomplish his purposes, or secondary causes, and that would be us! So, it is important to educate non-Christians on what the Bible claims for itself, which is divine revelation from God, and true history.

We should encourage our friends to start reading the stories of the One whom the entire Bible is about, Jesus of Nazareth. The gospels are incredibly powerful stories and have brought innumerable people to Christ over the last 2,000 years, including me. As a freshman in college, I was invited to a Bible study about “what the Bible says about who Jesus is.” That’s how I remember it being put to me, and it was the perfect question because that was something I wanted to know. The gospel we studied was John, a very good choice for any non-Christian to read, but any gospel will do, and Acts as well. I heard a testimony of an ex-atheist recently, and he said as he was reading Acts, he thought there is no way that it could be made up. Bingo!

One thing our non-Christian friends might not expect is how miracles are portrayed. They are never hyped or embellished, but are a simple part of the narrative, something you would expect from eyewitness testimony. Also, encourage them to notice the psychology of the people who encounter Jesus and his miracles. Everything he does is unexpected, which is why I argue he would be impossible to invent. In the book I call him the conundrum that is Jesus.

The Jesus in the gospels is a Messiah that would have been impossible for Jews to have made up because he was so unexpected. This includes not only his miracles but his teaching and personality. Jews never expected a miracle working Messiah, although the miracles confirmed he came from God. I love the way the gospels portray everyone who encounters Jesus. He just confuses the heck out of them.

The most impossible miracle for his disciples to have “made up” is the most important, the resurrection. There are many reasons for this I explore in Uninvented, but the impossibility of invention is from both sides of the ancient civilizational divide. Pagans wouldn’t make up a resurrection because their goal was to escape material reality. Jews wouldn’t either because resurrection was only something that happened at the end of time. You can see this in the interaction Martha has with Jesus when her brother Lazarus was still in the tomb (John 11). There are also significant psychological reason they would never have made it up, the most obvious was that Jesus was hung on a tree, and that meant he was under the curse of God. The Messiah? Impossible!