Oct 21, 2021 | Explanatory Power
It’s amazing to me how many Christians in the 21st century live in a state of insecurity about their faith and the nature of reality. I’m not myself immune to the secular temptation that wafts unseen through the secular culture pushing material reality as the only reality. Mind you, I and very few other people believe that the universe and everything in it is somehow a product of mere matter and chance. Just ask anyone you come across if they believe that there is no God, and that the universe is a product of mere matter and chance, and 95 plus percent will say, no way! Yet most of them live as if God is absolutely irrelevant to their lives, practical atheists if you will. Yet we, if we’re honest, are tempted to live the same way. I know I am, which I why one of the verses most on my mind and lips and prayers is Paul’s declaration in Romans 1:20, that “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” Meditate on that, clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . . . We just need to open our eyes! And we will know, God is. (more…)
Oct 17, 2021 | Apologetics
Given I’m not a “somebody” with a big “platform,” getting book reviews is not easy. I
finally did get one, and it was at a site that was instrumental in my journey back into apologetics, Apologetics315. It was worth the wait. The author’s final words are most gratifying: I love this book!
I think you will too. So if you’d like to see why she thought so, get yourself a copy of The Persuasive Christian Parent and you can find out for yourself. Let me know what you think.
Oct 15, 2021 | Theology
God has revealed himself to us in creation, Scripture, and Christ. My first thought experiment post was on creation, and my second on Scripture. Now we come to the ultimate thought experiment, Jesus Christ, the Jesus who was from Nazareth who claimed to be Israel’s long awaited (400 years!) Messiah, and the Savior of the world. Here is our thought experiment: try to make sense of reality without Jesus. One time atheist C.S. Lewis tried and realized the futility of such an exercise. He came to this conclusion:
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.
That’s what Jesus does, he makes sense of everything, all the puzzle pieces that puzzle us can now fit into the biggest of big pictures. Without him, all you have is the pieces, and they will never fit together because there is no universal (big picture) into which the particulars (the puzzle pieces) fit. Speaking of Russia in 1939, Winston Churchill’s description fits life without Christ perfectly: It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. (more…)
Oct 11, 2021 | Culture
And it started out with some promise, which is why we ended up watching all seven episodes, but it went downhill from there. We (the wife and I) wanted to see where the writers and director took it, and we did. It was easily predictable, but I was hoping against hope that people who obviously have no clue about Christianity might get Christianity, but alas they didn’t. If you’re not familiar with it, Midnight Mass is a new Netflix series about a very strange little island with only one lone old Catholic church that eventually dominants everything on the Island, and in very unexpected ways. If you want to watch it and be surprised, I’d suggest you come back to this later because I can’t talk about it without revealing spoilers, including the next sentence. (more…)
Oct 3, 2021 | Culture, Plausibility
You might be familiar with the Netflix series, The Last Kingdom, and if so you might think it a very strange thing that it would have anything to do with my mind being programmed by modern medicine. I realized, looking back, how easily I, and by extension all of us, can be programmed to believe certain things. That programming is the result of the power of culture to shape and mold our perspectives on reality. The sociological term for that is plausibility structures, or the frame of reference in our mind that makes certain things seem real, and other things seem not real, plausible or not. (more…)
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