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…)
Sep 25, 2021 | Theology
In a previous post I mentioned that most mornings as I pray I thank God for his revelation in creation, Scripture, and Christ. I suggested a thought experiment that encourages us to see God’s invisible qualities as we encounter creation every day, his eternal power and divine nature in everything. As we see the invisible God made visible in creation, we are driven to God’s further revelation of himself in Scripture, in our Bibles. As I’ve delved deeper into Scripture over the years, I’ve come to see God’s revelation of himself in the text of his word as even more amazing than his revelation in creation, and that is saying something. I used this phrase speaking creation: “The beauty, majesty, the improbable incomprehensible preposterous complexity of it all.” I suggested it should always and often leave us dumbfounded. I’ve come to feel this way about the Bible; it continually blows my mind. You would think that after 43(!) years as a Christian who has engaged the Bible almost daily that I might be a bit tired of it, you know, the same thing over and over and over. Nope! I find, literally every day, amazement on every page. It’s almost as if this book that claims to be the word of the invisible God who created the universe is as infinite and boundless and profound as its author! It is. The deeper I go, the more I realize . . . there is no bottom! Could any other merely human writing endure such scrutiny, and criticism, and passion for thousands of years, and convince millions, even billions of people, that it is divine? (more…)
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