Jan 23, 2021 | Truth
1984 ain’t got nothin’ on 2020! And now, apparently, 2021. While this is a blog committed to Christian apologetics, the defense of the truth claims of Christianity, it is also committed to the defense of Truth. Since we live in deeply secular, postmodern times, Truth as objective facts regarding the nature of things has become a casualty of the times. As a Christian parent who has sought to persuade my children that Christianity is true, I’ve also sought to persuade them that the truths of Christianity apply to all of life, including politics, culture, economics, everything. So I’ve brought them up in a proudly American home, and taught them that America is a providentially exceptional nation that has brought more liberty and prosperity to more people than any nation in the history of the world. While flawed, because all systems filled with fallen human beings are flawed, America is something worth standing for, and fighting for. As Benjamin Franklin was supposed to have said coming out of the constitutional convention, we have a republic, if we can keep it. (more…)
Jan 17, 2021 | Apologetics
I made one of the big mistakes of my life back when I was a young Christian some four decades ago. I asked God to give me patience . . . . and I’ve been waiting ever since! Writing a book, and finally getting a version up I’m not embarrassed by, has been a long, long wait, especially when I was thinking that I’d be doing what I’m doing right now three and a half years ago. As I’ve learned over the years, God’s timing is never our timing. Just read the Bible and that will become readily apparent not too many pages in. I’m pretty stubborn, though (ask my family), and I was determined that sooner or later I would get the book published, and it was definitely later. As the title indicates, the third publishing option finally worked: Me!
A funny thing happened after all this time on the way to publishing fame, I no longer really cared. I just kept trying to knock down walls as they appeared in front of me, and after a bloody nose or two, I would find a way through, over, or around, and made progress. It also seems in spite of myself, and by God’s grace, through the process I found I’ve actually matured a bit in my Christian life. I’m still fundamentally rotten (increasingly) old sinful me, but I find it’s much easier after four-plus decades to “let go and let God.” I do hate that phrase, but it does capture something of the trust I have in him that comes easier than when I was a younger man and lived as if I was the master of my fate, and the captain of my soul. When I was young and naive and full of myself (I’m only half full now), I believed I could change the world. It didn’t take all that long for God to disabuse me of that notion, and it was rarely a pleasant experience. But God crushes those whom he loves so that they will put their hope and trust in him alone.
I have found over time that I can be a pretty persuasive fellow to those who are persuadable, and it seems I’m not too bad at it. You’d have to ask my children who have been the object of my persistent persuasion (often annoyingly so) over the years, but I think they would agree. So writing this book, and finally getting it published, has been a wonderful experience, even if it took way longer than I thought it would. If others are blessed by it, and the confidence in the faith of my brothers and sisters in Christ, parents or not, grows because of it, all the better. Now on to the next part of the journey, which is trying to promote it. I don’t know if anyone will be interested, but you don’t know until you ask. Actually, somebody already was, and I got my first interview. I’ll put that in another post soon, but there is nothing I love doing more than talking about Jesus!
Jan 1, 2021 | Explanatory Power
I’m such a Debbie Downer! I can’t help it. After I became a Christian when I was 18, I haven’t been able to attend or see a New Year’s celebration with out being struck by how ridiculous it all is. Do not these people, I always think, realize that they are celebrating being one year closer to their death? Is that not the ultimate buzz kill? Of course it is! So, let’s just stuff the thought down whenever it might bubble up a bit, and PARTY! Yet we cannot escape the uncomfortable fact of our mortality, no matter how hard we try, and people try very hard. What a bummer this death thing is—puts such a crimp in our plans. In our health obsessed, airbrushed culture, thinking about death too much is an indication of some kind of psychosis, and talking about it too much is impolite, not to mention awkward. Blaise Pascal understood this modern condition some 350 years ago:
In spite of all these miseries man wants to be happy, and only to be happy, and cannot help wanting to be happy. But how can he go about this? It would be best if he could make himself immortal, but since he cannot do this, he has decided to stop thinking about it. Being unable to cure death, misery, and ignorance, men have decided that in order to be happy, they must repress thinking about such things.
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Dec 25, 2020 | Theology
Since this is Christmas, and we’re focused on the miraculous birth of a baby over 2,000 years ago, a baby who would be the Savior of the world, I thought it an opportunity to broaden our focus on the one who made that birth possible. That would of course be the living God, all powerful, all knowing, all present. In all of biblical history there was no conception and birth like that of the young peasant girl Mary. Going back to Abraham and Sarah, there were several times when barren women beyond child-bearing years got pregnant, including Mary’s cousin Elizabeth, but they all got pregnant the old fashioned way. God being God, he was able to impregnate the virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit, as we read about in Matthew and Luke. The old fashioned way, though, is every bit as miraculous, but we’re so conditioned by secular Western culture that we think women getting pregnant is somehow “natural.” There is nothing natural about it! (more…)
Dec 23, 2020 | Notable Quotations
These medieval attitudes contrast sharply with our own. We have fewer plagues but more wars and of a far bloodier nature. Our approach is to hide death. It is another of our new secrets. There is absolutely no general conviction that death is something to be faced. Instead we place our quest for eternity on the material level. Life is devoted to working, preparing, saving, driving ourselves towards something undefined. The process of our movement through the system gives us the sense of being somehow here forever.
Since our age is technological, most people add to their material obsession a devotion to defeating disease. In the background lurks the idea of immortality. If five years can be added to a life, why not ten? And if ten, why not . . . ? The culture surrounding old age has been changed to the point where its vocabulary is filled with the promise of a new youth. Phrases such as “the golden age” have emerged to obscure the realities of physical decline. Charles de Gaulle, as always out of step with the conventions of his time, said old age was a shipwreck. Of course, the individual must attempt both to survive and to make use of survival. It is the obscuring of the inevitable process which is so new and so peculiar. Not only, it seems, should we not prepare our minds for termination, we should, as the moment approaches, create a whole new set of illusions in order to avoid the relevant thoughts.
—John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards, p. 350
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