Some time ago listening to an apologetics talk I heard something that was so obvious I wondered why I had never thought of it just that way before. I probably had to some degree, but it never made as much sense in the context of evidence for God’s existence. The statement went something like this: you can no more break God’s moral laws than you can break his physical laws. If you tried to break the law of gravity by jumping out of a building with thoughts of flying, you would shortly surely splatter on the ground. God’s moral laws are just as unforgiving if not just as immediate. Take sex as a ubiquitous example in our culture. If you do it God’s way, man, woman, lifelong commitment in marriage, it is a very good thing, and there is no downside. If pleasure and romance and self-fulfillment are your gods, then misery awaits, whether that is a sexually transmitted disease, or broken hearts, or jealousy, lying, violence, or children growing up without a mother and a father, or killing the “product of conception.” (more…)
I learned about this movie called “Risen” coming out next spring, obviously around Easter. It looks very promising, with a big name lead, Joseph Fiennes, and obviously excellent production values. From the piece at Empire:
Kevin Reynolds’ film, which he co-wrote with Paul Aiello, follows Roman military tribune Clavius (Fiennes), a firm believer in his empire’s power and someone tasked with removing resistance. But when it appears that Jesus of Nazareth has – in accordance with his followers’ beliefs – risen from the dead after his crucifixion, Pontius Pilate (Firth) assigns Clavius and his aide Lucius (Felton) the task of figuring out the mystery, to avoid an uprising in Jerusalem.
Those familiar with apologetics will instantly recognize what most people ignore: The crucified and buried body of Jesus of Nazareth disappeared. His followers claimed he was risen from the dead, claimed to have seen him, which is obviously impossible. Many of them paid with their life for this claim. The premise of the movie is no doubt true to history: Jesus’ enemies and those who convicted him and carried out the sentence, had every incentive to find the body. Do that, and this menace is crushed once and for all. Of course they never did because, well, Jesus is even now sitting at the right hand of God.
As an aside, I have to wonder if Fiennes is a Christian or at least has Christian sympathies. He stared in the 2003 movie Luther, yes the same one who started the Reformation, and he’s working on a movie coming out next year called, The Last Race, a sequel to the 1981 classicChariots of Fire, about Christian Olympic athlete Eric Liddell, who refused to run a race on the Sabbath and forfeited the event. It’s possible he’s a member in good standing of the Church of England, a good Anglican.
[M]oral relativism implies that neither cultures (if conventionalism is in view) nor individuals (if subjectivism is in view) can improve their moral code. The only thing they can do is change it. Why? Consider any change in code from believing, say, racism is right to racism is wrong. How should we evaluate this change? All the moral relativist can say is that, from the perspective of the earlier code, the new principle is wrong, and from the perspective of the new code, the old principle is wrong. In short, there has merely been a change in perspective. No sense can be given to the idea that a new code reflects an improvement on an old code because this idea requires a vantage point outside of and above the society’s (or individual’s) code from which to make that judgment. And it is precisely such a vantage point that moral relativism disallows.
Some time ago listening to an apologetics talk I heard something that was so obvious I wondered why I had never thought of it just that way before. I probably had to some degree, but it never made as much sense in the context of evidence for God’s existence. The statement went something like this: you can no more break God’s moral laws than you can break his physical laws. If you tried to break the law of gravity by jumping out of a building with thoughts of flying, you would shortly surely splatter on the ground. God’s moral laws are just as unforgiving if not just as immediate. Take sex as a ubiquitous example in our culture. If you do it God’s way, man, woman, lifelong commitment in marriage, it is a very good thing, and there is no downside. If pleasure and romance and self-fulfillment are your gods, then misery awaits, whether that is a sexually transmitted disease, or broken hearts, or jealousy, lying, violence, or children growing up without a mother and a father, or killing the “product of conception.” (more…)
Recent Comments