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…)
Sep 19, 2021 | Notable Quotations
When I was a young man early in my intellectual journey searching for truth, I came across Idols for Destruction; Christian Faith and It’s Confrontation with American Society. It was published in 1983, and I was just beginning to expand my understanding of faith to all of reality beyond my own religious experience. I remember being awed by the author’s learning and insight, and how he took a Christian worldview and critiqued everything, it seemed, about the modern world. It was, to me, a tour de force, especially because as a 23 or 24 year-old I was just beginning to exercise my intellectual chops. It was from a universe of learning I could only marvel at. The author, Herbert Schlossberg, was an historian who seemed to know everything. I decided after lo these man years to read it again, and it amazes me now just as much as I remember it amazing me then. It’s now a classic in Christian intellectual history. What is striking as I read it in 2021 is how prophetic it was. He died a couple years ago before the world went mad with COVID, and Trump drove the woke left into complete madness, but he predicted with uncanny accuracy the destruction of the idols of our age we are experiencing right now. (more…)
Sep 17, 2021 | Explanatory Power, Theology
Most mornings when I pray I find myself thanking God for revealing himself in creation, Scripture, and Christ. I think how futile existence is without God’s revealing himself to us. Without that revelation, the human race is like a blind man in a dark box groping around without any way out. Every which way he runs looking for an exit he only finds a hard, cold wall, so he looks and runs harder. The history of philosophy is a perfect picture of the endless futility inside the box, speculation built upon conjecture based on assumptions based on nothing but human reason or human senses. Such thinking will only take humanity as far as human reason and senses can go, which is far, but not outside the box. The brilliance of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle is a testament to just how far human thinking can take us, but soon descended into philosophies not nearly as brilliant, like Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Cynicism. Many other great thinkers came after, but without revelation it was all just a big intellectual food fight. (more…)
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