Oct 28, 2015 | Culture
I recently wrote a post at The American Culture about how the hot fall TV trend is interracial lesbian relationships. I argued that Hollywood has long had an agenda to normalize homosexual behavior, and because of that many Americans vastly overestimate the gay and lesbian population. One commenter, Edmond D. Smith, was kind enough to say that because I had the temerity to say such things that I am “obviously racist, sexist and homophobic.” You gotta love that: three for the price of one! In the fevered totalitarian leftist secularist progressive mind if you speak unpopular truths, to them, you are unmitigated evil. But speak we must.
As I wrote in that previous post, last year the CDC did an extensive study and found that self-professed homosexuals make up 1.6 percent of the American population. Yet because of popular culture, and specifically the number of gay and lesbian story lines coming out of Hollywood, most Americans would be shocked at this number. I got startling confirmation of this distorted perception from my own family not long ago. I don’t know why I was so surprised. (more…)
Oct 25, 2015 | Apologetics, Explanatory Power, Plausibility
We live in a secular age, at least in the West, in which the dominion of science for all the good it has done has essentially replaced God for many people who find religion untenable. If “Science” says it, people believe it, few questions asked. In a little discussion with a co-worker recently the issue of religion came up, and being the consistent agnostic she is she said, “I’ll stick with science.” I guess she thinks science can answer the questions and address the issues religion and philosophy address. It can’t. She obviously hasn’t thought deeply about any of this. No surprise. Most Americans don’t.
Many atheists misuse the authority of science as a battering ram against belief in God, as if science itself makes belief in God a relic of a bygone era of simplistic faith. One reason they do this is because they define faith in a perversely self-serving way. Faith, which for them only applies to religious belief, is either believing something when evidence is lacking, or believing something we know is not true. If that is what faith actually is, I wouldn’t be religious either! (more…)
Oct 24, 2015 | Culture
Colson’s public-square work offers modern evangelicals a workable model. Initially, Colson considered himself contra mundum, “against the world,” as a believer. He wished to stand against evil. He never lost this vital perspective, but his friend, First Things editor Richard John Neuhaus, suggested Colson tweak the self-descriptor. The Christian, he said, is contra mundum pro mundo, “against the world for the world,” an elegant and accurate summation of evangelical engagement with a fallen order. The believer, and particularly the public-square witness, opposes evil, but does so not to defeat opponents or gobble up cultural territory. We are against the world out of love, seeking always to win lost friends to Christ and usher them into flourishing.
–Owen Strachan. “Chuck Colson Was Not a Culture Warrior: And anyway, he stopped “winning” his battles a long time ago.”
Oct 15, 2015 | Explanatory Power
[T]he disciples of scientism had a material explanation for the universe that they thought was rock solid. Now that explanation has collapsed, and we have the discovery of fine tuning pointing toward intelligent design strongly enough that it has convinced several Nobel laureates in physics. This is just one of the spectacular counterexamples to scientism’s grand progress narrative. The evidence for intelligent design is growing, not shrinking. Believers need not shrink back from the academy, from the sciences, or from the public square. We’re on the side of history and evidence — not to mention the Alpha and the Omega.
–Jonathan Witt, “The Scientific Evidence for God is Growing, Not Shrinking: The atheism that masquerades as science misrepresents the history of science.”
Oct 9, 2015 | Theology
Most Christians know very little in the way of doctrine or theology or church history. For many these seem at best unnecessary, for others they are downright dangerous. I am familiar with such thoughts because I was born-again into the Christian faith among such Christians and such teaching. What really counted, what only counted, was my relationship with Jesus mediated through the Bible. Just me and God’s word supposedly illuminated by the Holy Spirit, and I was good to go. After several years I just could not be held in such a myopic box, and I was exposed to a Christianity that was rooted in history, and thus doctrine and theology took on a whole new meaning.
The term Christology means literally the study of Christ, just like any “ology” means the study of. Theology is the study of God, for example. If you want to know why Christology is so important, this piece by Timothy George at First Things is an excellent historical primer on the the role questions about the nature of Jesus played in early church history. Today we may take it for granted that there is a Trinity, and that Jesus is fully God and fully man, the second person of the Triune God, but in the early church this was no slam dunk. And these issues about the nature of Christ have profound implications for soteriology, or the nature of our salvation, but that is a topic for another blog post.
Every Christian should be familiar with Marcion and Arius because because it was their questions and assertions about the nature of Christ that the Church fathers had to wrestle with. In fact, heresy always forces the Church to grapple with fundamental issues about the nature and content of the Christian faith. We’re going through that today with questions about the nature of marriage. So I don’t think you could get a better, more concise overview of this critical period in Church history that led to a council in Nicea that gave us the creed by the same name we recite in church to this day.
I recently wrote a post at The American Culture about how the hot fall TV trend is interracial lesbian relationships. I argued that Hollywood has long had an agenda to normalize homosexual behavior, and because of that many Americans vastly overestimate the gay and lesbian population. One commenter, Edmond D. Smith, was kind enough to say that because I had the temerity to say such things that I am “obviously racist, sexist and homophobic.” You gotta love that: three for the price of one! In the fevered totalitarian leftist secularist progressive mind if you speak unpopular truths, to them, you are unmitigated evil. But speak we must.
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