Mar 18, 2021 | Explanatory Power
As everyone in the Evangelical world, and many beyond, know by now, evangelist and apologist Ravi Zacharias was a phony and serial sexual abuser. Those are words I never thought I’d write, to say the least, but they also don’t surprise me. Christianity assumes and teaches that fallen man is, well, fallen. It assumes and teaches that the sinful human heart is capable of complete self-deception. It also teaches that salvation is the reconciliation of man to a holy God by an inner transformation, and not merely intellectual assent to certain propositions. It appears that Ravi was all head and no heart. Zillions of people have written and talked about this, and many have asked if they thought Rave was saved, or not. A tree, Jesus tells us, is known by it’s fruit, but the history of redemption we encounter in our Bibles is filled with God using and saving terribly flawed human beings, so none of us knows the answer. From what I’ve heard and read about all this, Ravi seems to me like he was a smooth talking sociopath, but I’ll leave the judging of his soul to God. (more…)
Feb 6, 2021 | Explanatory Power
In my last post I discussed the explanatory power of Christianity, why it better explains reality as we experience it than any other religion or worldview. I wasn’t able to address why it isn’t only Christianity as a worldview that makes sense of everything, but specifically the gospel. Let’s start with our own consciousness. There are many common threads to how human beings encounter themselves and the world, but none as common as conscience. We, at almost every moment of our existence, encounter the notion of right and wrong, good and evil, and that none of us measure up to the standard, whatever we think that is. Because the moral law is built into the universe and into our beings, nobody lives up to their own standards, let alone those of a holy God. I don’t often quote Immanel Kant approvingly, but he got it right when he wrote in the Critique of Practical Reason:
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.
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Jan 29, 2021 | Explanatory Power
Ideas for blog posts often seem to come when I start praying in the morning. As has been my habit for almost seven years, every morning I wrestle my way through a text of Scripture and write my thoughts in my uncreatively named Walk Through the Bible blog. Contemplating the word of the living God, the Creator of all things, can’t help but inspire, so thoughts bubble up as I pray. Then I stop, say to myself, I have to write that down! Such is the subject of this post. I’ll explain why that may have happened with this specific thought at this specific time, but it goes back to a quote from C.S. Lewis I put on the cover of my book, and one of the most powerful apologetic (defense of the truth claims of Christianity) sentences I’ve ever encountered. It’s no surprise it came from the pen and mind of Lewis:
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.
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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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Oct 10, 2020 | Explanatory Power
I don’t know about you, but I find this whole spiritual, Christian, life after death, life is more than matter thing very hard to believe at times. Scripture tells us we live by faith, and not by sight, but I find it so much easier to live by sight and not by faith! This is of course really dumb, because there are all kinds of things I can’t see, or understand, or comprehend, but which I live by all the time. I can’t “see” gravity or wind or logic or love or quarks or smells or my thoughts or any number of other things, but that makes them no less real. In fact, the more we learn about the so called “natural” world, the more inconceivable and incomprehensible it becomes, but we still “believe” in it. It’s impossible to read a book like Michael Denton’s Nature’s Destiny, like I’m currently doing, and find atheism/materialism the least bit plausible. In fact, it is absurd! That everything came from nothing for no reason at all, and that by chance, is truly unbelievable! With all that said, spiritual reality is still hard for me to believe. (more…)
Oct 3, 2020 | Explanatory Power
Given I spend my days in front of two computers, one for work, and one for me, I’ve started listening to Christian conversion testimonies on Youtube when I have busy work to do. For reasons because of my Christian fundamentalist past, I’ve tended to downplay the importance of conversion testimonies. In the early years of my Christian life, experience seemed to take precedence over the objective testimony of God in Scripture. The focus, I felt, was too much on our subjective experience of God, rather than his revealed truth in Scripture, to validate the truth claims of Christianity. I now believe that’s wrong, and a false trade-off. God’s truth revealed in the Bible is validated by people’s experience, and of course it would be if the Bible is true! And oh how true it is! Many of the testimonies I’ve heard bring me to tears because of how real God makes himself to all kinds of people in all kinds of ways, to as the Apostle John says, every tribe and peoples and language. If Christianity is true, this is exactly what we would expect, God having a real impact on real people in ways that defy predictable explanations. (more…)
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