More Than Words

The Binding of the Blade

2012-02-11T20:09:00.001+03:00

After finishing Narnia again, I began reading to my children the "Binding of the Blade" series.

Brilliant; absolutely brilliant. We're presently in the second half of book 2. I can't understand why we'd never heard of it (we found it in the ACTS bookshop in Nairobi). A great story, and a well executed echo of that awesome story of all stories that, in our house, has both reader and hearers eagerly waiting for the next chapter...

So dear reader, I do my duty by pointing you to: http://www.bindingoftheblade.com

Permission to pray

2012-02-10T16:08:00.000+03:00

If I follow this news story from the UK rightly...

Bideford Town Council had a vote, in which the majority voted to pray before their meetings.
Mr "Justice" Ouseley has ruled that, despite its desire to pray, it has not been granted the powers in law to do so.
The logic of his decision seems to be this: if there's no law saying that you can pray on some particular occasion, then you can't. Even if you want to. In Mr Ouseley's world, it seems that councils may have powers to spend tax money, pass by-laws and the like: but the act of praying is one that is strictly forbidden to them.

Welcome to the world as re-made according to the desires of the National Secular Society. Think you'll like it? Perhaps you have no particular interest in council meetings or what happens in them. But suppose that the whole of society was run by people of the NSS's ilk and inclinations... would that be better or worse than living in one that had been shaped by the Bible?

The Ministers of Alice in Wonderland

2012-02-09T09:46:00.001+03:00

Kevin De Young recently did a post on “10 reasons to believe in a historical Adam.” It drew predictable criticism from the usual quarters.

BTW, we’re glimpsing an Alice in Wonderland sort of world when it’s controversial for a minister to defend Bible history. Shouldn’t it be controversial for a minister to deny Bible history? But somewhere along the line, certain segments of evangelicalism fell through the rabbit hole.

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2012/02/deja-vu.html

The last first world war veteran dies

2012-02-07T23:04:00.001+03:00

According to the Guardian, the final known uniform-wearing veteran of the first world war has died:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/07/florence-green-war-veteran-dies

"Reality 'snapshot' of mission teams"

2012-02-07T10:41:00.000+03:00

Some good stuff here.

Barnabas Fund "Proclaim Freedom" Campaign

2012-02-02T12:20:00.001+03:00

https://barnabasfund.org/Act/Campaign/Proclaim-Freedom

Lovers of the truth must also challenge heresy

2012-01-31T15:58:00.001+03:00

T D Jakes is big in East Africa. His mean, moody and magnificent mug beams out at us in many bookshops (not just "Christian" ones) and even from the back of buses.

In accordance with that, there are lots of churches which deny the revealed truth about the Trinity, and they teach health/wealth/prosperity theology.

And many lives are accordingly ruined on the rocks of error that Jakes points them to. It's not just a theory. We meet those people.

Thus, it's good to read what James White has written here in response to those who seem to have taken it to themselves to declare that Jakes is acceptably orthodox: "The Discernment Gap: Showing a Lack of Passion for God's Honor and Glory"

Reforming in Kenya

2012-01-31T14:03:00.001+03:00

I've begun to publish online some papers related to our situations in Kenya; the needs, opportunities, challenges and ways forward to bring the kingdom forward and the practices of those of us trying to outreach, especially to the urban poor, more closely into line with Scripture:

http://david.dw-perspective.org.uk/da/writings/reformation-for-kenya

I believe and pray these will be useful for all kinds of people; those who are interested in mission, the third-world, self-sustaining church-planting, East Africa, etc. They can be read online or freely downloaded.

The church and the middle class

2012-01-28T19:46:00.000+03:00

In passing, blogger "Archbishop Cranmer" says:

One of the Church of England’s fundamental weaknesses, in common with many churches in Europe, is its tendency to demand that people do not merely acknowledge the Lordship of Christ but also abandon their former way of life in favour of that of a peculiar middle-class sub-culture.

That's actually largely my experience of a lot of town churches in Kenya too.

I suspect that's not entirely an independent event, given that the missionary task force that has been seeking to teach Kenya what Christianity is, appears to be almost entirely Western.

Except we don't merely imply to them that they must adopt a peculiar middle-class sub-culture; we require them to adopt a peculiar middle-class and foreign sub-culture!

You probably don't need telling that that's a really bad idea.

A further unfortunate experience is that short-term Western visitors to Africa seem rarely to perceive how bad an idea this is. They visit, find that they can quickly associate with the churches they're visiting (because of the above), and then they return to the West and say how wonderful it was. How encouraging to see "our" kind of Christianity (which is probably the one true one) flourishing in a foreign land! And thus the money supply, to keep funding these enterprises, ensures their growth.

I'm not sure what a long-term route to solving this problem might look like, but maybe this short post will raise a little awareness.

The Bible is not simply a bolted-on explanation

2012-01-27T19:43:00.001+03:00

Someone forwarded to me a couple of extracts of two interviews with Dr Mike Taylor, "a computer programmer by day, and a paleontologist at the University of Bristol in his spare time." Here and the January 2012 issue of Christianity magazine (not sure if that's online).

According to Dr. Taylor, people who don't see issues of religion and science just the same way as he does are loonies who are wasting their time; they (I mean to say, we) give the impression that Christianity is an entirely unthinking religion - and the reason why we don't see things the way he does, is because we're not listening to him carefully enough.

I do like people who don't hide what they think from you. It saves a lot of time. But, from that I suppose he won't be interested in anything I have to say. Perhaps you will!

Here are a few points of unthinking lunatic non-interaction from me in response to quotes from him:

We'd probably all agree that science is the best available tool for figuring out what happens in the universe and how it happens. Religion, properly understood, doesn't really involve itself with those questions at all,

According to Christianity, the most important thing that ever happened in the universe is that the Son of God rose from the dead on the third day. How would Dr. Taylor verify that, since his position is that "religion" is unable to make claims about actual historical events? There was a physical resurrection, because physical death - one of the results of the curse - was defeated. Dr. Taylor seems to believe that the material world and the spiritual world are two distinct things; but the heart of the Christian faith says "not so"; we look for a new resurrection body, and believe that Jesus has gone ahead of us. As Paul says (1 Corinthians 15), if this is not so, then Christianity collapses. That's very far away from saying that Christianity doesn't care about such questions at all. Once you shunt the physical world outside of the concerns of "Religion, properly understood", you destroy the foundations of the faith.

Religion, properly understood, doesn't really involve itself with those questions at all, but with why things are as they are, and with who is ultimately responsible for it all. This distinction is of course is what Gould (1997) was referring to in his concept of Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA). Gould himself was an atheist, or at least agnostic; but he understood what kind of a thing religion is, and respected it on its own terms rather than holding it in contempt because it's not science.

First, it's clear that Taylor here is basing his views upon philosophical assumptions, not upon scientific ones. How did he learn that "religion" and "science" exist in hermetically sealed domains? That's not itself a finding of science, either actually or even potentially - it's a philosophical/religious dogma. Our views of to what extent "religion" and "science" overlap ought to be formed by the Bible (if we are Christians). And the Bible makes a huge number of assertions about what happened and when - creation, miracles, Jesus' death and resurrection being the major ones.

Secondly, Taylor should have taken more notice of Gould's atheism. Gould shoves religion out of the realm of the world as we touch and experience it, because that's where he wants God to be - out of the realm of relevance. He felt more comfortable with the religious implications of that view.

Gould's concept was atheistic to the core. According to Christianity, the Bible is God's word with authority over all things; seen, unseen, spiritual, physical. It does not simply have "magisteria" in a privatised, unseen (read: irrelevant!) "religious" world. The Bible begins by teaching us that God made the heavens and the earth; he rules over all domains, including over science.

The separation between "what happens" and "why it happens and who does it" is a profoundly anti-Biblical separation. God's word and his actions are inseparable; God acts in history and explains the meaning of his actions to us. Christianity is not simply a bolted-on explanation of the meaning of history; it is also a set of distinct assertions about the content of history itself. If Dr. Taylor wanted to know the route that Moses took out of Egypt, or what miracles were performed through him there, or what happened at the Red Sea, then how would he derive the answer? According to him, religion has no interest in such questions. The God who really is, on the other hand, seems to be very interested in them, and decided through those very things to reveal himself to us.

Once you cut God's actions in history out of the picture as irrelevant issues, then you ultimately cut God himself out - because it is through those actions that God has made himself known.

from any Christians who hang around this blog supporting creationism: guys, give it a rest. Religion is not science

and:

The first chapters of Genesis are about who caused the universe to exist, and why he did it. They are simply not interested in the mechanisms he used, any more than the John chapter 2 account of Jesus turning water into wine is concerned with the chemical reactions.

That's a straw man; the question is not "does Genesis explain scientific mechanisms?" but is the book of Genesis history? Is it intended to be an accurate account of God's actions, and in what duration of time it asserts he carried them out? No creationist thinks that Genesis is intended to give detailed scientific mechanisms. Creationists have been pointing out and correcting this straw-man from ever since this debate began; it would do Dr. Taylor's side of the argument well to either stop raising it, or to cease saying that the problem is that we're not listening to what he's saying carefully enough.

Dr. Taylor appears to allow that Jesus did turn water into wine. Suppose that in 1859 Charles Darwin had published a book demonstrating that water and wine are really the same thing, and that if left in a pot long enough, one will become the other without any intervention; that the action was simply nature taking its ordinary course - and that in fact the feast at which it took place was extended over several decades, and not a few days as John says? What would Dr. Taylor say to that? The point is that Dr. Taylor's neat "what/why/who" trichotomy, though simple to grasp and making for good sound bites, does not actually work when applied to the case in point. The questions are tied up closely together, and Genesis also makes assertions about "when" and "how long". To disagree with those assertions is one thing; but to simply rule them out-of-court because you arbitrarily assert that "religion" never makes such assertions is something else.

Christians who should be spreading the love of Christ are distracted into a fruitless argument that has nothing to do with the gospel

This is severe question-begging. We've seen that Taylor's view of Christianity is of a privatised spiritual religion that is hermetically sealed off from the real flesh-and-blood world - rather than of one in which the living God acts and has acted in our world in space and time to redeem. Where do we find the love of Christ? In dying for us in the 1st century under Pontius Pilate, as the early Christians were careful to remind us through their creeds. In his rising again, bodily, in a new glorious resurrection life. This was a foretaste of his coming again to remake this flesh-and-blood world - not to whisk us of to stay eternally into a privatised floaty ethereal spiritual realm. Why did he need to die? The Bible's answer is, it is because Adam sinned and Creation fell. This creation. The one in which we draw breath and in which he drew breath. Personally, I go out into the flesh-and-blood world to preach the love of Christ because I believe it's the same world that God created in six days, which fell when Adam sinned, the world which is populated with Adam's children who are under God's righteous wrath because of Adam's sin as their head and representative, and the world which is redeemed through Jesus' death. Taylor's theology redefines the root meanings of most or all of the terms and concepts in those sentences; it's hardly an irrelevant issue.

Principled disagreement is one thing. But to say that all these points are irrelevant, and that those who make them should be written off as thick loonies is another. It's sad that Dr. Taylor, who's evidently a clever man, has taken a leaf out of the "New Atheists"' book and decided that name-calling is the way forward, rather than honest and serious Christian debate.

Britain's moral free-fall

2012-01-26T09:56:00.002+03:00

Here, Peter Oborne in the Telegraph laments Britain's moral free-fall in recent years.

He does not, however, go back beyond the 1990s. He laments the generation that took power there, but does not join up the dots and note that these are the children of the 1960s sexual revolution.

Nor does he go back further and note that it is specifically a rejection of Christianity that took place and that we are now enjoying the fruits of.

We live in Kenya, which is a pre-Christian society. We're seeing the West's future, and it's not pretty. Oborne laments the growing culture of systematic dishonesty and impunity. Believe us, you won't like it when you experience the full flowering of what is now well underway in Britain. What the West is discovering is that only two choices exist, not three. You can either submit to the joyful rule of Jesus and deny yourself the so-called pleasures of sin, or you can refuse and taste the consequences. There is no way to enjoy the fruits of a good tree, whilst cutting off the roots. What is done to the roots will work its way up; and when the roots are rotten, the tree is ripe only to be cut down.

But Christians must not despair. It is still evident that vestigial Christianity, through the salt-and-light witness of believers, continues to do tremendous good in the UK. And that same witness, when Jesus makes it powerful, will bring much better things, so long as the church remains faithful to him and is willing to undergo the trials of fire that must come.

Actually, we make the KGB look like schoolboys

2012-01-24T10:03:00.002+03:00

I hope what is reported here is true; Joe Carter passes on a report that in Iran, Biblical Christianity is spreading "like never before".

I couldn't help noticing how it was introduced by Carter:

The Story: Step aside CIA, KGB, MI6. The most powerful intelligence agencies in the world today---at least according to some Iranian leaders---are groups like TGC, SBC, PCA. . .

The title Carter gives his post is, "Is Evangelical Christianity the New KGB?"

From that wording, Carter, an evangelical Christian writing for the Gospel Coalition, obviously thinks it's a bit of a joke.

I'm with the Iranians on this one. Because when the leaven leavens the lump, the lump is indeed fully leavened. The mustard seed might look pathetically small, but it will ultimately dwarf the rest of the garden. A tyrannical Islamic theocracy is indeed threatened by the willingness of Christians to first obey Christ, and suffer for it. To bow to the heavenly ruler and not the earthly tyrant. Because as they take up the cross to die daily, the mighty power of Jesus' resurrection is at work. Christianity does actually ultimately mean the death-blow for alternative civilisations; not by military might or political power, but by something much greater: the Spirit of the risen Christ working in peoples' hearts so that such might nor power are completely transcended and outmoded.

Anyone spotted the Roman Empire lately? Nope? Is the power of the corrupt medieval papacy still stifling Europe? Going further back, how about the Babylonian or Assyrian or Medo-Persian empires? Gone too!

But it seems that the gospel is still going forward amongst the nations - which it will indeed do so when the present Iranian regime, which is a mere 30 years old, and indeed the modern secular west which looks like it'll hardly make it into three figures, crumbles. The KGB has got nothing on the Christian church... what happened to the Soviet Empire by the way? Isn't it the new KGB now, since the old communist empire with its threats to displace Christianity is now a relic of history, having crumbled under the weight of its own internal contradictions? Forward, comrades, to victory - forward into the sufferings and cross-carrying which are the mark that the victory is indeed ours. A good first step would be for Christian leaders to stop laughing at the idea that the risen Christ is actually a wee bit mightier than the KGB....

God rejoices over his children

2012-01-23T09:15:00.001+03:00

http://biblicalhorizons.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/festivity-and-transformation/

God's Big Picture

2012-01-13T16:51:00.000+03:00

Here's a brilliant paragraph to open a book with. Here's a man who really gets the "big picture" of the Bible. This is an introduction to a theological survey of the Old Testament by William J Dumbrell ("The Faith of Israel"):

"Israel presented her revelation in terms of Law, Prophets, and Writings, the order in which her faith was informed. The Pentateuch - the Law - embraces the first five books of the Old Testament and contains the substance of Israel's gospel. God, who created the world with a New Creation in ultimate view, to be achieved ideally by human cooperation, had given Israel a model in the Eden narrative of what the world was to be. Dominion, in terms of service to God's creation, needed to be exercised over the world outside the garden. Within this dominion, the model of Genesis 2 was extended over all creation. The failure of representative humanity to rise to this task in Genesis 3 meant the call of Israel as the world's evangelist; Israel would be the nation calling the world to the new model of God's government.. This was to happen as Israel endorsed kingdom-of-God values in her Promised Land, the new Eden." (p9)

It's hard for modern Westerners to think in terms of God's story. It's hard for modern Africans too. Each has their own narrative. It's so much easier just to bolt "Jesus gets us into heaven after this is all over" onto our present narrative, rather than to let the Bible totally re-write our story.

But that's what the Bible does. The Bible begins to tell us a story. We need the Bible's story to progressively displace our own faulty stories with its infinitely more glorious one. What Adam and Israel did not do, Christ is doing and shall do. Hallelujah!

Giving to African churches

2012-01-10T13:22:00.001+03:00

A question about Western giving to African churches...

Suppose that the amount of giving by kind, generous mission-supporting churches in the West dwarfs the amount that is or can be given locally. Let's suppose too that the locals are the majority poor; they live hand-to-mouth (they're not the middle-class elite).

Suppose that the locals have noticed this. They realise that their contribution is minor, proportionally. If they don't give, then it will not change the big picture into a different level - the church income will remain in the same ball-park.

Remember, these people are living hand-to-mouth. In the towns, they live under great pressure for food, rent, medicines when sick, relatives needing loans from crises, etcetera.

What do you think their response will be, once they've added up the sums, looked at their own situations and the demands upon them, and looked at how easily the foreigner is apparently able to send more cash?

And why do you think that? Is it based on personal knowledge of the maturity of the churches? Or wishful thinking?

Moving on from there, what do you think the long-term effect of this kind, generous mission-supporting church giving on the African church will be?

There came a point in our own missionary adventure when we realised that the weakness of the African churches, at least those we are familiar with, is not a sad,regrettable and surprising outcome despite all the help that the West has been giving them. It's something else.

The Year Of Christ's Victory, 2012

2012-01-02T10:45:00.001+03:00

Happy New Year!

I read in the news headlines that the wealthy (i.e., who can afford to do so) world has been celebrating the New Year.

Being someone whose brain starts analysing everything, I wondered why. To most of them, it's an arbitrary event. We circled the sun one more time since last time that we celebrated doing so. Hurrah!

As often observed though, creatures are created; even when they don't really know why they're doing what they're doing, they do it.

For the Christian, the marking of time is meaningful. We believe in progress and success. We believe in the meaning and purpose and goal of history. Jesus has ascended his throne. His kingdom goes forwards. He exerts and makes known his dominion. In his all-wise way, he progressively brings the universe to rights through the suffering and obedience of his people. As the new and final Adam, each year he unfolds what he has purposed, especially through the lives of his covenant children, and brings the day when he shall be revealed in power and glory one revolution closer.

And 2012 will bring more of the same. Praise his name.

To know him

2012-01-02T08:40:00.000+03:00

"Christ-centred, gospel-focussed"

A Christian nation?

2011-12-31T14:42:00.004+03:00

Conrad Mbewe does not want Zambia to describe itself, in its constitution, as a Christian nation.

Jeremy Walker disagrees with David Cameron, for saying that he wants Britain to be a Christian country.

I used to agree with those two brethren, but now disagree with my older self.

There's much that they say that is good, and many dangers to avoid.

Good: Brother Mbewe doesn't want Zambia to be a secular nation, though this does beg the question of what he does want (he wants to just leave it be - which seems to mean, he wants the answer to the question left undefined; unsatisfactory). Good: he does not want us to confuse the state with the church. Good: he is not in favour of superstition, formalism or hypocrisy. He does not want us to confuse our nations with Old Testament Israel. He wants us to realise that the church is God's agent of regeneration and change, to not confuse the gospel with morality, etcetera, the first birth with the second, the nation from above with those below, the limited role of the state in regulating evil with the gospel's work in redeeming society, etcetera. He wants us to learn the historical lessons of the Constantinian settlement. Mere words in constitutions cannot replace, or supplement, or aid, the work of bringing in spiritual reality. Good, good, excellent, and so on!

And yet, and yet... I think I can agree with basically all of brother Mbewe's arguments, and brother Walker's commendations of them, and yet think that they've fallen short of supporting their conclusions. And I can do all this, as a Baptist, believing in a proper separation of church and state.

There's a fault-line that we can expose with the right questions:

1) Is Christ Lord of everything - including of the state?

2) Since the answer to that question is "of course he is", we then ask: "and should the state actually do anything in particular to acknowledge that Lordship, or does it have no practical effect?" Is the state meant to submit to Christ's Lordship, yet without admitting that it is doing so? Is it meant to be a secret?

Is the state meant to self-consciously reform itself in line with God's will, or not? If it is, then where does it get guidance concerning God's will from? There have been attempts in Christian history to derive a set of principles from nature/general revelation alone. The results have not been promising. The spectacle of a Christian theologian, self-consciously attempting to derive from the Bible principles about general revelation that will then allow the state to operate without the Bible, is absurd and should make us ask "how did we get here?"

Mbewe is exposing the fault-line when he realises but then tip-toes around the question: "so, what kind of state should it be?" It's all very well to say "not a secular one"; but the final answer "please, just leave us room to be Christians in our churches!" is unsatisfactory. The state is ordained by God, and under Christ's redemptive Lordship. His death and resurrection should have an impact on the state, as on everything else. Should that impact be an unspoken secret? Are hypocrisy/superstition etc. and "just leave us alone" the only two possible answers available to us?

I suspect that eschatology comes in here. If we expect Christ to bring all things into visible submission to himself and to complete the Adamic mandate before his final revealing, then you can believe as I do, that present and former incarnations of the "Christian state" leave much to be desired - and yet also believe that Caesar is intended to say "Christ is Lord" and not simply leave it as an open question. The question will be resolved as Christ exerts his all-authority more and more; the Christian state will in fact be a Christian state: in word and deed. Just because there are false starts and faulty settlements along the way is not a reason to abandon the whole idea, any more than the present faultiness of the church means that we need to throw our lot in with Harold Camping.

This is what incoherence looks like

2011-12-28T23:11:00.002+03:00

In a Guardian CIF article, Denis Alexander, as part of his hopeless quest to synthesise Darwinism with the Bible, asks the question, why did Jesus die? Good question; but he does not answer it in a coherent way. He gives no more of an answer than he did when he published "Creation or Evolution - Do we have to choose?".

Read it yourself and see if you can figure out the answer. Alexander himself during the article asserts that the Bible nowhere teaches that physical death is the penalty of sin (Alexander holds that death was always man's intended lot, a necessary part of the evolutionary process); yet also on the other hand asserts that Jesus died on the cross to pay the price for our sins.

Each time I come across something new from Dr. Alexander, I try to hunt for his explanation of how these two assertions harmonise. I'm not the only reviewer who's raised this issue and tried to get an answer; I'm not aware of anyone who's succeeded yet. Death is not the penalty for sin; Jesus experienced death as the penalty for our sins. I've read this latest one through three times, trying to spot the clue. I don't think there is one.

There's quite a few other give-aways about Dr. Alexander's departure from orthodoxy in the article; I've just chosen to highlight this big one in this blog.

Literal interpretation and asking the wrong questions

2011-12-27T10:22:00.001+03:00

I had a discussion with a couple of good friends the other day about millennialism. One friend held to a pre-millennial position, the other a-millennial.

An issue that often comes up in such discussions is, the question of "literal" versus "spiritual/metaphorical" interpretation.

I hold that this is a false question. It tends to skew the outcome from the beginning. It plays into a modern, false dichotomy. (Ironically, when faced with a false "physical/spiritual" choice, modern believers have tended to retreat from the physical realm into the spiritual one; but in the question of eschatology, have felt it is the "spiritual" choice to take the most "literal" possibly interpretation of prophecy. Perhaps this is a compensation - the devil largely gets the material world now, but Jesus claims it back in the millennium? One of the points I raised with my pre-millennial friend is that I dispute that pre-millennialism is the "literal" option. Revelation chapter 20 taken "literally" does not mention Jerusalem, or a bodily resurrection of all believers, but takes place in the heavenly realm, where John says that he saw "souls". But I digress).

This literal-versus-spiritual view of the question tends to view prophetic interpretation as a matter of a sliding scale. A line is drawn, from "purely spiritual" at the left end, and "completely literal" at the right end. Then we have to decide where to land on that line. Those of the pre-millennial school tend to say, we should go as far to the right as possible. This sometimes leads to unwarranted chest-thumping and drawing connections that don't exist - if you go further to the left, you are a secret liberal! Taking the Bible seriously involves "literally-as-possible", otherwise you don't really believe (my friend did not take this line)!

Where "possible" is involves a number of subtleties. My friends was dispensational pre-millennial, and in my view the particular subtleties of that school are indistinguishable from arbitrary special pleading. A time reference of one thousand years in Revelation must mean exactly one thousand years otherwise we have mangled the plain word of God; but to take a "generation" in Matthew 24 as a literal generation is "wooden literalism" which we must avoid - hmmm!

This whole idea of a sliding scale is wrong. We need to get past the idea that it is the right interpretative grid to bring to prophetic understanding. Much better is to let the Bible interpret itself. This is actually to take the Bible more seriously, not less.

There is plenty of examples of already-fulfilled prophecy in the Bible. There is a large cupboard of prophetic imagery - stock usages of the prophets, which we can see the meaning of. The LORD coming on the clouds. Multi-coloured horses travelling through the earth. Jehovah coming down from Mount Zion, etcetera. Prophetic imagery is interpreted for us in the Scriptures already. Our job is not to set up our own rules and a zero-to-one-hunderd spiritual-literal scale with its ensuing set of mistaken questions. Our job is to understand the Bible's own rules to interpreting the range of prophetic images, and apply those. We are not given Daniel and Revelation in a vacuum; they cycled and recycled imagery that was part of the prophet's stock-in-trade, rather than inventing something entirely new and leaving us to figure it out for ourselves.

At times this more Biblical approach will bring issues which intersect with the literal/spiritual question; for example, when Jeremiah said that the exile in Babylon would be 70 years long, he really did mean 70 years as in 840 months as in 70 trips around the calendar, and not something else. But a study of prophetic usage emphatically does not lead to the sliding scale as the basic tool of interpretation. If we start there, we will not end up with authentically Biblical answers.

Peshat Books

2011-12-23T09:30:00.001+03:00

One of our (few!) commenters here is Wayne Talbot; and his contributions are always thoughtful.

And hence I'm sure you'll also find it worthwhile to consider some of his writings at: http://www.peshatbooks.com

His most recently published work is "The Dawkins Deficiency".

The Bible, right and wrong

2011-12-19T09:37:00.000+03:00

The notion that the Bible was “at the forefront of the emergence of democracy, the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women” would have raised the Hitch-hackles. As he put it in his debate on religion with Tony Blair in Toronto in November 2010: “We don’t require divine permission to know right from wrong.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/8963148/David-Cameron-must-now-pass-the-Christopher-Hitchens-test.html

The Bible itself tells us that those without the Bible know right from wrong - that's how those without the Bible can still be justly judged on the day of judgment. God has placed a knowledge of right and wrong in our hearts - a knowledge that will show we are right to be condemned, because we have not lived up to what we know (Romans chapter 2:14-16).
The historical examples chosen make the (controverted) point very well, that the answer given is irrelevant. We may not need the Bible to know that right exists and is better than wrong. Even so, we do very much did need the Bible and its influence on our culture to have the power to put that knowledge into practice. Knowing the difference between right and wrong is one thing; but having the will to respond to that knowledge is another. That's what the Bible teaches too; the law may be written by the finger of God upon tables of stone, but until it is written upon our hearts by the power of the risen Christ we won't be able to keep it as we ought.

Thus we have the irony that it's the Christian West where talented bon vivantes like Christopher Hitchens could spend and mis-spend the cultural capital of freedom and prosperity that centuries of Christianity had bequeathed to them; an irony that sadly Hitchens never properly appreciated.

Prosperity and envy

2011-12-17T10:29:00.000+03:00

Douglas Wilson here has a useful test to do with social justice, progressive politics and envy.

Misotheism masquerading as science and reason

2011-12-17T10:15:00.000+03:00

Misotheism, aka atheism, claims for itself the mantle of science and reason.

Like small children sometimes claim to be super-heroes. Then it's time for tea and bed.

Consider some of the claims of misotheism:

Everything came out of nothing, unaided by anything (because there was nothing to aid it). (Not out of a vacuum; out of nothing).
Complex order came, by itself, out of disorder, guided by nothing and with no external input; though science has never yet observed such a thing happening.
Complex codes, e.g. in the genome, produce themselves without intelligent input; which science has never observed.
Self-consciousness (the "I" which is the essential fact of our existence as personal individuals) is basically an illusion (in which case we ask, exactly who is the being experiencing that illusion?)
Life can spontaneously generate itself out of non-life, guided by nothing - despite the fact that millions of man-hours of intelligent human research have not yet been able to produce such an outcome, and science has never observed it.
Natural selection, filtering the species based upon survival possibilities, produced every face of human life - including those which have no plausible known value for survival (like genuine talent in art, music, chess, higher mathematics, etc.). All the evidence is that humankind of vastly over-endowed for mere survival - the offered explanation does not meet the facts.
Many of the universe's physical attributes exist within a very small band which is fine-tuned for existence and life, despite no known material explanation why that should be. (Note that the misotheist's observation "but if it weren't so, we wouldn't be here to observe it" no more explains this fact than the survivor of the firing squad's observation "of course I survived, otherwise we wouldn't be able to have this chat" explains why the crack shooters all missed).

In the face of this vast "reality gap" between observed scientific facts and misotheistic explanations, the best that the Internet misotheists have been able to come up with is empty rhetoric - not science but childish attempts at philosophy. "Science is still working on that", "You're just preaching God-of-the-gaps", "Physics hasn't yet had its Darwin", etc.

Little Johnny says, "and after tea, I'm going to fly to the moon!" Of course you are, little chap - but don't forget it'll soon be bed-time!

Original sin, again

2011-12-16T11:43:00.001+03:00

Child psychologist Margit Ekenberg told Sweden's Aftonbladet newspaper: 'Children can be cruel to each other, but not evil.

'Children who commit acts like this have probably not received the care and assistance they needed from adults in setting limits to their actions.'

Those are the words of a supposed expert, responding to the case of a ten-year-old boy who strangled a four-year-old to death and dumped his body in the bushes.

Perhaps something got lost in translation? Hmmm....

Apparently, "cruelty" is not itself evil. How did she conclude that?

How would Ms Ekenberg know what evil is? What standard is she measuring it by?

Since strangling someone to death is, in fact, evil (the standard we measure that by is God's law), obviously ten-year-olds can commit evil. You only need one instance of a ten-year-old committing evil to prove that yes, ten-year-olds can commit evil.

As indeed can four-year-olds.

"'Children who commit acts like this have probably not received the care and assistance they needed from adults in setting limits to their actions.'" - since children of age ten can't (allegedly) commit evil, then why do adults need to set limits to their actions? If evil is actually impossible for them, then what is it we're meant to be stopping them from doing?

Apparently, we're meant to be stopping them from committing "cruelty". But since cruelty isn't evil, what's the problem, again?

Ms Ekenberg apparently subscribes to a situational view of the cause of (non-)evil. She believes that it's because adults haven't applied appropriate "limits".

What are those limits? Again, as ten year-olds are apparently beings who exist outside of the sphere where categories of "good" or "evil" apply, we must be meant to educate them on some other basis. It's apparently not "appropriate" to tell them that throttling the weak is wrong, as ten-year-olds can't commit wrong. Is the idea just that we educate them about what would be evil if they were older, so that when they're older they won't commit evil after it becomes possible for them to do so? "Don't throttle the weak now, because if you do it when you're older, it'd be evil" "What - it's not evil now?" "Nope, just cruelty." "Is cruelty evil?" "Not for you, no". "Thanks. Can I throttle you now?"

What age does evil begin to exist as a possibility for a child to commit, by the way, Ms Ekenberg? How did you determine that answer? It's apparently many years after the child can self-consciously assert its own will in ways that are contrary to God's revealed will for mankind to live. Presumably the ten-year-old wanted to inflict pain and suffering upon the four-year-old; that was his desire, and it carried over into action.

Ten-year-olds seem blissfully unaware that they are living in a universe in which (according to Ms Ekenberg) moral categories do not exist for them. They are continually debating about what is right or wrong, completely uninformed about the apparent reality that there is no such thing. They get cross if you, or one of their companions, commits an evil against them. They seem to intuitively all believe in this so-called impossibility.

What is the difference between a ten-year-old desiring to inflict pain on a four-year-old and then carrying it out, and a twenty-year-old doing the same thing? What if the twenty-year-old didn't receive sufficient "care" and "assistance" before he/she reached the magical age at which such actions become evil? Why has that now become the twenty-year-old's fault?

What's the point of all this? It's to point out the hopeless moral confusion that results when you reject the Bible's clear revelation of the reality of original sin. Original sin is also the explanation for how an adult with a brain can be accepted by a society as a supposed "expert" whilst coming out with such spewings of ignorance and darkness as Ms Ekenberg. The true path is not to be found in child psychologists of such an ilk, but in receiving a new heart from Jesus - which is a glorious possibility when you are an adult, or ten or four. Without it though, we're condemned to societies in which four-year-olds can be executed and the favoured ones in society, far from doing anything about it, actually make the evil-doers' excuses for them. The world's wisdom makes excuses for evil and tells you it's not really there; but Jesus defeats it.