Scholar John Frame reviews Barnabas Piper’s latest, Help My Unbelief: Why Doubt Is Not the Enemy of Faith
“Searches on Google and Amazon reveal that a number of books have been written on this subject by mature writers like Alister McGrath and Lesslie Newbigin. What does Piper bring to the table?”
“I think Piper often says exactly what needs to be said.”
“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you” (Isaiah 43:2).
Suffering is never for nothing.
Author and teacher Elisabeth Elliot, 88, died yesterday in her sleep. Her legacy will never die.
Jared Wilson enthuses over the mysteries of God and his creation by hoping Bigfoot exists and isn’t found.
I like that God keeps some things just to himself. It reminds me that he’s God and I’m not. It reminds me that this world he’s created is revealing his glory, not mine. This is part of the reason, I suppose, that when God responds to Job’s inquiries with an epic journey up the dizzying heights of divine sovereignty, he includes some stuff about sea monsters.
What is among those trees, glorifying the Lord in short, unobserved lives?
Robert Joustra and Alissa Wilkinson compare our world to the one in Game of Thrones and find many parallels. Secularists continue to redefine the world outside their little bubble, choosing to believe all religions are fruitless and merely the fading remnants of past generations.
The secular West in our own world has been stunned in the past several decades by the global resurgence of religion. . . . George R.R. Martin frames the problem of resurgent religion in theodicy, the age-old question of how a good God could let bad things happen.
In a July 2011 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Martin said:
And as for the gods, I’ve never been satisfied by any of the answers that are given. If there really is a benevolent loving god, why is the world full of rape and torture? Why do we even have pain? I was taught pain is to let us know when our body is breaking down. Well, why couldn’t we have a light? Like a dashboard light? If Chevrolet could come up with that, why couldn’t God? Why is agony a good way to handle things?
A one-time Catholic, Martin struggles painfully with theodicy in his stories, which are pregnant with a bitter lapse of hope. Every violation pierces the reader. How could such a thing be allowed to happen? What kind of world is it where this happens?
Martin wants us to hear this proclamation: this one. This world. That’s where these things happen.
Tim Keller reviews two books that argue in favor of Christians accepting homosexuality, saying the books by Vines and Wilson are the ones he is most often asked about. Not wanting to dismiss the books as simply unbiblical and open himself to the accusation of flippantly ignoring the subject, he writes over 2,500 words on what the authors profess and how they are wrong. On the issue of secularism, which we’ve discussed many times on this blog, Keller observes:
More explicit in Wilson’s volume than Vines’ is the common argument that history is moving toward greater freedom and equality for individuals, and so refusing to accept same-sex relationships is a futile attempt to stop inevitable historical development. Wilson says that the “complex forces” of history showed Christians that they were wrong about slavery and something like that is happening now with homosexuality.
Charles Taylor, however, explains how this idea of inevitable historical progress developed out of the Enlightenment optimism about human nature and reason. It is another place where these writers seem to uncritically adopt background understandings that are foreign to the Bible. If we believe in the Bible’s authority, then shifts in public opinion should not matter. The Christian faith will always be offensive to every culture at some points.
And besides, if you read Eric Kaufmann’s Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? (2010) and follow the latest demographic research, you will know that the world is not inevitably becoming more secular. The percentage of the world’s population that are non-religious, and that put emphasis on individuals determining their own moral values, is shrinking. The more conservative religious faiths are growing very fast. No one studying these trends believes that history is moving in the direction of more secular societies.
(via Jared C. Wilson)
The Bible Exchange labels J. Mark Bertrand “the most interesting man in the (Bible) world” as a way to soften him up before peppering him with questions. What’s his favorite Bible? The ESV Reader’s Bible
“Every so often people will ask me, ‘Why don’t you design your own Bible?’ I’d really like to. I’ve gone so far as to create the proposal to see whether any publishers are interested in the project. Meanwhile I am staying away from boats and airplanes for fear of being prematurely stranded.”
Randy Boyagoda of Ryerson College talking about Richard John Nauhaus:
What happens when you’re not allowed as a person of faith to speak from your deepest convictions to matters of singular importance in the world around you. Fr. Neuhaus made this case against two groups. One would be secular progressives who would want no place whatsoever for religion in public life. Probably for most of us, these are the groups we would think of as the great challenge to a religiously informed public philosophy. But Fr. Neuhaus actually argued that there was another group that was somewhat just as problematic. For him it was the Moral Majority. In other words, a Christian fundamentalism that had no publicly available account for how religion should matter in politics and public life but instead says, “you need to believe this because we believe this about the Bible.”
Aimee Byrd bruised herself working with nunchaku for her book trailer on Theological Fitness: Why We Need a Fighting Faith
“Theological fitness requires much of the same kind of fight to continue. The preacher to the Hebrews exhorts us to hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering (Heb. 10:23). If Christians are to persevere by holding fast to their confession, they are going to need to know that confession front, back, and sideways. “
Jared C. Wilson’s new book, The Prodigal Church: A Gentle Manifesto Against the Status Quo, urges churches to seek Jesus and his mission over all other people or missions. “I think the stakes are too high to simply preach to the Amen corner in the ‘young, restless, and Reformed’ movement. My hope for this book is that it may challenge the status quo outside my own tribe…”
Are we effectively looking to the nations to see if we can worship our God the way they worship their gods? No Christian wants to do that, but many have not been circumspect enough to recognize how they are doing it now.
Photo by jesuscm/Flickr (CC 2.0)
A conversation like this, or something like it, must have happened during the persecutions of the Christians in Rome.
Marcus, a Christian, meets his friend Gaius on the street.
Marcus: “How are you?”
Gaius: “Fine. Just got back from sacrificing to the emperor.”
Marcus: “Sacrificing to the emperor? When did you leave the Faith?”
Gaius: “Oh, I’m still a Christian. I just realized how ridiculous this whole business of refusing to sacrifice to the emperor is.”
Marcus: “How can you reconcile confessing Jesus as Lord with calling Caesar lord?”
Gaius: “See, this is where we’ve been getting it wrong. We’ve been making a big deal out of nothing. Look in the gospels. Do you see one passage where Jesus says we can’t sacrifice to Caesar? No. Not one. You’d think if this thing was so important, He’d have mentioned it, wouldn’t you?”
Marcus: “Jesus is the God of Israel, and He doesn’t allow worship of other gods!”
Gaius: “There you go. You’ve got to go all the way back to the Old Testament to find your rule. Aren’t we free from the Law now? Are we going to stone people for wearing mixed fabrics or eating shellfish?”
Marcus: “There’s a difference between the ceremonial law and the moral law.”
Gaius: “And there you go with the moral law. You realize that refusing to sacrifice makes our neighbors uncomfortable, don’t you? They feel judged. My God is not a God of judgment. He’s a God of love.”
Marcus: “You’re not a Christian anymore.”
Gaius: “You’re not a Christian either! You’re just a hater!”