Category Archives: Religion

Non-fiction, Religion

Not the Wrong Side of History

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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.

Leaving Kansas CityCharles 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)

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Religion

Bertrand: Let Me Design a Bible

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Gutenberg BibleThe 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, though possibly not the edition I’ve linked to. Is this the Bible he’d want if he were to be stranded on a dessert-ladened island surrounded by cakes and coffees… I mean, a desert island with only a shade weed and a view of Nineveh? No. He’d want “one that doesn’t yet exist.

“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.”

Religion, Uncategorized

Two Dangers

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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.”

Non-fiction, Religion

Why We Need a Fighting Faith

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Aimee Byrd bruised herself working with nunchaku for her book trailer on Theological Fitness: Why We Need a Fighting Faith. Learning how to fight well takes practice and patience.

“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. “

Non-fiction, Religion

Pushing Back the Status Quo

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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.

ocaso de reyes y dioses │twilight of kings and gods

Photo by jesuscm/Flickr (CC 2.0)

Religion

On the streets of Rome

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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!”

Authors, Non-fiction, Religion

Sin as a Damaged Form of Love

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Rod Dreher has written a personal reflection on Dante’s Divine Comedy in a book called How Dante Can Save Your Life. Readers are posting mixed reviews, partly, it seems, because they don’t understand the depth of the subject matter. Dreher quotes a review and offers some reflection on the family matters he revealed in his book:

Given his life experiences, it would have been easy for Dreher to paint himself as a victim and blame everyone else for his woes. But neither God nor Dante allows him to do so. Rather, as he descends the levels of the inferno and then ascends the cornices of purgatory alongside the Florentine poet, he comes face to face with his own propensity to make golden calves out of his family and his tradition: in a word, southern ancestral worship. Yes, his father and sister must bear some guilt, but Dreher alone allows himself to become bound to these false idols.

He says, “For me, Dante’s understanding of sin not as lawbreaking but as a damaged form of love was important to understanding my crisis situation, and how to break out of it.”

Religion

Lip Service Theology

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“If we say we believe God is sovereign, but spend our days wringing our hands and fretting, we’re just doing lip-service to theology.

If we say we believe God is love, but spend our days berating ourselves and others, we’re just doing lip-service to theology.”

Lore Ferguson has a brief devotional on this theme at a new website for gospel-oriented readers and leaders, ForTheChurch, at ftc.co.

Fiction, Religion

Making Bad Christian Art

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The trailer for the new movie, Little Boy, worries me. I can’t tell if it’s setting up a story that cautions an audience willing to believe that faith can be measured in specific acts and feelings or panders to such an audience. This review doesn’t exactly answer that question, but it does imply that the faith of the boy relates to the dropping of the bomb by the same name. Maybe if they had released the film on August 6 for the 75th anniversary of the leveling of Hiroshima, we would have all gotten the connection.

Heh.

I gather the movie is heavy-handed enough to need more explanation–still some people need things spelled out, you know.

Tony Woodlief, author of the concept “Dreadfully Wholesome,” linked to an old article of his, in which he describes common sins of the Christian writer: neat resolutions, one-dimentional characters, sentamentality, and cleanness. On this last point, he says, “In short, if Christian novels and movies and blogs and speeches must be stripped of profanity and sensuality and critical questions, all for the sake of sparing us scandal, then we have to wonder what has happened that such a wide swath of Christendom has failed to graduate from milk to meat.”

The point, of course, is not to mix a little filth into our current shallow stories. Little Boy is PG-13, I believe, because it shows some of the horrors of war and uses some contextual bigotry. It may even have smoking! That’s a letter grade drop all on its own. The point, though, is to think honestly and depict reality appropriately.

A strong example of this is the recent movie, Something, Anything. I saw it on Netflix Instant a few weeks ago at a friend’s recommendation. Justin Chang summaries it nicely as having a “dichotomy between materialism and spirituality, between the pleasures of a comfortably middle-class existence and the rewards of an introspective, examined one.” This is not a heavy-handed movie at all. In fact, there’s a touching scene in the middle that clearly shows the disconnect between two main characters. Viewers might overlook that scene because one says anything, but that appears to be the tension point between them. The husband picks up his wife’s journal, exposing him to her struggling cry to God, but he just puts it back down and walks out of the room. He doesn’t know how to talk about that.

If you watch Something, Anything, let’s talk about it here. It’s beautiful, quiet film without common sins listed above.

Religion

When non-persons are murdered

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Gene Edward Veith writes on the horrific murders of Kenyan university students here. What impresses me most about the story, and the larger story of Christian persecution in the Islamic world, is how, despite all the coverage, nobody seems to have any plans to do anything about it. Expressions of outrage seem to be the limit.

I think I see a reason for this. Nobody really cares, because these Christians occupy no conceptual place in the mind of the world. Or at least in the mind of the world’s opinion makers.

In contemporary thought, there are two religious alternatives for third world people. They can belong to indigenous religions, such as animism, or they can be Muslims.

In the eyes of the world, Christianity is a religion for white westerners only. Anyone not white or western, in this view, should not be a Christian. If they are Christian, they are somehow “inauthentic.” Uncle Toms. Race traitors. In a sense they deserve anything that is done to them.

They are non-persons in the eyes of the world.

But “precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of His saints” (Psalm 116:15).