Category Archives: Religion

Non-fiction, Religion

The Gospel of Grace for Mormons

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John Wallace knows Latter-day Saints. He held temple recommendation and Elders Quorum presidencies for years. He examined the Bible for what he believed and read the Book of Mormon cover-to-cover repeatedly. But a seed of doubt was planted in him during his high school years that eventually grew too large for him to stay a Mormon. He knew he could never be perfect on his own. He could not prove his worthiness to return to live with Heavenly Father. If he had to be made perfect, it would have to be by someone else.

In this book, Starting at the Finish Line: The Gospel of Grace for Mormons, John spends almost all of his time exploring what Christ Jesus did for us on the cross. He shows what the Bible teaches about our sin, God’s unapproachable holiness, Christ’s eternal deity and righteousness, and how his death on the cross cancels the power of sin in our lives without any work from us.

Is Christ Jesus completely righteous? Yes, but he was made sin on our behalf and punished for our sakes. Does He give us His righteous completely? Yes. We cannot earn it. We cannot improve on it. When the Lord Jesus Christ said from the cross, “It is finished,” he paid for everything for us. His perfection became ours in the eyes of God.

John says, “Mormons believe the Bible to be the Word of God ‘as far as it is translated correctly…’ I aim to show my readers that the Bible has been translated correctly and that it points to the cross of Christ Jesus.”

Moreover, the Bible is not compatible with LDS doctrine. Speaking to Mormon readers, John remembers that Latter-day Saints believe that God will look down on us and if He sees that we are trying to obey Him in everything, He will give us eternal life. Moroni 10:32 says almost exactly that, but the Bible says salvation is by grace through faith, not by works so that no one can boast of earning anything.

With painful honesty, John describes his personal walk of faith toward God’s all-sufficient grace. He lovingly explains what the Bible teaches and how it conflicts with LDS teaching by quoting LDS prophets, elders, and sacred writings. His focus, however, is not to criticize the Mormon church. It is to explain how God’s grace is so much better than the “miracle of forgiveness” taught at LDS temples. It’s something to celebrate.

John writes: “If nothing else, I want my LDS reader to come away with these three things:

  1. The Bible is the Word of God. It is trustworthy and reliable, able to teach you and guide you through his life and into eternal life.
  2. Christ on the cross, suffering and dying to pay the penalty for your sins, is the gospel. There is no other gospel, and there is no other name (or combination of names) under heaven by which you can be saved.
  3. Any attempt on your part to add to Christ’s sacrifice with your own efforts nullifies God’s grace and severs you from Christ as Savior. He is the Way—and He’s not asking for help.”
Authors, Religion

Mahaney, Harris leave The Gospel Coalition

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World magazine reports on the civil suit against a former member of a church once led by C. J. Mahaney and now by Joshua Harris. Last week a jury found the man guilty of molesting three boys in the 1980s, and questions have come up about whether church leaders, not just these two men but many more, knew about the problem and did not report it or handle it properly. Harris believes he should take full responsibility for part of the mishandling and has asked for a leave of absence along with four other church leaders. He steps down from The Gospel Coalition, he says, “because I don’t want the present challenges at my church to distract from this terrific ministry.”

Harris comes at the end of this case and appears to be taking the high ground. He has even talked about suffering abuse as a child himself. I’m less sure about what high ground Mahaney can take at this point. Here’s a report from last year about his part in the lawsuit. At the time, evangelical leaders were rallying to his support, saying they stood by him and “his personal integrity.”

I can make no judgment call here. It’s difficult for anyone at this distance to sort the facts and accuse these men, and we don’t have to. Let’s pray for them and their congregations. Let’s do what we can in our own churches and cities to protect each other and call people to account for their sins in godly ways.

The Gospel Coalition (newly redesigned) has a couple links on this subject:

Authors, Religion

Osteenification of American Religion

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Hank Hanegraaff must have read all of Joel Osteen’s books, because he quotes them all in this article on Osteen’s heresies.

Osteen is the hip new personification of God-talk in America… Behind Osteenian self-affirmations—“I am anointed,” “I am prosperous,” “My God is a ‘supersizing God’”—there lies a darker hue. Behind the smile is a robust emphasis on all that is negative. If you are healthy and wealthy, words created that reality. However, if you find yourself in dire financial straits, contract cancer, or, God forbid, die an early death, your words are the prime suspect. Says Osteen, “We’re going to get exactly what we’re saying. And this can be good or it can be bad” (Discover the Champion in You, May 3, 2004). In evidence, he cites one illustration after the other. One in particular caught my attention: the story of a “kind and friendly” worker at the church. He died at an early age, contends Osteen, “being snared by the words of his mouth” (I Declare [FaithWords, 2012], viii–ix).

That snare is meant to be an application of Proverbs 6:1-2, but read those verses to see if you get the same application as Osteen does.

Hanegraaff says Osteen’s gospel is a version of New Thought Metaphysics, the idea that our words are a force of magic in the real world. In Osteen’s book, Your Best Life Now, he writes, “You have to begin speaking words of faith over your life. Your words have enormous creative power. The moment you speak something out you give birth to it. This is a spiritual principle, and it works whether what you are saying is good or bad, positive or negative.”

Hanegraaff has written on this at length in his new book, The OSTEENification of American Christianity, which is available for a gift of any amount to the Christian Research Institute.

Religion

Doing my homework online

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Georg Sverdrup Sven Oftedal

I’ve been neglecting you folks recently, because of the pressure of graduate school work. Tonight I’m going to compound the offense by using this space for homework purposes.

The two fellows you see above, reading from top to bottom, in photographs from the H. Larson Studio circa 1904, are Georg Sverdrup and Sven Oftedal, professors at Augsburg College, Minneapolis, and founders of the Lutheran Free Church, of which my current employer, the Association of Free Lutheran Congregations, is the spiritual descendant. Both born in Norway and respected scholars, they are nevertheless best remembered for the bitter controversies they were involved in (and often initiated), especially in the 1880s and ’90s.

As an assignment for one of my classes, I have to help assemble a “Digital Library Project” at Omeka. This involves posting, and coding with metadata, certain items relating to the theme of a group project. My project involves Scandinavian Culture in the Upper Midwest. Two of the items I chose to post were the above photographs, which reside in the archive I oversee at work. I took the pictures myself (obviously), and my lack of competence is apparent. But the instructions require a link to an external source for the photographs, so I’m making this blog post the source. (I’m not even sure that’s ethical, but I can’t think of another way to do it.)

But since I’m posting anyway, I want to discuss something shocking I’ve learned in my studies of these two men. Continue reading Doing my homework online →

Poetry, Religion

Guite’s “Through the Gate”

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In his new collection, The Singing Bowl, poet Malcolm Guite offers this poem inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy: “Through the Gate”

The GateBegin the song exactly where you are

For where you are contains where you have been

And holds the vision of your final sphere

And do not fear the memory of sin;

There is a light that heals, and, where it falls,

Transfigures and redeems the darkest stain

Into translucent colour. Loose the veils

And draw the curtains back, unbar the doors,

Of that dread threshold where your spirit fails,

The hopeless gate that holds in all the fears

That haunt your shadowed city, fling it wide

And open to the light that finds and fares …

Read the rest on the poet’s blog.

“My own poem,” Guite says, “is written in the conviction that that there is no depth or recess, no sin or secret, in me or in anyone, beyond the light of Christ, but we have to open the gate and let him come down to our depths, let his Light reveal and name and heal what we have hidden.”

Guite has written nine poems inspired from Dante’s great work.

Reading, Religion

Understanding the Bible Yourself

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John Piper has a new plan to teach people to understand the Bible on their own. He’s calling it “Look at the Book,” and at first blush it looks to be inductive Bible study, something Precept Ministries and Bryan College have done for years. Not that it isn’t worth doing again by other people. I’m just making the connection.

Authors, Music, Religion

Dan Haseltine of Jars of Clay Apologizes, Offers Context

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The lead singer of Jars of Clay, one of my favorite bands, cannonballed the Twitter pool repeatedly this week with commits and questions on gay marriage. Dan Haseltine asked if ruling out gay marriage was really as bad as many say it is. I’m tempted to reenact the drama for you. I got caught up in it somewhat. I saw Dan’s tweet splash down: “I don’t particularly care about Scriptures stance on what is “wrong.” I care more about how it says we should treat people,” and my heart sank.

But yesterday, Dan explained the context of his tweets, what he was trying to say, and how he messed it all up. He says he came from a panel discussion on gay marriage in Australia last week where many things were said that provoked him. He hadn’t thought about it much before, so on Twitter, not the best platform for this, he wanted to ask questions outside of his own box, to assume he didn’t have all the answers and to wonder where his blind spots were, if any. And he said things that easily misrepresent his views.

It’s encouraging. I like this guy and his music. One of his recent songs says we “don’t know enough about love, so we make it up.” It seems to call our current sexual chaos into question. Some of us talk love but we don’t know anything about it. In one of his books, Jared C. Wilson notes that God is love, but love is not God. We can’t define love however we feel is right and then say that’s god. It doesn’t work that way.

I feel we’re in a similar situation with homosexuality and the civil marriage debate. Continue reading Dan Haseltine of Jars of Clay Apologizes, Offers Context →

Non-fiction, Religion

Like Saying It Was Magic

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Dr. Vern Poythress has written a book on chance and the sovereignty of God. In fact, that’s the title. He says he was thinking about one of his previous books, Redeeming Science, when he developed the concept of chance for this book. People have appealed to chance almost as an intelligence behind questions of our origin, but to say it happened by chance when the odds are inconceivably high against it is like saying it was just magic. It’s nonsense. The real problem, Dr. Poythress explains, is that many scientists have insisted that their naturalistic philosophy is the only way to interpret the data:

Evolutionary naturalism is the view that all forms of life came about through merely material processes, with no guiding purpose at any point. But the narrow study of material causes can never legitimately make a pronouncement about God’s involvement or God’s purposes in the processes. And scientific study ought not say that there can be no exceptions, that is, events in which God acts in surprising ways.

Many pronouncements made these days in the name of science use the successes of science and the prestige of science as a platform from which to advocate the principle that there are no purposes and that God is absent. But such pronouncements represent a form of philosophy; the advocates of materialistic philosophy are importing their own assumptions into their interpretation of the scientific data.

Many of them say they will entertain any theory that explains the data well, but we have seen plenty of examples where this has not been true at all. Even the suggestion that a god of some kind may explain the patterns seen in the data is enough to raise the ire of Darwin’s watchdogs. That’s what the documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is about.

Religion

Keeping Quiet about Creation

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I don’t think I wrote here that I thought the Ken Ham vs. Bill Nye debate was less than great. The fact that you can still watch it is impressive, but the debate itself disappointed me. I thought Ham posed a question he did not answer. Though Nye appeared to be prepared to go toe-to-toe with him on specific scientific claims, Ham didn’t want to wrestle for some reason. The next day, his group announced that he would answer all of Nye’s objections that evening, but I want to know why he didn’t do it during the debate. It’s a day too late, sir.

A few years ago, I visited The Creation Museum in Kentucky with my family and enjoyed it. My only complaint at the time was the occasional straw man you saw characterizing evolutionists. I would have been much more impressed if certain presentations had presented teachers of Darwinian evolution as serious scientific people who could handle the data. Other than that, it was a great museum. But we need more than this to overcome the big problem as Joel Belz presents it today:

“The big problem more and more is that those of us who profess to be believers have to such a large extent joined them in their silence. So theoretically, we are still creationists. But practically speaking, we don’t let our allegiance to that great truth affect us much in everyday life.”

Science is not a godless field of study, and Christian need not cede it to them. As Dr. Poythress explains in his booklet, Did Adam Exist? Darwin’s model of evolution is only one valid way of interpreting the data–not the best way and not the only way. Interpretations that include God’s designing hand are also valid.

Goofing, Religion

Twelve Reasons Why God Can’t Get Tenure, Rebuttal

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Twelve top reasons why God can’t get tenure (from the Internet of Yesteryear)

  1. He’s authored only one paper
  2. That paper was in Hebrew
  3. His work appeared in an obscure, unimportant publication
  4. He never references other authors
  5. Workers in the field can’t replicate His results.
  6. He failed to apply to the ethics committee before starting His experiments on humans.
  7. He tried to cover an experiment’s unsatisfatory results by drowning the subjects.
  8. When subjects behavior proved his theory wrong he had them removed from the sample.
  9. He hardly ever shows up for any lectures. He merely assigns His Book again and again.
  10. His office is at the top of a mountain, and He doesn’t keep office hours anyway.
  11. When He learned that His first two students sought wisdom, He had them expelled.
  12. His exams consist of only ten assigments which most students fail.

Rebuttal: Why God Did Receive Tenure.

  1. The one publication was a Citation Classic.
  2. The Hebrew original was widely translated courtesy of the author.
  3. Being written before journals existed, references were hard to come by.
  4. Original treatises that found a new area often require their own monograph.
  5. Although research has been sparse since the Creation, the professor has taught a number of courses: Human anatomy 212; Ancient Middle Eastern History 101, 102; Hydrology 207; Human Development 350; seminar on Egyptology; extended field trips to the deserts between Egypt and Palestine; Politics of Theocracies 277; Military Science Special Topic: Use of Voice as a Municipal Assault Weapon; Criminology 114; guest lectures in the Vet School: Digestive Anatomy of Whales; Wisdom & Ethics 550; Special seminar: Fertilization without sperm; Winemaking 870; Healing by miracle 987; Theology 101, 102, 230, 342, 350, 466H, and 980.
  6. The substitute teacher (son) was highly committed to his work.
  7. The substitute teacher cancelled the original ten requirements.
  8. The twelve teaching assistants formed numerous discussion groups.
  9. The substitute teacher knew students names without an attendance sheet.
  10. The professor’s weekly Sunday lectures by surrogate instructors are attended by 974 million students.