Category Archives: Religion

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.
Music, Religion

Yes, Even When He Is Silent

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Here we have the St. Olaf Choir with Conductor Anton Armstrong performing “Even When He Is Silent” by Kim André Arnesen. It was recorded at Nidaros Cathedral, Trondheim, Norway on June 16, 2013

The piece was commissioned by the St. Olaf Festival in Trondheim, Norway (Olavsfestdagene), using a text was found in a concentration camp after World War II:

“I believe in the sun, even when it’s not shining.

I believe in love, even when I feel it not.

I believe in God, even when He is silent.”

But, Lord, do not be silent or allow us to be deaf.

Poetry, Religion

Pilgrims’ Hymn by Stephen Paulus

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Pilgrim’s Hymn by Stephen Paulus

Even before we call on Your name

To ask You, O God,

When we seek for the words to glorify You,

You hear our prayer;

Unceasing love, O unceasing love,

Surpassing all we know.

Glory to the father,

and to the Son,

And to the Holy Spirit.

Even with darkness sealing us in,

We breathe Your name,

And through all the days that follow so fast,

We trust in You;

Endless Your grace, O endless Your grace,

Beyond all mortal dream.

Both now and forever,

And unto ages and ages,

Amen

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

Did Adam Exist?

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Can we still believe in a historical Adam? That’s the question Dr. Vern S. Poythress, professor of New Testament Interpretation at Westminster Theological Seminary, answers in this booklet. He talks through scientists’ claims that Adam and Eve could not have existed, starting with the claim that 99% of the DNA of humans and chimpanzees is identical. Is this accurate? What about an authoritative report that refers to both 99% and 96%? Is that a mistake? No, he observes, both figures come from an interpretation of data using a few restrictions. Without getting too deep for thoughtful readers, Dr. Poythress explains how the data is being interpreted to come up with these figures and what is being left unsaid.

Step by step, asking questions on every other page about what this bit of information could mean to the reader, Dr. Poythress gets to his main point: Darwinist evolution is a framework for interpreting scientific data, and there are other frameworks.

Scientific findings are often reported as unarguable facts, as conclusions naturally drawn from the unbiased data at hand. That simply isn’t true. If a scientist or science reporter assumes gradualism is true, interprets his data set accordingly, and then announces he has proven gradualism with his data, then he has begged the question. This kind of circular reasoning is common, and this booklet aims at tripping it up.

“[W]ithin the mainstream of modern culture, Darwinism is not seen as religious, but merely ‘neutral’ and ‘scientific’,” he writes, yet Darwinists claim to have disproven God’s existence, which is a religious and unscientific claim. Such unscientific claims are being made in the name of science all the time these days, and it falls to those who aren’t scared of religion to point this out.

Dr. Poythress doesn’t shy away from the fact that the Bible states Adam and Eve existed, but he doesn’t argue from the text or any research to prove the point. He is content to poke holes in the claims that they could not have existed as well as criticize the idea that Science sees all, knows all, and cannot be questioned.

This thoughtful, accessible booklet is part of a series from Westminster Seminary Press called “Christian Answers to Hard Questions.” I recommend it to anyone who is wrestling with how to reconcile scientific claims with biblical truths. (I received this title for free as an ebook through Netgalley.com.)

Religion

At What Price Liberty?

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Professor Alan Jacobs believes we will soon have the freedom to worship without much religious liberty, personal freedom to contemplate the divine on our own time without the liberty to exercise loving our neighbor in the name of Christ.

“I suspect that within my lifetime American Christians, at least those who hold traditional theological and more views, will be faced with a number of situations in which they will have to choose between compromising their consciences and civil disobedience. In such a situation there are multiple temptations. The most obvious is to silence the voice of conscience in order to get along. But there are also the temptations of responding in anger, in resentment, in bitterness, in vengeance. It might be a good exercise in self-examination for each of us to figure out which temptation is most likely for us.”