Resurrection!!!

Easter is all about celebrating the real, physical, historical resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

I think most of us are on the same page with this one, but you might find some of this interesting:

NT Wright:

Lee Strobel:

William Craig Lane:

Happy Easter!

Should the Church accept Evolution?

This one could open a can of worms!

What do you make of this?

"... but the LORD was not in the earthquake."

While my title is a blatant mis-quote of 1 Kings 19:11 this phrase has really struck me.

It seems as though every few years there is some sort of huge natural catastrophe that brings uncomfortable issues to the forefront of our minds. As long as the media pushes these to the front-page we feel some sort of compassion/obligation to toss a few dollars to the Red Cross or some other agency, but for the most part as soon as the media lets the issue go we slip back into our egocentric, ethnocentric lives.

How do we deal with natural evil?

Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes... or even cancer for that matter. How do we deal with these? Who do we blame? We have no person, no human to blame. I don't think we can blame it on Satan either. When nature strikes who do we blame? Who is there to blame except God?

These are the uncomfortable questions we often push to the back of our minds until life gets back to "normal."

If you have a couple of minutes check out 38:40-41:40 of the video below. The moderator is asking Nancey Murphy what current issues are facing the world of philosophy, theology, and science (she is an expert on the interrelatedness of these 3) that need to be dealt with.

Of course, her answer is: natural evil.

I find her answer interesting. Traditionally, Christians have said that natural evil is the result of moral evil or sin. Of course, as our understanding of science has progressed (she says) this sort of answer doesn't fit with the way the world actually functions.

According to Murphy neither the sinfulness of man nor the wrath of God are directly responsible for natural evil. Instead she says (obviously from a scientific perspective... [how does that shape our theology?]) that if humanity is to exist at all we need a world with tectonic plates. In other words, for any life of any kind to survive on this planet it requires a world with volcanoes and earthquakes. And thus God created our world that way.

What do you make of that?

You don't need to have some sort of fancy intellectual insight.

What sorts of things run through your mind when you see events like we have now in Haiti?

The Mystery of Faith

In what little spare time I've had recently I've been reading through G.K. Chesterton's oft-overlooked classic, "Orthodoxy." Published in 1908, Orthodoxy is Chesterton's view of apologetics (along with "Heretics" which I haven't read).


What I've been struck by as I've read this book is how countercultural Chesterton's views were. He was writing in the midst of the height of modernity. The "Myth of Progress" was in full swing and yet Chesterton says, "I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century. I did, like all other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age. Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it..." (Chesterton 4). What modern Englishman would ever call the enlightenment ambitions "idiotic"?



He almost sounds like a postmodernist!



While he doesn't reject reason and logic outright he says that they need to be balanced by mysticism. “Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity” (Chesterton 23).


Orthodoxy is Chesterton's call for Christians to regain the mystery and adventure of Christianity. Stories say that Chesterton, a big fat jolly man, walked everywhere with a sword-cane (a walking stick with a sword hidden in the handle) just in case he ran into an adventure!



Do we as Christians need to regain our sense of adventure?
... of mystery?
What might that look like?

The Limitations of God

So I've been reading this book called "The Language of God" (it's all about genetics and DNA and how science and faith should be working together instead of bickering) and there's a section talking about the limitations of God that reminded me of something that happened back in high school.

I think I was in grade 11 or 12 when this happened. I was talking to some atheist acquaintance of mine who decided to prove to me that God didn't exist. The conversation went a little something like this:

Atheist Guy: So you believe in God, right?

Tim: Yah.

AG: And you think God is all powerful, right?

T: Yah.

AG: So, can God create a rock that is so big even he can't lift it?

T: Huh?

And that was about it. I was so taken off guard by this obviously inane question that I had no idea what to say... and my

acquaintance won the day.

[I know he's not God but don't you just love my picture of an ultra ripped Atlas holding up the world... that's the best I could come up with.]

By now I've heard a number of other variations of this question:

"Can God create a 'round' square?"

"Can God create a 'person' who isn't a person?"

They are all the same silly pointless question just phrased a little differently. Now that I'm at least a little bit more clever than I was back then I would just answer, "Nope" and be done with it.

While some people may be uncomfortable saying that God has limitations I think that it's pretty obvious from scripture that he does. After all, in Hebrews 6:18 it says that, "...it is impossible for God to lie..." And look at 2 Timothy 2:13 - "...if we are faithless, he remains faithful -- for he cannot deny himself."

God has very clear limitations. He cannot be self-contradictory. For him to be self-contradictory would mean that he would cease to be who he is... God! That is why God cannot lie; he is the source and personification of all truth.

Have you ever had conversations like this? How did it go?

What other variations of this question have you heard?

How do we reconcile the two ideas of an all powerful God and a God that has limitations?

Out of date = Out of mind

So, this semester I'm taking a class again at Bethany. This one is "Christian Apologetics". For those of you who may not know, apologetics can be briefly defined as "defending and commending the faith."

Ever since first reading CS Lewis' non-fiction more than a decade ago I've been interested in apologetics. Naturally, it all started when I first read Lewis' "Mere Christianity", the all-time classic Apologetic book.

I think it's important that Christians think through what they believe and why they believe it. I think it's important that Christians know they don't live in a vacuum. We live in a world that we are called to interact with. As such, we will have to be "prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you" 1 Peter 3:15 (ESV). This verse is often used as a basis for Christian Apologetics.


There may be a few of you out there who have read both Lewis' "Mere Christianity" and NT Wright's "Simply Christian". Essentially, Wright wrote his book to be the "Mere Christianity" of

the post-modern age. It is.


Anyway, the point of all this is that I have a little beef with Apologetics and North American Christianity in general: why are we always several decades behind the times?


Have you ever been frustrated at how Christian culture often sees a trend in the world then goes to work making a crappy, B-rate, "Christian" knock-off version of it... and by the time it's out there it's already out of date?
Any examples?


My beef with apologetics is that you can see a similar trend. Every once in a while there is a CS Lewis or an NT Wright who is a true contemporary of his day or even ahead of the times but they are few and far between. It seems as though many, if not most, apologists are still trying to address the questions posed by modernity when the rest of society has moved on to post-modernity.


Thus they render themselves obsolete to everyone but those Christians who read their books and become obsolete themselves.


People won't even consider the church as a source of the answers to life's hard questions if we're completely culturally irrelevant.


Out of date = Out of mind.


Am I being too hard on these people? Probably.
Is apologetics still relevant in a Post-Modern age?
Who is apologetics for; Christians or non-Christians?
Which is more important; "defending" or "commending" our faith?
What examples of crappy "Christian" knock-off trends can you think of?