Monday, March 30, 2020
Crackdown on churches and synogogues
Friday, March 27, 2020
Chinese Christian fiction
Among writers in China, whose Marxist grand narrative has also stuttered to a stop, many contemporary novelists have identified openly with religious story, now not only Confucian or Buddhist but also the Christian grand narrative. (Among the prominent Christian novelists are Lao She, Xu Dishan, Bing Xing, and Mu Dan.) There is even a new literary style called sheng jing ti ("biblical"), whose characteristics are described as "objective, truthful, terse" (Aikman 254).
https://www.christianityandliterature.com/David-Jeffrey
Wednesday, March 18, 2020
Why Believe? A Reasoned Approach to the Christian Faith
Thursday, February 20, 2020
Why be Christian rather than Jewish?
There is only one Messiah, but there are two parts to his mission, hence two comings, but the first had to precede the destruction of the Second Temple as we learn from Haggai 2 (where God promised to fill the Second Temple with greater glory than the First Temple, yet the Second Temple did not have the Shekhinah or the divine fire or even the ark of the covenant); Malachi 3 (where the Lord Himself promised to visit the Second Temple and purge the priests and Levites); and Daniel 9 (where the measure of transgression and sin had to be filled up, atonement made for iniquity, and everlasting righteousness ushered in).
Yeshua fulfilled these prophecies, bringing the glory of God to the Temple with his own presence and sending the Spirit to his followers there, and as the Lord, visiting the Temple and purging and purifying the Jewish leadership. And the measure of transgression was filled up when the Messiah was crucified, at which time he made atonement for iniquity and ushered in eternal righteousness. And so Haggai, Malachi, and Daniel testify that the Messiah had to come before the Second Temple was destroyed.
This is why we also have two pictures of the Messiah’s coming, one meek and lowly, riding on a donkey (Zech 9:9), the other high and exalted, riding on the clouds (Dan 7:13-14). But these are not either-or pictures, they are both-and pictures. First he comes riding on a donkey, to be rejected by our people, to die for our sins, only to become a light to the nations of the earth; then he will return riding on the clouds, bringing judgment on the wicked, regathering his scattered people, and establishing God’s kingdom on the earth.
https://askdrbrown.org/library/dr-brown-notes-debate-yisroel-blumenthal-real-jewish-messiah
Saturday, February 08, 2020
Mother Teresa and the same God
Saturday, February 01, 2020
From son of Sam to son of God
Friday, January 31, 2020
Did Jesus die for Klingons?
Christian Weidemann argues:
Every major religion on Earth could easily accommodate the discovery of (intelligent) alien life, with one exception: Christianity....Now imagine the universe is teeming with other intelligent civilizations. What is a Christian believer supposed to say? Claiming that Christ died only for us, while the rest of the universe is screwed, would be incompatible with God’s love. If, however, earthly Jesus died for the whole universe, myriads of extraterrestrial sinners included, we would have to accept a geocentrism even more preposterous than the spatial variant. Neither is there a way out by suggesting that other intelligent species may not have been “fallen.” This proposal amounts to a negative human exceptionalism that is totally unbelievable, given that alien species are subject to the same general evolutionary mechanisms as we are. Natural selection favours “selfish” traits.
What about multiple incarnations? Here another difficulty of traditional Christian doctrine comes into play: Christ has two natures—he is “truly God and truly man.” But how are members of completely different biological species (“truly man” and “truly Klingon,” let’s say) supposed to stand in a relationship of personal identity? Even worse, if the number of sinful species in the universe exceeds a certain threshold, God would be forced to incarnate himself simultaneously. However, no single person who is an embodied being with a finite nature, i.e. a “truly” biological organism, can be more than one such being at the same time. If, on the other hand, the incarnations were not personally identical, many different persons with a divine nature would result—too many even for a Christian. Finally: May extraterrestrial sinners have been reconciled to God by means different from a divine incarnation? Perhaps, but even if the Christian believer concedes alternative means of salvation she is stuck with the highly implausible geocentric claim that the incarnation, i.e. one of the most remarkable events in the history of the cosmos, happens just 2000 years ago on our planet, although myriads of other inhabited planets were also available.
Therefore, I conclude, the traditional Christian believer can’t make theological sense of extraterrestrial intelligent life.
(Source)
1. And this is from a lecturer in Protestant theology! With "friends" like these...
2. Why isn't it possible for Christ to have died "only" for humans? Suppose intelligent aliens exist, but suppose they likewise rebelled against God. So they're fallen too. In that case, why should God's "love" extend to rebels? What about God's justice? Is it "incompatible with God's love" if God doesn't rescue Satan and the fallen angels?
3. Is it "preposterous" if an "earthly Jesus" died for other extraterrestrials? What if other extraterrestrials in the universe are also human?
4. Weidemann assumes evolutionary mechanisms shape our morality, but that's highly contentious. He'd have to mount a case for this for a start.
Besides, just because an act is "selfish" doesn't necessarily mean it's sinful. It's selfish for me to walk on the beach alone when I could be having a conversation with a friend, but it's not necessarily sinful for me to do so.
In theory it's possible aliens could have evolutionarily "selfish traits". Such as caring more about themselves than other aliens. But that's not necessarily sinful. Just like it's possible humans might care more about other humans than other animals, but still care for other animals.
5. The multiple incarnations dilemma is an interesting one. Granted, I'm no philosopher or theologian, but I'll try to take a stab at this:
a. For one thing, why assume "God would be forced to incarnate himself simultaneously"? Why couldn't God incarnate himself sequentially?
b. What's more, even if the Son of God incarnated himself simultaneously, I don't see how this would be problematic if, as most traditional Christians believe, God is outside spacetime. Why couldn't a timeless God have multiple instances of himself at multiple points in the spacetime continuum? Take the fiction of C. S. Lewis. Lewis wrote about Aslan in Narnia as well as Maleldil in Perelandra. We know Lewis meant both to be the Son of God. I envision Narnia and Perelandra sort of (not quite) paralleling other worlds. (Indeed, consider whether God the Son could have become incarnate in parallel universes rather than other worlds within the same universe.)
c. I assume some form of Cartesian dualism is true. If so, then it's possible for humans to become disembodied. Our souls can be decoupled from our bodies (at death). We live on despite the death of our physical bodies. Meanwhile our corpses rot away; they become dust and ashes. At the same time, God promises his people new bodies in the world to come. As such, it's possible for our souls to inhabit more than one body. (As an aside, this likewise calls to mind scifi shows like Altered Carbon where people have their minds uploaded to a cloud, then downloaded to various bodies.)
Why couldn't something like this be true of the Son of God too? However an objection might be humans cannot possess more than one body at the same time. Perhaps a response could be that that's not necessarily the case for the Son of God. For one thing, he is omnipresent, unlike humans.
d. As far as the issue of identity, was the Son of God's pre-resurrection body identical to his post-resurrection body, given his pre-resurrection body died and deteriorated?
e. Weidemann floats the rejoinder that the salvation of extraterrestrials could have occurred with "alternative means of salvation" absent the incarnation (I agree). However, he immediately dismisses it because it means the Christian is "geocentric". However I don't see what's necessarily wrong with "geocentrism"? Why is it necessarily morally problematic for God to have saved Earthlings by having the incarnation (and crucifixion and resurrection)?
If anything, wouldn't the incarnation imply how far the moral rot in humans has spread that God the Son had to become flesh like us to save us rather than implying anything virtuous about humans? There's no room for pride in the criminal who had to have another pay for his crimes because he had no other options for restitution left to him.
Saturday, January 18, 2020
Dark planet
I grew up in a deeply religious household on the prairie of Manitoba, Canada's "keystone" province (so we self-importantly told each other in school), with a father who, when I was a child, sang me to sleep with songs about Jesus he himself had written. We lived far from any town and were very poor; my dad, though in some ways a startlingly creative individual, suffered from a variety of complexly interwoven physical and mental troubles that undermined his every worldly endeavor. It was left to my mother, a salt of the earth type and my father's opposite, to help us hold body and soul together–and also to my siblings, much older than I, who one by one left home and through ingenuity and grit made a better way in the world, and then supported Mom and Dad and me with the fruits of their labors.Alone on the prairie with my parents, feeling a loyalty to them and to their God, stirred by what I took to be God's presence in the whirling wind and sky and my inmost thoughts, atheism was unthinkable (I don't believe I even knew the word). I wrote my own songs about Jesus. In three years of Bible and musical training after high school I also sang them (I come from a family of singers). During one year as associate pastor of a Mennonite Church in Alberta I preached the Word as diligently and fervently as anyone. It was only after all this–after I too left home, both literally and metaphorically, discovering all the books about the deeper things of life from which I had been cuff off, that religious questions began to arise in me.They arose quite quickly, as I recall, and although there was considerable pain in letting go of childhood beliefs and experiences at odds with the new insights generated by biblical criticism and philosophical argumentation, and although my loyalties did not shift swiftly, there was also a sheer exhilaration at the ideas I found. It was as though they had always been waiting for me, or I for them. And even after the shift occurred, there was still a felt continuity with my previous self, who so earnestly and naively proclaimed to others the "truth" about God. For although I had lost a passel of beliefs, I was still committed to the truth in my newfound vocation as a philosopher. Indeed, an unrelenting and scrupulous pursuit of truth and understanding–a fierce and unwavering desire to know the truth, whatever it might be–was something I now set before myself as worthy of cultivation much more consciously and earnestly than I had ever done before.One of the ideas that intrigued me in my early days as a nonbeliever (I was not yet a disbeliever), even as it deepened my doubt and thus simultaneously troubled me, was the germ of the hiddenness reasoning I mentioned in the previous chapter in connection with the notion of religious ambiguity.Considering the arguments for an against God's existence and evaluating the intellectual worth of my religious experiences, I at first found myself with just the sense conveyed in the writings of Hick and Penelhum: that the world was somehow religiously ambiguous, equally open to theistic and non-theistic interpretations.Let me say a bit more about the "naturalness" of nonbelief in many parts of our culture, which is of central importance here. For people who spend all their time in the bosom of a deeply religious community, say, your typical small town with ten churches in the American Midwest or the Manitoba prairie, religious nonbelief may seem to be deeply unnatural. They and almost everyone they talk to–in the hall, on the street, in the post office, in restaurants–takes the existence of God for granted much as people take for granted that the grass is green and that the sun rises in the east. Their life, in this respect, is similar to that of people in Europe 800 years ago, who lived in a time when pretty much every department of living was saturated with the assumption of God's existence. And yet even their lives are profoundly different from the lives of the medievals in ways that have the fingerprints of secularity all over them. J. L. Schellenberg The Hiddenness Argument: Philosophy's New Challenge to Belief in God (Oxford 2015), 35-37, 83.
Sunday, September 01, 2019
The bachelorette
1. I hesitate to even comment on this. For one thing, I find shows like The Bachelorette too worldly. There are far better things to consider in life.
For another, I just don't care for these sorts of shows. I have never watched The Bachelorette or The Bachelor. Nor do I plan to. Not unless the bachelorettes and bachelors featured involve space aliens shooting space lasers at each other in space wars!
And even if these shows were valuable (which I'd say they're not), they're so ephemeral. Who's going to remember any of the contestants a generation from now? Rather the contestants would do well to heed Ecclesiastes' message: hebel. Life is a vapor. A mere breath. A chasing after the wind. Fleeting. Or as James puts it: "What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes" (4:14).
2. That said, the latest season apparently starred a professing Christian bachelorette named Hannah Brown along with another professing Christian bachelor named Luke Parker. I saw a few clips of them. Evidently the most talked (gossiped?) about moment on the show was when Hannah kicked Luke off the show for (according to Hannah) "slut shaming" her for having had premarital sex multiple times, which she all but boasted about. Indeed she gave him the middle finger. And she insisted and continues to insist "Jesus still loves me".
3. I made comments about how either Hannah needs to repent of her sexual sin and live like a Christian or stop professing to be a Christian if she wishes to continue in her sexual sin. Hannah's legions of "sisters" came to her defense against me. All of them were likewise professing Christians. They seemed to take what I said quite personally and criticized me for what I said about Hannah.
4. All of them told me how judgmental I was (or words to that effect). Ironic how these women judge me for being judgmental...but Hannah gets a free pass, their sympathy, forgiveness, love, and acceptance from them. Of course, the Bible doesn't say we should never judge anyone, period. Rather the Bible teaches us we should "judge with right judgment" (Jn 7:24).
This and other things the professing Christian women said to me illustrated how biblically illiterate they are. That seems to be a growing trend. Christians should be a people of the Book.
5. The kind of Christianity espoused by Hannah and her sisters is more akin to moralistic therapeutic deism than biblical Christianity.
6. It's interesting how so many women often idolize other people. Take women at concerts. Jumping up and down, tearing their hair out, in a state of frenzy. I mean, men go to concerts too, but we don't go gaga over rockstars like women do.
As such, I suspect what's partly happening with these professing Christian women defending Hannah is that she's an idol for them. They identify with her. Or at the very least she's a heroine to them. A professing Christian like they are, trying to find true love. And criticism against Hannah is tantamount to criticism against them.
If so, I'd say these women need better heroines. Why settle for someone like The Bachelorette's Hannah rather than (say) the Bible's Hannah? Or the Bible's Sarah, Zipporah, Deborah, Jael, Rahab, Ruth, Esther, Anna, Elizabeth, Mary, the Samaritan woman at the well, Martha and her sister Mary, Lydia, etc. Or women like Anne Bradstreet, Christina Rossetti, Selina Countess of Huntingdon, Ann Judson, Amy Carmichael, Helen Roseveare, Corrie ten Boom, Bethan Lloyd-Jones, Susanna Wesley, Sarah Edwards, etc.
These are the sorts of women of whom the world was not worthy. By contrast, at this point in her life Hannah Brown strikes me as a woman indistinguishable from the world.
Monday, August 19, 2019
Diet Eman
Like Corrie ten Boom, Diet Eman is a Dutch Christian who helped Jews and resisted the Nazis during World War II. She's also honored as a "righteous gentile" by Israel. Her testimony about her time in the war is edifying to listen to and it likewise holds lessons for us today. In the end, in life or death, the only certainty is God with us if we are his.
Saturday, August 17, 2019
Family ten Boom
(The ten Boom family in 1895. Top row: Cor (mother), Casper (father), family friend. Middle row: Aunt Jans, Aunt Bep, Aunt Anna. Bottom row: Willem, Corrie, Nollie, and Betsie. Betsie was the eldest child, Willem second, Nollie third, and Corrie the youngest.)
1. It seems to me the ten Boom family had many faithful Christians (Dutch Reformed) across several generations. At least as far back as the early 1800s. Apparently they were always poor watchmakers but everyone in their community knew and respected them.
Their home was always open. They held Bible studies and prayer meetings in their home. They always welcomed guests. They always contributed to their community (e.g. lending what money they had). Not only to help Jews, but also others like missionaries and their kids (e.g. missionaries from the Dutch East Indies aka modern Indonesia).
In this respect Corrie ten Boom wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary in helping Jews since her family had always been doing the same for generations. In fact, though Corrie was most famous (because she lived to tell the tale), her other immediate family members seemed to have done more than Corrie did during the war. Today Corrie, her sister Betsie, and her father Casper are honored as "the righteous among the nations" by Israel. Yad Vashem is Israel's official Shoah (Holocaust) museum to honor the deceased; Yad Vashem honors the ten Boom family too.
2. However, from what I can tell, World War II effectively wiped out most if not all the ten Boom family (e.g. Corrie's father Casper died 10 days into his imprisonment in Scheveningen prison, Corrie's eldest sister Betsie died in Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944). The few that survived the war died soon after (e.g. Corrie's brother Wilhem who was a pastor died in 1946 from an infectious disease he contracted in a concentration camp), never married or had kids (e.g. Corrie ten Boom), or their kids were never heard from again (e.g. Corrie's nephew was never seen again and most likely died in a concentration camp).
3. Sometimes Christians can be utterly faithful and committed to God, but it doesn't necessarily end well for them. Their branch is cut off from the tree. Indeed their family ends precisely because they were faithful.
4. That stands in stark contrast to professing Christians today who have a mindset that God is always going to bless them in terms of material success. As if a relationship with God is a quid pro quo relationship.
5. It likewise stands in stark contrast to those who prosper because of their wickedness. Consider Psalm 73.
6. I suppose that's one reason why biblical wisdom literature includes both the book of Proverbs as well as the book of Ecclesiastes. To (over?)simplify, Proverbs is about the general moral norms of life, while Ecclesiastes is about the hard cases in life. It's one thing to walk on a clear and bright day, but it's another to walk when the sunlight has dimmed, when the shadows creep in, when the darkness envelops.
Monday, July 29, 2019
Last call
By Os Guinness
The name Moltke had resounded proudly through two centuries of Prussian and German history. Count Helmuth Carl Bernhard von Moltke had been Chancellor Bismarck's field marshal and the terrible, swift sword wielded in his crushing German victories over the Danes, the Austrians, and the French. The field marshal's greatest est triumph, the destruction of the French Imperial Army at Sedan in 1871, had led to the capture of Paris and the creation of the German Empire.
Saturday, July 27, 2019
I kissed marriage and Christianity goodbye
View this post on InstagramA post shared by Joshua Harris (@harrisjosh) on
1. Josh Harris made the announcement about no longer being a Christian after he made an announcement that he and his wife are "separating" from one another. Here he explicitly says it's a "divorce".
Saturday, July 20, 2019
Apollo 11
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon. Buzz Aldrin followed immediately behind him. Michael Collins was in orbit around the moon in the command module.
Monday, July 15, 2019
Modern Joseph and Mary
I've seen some Christians calling the above modern-day Joseph and Mary artwork "blasphemous". They argue it's "blasphemous" due to "political expediency" and because it's "disgusting" to depict the holy family in a plain manner.
- Political expediency.
a. I don't know that the artist's intention is about politics at all. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. However, I wouldn't be able to tell based on the art alone. At most, I could see some hints, but it's not entirely clear to me.
b. If the artwork is about politics, then presumably it's in light of illegal immigration and/or refugees. If so, then I'd disagree that illegal immigrants and refugees across the border are in the same situation as Joseph and Mary. At the very least, the artist arguing for a parallel between the two would need to present an argument, but I don't see any argument presented.
c. However, even if the artist's intention is to parallel Joseph and Mary with illegal immigration, it's possible to divorce the image from its political connotations. At least it's possible to have the same kind of image which is apolitical.
d. And even if it's somehow immoral to parallel Joseph and Mary with illegal immigrants or political refugees seeking asylum in the United States, how is that necessarily blasphemous too? It's unethical for me to steal, but theft isn't blasphemous, per se.
- It's "disgusting" to depict Mary and Joseph as plain.
a. There's a visceral reaction in the use of the word "disgusting". What's that based on? Besides, something can be disgusting, but not blasphemous.
b. I don't see what's necessarily wrong with depicting "the holy family" as more homely than we might imagine. Aren't most people average-looking? Nothing wrong with that.
I take it most Christians believe Isaiah 53 is messianic prophecy. Isa 53:2b describes the Messiah as one who "had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him". As such, it seems Jesus had at best average looks. Typically children tend to look like their parents. If a child has average looks, then it's likely their parents have average looks too. I'm speaking a general rule, but of course there may be exceptions.
Should we expect Joseph to look as handsome as Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Chris Hemsworth, or Jaime Dornan? Should we expect Mary to look as beautiful as Margot Robbie, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Lawrence, or Alison Brie?
c. Suppose it's somehow immoral to depict Mary and Joseph as plain. Even so, not all things that are unethical are necessarily blasphemous too.
Let's take me as an example. I don't want to brag, but objectively speaking I'm so devastatingly handsome, tall, and well-built that beautiful women swoon at the sight of me irl. I know, I know, it's a curse. At any rate, it would be inaccurate to have an uglier actor like Henry Cavill play my part. What's more, perhaps it might even be unethical (arguendo) to inaccurately depict me as uglier than I am. Nevertheless, I don't see how it's likewise necessarily blasphemous. For one thing, I'm just a human being.
Wouldn't that be the case for Joseph and Mary too? Can one commit blasphemy against other humans?
Does having Jesus as their child somehow change what it means to blaspheme?
Thursday, June 13, 2019
Who is your favorite philosopher?
Cameron Bertuzzi at Capturing Christianity asks: who is your favorite philosopher?
Of course, one could name famous philosophers across the ages like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Peter Abelard, Leibniz, Descartes, Kant, Hume, Reid, Paley, Gosse, Nietzsche, Sartre, Wittgenstein.
Alternatively, one could name modern philosophers like Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, Bas van Fraassen, Richard Swinburne, Tim and Lydia McGrew, David Chalmers, John Searle, Thomas Nagel, Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, Graham Oppy, John Haldane, Peter Geach, Elizabeth Anscombe, Bertrand Russell, Alasdair Macintyre, Charles Taylor, David Oderberg, William Lane Craig, J.P. Moreland, Gary Habermas, William Dembski, Doug Groothuis, Win Corduan, Greg Welty, James Anderson, Paul Manata, Tim Hsiao.
Perhaps some might even consider a place for "philosophers" like C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Francis Schaeffer, R.C. Sproul, Ravi Zacharias, James Sire, Dallas Willard, Peter Kreeft, Ayn Rand.
However, I'd like to take a different tack and name a philosopher that seems woefully underappreciated today. My favorite philosopher is the ancient Chinese sage Sum Tin Wong. Wong founded an influential school of Eastern philosophy that may not be well-esteemed among contemporary professional philosophers but that has a wide following in many regions of the world. For example, consider the tremendous influence of Wong's disciples who played Mencius to his Confucius: He He, Ai Bang Mai Ni, and No Khi Ding. Not to mention Wong's school has left us with a plethora of wit and wisdom such as "May you live in interesting times", "Snowflake in avalanche never feel responsible", "Lucky numbers 60, 2, 2140, 857, 10, 23", and "About time I get out of this cookie". In addition, many Westerners have been indirectly influenced by Wong. Consider the likes of Yogi Berra, Charles Barkley, your local bartender, and the masterminds behind the NYT best-sellers The Shack and The Secret.
My deep and abiding hope is more professional analytic philosophers will take Sum Tin Wong and his school of philosophy at least as seriously as they take continental philosophy.
Tuesday, May 28, 2019
10 days till heaven
Jon Tilson passed away 10 days later. His daughter Sarah Phillips writes more about him in "How cancer healed my dad".
Friday, March 22, 2019
Racial inclusivism
Furthermore, language cuts across racial lines inasmuch as members of the same race frequently speak different languages while members different races frequently speak the same language.