The Worldwide Lockdown May Be the Greatest Mistake in History

The United Nations World Food Programme, or the WFP, states that by the end of the year, more than 260 million people will face starvation — double last year’s figures. According to WFP director David Beasley on April 21: “We could be looking at famine in about three dozen countries. … There is also a real danger that more people could potentially die from the economic impact of COVID-19 than from the virus itself” (italics added).

That would be enough to characterize the worldwide lockdown as a deathly error. But there is much more. If global GDP declines by 5%, another 147 million people could be plunged into extreme poverty, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute.

Foreign Policy magazine reports that, according to the International Monetary Fund, the global economy will shrink by 3% in 2020, marking the biggest downturn since the Great Depression, and the U.S., the eurozone and Japan will contract by 5.9%, 7.5% and 5.2%, respectively. Meanwhile, across South Asia, as of a month ago, tens of millions were already “struggling to put food on the table.” Again, all because of the lockdowns, not the virus.

In one particularly incomprehensible act, the government of India, a poor country of 1.3 billion people, locked down its people. As Quartz India reported on April 22, “Coronavirus has killed only around 700 Indians … a small number still compared to the 450,000 TB and 10,000-odd malaria deaths recorded every year.”

One of the thousands of unpaid garment workers protesting the lockdown in Bangladesh understands the situation better than almost any health official in the world: “We are starving. If we don’t have food in our stomach, what’s the use of observing this lockdown?” But concern for that Bangladeshi worker among the world’s elites seems nonexistent.

The lockdown is “possibly even more catastrophic (than the virus) in its outcome: the collapse of global food-supply systems and widespread human starvation” (italics added). That was published in the left-wing The Nation, which, nevertheless, enthusiastically supports lockdowns. But the American left cares as much about the millions of non-Americans reduced to hunger and starvation because of the lockdown as it does about the people of upstate New York who have no incomes, despite the minuscule number of coronavirus deaths there. Or about the citizens of Oregon, whose governor has just announced the state will remain locked down until July 6. As of this writing, a total of 109 people have died of the coronavirus in Oregon.

https://www.dennisprager.com/column/the-worldwide-lockdown-may-be-the-greatest-mistake-in-history/

The 500 eyewitnesses

One of the sillier objections to Paul's appeal to 500 eyewitnesses (1 Cor 15:6) is that Paul doesn't name them. But what difference would that make? These aren't famous men. Even if he named them, few 1C readers would recognize the individuals by name. And of course, modern readers are in no position to identify them even if they were named. If Paul listed them by name, they'd be anonymous to us, given our historical distance. So the objection is just a distraction. 

Inerrancy and evidentialism

I hesitate to do another post on the evidentialist/presuppositionalist debate because I don't wish to belabor the issue, but when I happen to be thinking about something, I tend to do a series of posts on the same topic because that's what I have on my mind. So here's one more post.

I recently said I like the evidentialist menu. In addition, evidentialists produce a lot of firstrate apologetic material. 

However, a fundamental problem with evidentialism is it's neutrality or noncommittal attitude about inerrancy. An evidentialist can affirm or deny inerrancy. Both positions are consistent with evidentialism.

But once you surrender inerrancy, you're free to surrender other biblical teachings. Anything that you feel is too awkward or inconvenient to defend. Anything that might be a stumbling block to people coming to the faith. Anything you yourself would like to get rid of.

The problem with that attitude is that evidentialism makes Christianity theologically unstable. It suffers from an identity crisis. There's no built-in limit on what biblical teachings you can jettison. It comes down to your personal assessment of what constitutes the core of Christianity. The underlying problem is that evidentialism fails to take seriously the nature of Christianity as a revealed religion.

By contrast, presuppositionalists don't treat biblical teachings as negotiable and expendable. Now we might ask if that's an implication of presuppositionalism or just a reflection of the religious culture in which presuppositionalists operate. 

I'd say it's an implication of presuppositionalism. Basically, evidentialists approach the Bible as historians while presuppositionalists approach the Bible as theologians. And presuppositionalists are right about that. Of course, that's not deny the historicity of Scripture. But Christianity is a religion. It's about God and God's relation to the world he made. 

And it's not as if the Bible is a secular record of sacred history. Bible writers are agents of sacred history. They have a divine vocation in redemptive history. They aren't just spectators of divine activity in redemptive history; rather, God acts in them and through them as divine spokesmen and witnesses. In that regard, presuppositionalism has a more holistic and integrated viewpoint. 

(Gary Habermas) Answering Objections to the Resurrection

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csWztRxbfo8

Does Evolution disprove Christianity?

One of those Bambi meets Godzilla debates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Idyy8p4lShc&t=4616s

In addition to Jonathan's performance, a few observations of my own:

1. Jonathan McLatchie is well-qualified to discuss the issue. That said, the title is ambiguous. It could mean does evolution, if true, disprove Christianity. Or it could mean evolution fails to disprove Christianity because evolution is false.

2. A couple of issues:

i) Lim thinks disease is incompatible with God's existence, but diseases perform a necessary function in maintaining that balance of nature. In addition, most organisms were never designed to be immortal. 

ii) Lim fails to understand that there are constraints on what an omnipotent God can do by natural means. In many cases, God can bypass natural processes to produce a result directly, but if God is creating a cause/effect world, and God is using a physical medium, then that's a self-imposed limitation on God's field of action.

3. We also need to distinguish between Christianity and generic theism or perfect being theology. Even if we posit that disease is incompatible with an abstract concept of God that's a philosophical construct, the existence of disease in no way disproves the existence of the Biblical God. In Scripture, God coexists with disease. So disease in no way counts as evidence against the existence of Christian theism, but is entirely consistent with the God of the Bible.

4. Lim acts like the Genesis creation account indicates that God made all the species from the outset. But Gen 1 doesn't detail the species. Gen 1 doesn't preclude adaptation. Gen 1 refers to a few general taxonomies based on their natural habitat (land animals, freshwater or marine organisms).

5.  Since the issue of how best to interpret Genesis came up, here's a free, recent book: https://frame-poythress.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/PoythressVernInterpretingEdenAGuideToFaithfullyReadingAndUnderstandingGenesis1-3.pdf 

6. Lim constantly raises hypothetical objections to Christianity, but ignores al the evidence. He mentions prayer, but there are countless examples of answered prayer. The fact that many prayers go unanswered doesn't cancel out the evidence for the prayer requests that God does grant.

7. Lim then trots out Sai Babba, but from what I've read, there's lots of evidence that he's a fraud.

8. There are multiple problems with Lim's appeal to alleged pagan parallels between Jesus and hero archetypes:

i) You can't legitimately compare a well-documented historical figure with fictional characters in pagan mythology. Jesus is a historical figure. We have 1C historical sources documenting his life. 1C sources about a 1C individual. 

ii) You also have to take into account the chronological gap between a historical figure like, say, Buddha, and the dates of our earliest sources. 

iii) In addition, you have to take into account the Jewish worldview of the NT, which precludes pagan syncretism.

iv) Did the NT writers even have access to the pagan sources? 

v) How specific are the alleged parallels?

Investigating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ

I recently skimmed Andrew Loke, Investigating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ: A New Transdisciplinary Approach (Routledge 2020).

Upsides:

• Detailed, comprehensive, and up-to-date. 

• Benefits from extensive engagement with various writings by Richard Carrier. Bart Ehrman is another target. As is Dale Allison. 

• Likewise, he targets more recent critics like Larry Shapiro and David Litwa

• Craig Keener is well represented, including his recent Christobiography.

• Personal correspondence with Timothy McGrew has sharpened his arguments. 

Downsides

• Despite the subtitle, I don't see that his monograph breaks new ground. 

• Unrevised first editions of Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, as well as the unrevised first edition of Moreland & Craig's Philosophical Foundations for Christian Worldview.

• Dated commentaries. Apparently the library at Hong Kong Baptist doesn't have much of a budget for commentaries. 

The upshot is that this is definitely one of the best defenses of the Resurrection. However, this is well-trodden ground with major competition. And there's lots of overlap.

Were the Canaanites Nephilim?

One of the stranger justifications I sometimes run across for the holy war commands against the Canaanites is the claim that the Canaanites weren't human. They were Nephilim. Angel/human hybrids. There are some problems with that interpretation:

i) That's not a reason given for why they were to be cleared from the Promised Land.

ii) If they were hybrids, they'd have superhuman abilities, so it's unclear how they could be defeated by the inferior Israelites. 

In principle, God could provide divine assistance to level the playing field, but in general the war narratives don't have the Israelites using anything other than conventional means.

What is presuppositionalism getting at?

There are different aspects to the evidentialist/presuppositionalist debate. Some of these are tedious and superficial. 

One question is the role of transcendental arguments in Christian apologetics. Do these make a necessary contribution to Christian apologetics? I'd say they do.

Should they be the centerpiece of Christian apologetics? Here I'd demure. I think inductive arguments for the Resurrection, the canon of scripture, the argument from prophecy, the biographical accuracy of the Gospels, and the reliability of the Greek/Hebrew text of Scripture are more directly germane to the Christian faith than most transcendental arguments for God, so in that respect I think inductive arguments should be front and center. 

But to some extent this is a matter of expertise. In the age of modern logic, with modal logic, Bayesian probability theory and other suchlike, formulating philosophically rigorous arguments for Christianity becomes a very technical exercise, and so you have philosophers who specialize on particular kinds of arguments (e.g. Pruss on the contingency argument, Collins on the fine-turning argument, Maydole on ontological arguments). 

That said, presuppositionalism isn't primarily about apologetic methodology or even transcendental arguments. It runs much deeper than that. It's about the nature of God, reality, and God's relation to the world. What kinds of things rely on God for their existence? Is it confined to truths of fact and contingent entities, or does it include necessary truths, abstract objects, and moral realism? Are logic, numbers, and possible worlds independent of God or do they have their grounding in God? A God who's the source of these things is a more fundamental being than a God who is not. A greater being. So this is ultimately about theology. 

James Anderson on presuppositionalism

Here's an outstanding exposition and defense of Van Tilian presuppositionalism: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EguVuY5HVkA

I'll venture a few observations:

1. Let's begin with some definitions:

As standardly conceived, transcendental arguments are taken to be distinctive in involving a certain sort of claim, namely that X is a necessary condition for the possibility of Y—where then, given that Y is the case, it logically follows that X must be the case too.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendental-arguments/

Transcendental arguments are partly non-empirical, often anti-skeptical arguments focusing on necessary enabling conditions either of coherent experience or the possession or employment of some kind of knowledge or cognitive ability, where the opponent is not in a position to question the fact of this experience, knowledge, or cognitive ability, and where the revealed preconditions include what the opponent questions. Such arguments take as a premise some obvious fact about our mental life—such as some aspect of our knowledge, our experience, our beliefs, or our cognitive abilities—and add a claim that some other state of affairs is a necessary condition of the first one. Transcendental arguments most commonly have been deployed against a position denying the knowability of some extra-mental proposition, such as the existence of other minds or a material world. Thus these arguments characteristically center on a claim that, for some extra-mental proposition P, the indisputable truth of some general proposition Q about our mental life requires that P.

https://www.iep.utm.edu/trans-ar/

2. Apropos (1), Anderson defines presuppositionalism partly in terms of presenting an internal critique of non-Christian worldviews. One way of putting this is that non-Christian worldviews lack the metaphysical resources to provide the necessary enabling conditions for coherent experience or the possession or employment of some kind of knowledge or cognitive ability. 

3. Is presuppositionalism circular? In a sense, but not viciously so. Take a transcendental argument which posits that knowledge/truth/human rationality possible, and Christian metaphysics provides the necessary enabling conditions. That's circular in the sense that it takes for granted the possibility of knowledge/truth/human rationality, but there's nothing fallacious or question-begging about that assumption. After all, what's the alternative? How would a critic argue that knowledge/truth/human rationality are impossible? Such a denial would be self-refuting. Although you can debate the degree to which knowledge is obtainable, or the degree to which human reason is truth-conducive, it would be self-referentially incoherent to deny those claims wholesale. 

4. Anderson classifies transcendental arguments as deductive arguments. Once again, let's provide a definition:

A deductive argument is an argument that is intended by the arguer to be deductively valid, that is, to provide a guarantee of the truth of the conclusion provided that the argument’s premises are true. This point can be expressed also by saying that, in a deductive argument, the premises are intended to provide such strong support for the conclusion that, if the premises are true, then it would be impossible for the conclusion to be false. An argument in which the premises do succeed in guaranteeing the conclusion is called a (deductively) valid argument. If a valid argument has true premises, then the argument is said also to be sound. 

An inductive argument is an argument that is intended by the arguer to be strong enough that, if the premises were to be true, then it would be unlikely that the conclusion is false. So, an inductive argument’s success or strength is a matter of degree, unlike with deductive arguments. 

Although inductive strength is a matter of degree, deductive validity and deductive soundness are not. In this sense, deductive reasoning is much more cut and dried than inductive reasoning. Nevertheless, inductive strength is not a matter of personal preference; it is a matter of whether the premise ought to promote a higher degree of belief in the conclusion.

Because deductive arguments are those in which the truth of the conclusion is thought to be completely guaranteed and not just made probable by the truth of the premises, if the argument is a sound one, then we say the conclusion is “contained within” the premises; that is, the conclusion does not go beyond what the premises implicitly require. 

Because the difference between inductive and deductive arguments involves the strength of evidence which the author believes the premises provide for the conclusion, inductive and deductive arguments differ with regard to the standards of evaluation that are applicable to them. 

https://www.iep.utm.edu/ded-ind/

5. This is often a sticking point between evidentialists and presuppositionalists. For instance, Bahnsen is highly critical of the fact that inductive arguments only yield degrees of probability. They fall short of certainty. But a basic problem with Bahnsen's position is that inductive and deductive arguments from Christianity differ in scope. Inductive arguments include the Resurrection, the canon of scripture, the argument from prophecy, the biographical accuracy of the Gospels, the reliability of the Greek/Hebrew text of Scripture. Christian apologetics can't afford to eliminate inductive arguments of this kind. Christian transcendental argument are limited in scope. So Christian apologetics requires a combination of inductive and deductive arguments. 

6. That may seem to leave a unsatisfying gap between the two kinds of argument. However, they're not essentially at odds or separate. Christian transcendental arguments provide the necessary backing for Christian inductive arguments. They justify the enabling conditions on which inductive arguments depend. So you can still have certainty at that foundational level. 

7. Finally, Anderson draws a distinction between knowledge and proof. Due to natural revelation, we intuitive know certain things independent of formal argumentation. So there's a kind of certainty that's not contingent on our ability to formulate sound arguments.

Deliverance

Rodrick's boyhood was literally hellish. His parents were obsessed with sorcery and Satanism. That had a dire affect on Rodrick. It had the fringe benefit of giving him firsthand awareness of the supernatural, and making the dark side repellent to him. He was plagued by horrific nightmares. And during the day he felt that he was always shadowed by a malevolent presence. He couldn't shake it off. Like he was under round-the-clock surveillance. Rodrick desperately wanted to escape the life imposed on him by his infernal parents, but he seemed to be trapped.

Then in junior high he met a Christian classmate who had the gift for discerning spirits (1 Co 12:10). Ed was a kind of budding exorcist by vocation. Not just about casting out demons, but combating witchcraft and evil spirits in general.                                                                                                                 

Ed's parents were divorced. His dad had custody, but his dad was scientist of international renown scientist who frequently traveled to conferences, so Ed often lived alone when his dad was away from home. His dad never understood his son's interest in Christianity, but he let it slide. 

When Ed first met Rodrick, he instantly sensed an aura about Rodrick. Not that Rodrick was possessed or evil. Indeed, Rodrick seemed to be good natured. But he was surrounded by invisible evil. Choked by evil. Especially at night he often felt the suffocating prevalence of evil spirits. 

Ed offered to let Rodrick move in with him. In one sense that intensified the evil. Ed and Rodrick could actually catch a glimpse of the evil spirit following them. It was enraged by Ed taking Rodrick away from the coven.

Sharing a bedroom with a Christian, especially a Christian with Ed's particular gift, was a novel and liberating experience for Rodrick. To be in Ed's presence was like a buffer that shielded Rodrick from psychological invasion by the evil spirits. The ubiquitous, smothering sensation was gone. The spirits were unable to penetrate the screen of godliness. It was like an electric shock. 

He sometimes had bad dreams that began as hellish nightmares, but then Ed would pop into Rodrick's dreams and keep the monsters at bay.

Ed introduced Rodrick to the Bible. Taught him the Bible. Taught him Christian prayer. Taught him Christian hymns. 

Coming at it from the other side, Rodrick also had the antennae to detect evil spirits, but now he had the resources to fight back. Ed and Roderick formed a lifelong team.  

Hitech gulags

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viuR7N6E2LA

Like we're zoo animals being monitored

Ahmaud Arbery

I wonder how many people who profess outrage at the murder of Ahmaud Arbery believe his killers should be executed? Or do they oppose the death penalty? It's an easy call for me, but that's because I support capital punishment. The execrable Dylann Roof is still alive because, thanks to the political correctness  of the Obama DOJ, he was charged with hate crimes rather than murder. 

The Tempter as shapeshifter

1. One of the oddities of Gen 3 is how the Tempter is introduced with so little exposition or backstory, as if the original audience would be familiar with a character like the Tempter. The name of the Tempter is a pun or triple entendre, so it has a dual identity. There's the image it projects and then there's its true identity. This suggests the Tempter is an entity in the tradition of shapeshifters. Agents that alternate between identities. Agents that may appear to be animals but that's not their true identity or original identity. Conversely, agents that appear to be human, but they've undergone a transformation. 

2. The tradition of shapeshifters is ethnographically quite diverse. Two standard academic monographs are Montague Summers, The Werewolf in Lore and Legend (Dover 2003 reprint) and Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Werewolves (2002 Blackmask Online). There's also American Indian folklore about skinwalkers and totemic animal spirits among Plains Indians, desert southwestern tribes, as well as Algonquian tribes (e.g. Manitou). cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ae_Xw8IlW8

3. Shapeshifters are naturally impossible, but within the worldview of Christian supernaturalism and pagan witchcraft, they may be realistic. It's necessary to sift evidence for shapeshifters from different phenomena:

i) Orphaned feral children misidentified as werewolves

ii) Lycanthropy as a psychotic condition (e.g. Dan 4). 

iii) People who aspire to be animals (e.g. (Berserkers). They may aspire to be possessed by an animal spirit or actually be transformed into an animal. That, however, is a kind of playacting. 

iv) Distinguishing folkloric shapeshifters from literary and cinematic shapeshifters. 

4. The role of magic also requires sifting:

i) Witchcraft spawns lots of mythology and legend that have no basis in fact. Ingrown folklore that's passed on. 

ii) Defamatory accusations of witchcraft. 

iii) Conversely, cultivating a reputation for witchcraft can have propaganda value by making the individual an object to be feared and placated. 

iv) A distinction between having the ability to be shapeshift and the ability to hex others: S. Augustine declared, in his De Civitate Dei, that he knew an old woman who was said to turn men into asses by her enchantments. Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Werewolves (5).

5. It may not be coincidental that shapeshifters are often associated with the desert. That's the case in American Indian folklore, and it has biblical parallels. Consider the ambiguous references in Isa 13:21 & 34:14. And the further fact that the Devil tempted Jesus in the desert. 

6. Of even greater potential interest is whether Lev 16:8 and 17:7 allude to goat demons in the desert. Occultic shapeshifters.

This might resonant with to the original audience for Gen 3, because the Israelites were living in the desert at the time Genesis was written. So even though Gen 3 recounts an incident that happened millennia before, the idea of a malevolent shapeshifter may well be a recognizable entity in their experience. 

This also explains the fluid identity of the Tempter, not only in Gen 3 but Rev 12 and 20. An evil spirit (fallen angel) with an animal name and reptilian imagery or symbolism. 

Year-long (or longer) moratorium on churches

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/illinois-governor-says-churches-may-not-reopen-for-a-year-or-more-because-of-coronavirus

Sola Fide In Acts 19

Acts 19:1-7 is a neglected passage in discussions of justification. And there's a neglect of the evidence for sola fide in the narrative portions of scripture in general. I want to post something I recently wrote in an email exchange, summing up the significance of the passage:

The reception of the Holy Spirit is associated with justification elsewhere, and Paul expects the Holy Spirit to be received at the time of coming to faith in Acts 19:2. The people he was addressing turned out to be in an exceptional situation, but Paul's question reflects what he considered normative.

I've discussed the passage further in previous threads, like here and here.

Paul's eyewitness testimony to the Resurrection

From  a recently conversation:

Paul had not been a companion of Jesus prior to the crucifixion and hence cannot testify that this is a person he knows well whom he is seeing again...I admit to being astonished that anyone would find this controversial, much less offensive. Have we become so committed to "doing the resurrection argument through Paul" that we cannot even recognize what is obvious right on the face of the text? Paul openly asks Jesus who he is! He had not known him well personally while on earth. This is all intrinsic to the story. Disagree with me if you will about Jesus' "being in heaven" when Paul saw him. But if you try to insist that Paul verified that Jesus was risen from the dead in exactly the same way that the disciples verified it as reported in the Gospels and Acts 1, you're defending something that is utterly indefensible based on the nature and brevity of his encounter and his lack of previous personal acquaintance with Jesus.

Hays 

Actually, a strong argument can be made that Paul knew Jesus by sight prior to the Resurrection:

https://williamaross.com/2016/09/02/review-stanley-e-porters-when-paul-met-jesus/

Well, if he did, he didn't recognize him on the road! He has to ask who he is. And there is no evidence that he ever recognizes him in that encounter. (Unlike Mary Magdalene or Cleopas, who do eventually recognize him.) You can say that is because Jesus was shining and glorified. That's fine. But the fact remains that in that encounter he does not verify of his own knowledge that it is the same Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified.

Hays 

Paul is literally stunned by this unexpected encounter, and there's been a 3-year interval between the Resurrection and Paul's out-of-the-blue encounter with Jesus on the Damascus Road. This quite different from Jesus appearing to the disciples a few days later.

Okay, if you insist that he knew him by sight, you can say that. I think it's an ad hoc attempt to hang onto the idea that he knew Jesus by sight, which is by no means a given. At best it's a conjecture. But even so, your theory there is a way of acknowledging the epistemological point I'm making--namely, that he doesn't verify Jesus' resurrection by way of the same type and quantity of evidence that the disciples had.

Hays

i) It's not ad hoc when I point you to a detailed academic monograph which makes that case. No, it may not be a given, but your self-confident denial, uniformed by Porter's scholarly argumentation, is hardly a given.

ii) I for one haven't indicated that I'm offended by you interpretation. And I realize you are pushing back against overemphasis on the testimony of Paul in 1 Cor 15 to the demotion of the Gospels. But in the NT, Paul's witness to the Resurrection is a major apologetic argument.

iii) There's a point of tension between your insistence that this must be a psychological vision, on the one hand, and you objection to Dale Allison appealing to "grief hallucinations" on the other hand as an alternative to a physical resurrection.

I don't know why people take offense at the word "vision." Real visions are a pretty big deal. Why insist that it was "much more than a vision"? Nobody is denying that Paul had a sensory experience. But isn't that why visions are called visions? Because you see something! If Jesus appeared to me tonight and gave me a message, that would be huge, but it wouldn't mean that I thought of him as physically present in the same sense that he was with the disciples.

Hays 

I don't object in principle of psychological visions. However, you're quite critical of how Dale Allision proposes postmortem apparitions as an alternative to appearances of a physically resurrected Jesus, so there are contexts in which you think the distinction is all-important.

I answered that on the other thread. If all we had were Paul's experience on the Damascus Road, Allison would be in far better shape epistemically! It would still be weird, but Paul's experience was relatively brief and far less polymodal and unambiguously intersubjective than the disciples' reported experiences were. I'm critical of the way that people strip themselves of the capacity to respond to Allison!! The way we respond to Allison best is by emphasizing aspects of the disciples' experiences that are precisely those that go far beyond anything Paul experienced. These posts are in fact a continuation of my critique of any form of minimalism that is more vulnerable to Allison's type of approach. The distinction is very important. Extremely. That's why it's good that we have the other disciples' experiences and not just Paul's to go on!

Hays

The problem is that you're undercutting Paul's testimony to the Resurrection to build up the testimony of the Gospels. You're treating Paul's testimony as secondrate. Yet in Acts and the Pauline epistles, Paul's encounter with Jesus on the Damascus road has always been a fixture for Christian belief the in the Resurrection. You're now pitting these against each other, where the price of the testimony in the Gospels is to downgrade Paul's testimony.

The church and social distancing

As I noted in another post, the ancient church didn't practice social distancing:

https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2020/03/praying-with-sick.html

Of course it didn’t. It couldn’t refrain from meeting in the same physical geographical area and be obedient. There was no other way to meet or minister to the sick. Likewise, they likely didn’t take more precautions with the sick because they had no concept that illness was spread through viruses and bacteria. This is simply an “is-ought” fallacy. Because people in church history didn’t do X, we ought not to do X. According to what? The authority of a tradition that had no alternative means available to them. If there is only one means to be obedient, then there is no choice to between options. There are no options.

http://theologicalsushi.blogspot.com/2020/05/not-by-might-nor-by-power-nor-by-spirit.html

1. That's a very revealing response. This isn't simply about the practice of ancient Christians in general or ecclesiastical tradition but the NT church. This is a divine command. So Hodge is saying the command is predicated on a faulty, prescientific understanding of disease transmission. 

2. In addition, he misses the point. Prayer doesn't require physical compresence. You can pray for someone without praying with them or over them. You can pray by remote control. The efficacy of prayer is normally independent of time and place in that regard. You don't have to be there to pray about it.

Yet the command enjoins elders to go to the sick and pray for them on site. Indeed, make physical contact by anointing their skin with oil. skin on skin contact. A hands-on ministry. 

That's the polar opposite of the social distancing measures that Hodges thinks we have a duty to practice. Evidently, Hodge thinks this is a command that elders ought to defy. Indeed, if they knew then what we know now, this is a command that should never have been obeyed. It was a fallible, misbegotten command from the outset. 

Strategic priorities in apologetics

These can each be resolved by simply setting aside Biblical inerrancy.1 A saved liberal Christian is better than nothing, so reserve the above sub-topics for later.

Let me add that you have a virtual responsibility to ensure that your interlocutor knows that one can be a Christian while accepting evolution.

https://beliefmap.org/apologetics-guide/strategic-priorities

1. This reflects an unfortunate trend among some younger generation apologists. They don't think like theologians. Yet Christianity is a religion, so it's necessary to think like a theologian. 

2. Although the Bible contains many historical narratives, the Bible is divine revelation. It's not just a historical record of events, but theologically interpreted events. God raises up prophets and apostles to speak to and through them. A supernatural process. Consider the altered conscious states of seers like Isaiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah, and John the Revelator. Or consider the theological interpretations of Paul, the author of Hebrews, &c. Or how the Gospels integrate history with theological interpretation. 

3. Is there such a thing as "saved liberal Christian"? Or is that someone with a fundamentally unmodified secular outlook who's tacked on some Christian sentiments? 

How is that better than nothing rather than worse than nothing? If he's satisfied with a bad answer, a wrong answer, he has no incentive to seek a better answer. He took a wrong turn and keeps going in the wrong direction. It's not as if a "saved liberal Christian" is doing God a favor. 

4. Many unbelievers will rightly see it as intellectually evasive when Christian apologists duck objections to the inerrancy of Scripture. That doesn't mean a Christian apologist is obligated to individually run through every objection to the Bible. There are lots of good resources we can point a critic to, viz., Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the New Testament (B&H Academic, 2016); D. A. Carson, ed. The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures (Eerdmans, 2016); James Hoffmeier & Dennis MaGary, eds., Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith? (Crossway 2012); Kenneth Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans 2003); John Oswalt, The Bible Among the Myths (Zondervan 2009); Vern Poythress, Inerrancy and the Gospels (Crossway 2012); Peter Williams, Can we Trust the Gospels? (Crossway 2018). If the critic is one of those frivolous people who recycles canned objections but is too apathetic to examine the answers, that's not the responsibility of a Christian apologist. 

5. If evolution is contrary to the Biblical revelation of organic origins, a Christian has no duty to say one can be an inconsistent Christian. While it's possible to be an inconsistent Christian, there's no obligation to commend or recommend intellectual or theological inconsistency. It's not as if a "saved liberal Christian" is doing God a favor. 

A Christian apologist lacks the authority to tell people what biblical teachings they must believe and which they are free to disregard. There can be debates about what Scripture teaches, but the principle is to accept all of divine revelation. 

3 things that would make Jesus Yahweh

Dale Tuggy Retweeted

Ryanprott

@ryanprott

3 thing [sic.] that would make Jesus YHWH

•1)Complete Superiority 

•2)Immortality that wasn't given

•3)Without Beginning

Acts 3:13 "God has glorified his SERVANT Jesus"

1 Cor. 15 "Christ DIED for our sins"

John 3:16 "He gave his only BEGOTTEN son"

1)❌X

2)❌X

3)X

https://twitter.com/ryanprott/status/1257336497772072961

1. Once again, unitarians keep demonstrating that they have no idea how to argue with folks who don't think like unitarians. They never leave their bubble. 

If the aim is to show that Trinitarian, Incarnational theology is inconsistent with Scripture, then the onus is on the unitarian to show that the Trinitarian, Incarnational theology can't be harmonized with Scripture given the assumptions and resources of Trinitarians. You must assume the opposing viewpoint for the sake of argument, then explain how that's contradictory on its own grounds. Why is Dale unable to grasp that elementary burden of proof? Why does he plug Ryan Prott's incompetent objection? Is this social promotion for unitarians? 

2. Jesus isn't merely Yahweh but Yahweh Incarnate. Yahweh Incarnate can undergo demotions or promotions in his status.

3. Immortality has reference to Jesus as Yahweh Incarnate. Biological mortality/immortality, and not immortality in the divine sense of aseity and timeless eternality. God is not physically mortal or immortal. He's not that kind of being. But God Incarnate assumes a body which can be mortal or immortal. 

4. Dale must be aware of the fact that most modern-day NT scholars and lexicographers don't think monogenes means only-begotten, but unique, one of a kind.

5. Jesus has a point of origin in time: the Incarnation. The Son has no beginning. Jesus is a composite being. The Son in union with a human body and soul. ❌

What if we tried a real quarantine

https://thedispatch.com/p/what-if-we-tried-a-real-quarantine