Gregory Koukl's Blog, page 103

His Weakness Glorifies God

I’ve written about the magnificence of 1 John 1:10, which frees us to glorify God’s grace by being open about our sin. But singer-songwriter Andrew Peterson beautifully puts a human story to that theological idea in a post he wrote after going on tour with Steven Curtis Chapman:

I’ve been in Nashville for 15 years now, and, well, you tend to hear less-than-flattering stories about folks from time to time (I’m sure there are a few about me floating around out there), but I have yet to hear one of those about Steven. What that might lead a rascal like me to conclude is that either a) Steven is so squeaky-clean he must be hard to like or b) he’s a complete wreck and he’s hiding it. I didn’t realize until this tour was underway that there’s a third option. Here it is: Steven is a wreck, he’s not hiding it, and because of the mighty presence of Jesus in his life, grace abounds to those around him.

It’s the great, confounding reversal of the Gospel of Jesus. If the word we preach is one of attainable perfection, of law, of justification by works, then when we fail, our testimony fails with it. But if we preach our deep brokenness and Christ’s deeper healing, if we preach our inability to take a single breath but for God’s grace, then our weakness exalts him and we’re functioning as we were meant to since the foundation of the world. Steven isn’t super-human. He’s just human. But what a glorious thing to be! An attempt on our part to be super-human will result only in our in-humanness—like a teacup trying to be a fork: useless. But if the teacup will just be a teacup, it will be filled. Humans were made (as was everything under the sun) for the glory of the Maker. Why should we try to be anything but fully human? Let God fill us up and pour us out; let him do what he will, let us be what we were meant to be. That gives us the freedom to sing about what’s really happening in our hearts without being afraid of sullying the good name of God. If our hearts are contending with the forces of darkness, clinging desperately to the hope of a Savior, then to sing boldly about the battle is no shame to us and all glory to our King.

The proof is in the pudding. Everyone I know in Nashville who knows Steven has said to me something like, “I love Steven. He’s a good man.” But from the first week of the tour I discovered that Steven isn’t a good man. He’s as sinful as the rest of us. He wears his weakness on his sleeve. He’s quick to share his pain and his struggle. That doesn’t make him mopey—he’s quick to share his joy, too. But what’s so wonderfully subversive about the Gospel is that our ability to honestly bear our grief and woundedness just makes room for God’s grace to cast light on all that shadow; it makes room for us to love each other. When we encounter that kind of grace we come away remembering not just the sin but, overwhelmingly, the goodness, and the grace, and we say, “I love that guy. He’s a good man.” What we’re really saying is, “I love that guy. God is so good.”

Many years ago when I saw Steven Curtis Chapman in concert for the first time, I was struck by the fact that when I left, I was primarily thinking about how great God is, not how great SCC is. I loved him not because of his talent, but because he was a window to the glory of God. I wasn’t quite sure how he’d done it, but ever since then, I’ve wanted to be the same. I appreciate Andrew Peterson’s insights.

Please read the rest of his post here.

Links Mentioned on the 2/18/14 Show

The following are links that were either mentioned on this week's show or inspired by it, as posted live on the @STRtweets Twitter feed:

In American Politics, It's Still Science vs. Religion by Ann McFeatters


Greg's appearance on Ray Comfort's The Comfort Zone


To End All Wars – Film by Brian Godawa


Calvin on the Christian Life: Glorifying and Enjoying God Forever by Michael Horton


For Calvinism by Michael Horton


White Horse Inn website


White Horse Inn podcast (subscribe)


Discount for White Horse Inn conference

Listen to today's show or download any archived show for free. (Find links from past shows here.)

To follow the Twitter conversation during the live show (Tuesdays 4:00–7:00 p.m. PT), use the hashtag #STRtalk.

Discount for White Horse Inn Conference

Michael Horton of the White Horse Inn will be joining Greg on the podcast today. (If you’re not familiar with the White Horse Inn, here’s a place you can start.) Greg will be speaking at the WHI conference in Vail, Colorado on July 24-26. The price for the conference has just gone up, but they’ve generously offered a discount to bring it back down to the early bird price for Stand to Reason listeners—just use the code “STR” (in caps) when you register.

“Do We All Worship the Same God?” is the conference theme, with topics like: “The Trinitarian Witness of Scripture,” “The Uniqueness of Nicene Christianity,” and “God at Work in the Muslim World.”

I appreciate the connection with history, the discussion of theology, the depth of thought, and the focus on Christ that the White Horse Inn weekly podcast offers, so I’m sure this will be a great conference if you’re able to attend.

Challenge: You Can't Say Nothing Comes from Nothing

At an Oxford Union debate on the existence of God, atheist Dan Barker said the following:

If nothing comes from nothing, then God cannot exist, because God is not nothing. If that premise is true that “nothing comes from nothing,” and if God is something, then you have just shot yourself in the foot.

How would you answer his challenge? Respond in the comments below, and then on Thursday we’ll hear Brett’s answer.

[Explore past challenges here and here. You can watch all the contributors to “The God Debate” (John Lennox, Michael Shermer, Peter Hitchens, etc.) here.]

Do Christians Focus Disproportionately on Homosexuality?

Why does it seem that many Christians focus more on homosexuality opposed to other sins? 

Do We Worship the Same God? & Get Rid of Faith

Brett’s and Alan’s February newsletters are up on the website:

We Need to Get Rid of Faith by Brett Kunkle: “In today’s culture, the word ‘faith’ comes with too much baggage. For many, faith is a blind, arbitrary leap in the dark that has no relationship to reason, evidence, or knowledge. So let me make a suggestion. Let’s use the word ‘trust’ instead. ‘Trust’ accurately communicates the biblical idea of faith. In addition, it helps us reunite true faith with reason, evidence, and knowledge. Why? Because we know people only put their trust in what they have good reason to believe is true.” (Read more)


Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God? by Alan Shlemon: “We need to recognize that ‘God’ is not God’s name. It’s more like the title of a position. The position is a what, but the person who fills that position is a who. It’s helpful to think of it as a public office. The president, for example, is the title of a position, but a unique person occupies that office and fulfills its duties. In the same way, God is the title of the position or office. Both Christians and Muslims believe in the same what – a God whose duties include things like creating, receiving worship, and judging. They differ on who they believe is the person who occupies that position. Muslims believe that person is Allah and Christians believe it is Yahweh.” (Read more)

(You can subscribe to their monthly newsletters here.)

Is the Bible Wrong about Camels?

According to Professor of Theology and Hebrew Dr. Andrew Steinmann in an interview on “Issues, Etc.,” recent headlines like “Camels Had No Business in Genesis” and “Will Camel Discovery Break the Bible’s Back?” aren’t quite accurate. He says the problem isn’t as much with the archaeology as it is with the archaeologists’ understanding of the Bible:

The Bible very clearly shows people from Mesopotamia and the Arabian Desert having camels early on, and we in fact know from other archaeological evidence in Iran (which doesn’t involve any Bible interpretation) that camels were domesticated long before Abraham’s time, which is about the first time camels are mentioned in the Bible. At least 1,000 years before Abraham, dromedary camels—the single hump ones—were domesticated, and Bactrian camels probably 500 years after that. So we know people in Iran did it, and it spread into Mesopotamia. We have good evidence from Mesopotamia that there were domesticated camels then.

What these archaeologists are doing, though, is when they read about somebody like Abraham having camels, they’re saying, “Aha! The Bible is saying that camels were widespread in Palestine during this period of time, and there’s no archaeological evidence for that.”

Well, indeed, there’s no archaeological evidence for widespread use of camels in Palestine at this time, but that’s not what the Bible is saying. What it is showing is that somebody who originally came from Mesopotamia, like Abraham, he did have some camels. And then the other mentions of camels in Genesis and in the early part of the Bible have to do with either people related to Abraham that were living in the Arabian Desert (for instance, the Ishmaelites…have camels when they come and buy Joseph and take him down to Egypt), or other peoples like that, associated with the Arabian Desert—the Amelekites…who live on the edge of the Arabian Desert are mentioned a number of times having camels. But there’s no mention of Israelites owning camels….

The Bible just doesn’t give any evidence for the assumption that these archaeologists are making that [the Bible says] there’s widespread use of domestic camels in Israel….

When asked for a response to the charge that “what we’re seeing here is obvious evidence that someone’s been tampering with the text and unwittingly gave themselves away by putting camels in Abraham’s possession”:

My response is just the opposite—that they show that they’re very accurate, because they confine it to people from Mesopotamia or the Arabian Peninsula. If this person was going to give himself away, you would expect [to see] him depicting the Canaanites having camels, or people like that. But he doesn’t say the Canaanites or the Phoenicians are making extensive use of camels.

And so by looking at the evidence in particular, and not just saying, “Well, Abraham has camels, so they must have been used all throughout Israel. Yeah, we don’t have any archaeological evidence for that”—well, that’s true, but if it’s only Abraham and people passing through that are using camels, well, then you wouldn’t expect to find a lot of camel bones there in the archaeological evidence during the period of Abraham or even later.

Again, it’s the problem of [the archaeologist’s] assumptions. He’s assuming that if camels are mentioned at all, the Bible must be wrong, rather than looking at the evidence and the distribution of where camels are mentioned, and then that reveals a lot more.

Listen to the rest of the interview. For more information, see articles in Apologetics Press, CrossExamined.org, and Christianity Today.

Is Christian Education Simply a Matter of Religious Indoctrination?

My good friend Brett Kunkle and I have been working diligently to address a dilemma facing the Church: the departure of young Christians who walk away from Christianity in their college years. We’ve had great success with youth groups when we’ve been able to convince their leaders to stop teaching and start training. I’ve been writing recently about the model I employed with my own youth group using the acronym T.R.A.I.N. In response to a recent post, however, two commenters described this effort as nothing more than religious indoctrination:

“I wish more parents would teach both sides of the argument, like a good professor would, and let the children decide for themselves. If I'm not mistaken, you're not recommending critical thinking; on the contrary, you're recommending a more rigorous indoctrination strategy.”

“If Christianity is true then I can see how this would help to further its growth, but if it's not true then doesn't this look like indoctrination? …Why not give up trying to control them and start to empower them to make their own decisions? Give them all the opinions and options for religious belief and let them pick what they think is right from a young age.”

Is our effort to train our Christian students nothing more than a biased, aggressive form of religious indoctrination? As someone who was a non-believer for most of my life, I think it’s possible (and necessary) to train students how to think, rather than simply tell them what to think:

A Reasoned Conviction Is Different Than a Prior Bias
As a Christian, I have beliefs, just like all my non-Christian friends. The real question is whether my beliefs are justifiably true. I was inclined against Christianity for 35 years; I entered the investigation with a bias against the Christian worldview. At some point, however, I concluded the truth of the Christian claims were the most reasonable inference from the evidence. I arrived at a reasoned conviction. As I now share what I’ve learned with others, I’m not teaching from a bias (an unfair, unwarranted prejudice in favor of Christianity), but from a reasonable conviction in light of the evidence.

Everyone Teaches From Their Reasoned Convictions
Everyone has a set of personal beliefs they’ve adopted for one reason or another. Hopefully these beliefs are reasonably grounded in evidence. No one teaches without such beliefs. Do we really think professors in the university setting are providing students with “all the opinions and options for religious belief” and allowing students to “pick what they think is right”? Do we really think university professors are accurately or fairly characterizing Christianity to their students? Not likely. The burden to teach fairly from our reasoned convictions (rather than our unwarranted, personal biases) is a shared responsibility. All of us struggle in this area; Christians are not the only ones who bear this responsibility.

Reasonable Christian Convictions Can Withstand Scrutiny
When training young people, I never feel like I have to stack the deck in favor of Christianity. In fact, I typically start by role playing as the old, unbelieving Jim, challenging Christian students with all the objections I frequently offered when I was an atheist. My goal is to show students how unreasonable their defenses are when they aren’t rooted in evidence. I begin by providing the atheistic alternatives in a robust form, being careful not to mischaracterize my old claims or create straw men arguments. I’m very comfortable presenting the alternatives in their strongest formulations because I am confident the Christian worldview provides a more rational explanation in light of the evidence and our common experience as humans. We demonstrate this reality by applying the laws of logic (and examining their origin) to the claims of atheism as they are presented by the atheists themselves. I encourage young Christians to read the best-selling books, websites and blogs of popular atheists. When students learn how to think carefully and examine the foundations of theistic and atheistic claims, they can make decisions about which worldview best represents and accounts for the reality in which they live.

Christian training, as I’ve proposed it here at Cold Case Christianity, is not indoctrination. We don’t want students to accept the claims of Christianity uncritically without consideration of other ideas, opinions, and beliefs. In fact, I believe the comparison of ideas serves the Christian cause powerfully. The strength of theism is often recognized more readily when contrasted with the limits of atheism. While the approach we’ve taken with students has been wildly successful in preparing them and strengthening their Christian beliefs, not every student emerges from this process as a Christian (further evidence the approach we take is fair and non-coercive). Students walk away from Christianity for a number of reasons and many of these have nothing to do with a reasoned examination of Christianity’s truth claims. But those who take the investigation seriously emerge with incredible confidence. They are prepared for whatever they may face in the university setting.

The Gospel's Impact on Cannibals

I love the book Peace Child, written by Don Richardson, a missionary who went with his wife and baby to a tribe in Western New Guinea that highly celebrated treachery, murder, and cannibalism (e.g., when they first heard about Jesus’ life and death, they thought Judas was the hero of the story). Peace Child is an account of how the Richardsons were finally able to convey the value of the gospel to the Sawi people, and the story is an incredible one.

When Richardson and his sons returned to visit the tribe after decades, they saw the effect that knowing Christ had had on the entire society. Excerpts from a video documenting their visit describe some of the changes (the full video is posted below):

Normally, you wouldn’t hear someone say, “It’s great to see so many old people.” Disease took its toll. Death from warfare took its toll. But now, to come back and see that there are just throngs among the crowds of people—throngs of people with gray hair, and old enough that they have trouble walking along the trail—that’s a special joy….

When we came for the first time, there was a lot of enmity between the tribes. Coming back after so many years, to see the relationship between these people, where there’s really almost no line of demarcation between them—they’re just treating each other like brothers and sisters, they love each other, they share the leadership in the church services, and they’re intermarrying. So the walls that have been broken down by virtue of the gospel’s impact are very, very obvious….

A SAWI VILLAGER (interpreted): When [the missionaries] came years ago, [we] were still living in darkness. God’s word has been planted here, the gospel has been received, this place is full of peace. It’s a safe place to live. We’re very blessed. I want to give thanks to God because the gospel came here. And I want you to know that when you leave on the airplane tomorrow, that we’re going to stay faithful to the gospel as long as we live. It’s everything to us.

In C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair, Aslan (the Christ figure) says, “I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms.” And so Jesus has. We have no idea of the scope of the blessings that Christianity has brought the world, but stories like this one give us a hint.

(HT: Justin Taylor – Returning Home to Ex-Cannibals)

 

We're Not Good at Estimating Our Goodness

Here’s an interesting study with theological implications:

[A] team led by Constantine Sedikides has surveyed 85 incarcerated offenders at a prison in South East England about their prosocial traits. The inmates were aged 18 to 34 and the majority had been jailed for acts of violence and robbery….

Compared with "an average prisoner" the participants rated themselves as more moral, kinder to others, more self-controlled, more law-abiding, more compassionate, more generous, more dependable, more trustworthy, and more honest. Remarkably, they also rated themselves as higher on all these traits than "an average member of the community", with one exception – law-abiding. The prisoners rated themselves as equivalent on this trait relative to an average community member.

Sedikides and his team say these results show the better-than-average effect cannot be explained by the fact that most participants are in fact better than average. In this case, they said there was "good reason to assume that the average non-prisoner is more honest and law abiding than the average prisoner."

Past research (pdf) on intellectual performance has shown that it is weaker performers who most over-estimate their own ability. Sedikides and his colleagues wondered if their new results add to this pattern, and raise the possibility of a more general tendency for those with especially poor skills or detrimental behavioural habits to lack insight into their own person.

I encountered this once, years ago, when I came across a blog post written by an incarcerated murderer, wherein he mentioned he was “a good person.” I was stunned—not because of how wrong that particular person obviously was, but because at that moment I realized just how deep the human capacity for self-deception is. And I recognized that I and everyone around me were included in that sobering realization.

That moment changed the way I understood our sin and God’s holiness forever. Whenever anyone claims our sins don’t deserve Hell, I think of that murderer. We have no reason to think we’re not as deluded as he is about what we deserve. We compare ourselves with the people around us who engage in a similar level of sin, and like that murderer, we feel pretty good about ourselves. But here’s what will happen when we finally see things the way they objectively are—and by “things,” I mean both God and ourselves:

Woe is me, for I am ruined!
Because I am a man of unclean lips,
And I live among a people of unclean lips;
For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. (Isaiah 6:5)

The article quoted above says that “the prospects for helping [people who overestimate themselves] (and for rehabilitating prisoners) is not promising.” The prospects for helping them spiritually are similarly bleak. Who asks for a pardon when he doesn’t think he needs one? Who sees salvation as gracious when he thinks he deserves it? Who sees God as good when he thinks he’s being unjustly condemned?

Our understanding of our sin and God’s holiness is crucial. It’s also impossible for us to apprehend even remotely accurately on our own. But with God all things are possible. Our hope is in the Holy Spirit, who “convicts the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment”—a great and terrible service, without which none of us would ever see ourselves, see God, be reconciled to Him, and enjoy Him forever.

(HT: Joe Carter)