Gregory Koukl's Blog, page 117

Links Mentioned on the 10/29/13 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:

Same-Sex Marriage Challenges and Responses by Greg Koukl (PDF)


The Text of AB 1266 – The gender identity bill in California


Same-Sex Marriage Quick Reference Guide by Greg Koukl


Does God Whisper? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 – Greg's response to the idea that we need to learn to hear God's voice


The Morning I Heard the Voice of God by John Piper


Contradict: They Can't All Be True – An alternative to the "Coexist" bumper sticker


Star Light and the Age of the Universe by Greg Koukl (PDF)

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

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Challenge: How Could a Sin in the OT Not Be a Sin in the NT?

A few months back, one of our commenters asked for help answering this question, so I've made it this week's challenge:

If God is absolutely moral, because morality is absolute, and if the
nature of “right” and "wrong" surpasses space, time, and existence, and
if it is as much a fundamental property of reality as math, then why
were some things a sin in the Old Testament but not a sin in the New
Testament?

So are right and wrong absolute, or aren't they? How do you explain the change in laws? Let's hear what you have to say in the comments below, and then Brett will post a video on Thursday with his answer.

[Explore past challenges here and here.]

Do Not Throw Away Your Confidence

Hebrews 10:32-36 has a very relevant exhortation for our
postmodern times:

But remember the former days, when,
after being enlightened ["after receiving the knowledge of the truth"
(v. 26)], you endured a great conflict of sufferings, partly by being made a
public spectacle through reproaches and tribulations, and partly by becoming
sharers with those who were so treated. For you showed sympathy to the
prisoners and accepted joyfully the seizure of your property, knowing that you
have for yourselves a better possession and a lasting one. Therefore, do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward.
For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you
may receive what was promised.

This confidence in the supremacy of the person of Christ and His reconciling sacrifice for our sins in objective history (the focus of
the beginning of Chapter
10)—the kind of confidence and “knowing” that brings the reward of
endurance through reproaches and tribulations…can this thrive in a
person who thinks religious beliefs are merely subjective preferences?

What Motivated Early Non-Canonical Writers to Modify the Story of Jesus?

As an early investigator of Christianity, I was interested in everything ever written in antiquity about Jesus. One day, while searching the religion section of a local bookstore, I discovered a book titled The Lost Books of the Bible . I purchased it immediately, expecting to find evidence our current understanding of Christianity was somehow incomplete or inaccurate due to the loss of original data about Jesus. After all, this book claimed to include the ancient record of eyewitnesses who had been lost from the original canon of Scripture. I spent several weeks investigating these “non-canonical” legends and stories, and I was eventually disappointed to find the book had been mistitled. It should have been called The Late, Obviously False, Discarded Legends of Christianity. These weren’t early eyewitness accounts lost in antiquity; they were the late fictional efforts of religious believers trying to rewrite the nature and history of Jesus to accommodate their own religious desires. The early Christian believers and leaders knew these legends were false and protected the church by excluding them from the New Testament.

It shouldn’t surprise us a character as historically important as Jesus would inspire such late fiction. Like George Washington and the story of the cherry tree, later generations of admirers (and people with their own agenda related to Jesus) began to craft their own version of the Jesus story. If Jesus is who He claimed to be, we should expect His life would evoke a number of legendary responses and attempts to co-opt His name. Thousands of years later, it's sometimes hard to sort the truth from the legend and distortion. We need to take the time to carefully examine the non-canonical tales of Jesus to see if they contain any truth at all, and this begins by understanding what motivated these late authors. The writers of the non-canonical gospels were driven by a number of desires causing them to gently (or dramatically) twist the story of Jesus:

Filling in the Gaps
Sometimes the writers were simply trying to fill in parts of the Jesus story missing from the Gospel accounts. What was Jesus like as a child? What did Jesus do from the age of 12 to the age of 30? These periods of time were not described in the canonical Gospels, and there was great interest in the ancient world related to these areas of Jesus' life. Some non-canonical writers invented narratives satisfying this desire to "fill in the gaps."

Supporting a Heresy
Many early religious groups re-wrote, edited or created their own narrative of Jesus in order to affirm a theological belief held by the group. If, for example, a sect of believers held to the idea matter is inherently corrupt or evil, they wrote gospels describing Jesus as an immaterial spiritual being; denying the physicality of Jesus described in the canonical Gospels.

Acquiring Power from an Esoteric Secret
Some groups within the Gnostic movement sought to describe Jesus as the source of esoteric, spiritual mysteries. These groups wrote narrative accounts focused on the statements of Jesus. They concentrated on efforts to learn hidden, esoteric truths, and their gospels typically reflect their theological agendas rather than the theology of Jesus as represented in the canonical Gospels.

As investigators of Christianity, it’s important to keep these motives in mind as we begin to examine the claims of the non-canonical authors related to Jesus. Although their late legends contain many exaggerations and lies, they built their myths and fabrications on the foundation of a true account. As we sift through the legendary claims, we can expose the true foundations upon which they crafted their stories. Once exposed, these foundations can give us even greater confidence the original story of Jesus is early and accurate, even though these late legends are not to be trusted.

Eye Contact Makes Listeners Less Open-Minded

This is fascinating. From Josh
Brahm:

The Washington Post reports
something I’ve noticed in my dialogues with pro-choice people: “Forcing eye
contact when trying to change someone’s mind may actually cause listeners to
become more stubborn, a new study shows.”

In a persuasive context, people
tend to be on the defensive, like when a speaker is addressing an audience or
when two people are debating a political issue. According to the
study, being forced to stare into the eyes of another person, as opposed to
looking elsewhere, can make that person less open-minded.

You’re less persuasive when you make eye contact while
you’re speaking, but I wonder if the rule
against eye contact also applies to when you’re listening. I tend to look away from a person when I talk, but at him when I’m listening, because I
instinctively assume I will be more persuasive when my listener is certain I’m
hearing his side of things. But perhaps eye contact with him while I’m listening
will also make him more defensive. I’ll have to consider this.

Unified Truth: Faith and Reason

You've probably heard of Thomas Aquinas because he was so influential, but you may not know why. He's known as the "Doctor of the Church" because he's one of the most influential theologians and philosophers, and he had considerable influence on western thought. 

Here's a brief summary:

Thomas Aquinas was a profoundly influential thinker from the thirteenth century. As a scholastic, Aquinas sought to understand Christian theology in light of the rediscovery of Aristotle’s works, and he redefined the relationship between revelation and reason, science and theology, and faith and philosophy for the next eight centuries. As a philosopher, Aquinas developed principles of just war and natural law, and outlined an argument for God’s existence from contingency—the intellectual forerunner to the modern Argument from Design.

Here's more on Aquinas' thinking on the complementary nature of faith and reason:

Christianity’s engagement with non-Christian thought proceeds from the Christian belief that reason and faith are complementary, not oppositional. Thomas Aquinas’ synthesis of Aristotle and Christianity is a vital chapter in this engagement. His interaction with the philosophy of Aristotle demonstrates both the harmony of reason and faith and the oneness of truth, which are both central to the Christian intellectual tradition....

Aquinas felt comfortable undertaking such incorporation because, as he said, “All truth is one.” He argued that what we learn from the natural world through science and philosophy, provided it is unquestionably true, can never contradict that which we learn from revelation, that is, directly from God. He compared Scripture and reason to two books, “the book of revelation” and “the book of nature,” which were both “written” by God and consequently compatible. Therefore, though Aquinas was well educated in the Bible and the writings of earlier theologians, he preferred to base his arguments in logic and philosophical reasoning that could appeal even to nonbelievers. He did so confident in his faith that reason and philosophy would confirm and not contradict the revelation of God.

How the Early Church Sought to Resolve Textual Variants

Dan
Wallace of the Center for the Study of New
Testament Manuscripts has an interesting article offering evidence that the
transmission of the New Testament text wasn’t merely linear—that is, it wasn’t
like a child’s game of “Telephone” (or “Chinese Whispers,” for our European friends),
where one person tells the next person, and he tells the next, and so on.

Instead, imagine a
game of Telephone where the third, fourth, and fifth people in line can go back
to the first and second and check the message they received against the
original before they pass it on. Then imagine the first person doesn’t just
tell one person, but multiple others who also check their copies against
earlier copies (likewise with the second person, third person, etc.), and add to
that the fact that the goal is to get an exact copy (not to end up with a funny
joke), and you have a better picture of the situation.

Wallace explains how
statements by Tertullian reveal the early church’s concern with textual purity
and their practice of resolving variants by referring back to copies as close
as possible to the apostolic originals, and possibly to the originals
themselves:

There are two or three places that
address whether the originals survived into the second century. Tertullian,
writing in c. 180 CE, said, “Come now, you who would indulge a better
curiosity, if you would apply it to the business of your salvation, run over
[to] the apostolic churches, in which the very thrones of the apostles are
still pre-eminent in their places, in which their own authentic writings are
read, uttering the voice and representing the face of each of them severally”….

Tertullian goes on to discuss each
of these ‘authentic writings’ as being found in the very churches to which they
were written. He mentions Corinth, Philippi, Thessalonica, Ephesus, and Rome.
He urges his reader to visit these sites to check out these authentic writings.
This seems to suggest that he believed that these documents were the
autographs. In the least, it suggests that by his day carefully done copies of
the originals were considered important for verifying what the apostles meant,
and such copies had a strong connection to the churches to which they were
originally written….

Tertullian’s statement tells us
that some early Christians were concerned about having accurate copies and that
the earliest ones still in existence were not quietly put on the shelf….

An important ramification of all
this is as follows: By the middle of the second century, when canon
conscientiousness was on the rise, the Christian community regarded the autographs,
or at least the earliest copies of the New Testament documents, as important
witnesses. They were concerned about the purity of the text with regard to
select textual variants. Most likely, this implies that the copying of the
manuscripts in the early decades of the Christian faith was not that of
strictly linear descent (one copy of another copy of another copy). Rather,
there would be times when at least a few scribes would want to check behind
their exemplar and look at its exemplar. This would especially occur whenever a
disputed reading cropped up. So, there seems to have been a bit of a check on
the quality of the transmission of the text from very early on.

Read the rest of the article “Did
the Original New Testament Manuscripts Still Exist in the Second Century?”

(HT: The
Poached Egg)

Links Mentioned on the 10/22/13 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:

Is Mormonism Just Another Christian Denomination? by Greg Koukl (PDF)


LDS Test [of good behavior] Is Necessary, Not Sufficient [for recognizing a true Christian] by Amy Hall


Baptism and Belief by Greg Koukl


Red Letter Christians by Melinda Penner


Should Women Teach in the Church by Greg Koukl


50 'Hand Picked' Christians Trained to Convince Churches to Re-Interpret Scripture's Gay Boundaries by Jeff Schapiro


A detailed response from James White to Matthew Vines' arguments for Christian homosexuality


Same-Sex Marriage Challenges and Responses by Greg Koukl (PDF)


Same-Sex Marriage Quick Reference Guide by Greg Koukl


For Baby or for Me by Greg Koukl


How to Choose a Church by Greg Koukl


Drifting Towards Darwin by Greg Koukl


The Trouble with Theistic Evolution by Melinda Penner


Flight: The Genius of Birds – documentary


Metamorphosis – documentary


Rethink Apologetics Conference is this weekend!


Divine Direction and Decision Making in the Book of Acts by Greg Koukl


Decision Making and the Will of God – Lectures by Greg Koukl

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.

Darwin's Doubt Makes Positive Claims

Stephen Meyer’s response to the charge that Darwin’s Doubt
makes only a negative “God-of-the-gaps” argument (i.e., “We can’t explain it,
therefore God did it”) is helpful in concisely explaining why this isn’t the
case:

True, the book does offer several
evidentially based (and mathematically rigorous) arguments against the
creative power of the mutation/natural selection mechanism…. (However, it is probably more accurate
to characterize this "absence of knowledge" as knowledge of
inadequacy, since it derives from a thorough assessment of causal powers –
and limitations – of various materialistic evolutionary mechanisms). In any
case, the argument presented in the book is not…a "purely negative"
and, therefore, fallacious argument based on the inadequacy of various
materialistic evolutionary mechanisms (or gaps in our knowledge).

Instead, the book makes a positive
case for intelligent design as an inference to the best explanation for the
origin of the genetic (and epigenetic) information necessary to produce the
first forms of animal life (as well as other features of the Cambrian animals
such as the presence of genetic regulatory networks that function as integrated
circuits during animal development). It advances intelligent design as the best
explanation not only because many lines of evidence now cast doubt on the
creative power of unguided evolutionary mechanisms, but also because of our positive,
experience-based knowledge of the powers that intelligent agents have to
produce as digital and other forms of information as well as integrated circuitry.

Meyer sums up the argument in his book this way:

Premise One: Despite a
thorough search and evaluation, no materialistic causes or evolutionary
mechanisms have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of specified or
functional information (or integrated circuitry).

Premise Two: Intelligent
causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of
specified/functional information (and integrated circuitry).

Conclusion: Intelligent
design constitutes the best, most causally adequate, explanation for the
specified/functional information (and circuitry) that was necessary to produce
the Cambrian animals….

Unlike an argument from ignorance,
an inference to the best explanation does not assert the adequacy of one causal
explanation merely on the basis of the inadequacy of some other causal
explanation. Instead, it asserts the superior explanatory power of a proposed
cause based upon its established – its known – causal adequacy, and based upon
a lack of demonstrated efficacy, despite a thorough search, of any other
adequate cause. The inference to design, therefore, depends on present
knowledge of the causal powers of various materialistic entities and processes
(inadequate) and intelligent agents (adequate).

The rest of the post
is worth a read.

The Tactical Approach and the Holy Spirit (Video)

Isn't the tactical approach antithetical to letting the Holy Spirit work in bringing someone to salvation?