Gregory Koukl's Blog, page 66

Challenge Response: No Scientific Consensus on When Human Life Begins

Here's my response to this week's challenge:

Why Christians Don’t Seek to Avenge Insults against God

Over a year ago, I heard something on James White’s podcast that I’ve been thinking about off and on ever since. It’s a clip of Yusuf Ismail, a Muslim, from a debate he did with a Christian, and it gives some insight into how Muslims view God and the Christian gospel. Dr. White explains in the podcast:

I think this is one of the best insights into the Muslim mind that is trying to interpret the gospel of Jesus Christ within a context that has no room for a suffering Messiah, has no room for the gospel message. This, to me, is a clear illustration of how…Mohammed never understood the very central aspect of the message of the gospel. He never understood it.

This was Yusuf Ismail’s objection to the gospel: 

The idea, or the concept, of Jesus being God or being divine has raised for Muslims a number of issues pertaining to the theological mistrust. If Jesus is God, and God allows Himself to be edged out of the world and onto the cross—and as John had suggested earlier on, it was the idea of God incarnate, coming down to earth, humiliating Himself, in a manner of speaking, and being crushed by his enemies, in a manner of speaking—now, if that’s the idea of God, if God allows Himself to be edged out of the world onto the cross, then our understanding of God is fundamentally a God who is weak and totally powerless in the world. He helps us, not through His omnipotence, not through His almightiness, but rather through His weakness and suffering.

We forget how entirely unexpected and shocking the humility and servanthood of Jesus is—how foreign it is to human expectations of God, and in this case, to Muslim expectations. Transcendence, power, judgment, and victory, they expect. But humility? Self-sacrificial grace? These seem obviously incompatible with deity to Yusuf Ismail. 

But this is Christianity: God accomplished His purpose through the weakness, suffering, humiliation, and even death of Jesus, the divine second person of the Trinity. And even more shockingly, Jesus did this for people who were the cause of His suffering, and humiliation, and death. Because of this, it’s not by accident that Christians who live in gratefulness and awe of this don’t seek revenge on those who mock them and their God. We’re told in Philippians 2:

Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Yes, God will accomplish perfect justice in the end. Justice is good, and we rest in that. But the most honored act of all time, for which Jesus was highly exalted by the Father, was not avenging His Name, but dying for those who disgraced it. He didn’t dismiss justice, but instead He upheld it by bearing it on His own shoulders. This central act of Christianity burrowed into our understanding of the virtuous life and slowly infiltrated all of Western culture—so much so that we in the West now take for granted the beauty of patient, gracious, self-sacrificial humility over an immediate exercise of punitive power. We forget that not every culture has seen this as desirable. It’s an echo of Christ, not something men naturally reason to on their own. 

As with any ideal, neither individual Christians nor societies shaped by Christianity have always lived up to this. But the astounding truth is that our knowledge of Christ created this cultural ideal where it didn’t exist before.

Links Mentioned on the 1/13/15 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:

The Line in the Sand by Greg Koukl


Atlanta Ousts Fire Chief Who Has Antigay Views – New York Times


The Firing of Atlanta Fire Chief Is an Intolerable Precedent by Denny Burk


Perspectives course on missions

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.

Challenge: No Scientific Consensus on When Human Life Begins

This challenge comes from the first item in the Pro-Choice Action Network’s article refuting “some common misconceptions about abortion”:

Human life begins at conception.
There is no scientific consensus as to when human life begins. It is a matter of philosophic opinion or religious belief. Human life is a continuum—sperm and eggs are also alive, and represent potential human beings, but virtually all sperm and eggs are wasted. Also, two-thirds of human conceptions are spontaneously aborted by nature.

What mistakes are made here? How would you argue that we can objectively know when a new human being comes into existence? Answer this challenge in the comments below, and then we’ll hear Alan’s answer on Thursday.

[Explore past challenges here and here.]

Give Up Your Stereotypes, Not Your Christian Convictions

Many hurtful stereotypes surround those who identify as gay or lesbian. Giving up stereotypes is good, but that doesn't mean you have to give up your Christian convictions too.

Textual Variants Aren’t a Problem

For the past two days, I’ve posted bits of responses to the poorly-researched Newsweek article “The Bible: So Misunderstood It’s a Sin” by Kurt Eichenwald. Today I want to point you to one more response by Michael Kruger (author of two books related to this subject matter, Canon Revisited and The Heresy of Orthodoxy). Here he responds to Eichenwald’s discussion of textual variants:

In an effort to shock the reader, Eichenwald appeals to two significant textual variations in the NT, namely the long ending of Mark (16:9-20) and the pericope of the adulterous woman (John 7:53-8:11). These are the same ones that Ehrman highlights in his book Misquoting Jesus—which is evidently a big influence on Eichenwald.

But, Eichenwald only tells part of the story. First, he doesn’t tell the reader that these are the only two significant variations in the entire New Testament. He presents them like they are typical when they are not. Second, he doesn’t explain how text-critical methodologies allow scholars to identify these changes as later additions. And if they can be identified as later additions, then they do not threaten our ability to know the original text [emphasis added].

Even more, Eichenwald continues to make factual errors about these changes. He states: 

Unfortunately, John didn’t write it. Scribes made it up sometime in the Middle Ages. It does not appear in any of the three other Gospels or in any of the early Greek versions of John. Even if the Gospel of John is an infallible telling of the history of Jesus’s ministry, the event simply never happened.

This statement is riddled with errors. For one, scribes probably didn’t make the story of the adulterous woman up—it probably circulated as oral tradition. Second, it was not added in the “Middle Ages” as he claims, but probably sometime between the second and fourth century. Third, we don’t know that “the event simply never happened.” On the contrary, scholars have argued it may be an authentic event that circulated in the early church for generations.

Kruger’s two-part response to the Newsweek article (Part 1, Part 2) is worth reading in full. I appreciate his conclusion:

By way of conclusion, it is hard to know what to say about an article like Eichenwald’s. In many ways, it embodies all the misrepresentations, caricatures, and misunderstandings of the average non-Christian in the world today. It is short on the facts, it has little understanding of interpretive principles, it assumes that it knows more about theology than it really does, and it pours out scorn and contempt on the average believer.

Nevertheless, in a paradoxical fashion, I am thankful for it. I am thankful because articles like this provide evangelicals with an opportunity to explain what Christians really believe, and what historical credentials the Bible really has. Eichenwald’s article is evidence that most people in the world understand neither of these things. With all the evangelical responses to this article, hopefully that is changing.

You can learn more about how textual criticism works in this brief interview with Dan Wallace or by watching his more detailed iTunes U course.

The Bible Is Not a Game of Telephone

In his response to the now infamous Newsweek article by Kurt Eichenwald attacking the Bible, Dan Wallace succinctly explained why the transmission of the Bible was not like a game of Telephone (bullet point formatting added by me for ease of reading):

The title of Eichenwald’s section that deals with manuscript transmission is “Playing Telephone with the Word of God.” The implication is that the transmission of the Bible is very much like the telephone game—a parlor game every American knows. It involves a brief narrative that someone whispers to the next person in line who then whispers this to the next person, and so on for several people. Then, the last person recites out loud what he or she heard and everyone has a good laugh for how garbled the story got. But the transmission of scripture is not at all like the telephone game.

First, the goal of the telephone game is to see how badly the story can get misrepresented, while the goal of New Testament copying was by and large to produce very careful, accurate copies of the original.
Second, in the telephone game there is only one line of transmission, while with the New Testament there are multiple lines of transmission.
Third, one is oral, recited once in another’s ear, while the other is written, copied by a faithful scribe who then would check his or her work or have someone else do it.
Fourth, in the telephone game only the wording of the last person in the line can be checked, while for the New Testament textual critics have access to many of the earlier texts, some going back very close to the time of the autographs.
Fifth, even the ancient scribes had access to earlier texts, and would often check their work against a manuscript that was many generations older than their immediate ancestor. The average papyrus manuscript would last for a century or more. Thus, even a late second-century scribe could have potentially examined the original document he or she was copying.

If telephone were played the way New Testament transmission occurred, it would make for a ridiculously boring parlor game! 

Wallace’s piece responds to many other errors in the Newsweek article, as well. You can read the whole thing here.

Constantine Didn’t Influence the Canon

By now you’ve probably read, or at least heard about, Newsweek’s cover article, “The Bible: So Misunderstood It’s a Sin” by Kurt Eichenwald. Here’s what Brian Mattson had to say about the article’s claim that Constantine influenced the assembling of the biblical canon:

There's an even stronger historical indicator, however, that by the time Constantine reigned the books of the New Testament were near universally understood. 

In 331 Constantine wrote a letter to Eusebius of Caesarea asking him to prepare 50 Bibles for use in Rome's churches. Remember, books were not printed at this time; they were copied by hand. A commission for 50 volumes was an astonishingly large request and a massive undertaking. 

If you look carefully, there is something very important missing in the letter.

It apparently never occurred to the Emperor to instruct Eusebius what books to include in the Bibles. And it never occurred to Eusebius to even ask. There is only one plausible interpretation of these deafening silences: the status of the Christian canon was implicitly understood. Can you imagine a world in which there is hot controversy over the number of books in the New Testament, receiving a request from the Emperor of the known world for copies of the Bible, and not clarifying what he wanted in them? Neither can I. 

That's because there was no hot controversy. Whatever messy confusion had existed about the question had obviously been so settled in the public mind that Constantine didn't feel the need to specify, and Eusebius didn't feel the need to ask. Moreover, I would suggest that for that level of implicit understanding, the question must have been settled for a very long time.

Read the rest here.

How (and Why) to Make Habits, Not Just Resolutions

On the show yesterday, Greg recommended developing good habits rather than merely making resolutions. To that end, Joe Carter has some practical advice on how to go about doing this:

Habits emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort. God designed our brains to automate mundane and rote tasks (such as walking) in order that we might have more mental energy to spend on spiritual or cultural tasks (such as worship or creating songs).

Every habit starts with a behavioral pattern called a "habit loop," which consists of a cue, routine, and reward. The cue is a type of trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and begin the routine, which is the behavior itself. The final step is the reward, an internal or external stimulus that satisfies your brain and helps it remember the habit loop….

To create a new virtuous habit, apply the following four steps…

Read about those steps here (and consider combining your habit-creation plan with these two useful apps). 

Once, many years ago, when I asked a pastor for help with being more disciplined in prayer and Bible reading, I was chastised for “trying to do things in my own strength.” This was not only unhelpful, it was bewildering and demoralizing. You may also hear something similar, but don’t believe it. We’re explicitly called to discipline ourselves “for the purpose of godliness” in 1 Timothy 4:7-10: 

[D]iscipline yourself for the purpose of godliness; for bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. It is a trustworthy statement deserving full acceptance. For it is for this we labor and strive, because we have fixed our hope on the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of believers.

1 Corinthians 9:24-27 likewise exhorts us to “exercise self-control in all things,” to “discipline your body and make it your slave,” just as athletes do, for we are training for a much better prize than any athlete ever worked for. God has said there is “promise for the present life and also for the life to come” in your “labor and strife”—your discipline—to seek to know, follow, and worship Him more fully. According to 1 Timothy, we do this because we have fixed our hope on our living Savior, not in spite of Him. He is the one who provided us with the means to deepen our knowledge and appreciation of Him, so how does it honor Him to neglect those means?

It’s true, you can’t do this “in your own strength.” You definitely need the Holy Spirit to empower your fight to discipline your mind and body, so ask Him. Then fight.

Links Mentioned on the 1/06/15 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:

Misquoting God by Greg Koukl


Study of Gay Brothers May Confirm X Chromosome Link to Homosexuality by Kelly Servick


An Inconvenient Truth for the Gay Rights Movement by Alan Shlemon


Homosexuality Is Unnatural: An Is-Ought Fallacy? by Greg Koukl


Don't Just Make a Resolution, Make a Habit by Joe Carter (Tips on how to create habits)


God Cares More about Behavior Than Most People Think by Amy Hall (In response to the challenge that God cares about behavior, not theology)


The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective by Pinchas Lapide (He's still Jewish, not a Christian, but he argues that the resurrection is historical)

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.