Gregory Koukl's Blog, page 84
July 30, 2014
Scripture Memory System
This looks like it could be really helpful:
Read more about the system here. I think I would prefer using physical cards, but there’s also a Windows 8 app available. The app might make it easier to put a larger portion on a single card (a paragraph or a chapter at a time is usually better than a single verse if you want to understand the meaning of the verses you’re memorizing). You can take as many days as you need to memorize a single card, so a chapter is doable.
(HT: Justin Taylor)
July 29, 2014
Links Mentioned on the 7/29/14 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:
Good Reasons to Say Grace in a Restaurant by Greg Koukl
Like the new STR Facebook page
Is God in Time? by Greg Koukl
Who Created God? by Amy Hall
God, Time, & Eternity (CD) by William Lane Craig
ReTHINK Student Apologetics Conference – September 26-27
Become a monthly supporter of Stand to Reason
The Forgotten Trinity by James White
The Trinity: A Solution, Not a Problem (CD) by Greg Koukl
The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything by Fred Sanders
Father, Son, & Holy Spirit: Relationships, Roles, & Relevance by Bruce Ware
The Trinity Is Biblical by Melinda Penner
The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way by Michael Horton
Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine by Wayne Grudem
Sinners in the Hands of a Good God: Reconciling Divine Justice and Mercy by David Clotfelter
What We Believe about the Five Points of Calvinism – Desiring God
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.
News for Facebook Users
If you follow us on Facebook, I’ve got good news and bad news. And good news.
The good news is that we’re updating from an outdated group page to the newer page format. The bad news is that there’s no way to automatically convert a group into a page, and that means that if you want to keep getting updates from us, you need to like our new Facebook page before the old group disappears. Go ahead, take a few seconds right now to like the new page, then come back. I’ll wait here…
Welcome back, and congratulations! You will now be fully informed about what’s happening here at the blog, in our store, on the podcast, and more!
Now here’s more good news: When we reach 2,500 likes, we’re giving away a set of Doug Powell’s iWitness books (Softcover Collection) to one of our valued 2,500 fans. And if we’ve already passed the 2,500 mark when you like the page, don’t worry; we’ll be having more giveaways as we work on getting everybody moved over to the new page.
July 28, 2014
On an Old Earth View, How Do You Reconcile Animal Death Before the Fall with Genesis 1?
Greg brings clarity to the issue of animal death before the fall of mankind.
July 26, 2014
Where Did These Minimal Facts about the Resurrection Come From?
When Gary Habermas’s “Minimal Facts” approach to the resurrection comes up, I’ll often hear two challenges: 1) “Who are these scholars?” and 2) “This is an illegitimate appeal to authority.” So I’ve posted excerpts below from a paper by Habermas explaining his method that I think will clear some of this up.
It’s important to note regarding the second challenge that Habermas doesn’t dismiss the need for arguments for the historicity of the minimal facts apart from their scholarly support. The use of the scholars to show that “even by skeptical approaches, the resurrection can be established historically,” is merely used as a kind of shorthand in an apologetic approach (as well as being evidence for the strength of the evidence). Certainly, one could take the time to go through the arguments for each fact, but the idea is that as you’re talking to skeptical people, they’re likely to acknowledge a fact that’s accepted by even the most skeptical scholars out there, so this frees you to move on to assembling those facts into a conclusion. If they ask for the evidence for a fact, of course that can be given, as well.
From Habermas’s paper:
From the outset of my studies, I argued that there were at least two major prerequisites for an occurrence to be designated as a Minimal Fact. Each event had to be established by more than adequate scholarly evidence, and usually by several critically-ascertained, independent lines of argumentation. Additionally, the vast majority of contemporary scholars in relevant fields had to acknowledge the historicity of the occurrence. Of the two criteria, I have always held that the first is by far the most crucial, especially since this initial requirement is the one that actually establishes the historicity of the event. Besides, the acclamation of scholarly opinion may be mistaken or it could change….
Regarding my references to the “vast majority” or “virtually all” scholars who agree, is it possible to identify these phrases in more precise terms? ... At least when referencing the most important historical occurrences, I frequently think in terms of a ninety-something percentile head-count….
Where are most scholars and why, precisely, are they there?
To answer this question in my case, what began as a rather modest attempt to update my resurrection bibliography grew by large increments until it developed into a full-blown attempt to catalog an overview of recent scholarship. The study dominated five straight years of my research time, as well as long intermittent stretches after that. Apparently, I was not very successful at drawing boundaries! I pursued an ongoing study that classified at least the major publications on these topics, continuing on through other representative sources. I counted a very wide spectrum of scholarly views, tracing the responses to about 140 sub-issues or questions related to the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. My bibliography is presently at about 3400 sources and counting, published originally in French, German, or English. Initially I read and catalogued the majority of these publications, charting the representative authors, positions, topics, and so on, concentrating on both well-known and obscure writers alike, across the entire skeptical to liberal to conservative spectrum. As the number of sources grew, I moved more broadly into this research, trying to keep up with the current state of resurrection research.
I endeavored to be more than fair to all the positions. In fact, if anything, I erred in the direction of cataloguing the most radical positions, since this was the only classification where I included even those authors who did not have specialized scholarly credentials or peer-reviewed publications. It is this group, too, that often tends to doubt or deny that Jesus ever existed. Yet, given that I counted many sources in this category, this means that my study is skewed in the skeptical direction far more than if I had stayed strictly with my requirement of citing only those with scholarly credentials. Still, I included these positions quite liberally, even when the wide majority of mainline scholars, “liberals” included, rarely even footnoted this material. Of course, this practice would also skew the numbers who proposed naturalistic theories of the resurrection, to which I particularly gravitated.
The result of all these years of study is a private manuscript of more than 600 pages that simply does little more than line up the scholarly positions and details on these 140 key questions, without additional interaction or critique….
This entire exercise is about constructing a viable methodology that is capable of establishing the historicity of the resurrection even when utilizing the particular methods, tools, and conclusions of the critical community of scholars…. Chiefly, these can indicate that, even by skeptical approaches, the resurrection can be established historically.
But it should always be remembered that this is an apologetic strategy. Thus, it is not a prescription for how a given text should be approached in the original languages and translated, or how a systematic theology is developed, or how a sermon is written. So it should never be concluded that the use of such methods in an apologetic context indicate a lack of trust in Scripture as a whole, or, say, the Gospels in particular.
Read the whole footnoted paper here.
Where Did these Minimal Facts about the Resurrection Come From?
When Gary Habermas’s “Minimal Facts” approach to the resurrection comes up, I’ll often hear two challenges: 1) “Who are these scholars?” and 2) “This is an illegitimate appeal to authority.” So I’ve posted excerpts below from a paper by Habermas explaining his method that I think will clear some of this up.
It’s important to note regarding the second challenge that Habermas doesn’t dismiss the need for arguments for the historicity of the minimal facts apart from their scholarly support. The use of the scholars to show that “even by skeptical approaches, the resurrection can be established historically,” is merely used as a kind of shorthand in an apologetic approach (as well as being evidence for the strength of the evidence). Certainly, one could take the time to go through the arguments for each fact, but the idea is that as you’re talking to skeptical people, they’re likely to acknowledge a fact that’s accepted by even the most skeptical scholars out there, so this frees you to move on to assembling those facts into a conclusion. If they ask for the evidence for a fact, of course that can be given, as well.
From Habermas’s paper:
From the outset of my studies, I argued that there were at least two major prerequisites for an occurrence to be designated as a Minimal Fact. Each event had to be established by more than adequate scholarly evidence, and usually by several critically-ascertained, independent lines of argumentation. Additionally, the vast majority of contemporary scholars in relevant fields had to acknowledge the historicity of the occurrence. Of the two criteria, I have always held that the first is by far the most crucial, especially since this initial requirement is the one that actually establishes the historicity of the event. Besides, the acclamation of scholarly opinion may be mistaken or it could change….
Regarding my references to the “vast majority” or “virtually all” scholars who agree, is it possible to identify these phrases in more precise terms? ... At least when referencing the most important historical occurrences, I frequently think in terms of a ninety-something percentile head-count….
Where are most scholars and why, precisely, are they there?
To answer this question in my case, what began as a rather modest attempt to update my resurrection bibliography grew by large increments until it developed into a full-blown attempt to catalog an overview of recent scholarship. The study dominated five straight years of my research time, as well as long intermittent stretches after that. Apparently, I was not very successful at drawing boundaries! I pursued an ongoing study that classified at least the major publications on these topics, continuing on through other representative sources. I counted a very wide spectrum of scholarly views, tracing the responses to about 140 sub-issues or questions related to the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. My bibliography is presently at about 3400 sources and counting, published originally in French, German, or English. Initially I read and catalogued the majority of these publications, charting the representative authors, positions, topics, and so on, concentrating on both well-known and obscure writers alike, across the entire skeptical to liberal to conservative spectrum. As the number of sources grew, I moved more broadly into this research, trying to keep up with the current state of resurrection research.
I endeavored to be more than fair to all the positions. In fact, if anything, I erred in the direction of cataloguing the most radical positions, since this was the only classification where I included even those authors who did not have specialized scholarly credentials or peer-reviewed publications. It is this group, too, that often tends to doubt or deny that Jesus ever existed. Yet, given that I counted many sources in this category, this means that my study is skewed in the skeptical direction far more than if I had stayed strictly with my requirement of citing only those with scholarly credentials. Still, I included these positions quite liberally, even when the wide majority of mainline scholars, “liberals” included, rarely even footnoted this material. Of course, this practice would also skew the numbers who proposed naturalistic theories of the resurrection, to which I particularly gravitated.
The result of all these years of study is a private manuscript of more than 600 pages that simply does little more than line up the scholarly positions and details on these 140 key questions, without additional interaction or critique….
This entire exercise is about constructing a viable methodology that is capable of establishing the historicity of the resurrection even when utilizing the particular methods, tools, and conclusions of the critical community of scholars…. Chiefly, these can indicate that, even by skeptical approaches, the resurrection can be established historically.
But it should always be remembered that this is an apologetic strategy. Thus, it is not a prescription for how a given text should be approached in the original languages and translated, or how a systematic theology is developed, or how a sermon is written. So it should never be concluded that the use of such methods in an apologetic context indicate a lack of trust in Scripture as a whole, or, say, the Gospels in particular.
Read the whole footnoted paper here.
July 25, 2014
The Answer for Making Good Decisions
Chandler Vannoy wrote about “What We Get Wrong about ‘Finding God’s Will,’” and it’s always a good time to be reminded of this:
The phrase we have all heard…is we need to find God’s will for our life. And for the past 21 years, I thought I had to keep praying for God to open my eyes to the will he had laid out for me. That if I just kept searching long enough and hard enough, I would know exactly what I was supposed to do in the future.
But Kevin DeYoung blew up this idea for me while I was reading his book Just Do Something….
In the beginning of the book, DeYoung says, “We should stop thinking of God’s will like a corn maze, or a tight-rope, or a bull’s eye, or a choose-your-own-adventure novel.” This rocked my world. I always thought that if I made a wrong decision or took a wrong turn, I would be removed from God’s plan.
But what he is saying here is that we are free from the burden of trying to discover God’s will ahead of time. It is not a maze for us to perfectly navigate in order to reach our end goal, but instead, God desires for us to trust Him with all of the twists and turns.
Yes, God is sovereign over my life. Yes, He has specific plans for my future, but He does not expect me to find out the details of His plan before I get there. So this whole idea of finding God’s will for my life has been me searching for something God does not want to reveal.
The answer for making good decisions is to learn wisdom from the words God has already given us, and to rest in the knowledge that God has guaranteed that all things work together for the good of making us more like Christ (Romans 8:28-29). Even if a wise decision leads to unforeseen difficulties, that doesn’t mean it was the “wrong” one. In fact, difficulties are the most powerful tool God regularly uses to shape us.
We have resources on our website to help you think through this, including the book Vannoy recommended above:
Just Do Something: A Liberating Approach to Finding God’s Will by Kevin DeYoung (book)
Does God Whisper? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 (articles)
Decision Making and the Will of God by Greg Koukl (audio)
Decision Making and the Will of God by Garry Friesen and J. Robin Maxson (book)
July 24, 2014
Wedgwood Abolitionist
You may be familiar with Wedgwood pottery. One of the most distinct of Josiah Wedgwood's designs is jasper ware – most commonly with blue or green glaze with classic figures applied in white. He was a well known potter in the 18th century, and was also an abolitionist and innovative business man.
He was born in England in 1730 to a family of potters. They were dissenters of the Church of England, and his biblical values ran deep.
He opened his own pottery and experiments with glazing techniques and colors that became famous. Wedgwood invented the pyrometer to control the temperature in the kilns to ensure consistent quality of his pottery. He introduced a production line in his factory. "He is credited with creating the first illustrated catalogues, employing the first modern traveling salesmen, and pioneering direct mail marketing. He offered money-back guarantees, free delivery, and self-service in his shops. He even set up 'buy one, get one free' sales for his products." As a result, he became a very successful businessman, and his pottery was purchased in the royal palaces of Europe, as well as middle class homes.
Because of his Christian convictions, Josiah Wedgwood had a high view of the intrinsic value of all human beings, and this led him to become involved in the abolition movement in England. He asked one of his designers to create an emblem for the movement. It was a kneeling slave with the caption, "Am I not a man and a brother?" The design became a wildly popular symbol of the abolition movement in England and even America. It could be seen on snuff boxes, pipes, cuff links, and women's jewelry. The jewelry gave women a rare opportunity to express their social and political views when that was very uncommon. Wedgwood helped promote the cause of abolition that led to the end of the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807.
July 23, 2014
Is Plan B an Abortifacient?
I’ve been hearing the charge that there’s no reason to think the contraceptives Hobby Lobby refused to subsidize (Plan B, Ella, and two types of IUDs) are actually abortifacients, so I was happy to see that Josh Brahm of the Equal Rights institute had collected a series of articles by Dr. Rich Poupard of the Life Training Institute, along with an interview with Dr. Poupard on “How Should Pro-Lifers Talk about Birth Control?” to address this controversy (which is mostly centered on Plan B).
Read through the articles here and watch the interview below. Here’s the bottom line from one of the articles:
Let me contrast Plan B and Ella. Plan B is basically synthetic progesterone, and is merely a larger dose of a form of oral contraceptive that has been used for years. Ella is a progesterone antagonist, which means that it works by blocking the effect of progesterone. The only other progesterone antagonist on the market at this time is mifepristone, otherwise known as RU-486, the abortion pill....
In the case of Plan B – there is no direct evidence that it decreases the receptivity of the uterine lining to an embryo that is attempting to implant. There is some indirect evidence that has concerned many in our movement, but there is also evidence from both animal studies and human studies that indicate no post-fertilization effects from Plan B. In the absence of clear evidence, I urge caution, but cannot state that using Plan B is wrong because of its post-fertilization effects. Lots of my older posts on this topic can be found here....
What about Ella? I will show in following posts that just about everything that I stated about Plan B is completely different than Ella. Ella has been shown conclusively to have an adverse effect on the uterine lining. Investigators admit that if taken in higher doses, Ella will cause an abortion just like her sister RU-486. This is not an emergency contraceptive drug – it is a low dose abortifacient.
