Gregory Koukl's Blog, page 86

Sin and Sinners

I had a frustrating experience the other day you've probably had. A family member thanked me for being nice to her lesbian friend. My relative said she appreciated that since she knows how I feel about her lifestyle. I said, "You're welcome" and mentioned that I can be nice to people even if I think they're sinning.

In fact, we're all sinners. If I was going to be rude to sinners, I'd be rude all the time – including to myself.

Sadly, many people, even Christians, have a hard time distinguishing between believing someone is wrong and treating them with kindness and respect. At least when it comes to homosexuality. Obviously, those two principles are at the heart of classic tolerance, and people usually don't have trouble with them in most other contexts. But when it comes to homosexuality, the culture and many Christians have absorbed the idea that to love someone you must accept their sexuality.

It wouldn't have occurred to my relative to thank me for being nice to, for instance, another relative who is living with her boyfriend. It hasn't occurred to her to thank me for being nice to relatives who have divorced. That isn't surprising to her, but it is when it comes to homosexuality. The main reason, of course, is that there's constant cultural pressure to not just respect, but accept homosexuality as normal. And a lot of Christians yield to the pressure. Especially when they have family and friends who are gay.

Actually, I'd never said anything about the friend directly. The couple of times I'd said something was in response to my relative talking about how she admired her friend for the courage it took to be true to herself regarding her sexual attraction, ending her marriage and leaving her family. My comments to my relative (who is a Christian) were about her admiring someone for pursuing her sin, not specifically about her friend.

The fundamental biblical view is that we're all sinners. That's something every Christian has admitted personally. The Bible also teaches us to be respectful of others because they're made in God's image. We love people while at the same time maintaining that they are sinning. After all, every single one of us is a sinner. Why is homosexuality the sin most often talked about? Because it's the sin currently being normalized, just as divorce and living together have already been accepted.

I'm sure most everyone reading this blog understands that. But it's a distinction we have to be very careful and deliberate to maintain to help people understand. And if we're going to offer sinners living in rebellion to God reconciliation with Him as we've experienced.

It's hurtful to be misunderstood, even by those closest to us. It's hard to be ridiculed and marginalized in the culture. It's painful when it leads to divisions in families. But we have to continue to keep making this distinction for people, and maybe it'll sink in sooner or later. And even if it doesn't, we have to be faithful to the Bible. 

Abortion as Injustice Interview – Part 2

I was recently interviewed by students about the injustice of abortion. I thought I’d share my answers. You can read the first part of the interview here. This post is the second part of that interview.

Do you know of anyone else who is already trying to make a difference? What are they doing? 

There are many organizations and individuals working hard to make a difference. Besides myself and Stand to Reason (the organization I work for) there are other training groups, like Life Training Institute and Justice for All, that are trying to reduce abortions by changing minds. In addition, there are thousands of pregnancy resource centers that serve the needs of pregnant women. They provide pregnant mothers with prenatal care, supplies, and counseling to support them during and after their pregnancy. Many of these care centers also use ultrasound machines to show mothers images of their unborn babies. Sometimes abortion-minded women who see an ultrasound of their child will change their mind and carry their baby to term. By serving and helping them during their crisis pregnancy, these centers reduce the chances that the mothers will abort their children.

How many abortions do you think have been stopped through your program?

That’s a difficult question to answer because most of the time I don’t see the full impact of my work. The vast majority of what I do is training Christians to defend the pro-life view. When they actually engage in practicing what they’ve learned, I am not usually with them. The one exception is when I take pro-lifers out on the streets and engage abortion-choice advocates. Sometimes during my involvement in their hands-on training, we get a person who was abortion minded to change their mind. In several other instances, I have had students come back from engaging abortion-choice advocates and tell me that they prevented an abortion. But these examples are uncommon because of the nature of what I do. However, I do know that the pro-life principles I teach are effective and can change minds on abortion. In many presentations I’ve given on secular university campuses, I’ve had people tell me they are no longer pro-choice. These people may one day face a life or death decision and now I know they’ll make the right choice. Therefore, I’m confident that lives are being saved even if I don’t get regular reports of my impact.

What do you believe is the most effective way to combat abortions in the U.S. and also worldwide? 

This requires a three-pronged approach: personally, publically, and politically. First, individuals must personally commit to not have an abortion themselves. Around 30% of people who have abortions identify as Protestant or Catholic. So, first we need to act consistently with our own values and stop killing our own children. Second, we need to stand up, publically, against the killing of innocent human beings. That means changing minds on abortion with friends and family. It entails public presentations and debates at universities and other public forums. It also requires that we serve women facing crisis pregnancies with the care, love, and support they need. Third, we need to fight against abortion laws in the political realm. Laws tend to inform the conscience of the culture. When we make a behavior illegal, it communicates that the prohibited behavior is also immoral. To combat abortion in these three realms requires that people get trained with effective pro-life tactics.

What governmental change do you foresee about the issue of abortion? 

I think the government should act consistently. It is already against the law in at least 38 U.S. states to kill the unborn. If someone kills a pregnant woman, they are accused of a double homicide. Killing the unborn, in this case, is treated as murder. The only exception to this law is if the mother decides she doesn’t want to be pregnant, she can request a physician to kill her unborn child. But that’s not consistent. On the one hand, the government treats the unborn as a valuable human being who deserves protection. On the other hand, it treats that same child as neither valuable nor deserving of protection when something happens: the mother decides she doesn’t want a baby. Then, she can request a physician to kill her unborn child. Why does the government strip a member of the human community of their right to life simply based on the desire of their mother? The government isn’t being consistent and it needs to stop this behavior by treating all human beings under its jurisdiction equally.

How can young adults make a difference? 

First, they can commit to not have an abortion themselves. Too many people who are attitudinally pro-life aren’t behaviorally pro-life when it matters most. They think their situation is different and, when in a bind, succumb to the pressure to abort. Unfortunately, the data shows many Christians are having abortions. This needs to stop. Second, they can learn the art of pro-life persuasion so they can change minds on abortion when the conversation comes up. All they need is some basic skills to help them understand the science and some simple philosophical distinctions. The evidence is on our side so there’s no excuse. Third, they can volunteer for a pro-life organization or pregnancy resource center. There are many non-profit, pro-life organizations that work hard at saving lives. Anyone can call them and ask how they can help by volunteering their time. Also, they can volunteer at a pregnancy resource center. These centers come alongside women who are abortion minded and serve them when they need help the most. Fourth, they can financially support pro-life speakers, activists, and organizations. The reality is that money is needed to fund the work of people who have committed their lives to ending the injustice of abortion. It is the holocaust of our time and money provides the means to ensure the work they do to end it doesn’t stop today.

Challenge Response: A Universe Can't Be Made from Nothingness by a Non-Thing

I must say, I loved the responses to this week's challenge.  If you haven't read them, go read them.  And yes, I think there's a lot of wisdom in dealing with the mockery of this challenge first. Here's my response to some of the issues brought up: 

 

Cadbury Chocolate and Christianity

Cadbury Chocolate was founded by a Quaker, John Cadbury, who has a strong sense of social responsibility motivated by his Christian convictions.

His family were anti-slavery and campaigned for abolition. John opened a grocery store in 1824 and hoped that selling drinking chocolate would be an alternative beverage to alcohol. He was concerned that alcoholism led to poverty when people couldn't work. He devoted himself to social causes after handing over the business to his sons 35 years later.

Richard and George struggled to improve the business and their product, and continued find ways of improving people's lives. At a time when factories were dismal and dangerous places to work, the Cadburys made sure theirs were safe and humane. George was committed to social reform, and in 1893, they bought up land around their factory to build a community for their workers, named Bournville Village. They wanted to provide a safe, pleasant place to live as an alternative for grimy cities. Each home was comfortable and had a plot of land to grow vegetables. They built a community for families to enjoy activities. They provided their employees with good wages, medical treatment, educational opportunities, and pension plans, which was very unusual for the time. They introduced the 5-1/2 day work week and closing for bank holidays. The factory had sports facilities for the employees. In 1918, the Cadburys organized elected work councils, made up of equal numbers of wokers and management. The councils, one for men and one for women, oversaw the welfare of workers and their families.

George said of his plans: "If each man could have his own house, a large garden to cultivate and healthy surroundings – then, I thought, there will be for them a better opportunity of a happy family life."...The brothers set new standards for working and living conditions in Victorian Britain and the Cadbury plant in Bournville became known as "the factory in a garden."

George and his wife used their fortune to benefit their community, opening a hospital, building a camp for city children to holiday, and donating land for parks. Their home is still used as Europe's only Quaker study center.

Abortion as Injustice Interview – Part 1

I was recently interviewed by students about the injustice of abortion. I thought I’d share my answers. This post is the first of two parts.

When, where, and how did you first become aware of the injustice of abortion? 

I grew up as a Christian so, technically, I was attitudinally pro-life. But I was not behaviorally pro-life until becoming more aware of biology and embryology in my training and career as a physical therapist at Los Angeles County + USC Medical Center. It was then that I changed from merely thinking that abortion was wrong to actually doing something to stop the killing. Studying embryology and seeing graphic images of what abortion does to unborn human beings was one of the key factors that changed my awareness of this injustice.

What do you think makes it an injustice? 

It’s an injustice for exactly the same reason that killing a two year-old is an injustice: it’s wrong to kill innocent human beings. Abortion is the same. It also kills an innocent human being.

How does abortion affect your life?

I have not had a personal experience with abortion. However, I’m basically a human rights activist so it grieves me to know that innocent human beings are being killed for mostly socio-economic reasons. Knowing that my tax dollars can fund this killing only makes it worse. It is also perfectly reasonable to be motivated to stop an injustice, even if you are not personally affected by it. For example, many women and children are trafficked and sold into sex slavery. Though someone may not have experienced such an injustice personally, it is appropriate for them to do what they can to stop that evil and protect women and children from becoming victims. We are all fellow human beings and caring for your neighbor is not only loving, but commanded by Jesus of Nazareth.

What grieves your heart most about abortion? 

In every abortion that takes place, there are at least two victims. The first is the mother who is emotionally (and sometimes physically) wounded. Her decision to abort her child means she faced a crisis pregnancy. Something went horribly wrong. She chose abortion because there were many failures along the way. She didn’t have the love, support, and guidance she needed to make the right choice.

The second victim is her unborn child, who is fatally wounded. The unborn is the most vulnerable and defenseless of all the members of our human community. They should find themselves protected in their mother’s womb, given their vulnerable state. Yet, it is a place where unborn children are legally killed 2,899 times a day in the United States alone. Anyone who has seen images of the unborn after an abortion has seen the gruesome reality that befalls these innocent persons. It grieves my heart because our society is failing these two victims every day. I know we can do better than abortion.

What do you think should be done about it?

People should stop killing their unborn children and the government should make it illegal to do so. The government protects born children and adults from being killed by making murder illegal and punishing that crime. I believe they should extend the same protection to unborn human beings since they are morally equivalent to born ones. Until abortion is outlawed again, we should work to serve the needs of women who are facing crisis pregnancies and do everything we can to change minds about the morality of abortion.

How are you trying to make a difference? 

I try to change minds on abortion. If we change enough minds, we can change public opinion. If we change public opinion, we can change public policy. Changing public policy means that laws are changed to protect unborn children and that saves lives. Plus, laws tend to inform the conscience of a culture. When a behavior is made illegal, people think it is also immoral. Until abortion is outlawed, changing individual minds can also save lives by persuading abortion-minded women not to abort their children.

How do you talk to someone who has had an abortion? 

It depends on the topic of conversation, how recent the abortion occurred, and many other factors. I can say, however, that when a woman tells me she’s had an abortion, I’m quick to listen and hear the woman’s whole story. I don’t just make a case against abortion. Also, if I sense that she would be open to counseling or to a more pastoral approach, I’m eager to refer her to the many post-abortive ministries that are better equipped to help women who have had abortions.

Look for part two of this interview on Friday.

Challenge: A Universe Can't Be Made from Nothingness by a Non-Thing

Here’s an email I received recently containing a story meant to show that Genesis is “drivel”:

Monotheistic (or tri-theistic) morons call their preposterous absurd deity God, which is utterly without form or substance, consists of nothing whatever, cannot exist AS anything whatever, and therefore IS nothing (no thing) whatever.

Once upon a time when there was no time, there was nothing (also known as Nonthing). Nonthing was all there was. There was nothing else. Nada, nil, zero, zip, zilch. Nonthing had been existing forever, had never not existed, had no beginning, and therefore never began to exist. Nonthing was all-knowing, yet, having never begun to exist, it had no memory of its first realization that it did exist, much less that it had been existing forever.

But Nonthing somehow suddenly realized that it existed and had been existing forever… Bored out of its nonskull, Nonthing said to itself (there being no one else around), saying, “This sitting around all by myself doing nothing for seventy billion trillion quadrillion eons or so is getting old…. I will make a universe to play with! But with what will I make it? I am all there is…. Aha! I've got it! I will make a universe from all this nothingness surrounding me!”

And so, with an inexhaustible supply of nothingness for building material, Nonthing made the entire universe, complete with stars, galaxies, solar systems, planets, comets, quasars, black holes, dark matter, assorted cosmic flotsam and jetsam and interstellar junk, and a flat planet Earth.

Was the universe made from nothingness? Do ducks cluck? Do chickens quack? Do whales use toilets? Do sharks wear dentures?

In general, what’s the best way to respond to this kind of thing? Secondly, can you explain where this man went wrong in his reasoning and/or his characterization of the Christian God? There’s a pretty basic logical fallacy happening here, and he’s opened himself up to a huge counter-challenge. Can you find a legitimate challenge in his story, restate it for him in a more serious form, and then respond to it?

We’ll hear Brett’s response on Thursday.

[Explore past challenges here and here.]

What Are Some Good Tactics to Use When Engaging Cult Members?

Greg shares some effective tips to employ when people from alternative religions knock on your door.  

  

Shamed Prophets Become Fearless

Some good (albeit difficult) advice from N.D. Wilson’s article “Called to Be Uncool Christians”:

[W]hen was the last time you hedged on an opinion because of…those around you? When did you last choose your words based more on the politics of a situation than on truth?...

It's no wonder that one of the first tasks of any prophet was to make himself shameful. John the Baptist wore camel hair and ate insects. Isaiah had to walk around naked for years. Ezekiel had to cook his food over dung. Elijah ate only food carried by ravens—nasty carrion birds. The first thing God told Hosea to do was to marry a whore.

Prophets must be fearless, immune to the pressures of kings and crowds, aligned only with the breath of God.

We are in need of prophets now….

Prophets must be immune to floggings on Facebook and Twitter. They must be fearless before friends and tenure committees and stadiums filled with the priests of Baal. The cool-shaming can have no sting. The world is busy applying pressure on "social issues," and Christians are busy caving left and right, trying to accept fresh cultural dogma simply so that they might be accepted….

All of our positions—especially in controversy—should flow from honest exegesis, not from the mood at the local coffee shop. And we could all benefit from some shame. When the hot pressure comes, we need to be immune. If God wants it, we should be ready to wear camel hair while cooking locusts and raven scraps over a dung fire in the lions' den after our marriage to a whore.

Shame is easy to find. All we have to do is stop hiding. We already have seriously uncool friends. Moses. Paul. Christ himself. Enjoy them. Like them. In public. Offend the zeitgeist. Become immune.

A Conversation with Brett and Greg on Youth Ministry

Michael Horton discussed youth ministry with Brett and Greg recently on the White Horse Inn. You can download the episodes from iTunes or listen to the audio on the WHI website at the links below, where they’ve also collected related articles, study aids, books, and audio.

Keeping Our Kids, Part 1: “On this edition of White Horse Inn, I’ll talk with Greg Koukl and Brett Kunkle from Stand to Reason about various strategies of passing the faith on to the next generation. In particular, Brett discusses his own crisis of faith during his first semester of college and how that crisis affects his unique approach toward youth ministry.”

Keeping Our Kids, Part 2: “Continuing the conversation, Greg Koukl, Brett Kunkle, and I discuss the importance of preparing our youth for a life of faith in a secular age. Not only should they be taught what they believe and why, but before they leave home, they should also be given some basic training in how to communicate their faith and how to answer those with opposing points of view.”

Why the Outrage over the Hobby Lobby Ruling?

The response to the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision is troubling. I’m troubled not mainly because of the crazy things I’ve seen online from people who are uninformed about the nature of the decision, but because of a very polite, reasonable discussion I had with a knowledgeable person who strongly opposes the outcome. The outcome, of course, is that the employees of Hobby Lobby will still receive free contraceptives (even the four Hobby Lobby won’t be forced to pay for directly), so if the goal of protestors is for people to get free contraceptives, there should be no anger. But there is. Which means that isn’t their goal.

In the case of the conversation I had, it came down to this: “The public square should remain secular. To me, that is an expression of the separation of church and state*…. I do not think the religious beliefs of company owners should be accommodated when applying laws that impact their company’s practice.” And since, in this case, accommodating the company would have no impact on its employees, I can only assume that fact doesn’t matter to him. No, the owners of even family-owned companies should be prevented from acting according to their convictions when that action conflicts with the beliefs and goals of secularists, no matter how contrary to their conscience, even when accommodation is feasible.

That’s troubling.

I’ve come across two articles with particularly good, concise insight on what is going on here. The first is from Paul Horwitz:

The first source of controversy is the collapse of a national consensus on a key element of religious liberty: accommodation. Throughout American history, there has been widespread agreement that in our religiously diverse and widely devout country, it is good for the government to accommodate religious exercise. We have disagreed about particular accommodations (may a Muslim police officer wear a beard, despite police department policy?), and especially about whether religious accommodations should be ordered by judges or crafted by legislators. But we have generally agreed that our nation benefits when we help rather than burden those with religious obligations. That consensus seems, quite suddenly, to have evaporated.

(It’s worth reading what he cites as the other two sources, as well.)

The second article, by Julian Sanchez, gets to what I fear is at the heart of the anger:

[T]he outraged reaction to the ruling ought to seem a bit puzzling. If what you are fundamentally concerned about is whether women have access to no-copay contraception, then there’s no obvious reason to invest such deep significance in the precise accounting details of the mechanism by which it is provided….

The outrage does make sense, of course, if what one fundamentally cares about—or at least, additionally cares about—is the symbolic speech act embedded in the compulsion itself. In other words, if the purpose of the mandate is not merely to achieve a certain practical result, but to declare the qualms of believers with religious objections so utterly underserving of respect that they may be forced to act against their convictions regardless of whether this makes any real difference to the outcome. And something like that does indeed seem to be lurking just beneath—if not at—the surface of many reactions. The ruling seems to provoke anger, not because it will result in women having to pay more for birth control (as it won’t), but at least in part because it fails to send the appropriate cultural signal. Or, at any rate, because it allows religious employers to continue sending the wrong cultural signal—disapproval of certain forms of contraception—when sending that signal does not impede the achievement of the government’s ends in any way.

Personally, I have no sympathy whatever with the substantive moral views of Hobby Lobby’s owners. But I’m dismayed at how many friends who style themselves “liberals,” even recognizing the ruling will make no immediate difference in employee access to contraception, seem to regard it as an appalling betrayal that the Court refused to license what amounts to purely symbolic compulsion of people with retrograde ideas. If we accept that the exemption here makes no functional difference to whether people are covered, however, that’s the only rationale left for insisting on direct purchase of coverage by employers—and not, I had thought, a legitimate rationale for government coercion in a liberal democracy.

That’s troubling.

___________________________

*It seems he’s redefined “state” to mean not the government, but public life. Also very troubling.