An Involved Church

I started this a while ago, and just finished it recently.

Jesus and the New Testament authors rationally and logically responded to the questions of the day. Jesus answered questions about taxes, about marriage, about the resurrection, as well as others. When the Saducees questioned the resurrection of the dead, he responded with a verse within the only five books of the Old Testament that they accepted. He went into their territory, on common ground, and refuted their error.

Luke wrote both of his books to the Roman Theophilus to explain and defend the young Christian faith. Someone wrote Hebrews to show how Christianity completed and improved on Old Testament Judaism. Paul wrote I Corinthians to answer a variety of questions about church doctrine and practice. James responded to those who valued faith without works by reconnecting faith and works. John answered the early Gnostics in his epistle. The early church responded to the questions of its day in an intelligent, reasonable way.

After the Apostles died, others took up the mantle. These early apologists defined Christian beliefs, criticized their culture, and contrasted New Testament Christianity with Greek religions. They too responded to the questions of their culture.

On the other hand is FCC petition 2493. Back in 1975, Christians were encouraged to respond to FCC 2493 which would ban all religious programming from the airwaves. Madalyn Murray O'Hare was behind this attack on the church. Christians responded with 600,000 letters in the next few months. By the 1980's, the FCC had four full time employees responding to these letters. By the 1990's, one million letters per year were arriving at FCC offices. In the new millenium, Dr. Dobson and various pastors have been associated with this effort. This year (May 2009) even snopes.com has been associated with the veracity of this attack on the church.

The problem is that the entire panic attack is based on misunderstanding or outrigth fraud. FCC 2493 was requesting that channels reserved for education not be used for religious broadcasting. The FCC rejected the request in August 1975. O'Hare was never associated with this petition. Neither were Dobson or any other pastor. Snopes.com clearly tells about the fiction of this story. Yet, 80 million Christians have been fooled over the last 34 years. What does that say about Christians except that they are gullible and fail to check their facts? No wonder they believe that the dead can come back to life!

As a church, if we are to impact our culture, we must follow the example of the early church and not the 80 million. We must look at the issues of our day and find Biblical principles that respond to those issues. Most Christians have opinions on any topic, but rarely do we actually gather data, read the Bible, and think about the issue. As a church, we must do that.

As a church, we need to have Biblical positions on various current events? Do we have a Biblical position on health care? What about stem cell research? Welfare? Divorce and Gay marriage? Global warming? Cloning? Year-round schooling?

I know we all have personal opinions on these issues, but do we have carefully thought out Biblical positions? Have we considered what God would say about these things? If we are to follow the examples of the Bible, we must -- collectively if not individually.

Already Gone

I just finished Ken Ham's book, Already Gone. This is more a summary with a little personal commentary than a book review.

Nationally, 61% of twenty-somethings have left the church, 20% are still in the church, and 19% were never in church. Ken Ham had Britt Beemer survey 1000 twenty-somethings who grew up in the church but no longer attend. This survey was looking at that 61% to find out why they left the church and what we can change to keep our young people.

One disturbing factor was that there seems to be a correlation between attending Sunday School and leaving the church. No, I didn't write that carelessly. It seems that if a young person attends Sunday School more often, they become more convinced that the Bible is not true and leave the church. The research seems to indicate that not only is Sunday School not working, but it is actually detrimental.

Those who leave the church can be divided into two groups -- those who never attend church and don't plan on it and those who attend for Christmas and Easter or who plan to go back to church when they have kids.

The reasons they left the church are also divided into two groups. Those who have completely left the church did so because they no longer believe the Bible is true. Those who have practically left the church still believe the Bible is true, but do not believe the church is relevant to them.

The solutions are therefore two pronged. The first solution is that we in the church -- Sunday School, sermons, Christian education -- must teach apologetics. Ken Ham focuses on Genesis of course -- Creation, Catatstrophic World Wide Flood, Young Earth, Fossils and Rocks from the Flood, historical Babel, etc. I completely agree, although I think that is not even enough -- we need to include archaeology, the reliability of the Old and New Testaments, the Resurrection, prophecy, the existence of truth and God, the divinity of Christ, etc. The church has either abandoned the inerrancy of the Bible or replace defending the Scriptures with emotionalism. Either way loses young people. So step one -- Defend the Word.

The second solution is actually more complicated. Ken Ham says that we have three problems. First is hypocrisy. We in the church say that we believe the Bible but we don't live that way. Traditionally that means people who say that we should forgive (the Bible says so) don't forgive (don't live it). But, in my opinion, it also includes saying that the Bible is the basis of our entire lives but choosing our political, economic, educational, business, technological, psychological, etc. positions based on the thoughts of the secular world, conservative or liberal.

The second problem is shallow teaching in the church. Many chruches have gone for sugar coated, mushy-gushy, emotional, messages and entertainment oriented Sunday School and Youth programs and missed the opportunity to actually teach God's Word. The church claimed the upstairs of the spiritual life and abandoned the downstairs of the rest of our lives.

The third problem is setting tradition up as equal to the Bible. Ken Ham says that when we say "church" we think of a building, an order of service, sermons and Sunday School, and worship music. However, none of these are Biblically mandated parts of "church". [I think that preaching and singing are mandated though perhaps not the way we do it]. He argues that since these are traditions, they are negotiable. If we must change or abandoned tradition in order to reach our young people we should -- but that is very different from abandoning Biblical positions like the age of the earth and the global flood as the church world has largely done.

In summary, the second solution is Live the Word.

PS Interesting side note -- The young people who have left the church completely were much more likely to not have correct beliefs about Biblical topics than those who have left the church but come back periodically. That is true with one exception -- dinosaurs. The Christmas/Easter young people were more likely to believe that all the dinosaurs died before man was on earth than those who have completely discarded church. I don't know why, but I thought it was interesting.

The Opening go the Christian Mind, Pt 1

I recently finished David W. Gill's book, The Opening of the Christian Mind. This isn't so much a review as it is a summary of what stood out to me. Some of these are random comments and some are summaries of chapters. I hope it helps you as it helped me.

"There is no legitimate field of study or work which will fail to be illuminated by the Word of God. A corollary which I think is equally true: If a field of study or work is found, after due effort, to be impossible to locate under the lordship of Jesus Christ, the burden of proof is on us to demonstrate why we should continue in that field." (27) Whatever you do, the Bible has something to say. This is related to the sufficiency of Scripture as we studied in Sunday School a few weeks ago.

"A genuine pluralism means we have the cultural space to act as these foreign agents in the world. Our call is not to unify, master and manage the society, but to bear witness to it with truth and love. I think we should, therefore, thank God for the degree of freedom pluralism brings with it." (36) Sometimes we say we want a Christian America, and in some senses that would be good, but in many ways a pluralistic society is tolerant of our Christianity and our relationship with God in ways that a society with an official religion could not be.

In a discussion of the challenges of living in a techno-pluralistic world, Gill defines technique as "the method of reducing every phenomenon to rational analysis, reducing what is qualitative to quantitative consideration, thinking and working only in relation to measurable results. It is the worship of measurable effectiveness." Im afraid that in the church we have reduced spiritual techniques and Biblical education to those things that have immediate and measurable results. In school the question over and over is "When will we ever use this?" While relevance is important, there are long term benefits to education that can't be measured in the short term.

"...modern secular society 'compartmentalizes religions and treats it as peripheral or even irrelevant to large areas of life and thought.'... But my own visits to Christian college campuses have not turned up much integration there either....no significant attempts at creative Christian perspective on anything except religious studies....But my general impression (from many lecture tours to Christian colleges) is that most Christian college professors are no more interested in integration than are their secular counterparts. Their coursese treat economics, medicine, law, sociology, history, and other fields just as they would be treated in major universities -- but without the same level of academic depth and stature as the latter.) (54, 123) A biting indictment! The Christian school movement is crying "Biblical integration!" but often that is just tacking on a verse of Scripture to a lesson or making an object lesson out of the content. Really examining the foundations of our course of study and determining what God says about it seems to be rare in the church.

Way Back Book Review

Mark Buzard, a friend of mine, loaned me the book Way Back. I recommend it. I'll try not to include any spoilers.

The basic plot is that a group of scientists and security men are sent back in time to the age of Noah. They get to encounter the garden of Eden, dinosaurs, the antediluvian culture, and the Ark. There are some other subplots, but that would be spoiling the book.

Sam Batterman is the author and seems to have done a lot of research for this book. Unfortunately, not all his sources were good ones and they weren't consistent with each other. Here are some good and bad points about the book from a Young Earth Creationist perspective.

On pages 92 and 126 he describes a pre-Flood vapor canopy. He presents an older view of the canopy (from the 80's at the latest) and Creationists no longer emphasize the canopy. But he does well.

On page 74, he describes a Biblical timeline from Creation to the present. On page 76, he estimates the population of the pre-Flood earth as between 3-9 billion. Good job.

On pages 130-134, a character describes the Intelligent Design argument for Creation and includes an excellent though simple description of bacterial flagellum. I was impressed.

On page 192 he discusses the use of laminate boards on the ark. I just heard about that summer of '08.

His picture of the Ark in Ch 27 was excellent. He uses AIG's new "thinking outside the box" shape of the ark. I'm not convinced the new view is right, but I was pleased to see a serious description of the ark.

On page 194, the map they discover is consistent with many views of a pre-Flood single continent.

Ch 44 and Ch 49 describe the Flood itself. It is excellent, although a version that I have never heard elsewhere. The violence and the total destruction -- not only of the people and culture, but of the very geography -- of the sinful antediluvian world. Very well done.

Amazingly, on pp 69-70 and 78 they discover the original location of the Garden of Eden by following modern rivers and river beds. If the Flood occurred as described in Ch 44 and 49, the ancient rivers and rivers bed would be permanently wiped off the face of the earth. There is no way any modern rivers or river bed survived from before the Flood. Ch 13 concerning the Arabian Shield seems to me to have the same flaw, although I have never studied the Arabian Shield.

On page 93 he describes a parasaurolophus trumpeting. Parasaurolophuses had a hollow bone on their skull (6 foot long, I believe). Typical (evolutionary) books suggest it may have been used for trumpeting. Creationist books tend to suggest that it was used for "breathing" smoke and fire along the lines of a six foot bombardier beetle. I was disappointed that he didn't follow the creationist suggestion.

On page 128 the characters are discussing micro-evolution and macro-evolution. They limit micro-evolution to species and macro-evolution to larger categories than the species. This is a misunderstanding of the meaning of species and kinds. The key difference is that micro-evolution involves rearranging existing genetic information to form a new breed or species. Macro-evolution involves adding genetic information so that a one-celled protozoa evolves into a fabulous human being. The was the topic is discussed in Way Back, it sounds like creationists believe in fixity of the species, which they don't.

Overall, it was an excellent book and I highly recommend. I also recommend that if you read old earth creationist literature, ID literature, and young earth creationist literature, you need to make sure your final ideas are internally consistent. If Sam Batterman had done that a good book would have been even better.

Antediluvian Rivers

Just curious. Is there any reason why small rivers must join to make big rivers instead of big rivers splitting into smaller rivers? The Bible tells of a spring coming out of Eden and dividing into four rivers. Could those four rivers continued to divide to water the earth? I know I'm a physicist but I don't have any specific training in river physics. Any ideas?

Pergamos and Thyatira

We just studied the letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2-3. Growing up we often heard about the Ephesian church -- "You have lost your first love." We often heard about Laodicea and its lukewarmness. Preachers liked to emphasize the need for a vibrant passion in our relationship with God.

I have never heard a message on Smyrna or Philadelphia. Maybe a church with no flaws is less useful in preaching. Maybe a church under persecution is too far from American experience. I've never heard a message on Sardis, but since Sardis did nothing right they aren't a very good example.

But why haven't we heard about Pergamos and Thyatira? Pergamos was a that held fast to their faith in the midst of intense opposition. Even with martyrs dying in their midst, they were faithful. But God had something against them. They tolerated the doctrines of Balaam and the Nicolaitans. His message to them was that they should repent or He would come and fight against the heretics.

Thyatira was known to God for works, love, service, faith, patience, and works -- and works is listed twice. But God objected to their tolerance of Jezebel. God has violent judgment planned for Jezebel and her followers. Those who have avoided her heresy are encouraged to hold fast to their faith.

We have often heard that orthodoxy and works are not enough -- passion is necessary. We have not heard often enough that works and passion are not enough -- orthodoxy is necessary. Both Pergamos and Thyatira were praised for their passion and works, but condemned because they tolerated heresy.

I have two points. First, is that emotion is as dangerous as reason. In the last year I heard a speaker who was discussing worshipping God and listing various tools that God has given us to worship Him. The second was our emotions. The third was reason. As the speaker began talking about reason, he took time to warn us of the danger of reason. Then he gave the positive ways to use reason. Why was no warning given about emotion? Is there no spiritual danger in emotion?

If we are choosing a doctor, are we looking for one who gives us good emotions, or one who has the truth about our disease? If we are choosing mechanic, are we looking for one who gives us warm fuzzies or one who knows the truth about our car? If we are looking for a mate, do we trust our emotions or do we use our head? If we are trying to serve God, do we choose our church/religion with our heart or our head? Are we looking for thrills or truth? According to Rev. 2-3 the answer to the last two questions is "both".

So, what heresies is the church struggling with today? Bart Ehrman and Dan Brown and many other authors have been undermining the reliability of Scripture in the popular media with best selling books. You may not have heard about them, but they are having an impact on the popular concepts of our Bible. The church will be impacted (and many mainline churches already have).

The emergent church is adapting postmodern philosophies and embracing heresy in the process. While the holiness churches may not have been impacted directly, ACSI (our Christian school organization) has promoted emergent authors (as well as anti-emergent speakers). That means that our thinking may be impacted if we are not careful.

And worldliness is infiltrating the church. I'm not talking about standards (at least not right now). I'm talking about worldly thinking. Instead of thinking about life -- politics, economics, work, education, science, art, music, psychology, ethics -- in terms of what the Bible says and what God commands, we are making those decisions based on conservative radio and liberal media. Just one example will have to suffice for now.

An author I was reading recently was in London where anyone can speak about anything. An evangelist was doing his best to share the Gospel, though without much skill. He was confronted by a Marxist who was winning the argument. One of the Marxist's comments was "Your Jesus was not a nice guy." The evangelist didn't know how to respond. The author interrupted to agree with the Marxist and give examples of Jesus reproving the Pharisees, Herod, and the temple merchants. His question was, "Where did we get the idea Jesus was a nice guy?" I feel like we've replaced the judgmentalism that was prevalent when I was young with a feel good Jesus today. One of my coworkers was teaching the Gospels to Jr. High and the students were scandalized by the words of Jesus -- He wasn't nice. The God of the Bible (both OT and NT), like Aslan of Narnia, is good but not safe. Our concept of God has been influenced by the tolerance of our post-modern, politically correct society.

If we are going to serve God, we must be passionate about relationship, diligent about works, and orthodox in belief

Easter

I didn't get to finish my Easter Sunday School yesterday, so I'll finish it now.

First let me review.

There are five indisputable facts about Easter. By indisputable facts I mean that more than 90% of all experts, liberal and conservative, Christian and atheist, agree on these five facts. You may be surprised by some of them.

1. Jesus was killed by crucifixion.
2. The tomb was empty.
3. The disciples truly believed that Jesus had risen from the death.
4. The conversion of the persecuter, Paul of Tarsus.
5. The conversion of the brother of Jesus, James.

That led me to four implications of the Resurrection. If the Resurrection is true than
1. our religion is objectively, historically true.
2. Jesus is God Himself.
3. death is defeated.
4. we can live victoriously.

There are three objections to Easter that are currently popular. Actually there are more than three, but I chose three to refer to in Sunday School.
1. The Quran claims that Jesus never died, but was taken off the cross by Allah. However, the Quran was written centuries after Jesus died. It is inherently less historically reliable than the Gospels that were written within decades of Easter. In addition, Jesus said He would die and be raised again. If the Quran is right, than he didn't die and was a false prophet. But the Quran claims that he was a true prophet. So either the Quran is wrong or the Quran is wrong.

2. Baigent, author of the Jesus Papers, claims that Pilate saved Jesus' life because Jesus was friendly to Rome and advocated paying taxes. Baigent is a very popular author, but an unreliable historian. Pilate's job and life were hanging by a thread at the time of Jesus death. He desperately needed to keep the Jews happy. In addition, Paul was killed by Rome, but his writings were clearly pro-government. Baigent claims that Pilate gave Jesus a drug to imitate death and then Jesus was revived after he was taken down. However, Josephus tells of three friends who were taken down off crosses, given the best medical treatment Rome had to offer. All three died. Baiegent's story doesn't match historical facts.

3. The Discovery Channel claimed that they had discovered Jesus' family tomb. Their argument is based on names and marriage. The names in the tomb were Jesus son of Joseph, Joseph, Mary, Matthew, Marianme Mara, and Judah son of Jesus. The claim is that the names indicate that it could only have been Jesus family. However, Mary was an extremely common name -- one in four or five women had that name. 1/7 men were named Joseph, 1/11 were named Jesus, 1/10 were named Judah, and 1/20 were named Matthew. Based on the population of Jerusalem, there were 1,000 "Jesus son of Joseph"s in Jerusalem and 11 men in Jerusalem who would fit the whole tomb. Thus it would not be necessarily the Messiah's tomb. The name that supposedly clinches it is Marianme Mara. The Discovery Channel claims that this is Mary Magdalene, that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, and the Judah was their son. However, Marianme is a variation of Mary and Mara is a varition of Martha. There is no reference to Magadala. There is also no evidence that Jesus was married.


There are two perspectives on the Resurrection. There are those who claim that Jesus' resurrection was only spiritual resurrection that gave hope after death. How can a spiritual resurrection give hope? Paul Harvey tells of sailors who were afraid to sail on Friday the 13th. Employers finally tired of it. They built a boat called Friday the 13th. The building began on Friday the 13th. The boat was launched on Friday the 13th. The boat began it maiden voyage on Friday the 13th. And thus the superstition about Friday the 13th was ended. Of course the ship, Friday the 13th, sunk on that maiden voyage and was never seen again, but it conquered the sailors fears. Why? The story does not make sense. It makes no more sense than a dead man who never lived again would take away the fear of death. If Jesus only rose spiritually, then he is still dead. He didn't conquer death, death conquered him. How do you build a religion that has no fear of death from that beginning?

We believe that the resurrection was physical. Jesus physically rose from the dead, conquering death, and is truly alive today. What evidence do you give? I think of stories where a person is missing and loved ones waiting are sure they are still alive because their heart says so. Often, in the stories, they are right. But the people in the story are usually not impressed with such "evidence." In order to persuade someone of a historical, physical event, then we need historical physical evidence. Eyewitnesses who saw Jesus. People whose lives were changed by their encounter with the risen Jesus. Opposition who couldn't deny the empty tomb. This is the evidence needed for historical facts. "He lives within my heart" is not evidence of a historical resurrection, but only of a spiritual experience. Unfortunately, most religions have spiritual experiences that are meaningful to them. That makes all religions true in a postmodern world. Only Christianity has a historical basis for its truth.

Each of us has a single choice. Do we accept the historical fact of Easter, accept Jesus' sacrifice for us, and acknowledge His Lordship over our lives, or do we reject it?