faith for faith

Periodically, someone like a Pat Robertson or a Harold Camping will say or claim something that is so absurd and so ridiculous that it garners the attention of the national media and sends a collective shiver down the spines of the more sane persons who call themselves Christians. Because what has been carelessly spouted out by these persons are untruths and shine a negative light on Christianity, we are disgusted, outraged, and regretful that these persons decided to choose the Christian religion as the stage on which they showcase their tendencies toward lunacy.

And I believe that it is good and right to feel a certain sort of disgust and outrage when such persons say such things. Often when they do, they skew the truth, promote falsehoods, and lead others astray in the process. But as with all areas of life, I think that the motivations behind our disgust, outrage, etc. must be tested to show whether or not they are right in and of themselves and promote the truth. For though one reacts to the negative act of one, that reaction is not necessarily positive. In fact, it is probably more often the case that the negative acts of a person inspire and produce negative acts in another.

Read more…

Take a deep breath, everyone. Contrary to Harold Camping’s reports, the Rapture and subsequent Judgment will not be happening this Saturday. This news broke when an anonymous tipper pointed authorities to a seemingly obscure passage in the Apostle Peter’s second letter. There the apostle wrote:

But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed (2Pet. 3:10).

This passage seems to suggest, contrary to the hoopla surrounding Camping’s prediction, that the Day of the Lord (i.e. Judgment and the End) will come like a “thief in the night.” Through an intensive investigation of the practices of past nocturnal bandits, it has been determined that the typical night thief does not announce his intentions prior to his thievery, neither does he give clues encrypted in apocryphal literature. No, he simply comes unannounced and thus unexpectedly.

Read more…

A name is a loaded thing. It gives one description, a moniker, categories, and a sense of belonging. It also permits social interaction, structure, and order. Names are a fundamental element of human existence. But what does one do if a name no longer correctly describes him, or if the meaning the name portrays has changed over time, or if that name has become so broad that it encompasses those with whom one would never associate?

These are some of the questions I have been asking myself for years regarding the “Baptist” title. Baptist is one of those names that has become so broad and has developed so many connotations that it is hardly helpful as a name any more. Generally, the Baptist name encompasses almost anyone who professes Christ who does not hold to infant baptism. Apart from that, one can be Calvinistic or Arminian in his soteriology, covenantal, dispensational, etc., in his view of the New Covenant, charismatic or cessationist with regard to the gifts of the Spirit, congregational or elder-ruled with regard to ecclesiology, etc., etc., etc. In other words, the only thing that holds Baptists together is the dryness of their infants.

Read more…

For everyone who has wondered about life after death, wonder no longer. Stephen Hawking, astrophysicist and self-professed genius (of the Wile E. Coyote type), has formally declared that “Heaven is a fairy story.” While it is difficult to question the genius of such a man as Stephen Hawking (especially since his paraplegia gives him a certain sixth sense of knowing everything), just how did he come to such a conclusion? Usually when someone makes a claim about the afterlife they usually have discovered it in a religious book, in a near-death experience, or something. Hawking? Well, it just sort of naturally flows from his general repugnance of religion and the thought of God.

Enough of Hawking, but this view seems to be the view of the majority of astrophysicists apart from him. I enjoy watching the History Channel’s show, “The Universe,” but sometimes I just get disgusted by the presumption that holds the whole “science” together. These men and women talk with such certainly about cosmic events that happened millions and billions of years ago as though they found the journal of someone or something that live at that time. Amazing how there is such certainly about unrecorded history and so much skepticism about recorded history two-thousand years ago, but I digress.

Read more…

Limping around more awkward than a toddler with disproportionate legs is the post-Reformation, American church living under its self-inflicted delusion of democracy. When Rome was in charge, times were simpler, at least regarding the state, the church, the law, and morality, because the church was the state, and morality (at least that which was said to be moral) was the law. Yet even now, though for centuries all of these things have been separated in America, the church still has no clue on how to address them. Some try to do it with signs, others with bumper stickers, some at the polls, and others, like Tim Keller, just say that everyone else is doing it wrong and then suffer amnesia.

From all the confusion, there is a total absence of consensus on how to deal with homosexual marriage, abortion, etc., spanning from the liberal “churches” and their “come as you are and stay that way forever” message to the super-political, super-conservative, Rush Limbaugh-listening churches who cry themselves to sleep over prayer being taken out of public schools and the thought of a Pledge without “under God” scribbled in for added religiosity. And then there’s everyone else.

Read more…