Tag: The Christian Faith
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Always Learning, Never Knowing
Most people who embark on a journey expect to arrive at their destination. Airports contain huge boards showing the status, gate number, and destination of all of its departing airplanes. All of the people boarding a flight for a particular destination fully expect to arrive at that destination. But this situation isn’t true of every pursuit. Our premise here is that there are those embarked on the abstract journey of “knowing” that don’t always want to succeed. They don’t want to “arrive”.
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The Singular God and the Divine Christ: A Case for Modalism
Only some people believe that Jesus of Nazareth was divine, the same thing as God. Almost none of those believe that God is a singularity. They would say that He is “three in One”. Does the assertion of Jesus’s divinity by itself create a dichotomy between these two ideas, as many claim? The purpose of this piece is to demonstrate that a single Divinity does not represent a dichotomy but rather a transcendent truth that goes by the label “Modalism”. We will look at some of the voluminous textual evidence that supports this case and find that, far from being…
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Refuting Paul’s Attackers
The Apostle Paul has gotten a bad rap for centuries, mostly based on his antagonists’ misunderstanding/ignorance. Our purpose here is to review the attacker’s charges in some detail and demonstrate why they’re mistaken. In so doing, we’ll look at his criticisms in antiquity from both Jewish-Christian and Gentile-only factions of the early church, as well as from contemporary critics who contend Paul’s messages are counter to Jesus’.
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Searching For (and Finding) the “Needle in the Biblical Haystack”: Following the Bible’s “Blue Thread”
Our premise in what follows is that there is a unified message permeating throughout the entire Bible: both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. That message represents God’s “signal” concerning how we are to treat Him (love and reverence), and each other (love, as we love ourselves). But His signal must penetrate through lots of modern distractions and Biblical texts that have little, if anything, to do with living in accordance with God’s will and with one another in love. Thus, they are “noise” obscuring His signal.
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Ruminate on God’s Word
Recently Steve Gregg visited my area and presented a message to a Christian fellowship here. His subject was the change that we are expected to undergo having committed ourselves to Christ. But it was a metaphor he used in his message that I thought was stunning in its clarity, and worth sharing with those both familiar, and not yet familiar, with Steve’s teachings.
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What Is God Waiting For?
About 2000 years ago, Christ rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, prophesied by Zechariah (9:9) of Israel’s long-awaited Messiah, and hailed by His followers with “Hosanna[i]”. In keeping with God’s plan for His Creation, Jesus was murdered, buried, and then arose from death only to reappear to the Disciples and many who knew Him. During His ministry, He repeatedly taught about the immanence of God’s Kingdom on Earth (i.e. “at hand”, “in your midst”, etc.) The Bible says that for His act of sacrificial obedience, Christ was given all authority in Heaven and on Earth. Yet, here we sit, 2000…
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Groaning With the Spirit
Rom 8:26 “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.” A recent post on social media mentioned an interview with NT Wright (A Deep-Dive into the Book of Romans: Dr. N.T. Wright – Theology in the Raw) in which he makes a point regarding the above (and other Romans’) passages of Paul that for me was both startling and eye-opening. Let’s look at Wright’s narrative of the Romans story, and unpack his startling point.
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The “Fulfillment” of Scripture
Luke 4:[17] And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, [18] “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, [19] to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” [20] And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes…
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The Lesson of Ecclesiastes
Those somewhat familiar with the book of Ecclesiastes know that its headline message is encapsulated in its second verse, Ec 1:2: [2] Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. The book’s Hebrew title is Qoheleth whose meaning roughly is “an expounder of wisdom”, the narrator of the book.
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Developing Spiritual Fitness
Most of us think about our spiritual lives (when we think of them at all) as cerebral, passive things: things that just are, likely supported by some “quiet time”, perhaps some Bible reading, and prayer. However, our spiritual strength is only truly developed when, like a muscle in our body, it is stressed, and stressed repeatedly.
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A Critical Analysis of Eastern Orthodox Beliefs
In way of introduction, I have been forming my Christian beliefs, in some cases based on other’s views, in others personal study, for now some 20+ years. Recently, I have explored some of the beliefs and doctrines of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and, surprisingly perhaps, have found substantial overlap with my own. I say surprisingly, because I have never experienced any teaching of the Orthodox Church, a Church who claims its beliefs to be the authentic beliefs of the very earliest Christians. I would characterize my own beliefs as still shackled in some ways to traditional Western Christian doctrines (e.g.,…
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What is the Christian’s Calling?
There are three polar opposite popular opinions these days as to what it is the Christian is called to do. The first is that the Christian calling is to do essentially nothing. This is the view held, in whole or in part, by the vast majority of those who identify with the Reformed Church tradition, convicted as they are by the doctrine of God’s Grace. These folks’ understanding is that God is in complete control of the outcome of society, and so they are at best incidental to His Sovereign decision. Some who hold this opinion share it only up…
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Searching for a Consistent Biblical God
I wonder how many people have been thrown off of their inevitable search for God by what they perceive as not just the inconsistency of the characterization of God in the Bible, but by His seemingly severe, some would say immoral, characterization in the Old Testament. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could find and describe one, integrated, consistent whole of the Divine Nature across the entire Bible? Imagine being able to perceive God’s essential God-ness through a new lens, and so enable others to see beyond their personal prejudices. Looking for such a God is the task of this…
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Christ’s Cultural Revolution
Most people including self-professed Christians have no inkling of the enormity of the transformation of their everyday existence Christ prescribed. His prescriptions so thoroughly upended the culture of first-century Jews that they concluded He had to be eliminated.
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The Jewish and Christian God
Jews and Christians have almost nothing in common except their God. He is one and the same God. Jews believed they were chosen by God for special blessing, that this blessing was an inheritance due to their birthright, originating with their father Abraham if they would only faithfully live by His Law (discussed, below). They didn’t concern themselves with “going to heaven” (at least until the advent of their Pharisees in the first century BC), but were very concerned about their survival from hostile surrounding nations. And so, to them, God would “save” them, His chosen people, from these earthly…
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Escaping Christian Indolence
Multitudes of Christians today think that they have no obligation to serve their Lord. They seem to be content having, in their mind, obtained their “salvation”, to simply sit by, go through some motions, and wait to go to heaven. Why is this behavior so common today? There are a few reasons that can be fairly easily identified.
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Belief, and the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit
There appears to be in the Christian church today a profound misunderstanding of the working of Salvation in the Christian’s life. On the one hand, we have the tried and true fundamental statement of salvation found in Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians (2:8): For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. When one hears and receives this glorious proclamation, he breathes a groaning sigh of relief. “I no longer have to strive to please God…
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Free Will?
If God decided the destiny of every person that would ever live before the foundation of the world, why bother exhorting people to change their lives? If God directs every (significant) action and outcome of everyone’s life, why tell them to change? They’re just doing what God specifies they do. If God didn’t provide humans with free will, why then spend many Biblical books appealing to those same wills to change what they think and believe, telling them what they should choose to think and believe instead?
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Forsake Offense
When many look at what’s going on today they see an attack on their long-held values. Others see sinister forces at work to prevent them from achieving a better society. And let’s just stipulate that both are reacting honestly, in that their feelings are not fake. What’s unusual today is the strength of those feelings. It’s true that the media does its best to stoke the flames of those feelings. But unless you spend your day glued to a media outlet, its hard to believe that you are significantly more agitated by today’s events than, say, those of the 1960’s…
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Israel as Metaphor
Those familiar with the Jewish Bible — the Tanakh — or what Christians call the Old Testament, have puzzled for centuries over the meaning of the failed history of the Israelites, culminating in the destruction of their Temple and Jerusalem in 70AD, and their destruction or banishment from their homeland in 136 AD following the Bar Kokhba revolt. What exactly does it mean that God chose the Israelites from all the peoples of the world, led them, gave them a homeland and, for a time at least, heaped blessings on them only to have them nearly universally turn their backs…
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Should I Believe This, and If So, How?
God has endowed us with minds and logic. We look at the assembled evidence concerning a question, and we draw conclusions using them based on the criteria, deep down, of “What’s best for me?”
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Scientific Evidence for God
From our earliest days, we have perceived God through His creation. From the majesty of the Universe to the delicacy of a hummingbird, or the simple beauty of an Orchid, we have equated the exquisite wonder of creation with its even more majestic Creator[1]. Today, however, the evidence science finds in God’s “Second Book” – Nature – for the creative signature of God himself is overwhelming. It is virtually beyond dispute today that the Universe had a beginning, and came from nothing (ex nihilo). This makes the Biblical story unique among all religions’ stories of the beginning.
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Christianity in the Age of ‘Whatever?’
Lots of people write blogs. Very few people actually read them. So why this one? Recently I’ve been absolutely stunned by the power of the delusion our society is suffering regarding truth, good and evil. In this perverse worldview, people who elect to strap on explosives and detonate them, or fire automatic weapons at unsuspecting innocents aren’t really “wrong”. In this worldview they are just reacting to our evil. What is also remarkable is the popularity of this view. We’re all familiar with the phenomena of ‘political correctness’, in which what most people once agreed was simple, honest, common sense…