Archives For January 2010

Frame Summarizes Van Til

January 30, 2010 — 4 Comments

I really do not have a very good understanding of the Van Til/Clark debates or the Frame/Ligonier debates, but I hope to grow in that understanding. These are all serious men worth taking seriously.

For what it’s worth, here’s how Frame summarizes Van Til’s apologetic:

Van Til’s apologetics is essentially simple, however complicated its elaborations. It makes two basic assertions: (1) that human beings are obligated to presuppose God in all of their thinking, and (2) that unbelievers resist this obligation in every aspect of thought and life. (Westminster Theological Journal Volume 47, 1985: 282)

One thing I can say is that it has been incredibly useful to me in my work on What in the World! to recognize that everyone has presuppositions. That’s why, for example, people today are so quick to find evolutionary explanations for human behavior. Any questions they face—say, the reason for the existence of religion—are fed through the grid of their evolutionary presuppositions. It’s no surprise that out comes evolutionary explanations (e.g., “Religion evolved as a social mechanism for curtailing behavior detrimental to the group”).

I have presuppositions, too, but at least I admit it.

In Mission, Theology
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Star Trek and Richard Dawkins

January 29, 2010 — 1 Comment

It was a beautiful fall day for a seven-year-old kid to be playing outside, but when I came back into the house my dad was watching people in weird pajamas striding around on a spaceship. That was 1990, I believe, and my first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. My dad and I immediately loved it, and we regularly watched the show together for the next several years. I was a particular fan of Commander Data. (Interestingly, I was fascinated with his quest for emotions, and now I’m writing a dissertation on emotions in the New Testament.) I even learned lifelong leadership lessons from Captain Picard.

Why did two conservatives like what is supposed to be a thinly disguised leftist polemic? It wasn’t just the explosions and Klingon fights. It was the transposition of today’s issues into interesting circumstances in our distant tomorrow. Issues of race, sex, class, culture, and religion were taken out of their 20th century light and placed in a 24th century light (OLEDs, I would guess).

The explosions and Klingon fights were also nice.

I recently succumbed to my curiosity to see a few episodes after a decade’s hiatus, and my wife and I picked up two Star Trek DVDs from the library. The early 1990s production values faded quickly out of view as we both got into the stories and characters.

My wife and I watched an episode called “The Chase,” in which Cardassians, Klingons, Romulans, and humans all converge on a remote planet to put together the last piece of an intergalactic archaeological puzzle. Some think they’ll find an incredible weapon. Others are sure it’s a massive power source. No one wants anyone else to get whatever it is. As they all squabble, Dr. Crusher secretly finds what they’re all looking for, and a holographic image suddenly appears before the assembled races. It’s a 4-billion-year-old recorded message from an alien humanoid who explains to her surprised guests that her race had “seeded” life on all of their planets—in fact, on many planets throughout the Alpha Quadrant. Her race, she explained, had evolved to a high level and decided to preserve their memory by this means. There’s more linking Klingons and Cardassians than either would care to admit.

The Global Village Atheist

And that’s where Richard Dawkins came in. The climactic scene of “The Chase” brought Dawkins’ conversation with Ben Stein in Expelled to mind. It wasn’t quite fair of Stein, perhaps, but Dawkins was led to believe he was talking to a sympathetic ear. All the same, he said what he said:

BEN STEIN: How did [life] get created?
RICHARD DAWKINS: By a very slow process.
STEIN: Well, how did it start?
DAWKINS: Nobody knows how it got started. We know the kind of event that it must have been. We know the sort of event that must have happened for the origin of life.
STEIN: And what was that?
DAWKINS: It was the origin of the first self-replicating molecule.
STEIN: Right, and how did that happen?
DAWKINS: I told you, we don’t know.
. . .
STEIN: What do you think is the possibility that Intelligent Design might turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics or in Darwinian evolution?
DAWKINS: Well, it could come about in the following way. It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved, probably by some kind of Darwinian means, probably to a very high level of technology, and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. Um, now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer.
. . .
And that Designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe. But that higher intelligence would itself have had to have come about by some explicable, or ultimately explicable process. It couldn’t have just jumped into existence spontaneously. That’s the point.

The Point of This Post

There are two remarkable similarities between the Star Trek episode and the infamous global village atheist. Both are 1) willing to posit the existence of an intelligent designer behind evolution as long as it’s not God. And both 2) make sure to mention that this designer has to itself have evolved by naturalistic processes.

Everyone’s a fundamentalist. Everyone has presuppositions. Everyone believes some things he can’t prove except by appeal to his basic beliefs.

In Culture, Theology
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Love Your Neighborhood as Yourself

January 28, 2010 — Leave a comment

At the turn of each new year, our whole church gathers together for Sunday School for several weeks. It’s a chance to touch special topics that the pastoral staff and elders want everyone to hear about. One of those is the set of outreach ministries we have to the neighborhoods surrounding our church. I was asked to provide a bird’s-eye view of our evangelism ministries by telling the story of my own personal history with them. Others’ names and details have been changed or removed.

I came Mount Calvary Baptist Church during my freshman year—in Romans 16 in 1997, and I joined not too long afterwards. I had never heard expository preaching in my life, but it immediately arrested me and I had to hear more. I started doing Awanas here my sophomore year, but I didn’t take part in any of our evangelism ministries until January of 2001 when the Church Internship Program required me to go out street witnessing in downtown Greenville.

It was God’s way of moving me along in many areas. I began to really enjoy reaching out and just talking with people. I made it a goal to have real conversations if at all possible, though I also handed out tracts to those who wouldn’t speak with me. I kept a list of everyone I spoke to in order to pray for them and try to remember the lessons I learned from our conversations. I always came away invigorated spiritually. I especially remember one man whose words were a real encouragement from the Lord: He said, "If someone is going to speak to me about stuff like this, I like the way you are doing it." The love God gave us as a church for these lost people had shined through to this man. Very few people were hostile.

After getting a taste of reaching out along with my fellow church members, I wanted to continue, and in 2001 one of my friends invited me to a new church Bible Club, held right over there in Century Oaks apartment complex. This is where I first really got to know people from our church’s mission field.

Among many other kids I got to know, there was our little drama queen, Milly, and Stephana, and Lauren. In fact, a picture I have of those girls (and one more whose name I can’t remember who wasn’t a regular attender) became the basis of our current Bible Club logo. Milly and Stephana would not like it, but they had to be boys in the picture for things to be fair (two boys and two girls). That logo is now on our club T-shirts, and, interestingly, my job of printing the T-shirts is how I met some of my and my wif’e’s best friends in the world—a couple who are now members at our church (the husband was a screen printer at the time).

mcbcbibleclublogo

Focus on the one little girl in the front of the group. Her name is Lauren, she was 4, and her dad’s name is Allen. One Saturday morning no other leaders could make it and it was raining, so I took some cookies made by a church teen around to some of our regulars. I had one left, and I stopped by Lauren’s house at 208 Martel St. No one came to the door, but I looked across the street to 209 and I saw a Mexican boy playing a GameBoy on the porch.

That’s how I met Angel and his family, who pulled up in the driveway in a few minutes. I invited them out to Bible club, and they came, but it was clear they were too old for a kids Bible club!

Providentially, that’s just when our church’s Teen Club was starting up on Friday nights in 2002, so I took them there. That began what is now an eight-year relationship with this family. Some of them even attend our Released Time ministry now.

And this is the focus of my testimony. The Lord used my relationship with these boys to open my eyes to a number of things. For the first time in my life, I had an ongoing ministry to lost people that I could really talk to. And we talked a lot, especially Mateo and me. He asked great questions. We had a lot of fun and a lot of good chats. I really loved these boys, and to tell you the truth, that love came pretty unexpectedly. I hadn’t felt it at all like that before in ministry.

But the sobering truth is that none of these boys seem to have come to Christ. They all heard the gospel dozens if not hundreds of times. I explained and urged over and over. And they listened. Pedro even came to church here and was impressed by the ushers because they looked like soldiers… The boys came to special events with me, visited my dorm room, and hiked Paris Mountain with me. One of my good friends became close to Angel and he had similar experiences. I learned that I must faithfully sow the message and water it, despite seeing no fruit, and that real ministry usually takes time. I learned that kids will improve their behavior radically out of love for a male authority figure but not out of love for God—and that I had to make that fact clear to them so they wouldn’t think they were fine with God because they pleased me.

Fast forward a few years. The boys have been too old for teen club for a while, but because of all the time we as a church invested in them, we still have an open door with their whole family. They know us. I stop in every once in a while to their house on and they welcome me with very open arms. Some of them have gotten in some trouble, but because they know I love them, they let me rebuke them lovingly but openly and tell them what the Bible says about their sin. I wish to God that the purpose of our relationship will be their eventual salvation and not just my Christian growth. But I wouldn’t trade that growth in love and ministry experience for anything.

I loved teen club. (At least the Green Team, if not perhaps some people on the Orange Team. =) I really looked forward to it every week. God gave me, again unexpectedly, a real love for teens who are very different from me. And He built up a very solid team of others to love our neighborhood as ourselves together. I never had a week where I didn’t have at least one good conversation with a teen, and I usually had more. Love always bridged our huge cultural gap. We didn’t have to have driving music and video game consoles. Love does it for a lot less money.

Teen Club was an intro to many years of Cola Wars and my annual duty to pretend I like a particular soda—just another way to spend time with people, to love my neighborhood with my meager time investments.

Love is even a bridge to the biggest and scariest boys. They need love, and they usually eat it up. Usually.

Teen club was also an intro for me to Neighborhood Bible Class, a ministry also founded in 2002 to reach out on Sunday mornings. I’ve been in the teen class there for about five years, I think. I see a lot of the same kids from teen club. It’s another way our church is loving our neighborhood.

Getting married then opened up a new frontier of having people over. (My dorm room was generally inappropriate for hospitality.)

Teen club was one of the greatest experiences of my whole life. I hated to leave it after six years, but wives and dissertations need attention too, and I was allowed to move to Sunday ministries where I get to do a lot of the same things. Door-to-door visitation is a way of making initial contacts to form relationships, and I’ve been helping lead that and doing some evangelism training there since 2008.

God has given us a specific mission field, and it requires patient continuance in sowing the seed. The time our church has invested over at least nine years in some of the kids from that Bible club, one of whom I still see every week, seems to me to be the most likely way that God will bring people in our mission field to faith in Christ.

I have heard many people say there’s not much to do in a big church because so many people are already doing it. It’s true that you may never stand on the platform if that’s what you mean by being involved. But when it comes to evangelism there is no limit to how much time you could spend in our ministries. We’re looking for those willing to take personal ownership of their ministry, and we are looking for giftedness—which mostly means the gift God gives you to love your neighborhood as yourself.

In ChurchLife, Mission
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iPad

January 27, 2010 — Leave a comment

Now we know:

apple-creation-0096-rm-eng

In Uncategorized
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Found!

January 22, 2010 — Leave a comment

A friend sent my request for help to a friend, and the lost egalitarian/complementarian illustration has been found! (Thank you!) Only my memory didn’t serve me with 100% accuracy. Here’s the original:

Capture

David Gushee did not convert to complementarianism, but perhaps that makes his comments all the more powerful and interesting.

In Books, ChurchLife
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Carl Trueman States the Fundamentalist Position

January 22, 2010 — Leave a comment

Carl Trueman is having a friendly but serious and important debate with Paul Helm. Both are conservative evangelical men, but as American conservative Christians tend to fall on either side of the Billy Graham issue, so British Christians like Trueman and Helm fall on either side of the Packer-Stott/Lloyd-Jones issue. (These UK luminaries split in 1966 over separatism.) Trueman, while expressing great appreciation for Packer (as I would), nonetheless firmly opposes his decision to stay in the Anglican church (as I would!):

It seems to me to be illogical to claim that the Church (as a whole; I am not speaking of individual ministers and congregations here) does not deny the authority of the Bible and the terms of the gospel when it has long since ceased to uphold its basic doctrinal standards through its ecclesiastical courts. After all, a nation that has a law against theft on the books but allows anyone to take anybody else’s property at will, with impunity and without fear of prosecution, permits theft and, indeed, arguably has, in practice, no real concept of theft, no matter what the statute book says. Thus, a church that has for many years ordained those who deny many basic elements of the gospel, and even promoted such to senior positions within its ranks, and which does not regulate public teaching by its official doctrinal standards, has in its practice clearly denied the authority of the Bible and the terms of the gospel as articulated in those standards, and perhaps has no concept of them in any real, meaningful sense. Talk of denial of the gospel on its own is thus too vague: there is a crucial distinction which needs to be made between a church which promotes and maintains the preaching of the gospel as non-negotiable and normative, and a church which merely tolerates the same, while allowing teaching which denies the gospel to go unchecked. It would seem that when Packer speaks of the Anglican Church not denying the gospel, he simply means that the Anglican Church tolerates the gospel. That is not the position envisaged by the Thirty-Nine Articles and is arguably not Reformation Anglicanism.

In ChurchLife
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Incidentally…

January 21, 2010 — 2 Comments

While I was doing some research for a high school Bible lesson on gender roles, I ran across this article at the Council for Biblical Equality. The article includes this:

Theologian Wayne Grudem wants us to believe that the Greek word kephale (translated into English as “head”) always means a “person in authority over.” His premise is that words have one fixed meaning, the context does not matter. Virtually all linguists are of another opinion. Any given word has a range of meanings and the context is the most important indicator of that meaning.

This really bothered me, and not because of the apparent comma splice. I’m certain Grudem does not take it as a premise that “words have one fixed meaning.” No theologian and exegete of his stature could. This straw man argument was a reminder to me to try to be fair toward my theological opponents. That means, ideally, understanding their position as well as they do. Ouch. That’s part of the calling of a scholar.

You can see for yourself whether the author was fair to Grudem by reading Grudem’s article on kephale.

In Exegesis, NTScholarship, Piety
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Please Help!

January 21, 2010 — 2 Comments

Several years ago, in something like 2005 (?), I read an article (?) by an evangelical theologian (?) who had been an egalitarian. His story was something like this:

I was an evangelical Christian egalitarian. My wife and I split our marriage in half: everything was fifty-fifty. Cooking, chores, work. But after 15 years of marriage and three kids, my wife came to me.  “Honey, you’ve got to step up and take responsibility for our family. It’s just not working. You’ve got to take charge.” This came as quite a shock, but I loved the Lord and I knew she was right. The structure of the family works when everyone is fulfilling his or her particular role, and I needed to be the head. Whatever is true of other egalitarians, my egalitarianism had been an excuse not to do the work I knew God had called me to do.

At least, I think that’s what his story was… I cannot find this article. I’ve tried and tried, looking through all my indexed and organized files.

Can anyone help me? I’m presuming this was in a complementarian publication, and I want this illustration for a high school Bible lesson on gender roles.

I think the author’s last name started with “S.”

In Books, Piety, Solipsism
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Humpty Dumpty on Ἀγάπη

January 21, 2010 — Leave a comment

Humpty Dumpty took the book and looked at it carefully. “That seems to be done right—” he began.

“You’re holding it upside down!” Alice interrupted.

“To be sure I was!” Humpty Dumpty said gaily as she turned it round for him. “I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying, that seems to be done right—though I haven’t time to look it over thoroughly just now—and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents—”

“Certainly,” said Alice.

“And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory’,” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs: they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”

“Would you tell me please,” said Alice, “what that means?”

“Now you talk like a reasonable child,” said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. “I meant by ‘impenetrability’ that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.”

“That’s a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.”

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

In Dissertation, Exegesis, NTScholarship
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The New York Times Censors Me for the Second Time [CORRECTION APPENDED!]

January 19, 2010 — Leave a comment

I love reading Stanley Fish’s long blog posts on the New York Times web site. A recent post of his reviewed a book which, apparently, repeats Stephen Jay Gould’s argument that religion and science are “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA)—that is, two separate things doing separate jobs which need not come in conflict so there.

Several times in the past, Fish has skewered sloppy thinking about science and faith, but this time his postmodern sensibilities (he’s a premier postmodern literary critic, author of Is There a Text in This Class and many other influential books) determined his read of the book. He cheered on the author for not taking sides, but of course she did. Everyone does in a world where there are only two real rulers.

Along the way he tried to summarize one leading argument from each side of the religion and science divide. He quotes the science side as challenging the religion side with this question:

“Well, if your philosophy tells you that facts are relative to belief systems, how come you don’t walk through walls or jump out of your apartment window?”

The faith side, he says, has this question for the science side:

“Well, if your philosophy tells you that religion and ethics are reducible to materialist evolutionary forces, why do you bother to be ethical at all?”

I think the first question is inaccurate and the second is unanswerable from within a secular materialists’s worldview. So I left a comment—only it hasn’t been posted [see update below], even though others were posted after mine. This is the second time this has happened to me at the Times, and the first was in a nearly identical situation. I do believe I have been censored.

Other comments tend to be like the following, from “Ehkzu”:

Magnum mysterium shmisterium.

Religion is entirely explainable via anthropology and sociobiology. So are ethics. Religion and ethics derive from us being pack animals that take a decade and a half to raise our young….

The message you get after commenting reads, “Thank you for your submission. Submissions are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive.” Judge for yourselves whether my comments were on-topic and not abusive:

Mark L. Ward, Jr.
Greenville, SC
January 19th, 2010
8:44 am

Q: ”Well, if your philosophy tells you that facts are relative to belief systems, how come you don’t walk through walls or jump out of your apartment window?”

A: Because you didn’t represent the Christian position accurately—truth isn’t relative to belief, but to God. He constitutes the ultimate standard, the lodestone of inquiry. He even constitutes walls as physical barriers, “for by Him all things consist” (Colossians 1:17).

Q: “Well, if your philosophy tells you that religion and ethics are reducible to materialist evolutionary forces, why do you bother to be ethical at all?”

A: … I do not believe Smith has answered this question.

The only reason naturalistic materialists view the question as ridiculous on its face is that they have an innate moral sense planted in them by God (Romans 1:18–21). Otherwise they can’t get oughts from ises.

Smith did takes sides! She just pretended to be the umpire instead of one of the players on the field.

Update: Let me eat crow. Or at least a little. They did post my comment after three hours—and that might simply reflect the amount of time it took them to go through the comments in the queue. But they didn’t post my other comment from several months ago. Of that I’m sure, because I checked for several days afterwards.

In Books, Culture
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