Category: Culture & Society

19May2011

Is the Christian back-story too silly for moderns?

Written By robfaircloth

Some ostensible Christians — theoretically trying to ‘help’ believers get along in a world filled with materialists, secularists, and others who worship at an altar of scientism — have noted the phenomena of Christian youth growing up in the church but leaving for more intellectually fulfilling (some say honest) thinking as soon as they reach the state university and encounter more enlightened ideas.

Such ‘supporters’ contend that those stories of Adam & Eve, Noah and the ark, a catastrophic flood and the like are good for kids and were good for everyone when, well, people were a lot more ignorant. Now that we are all more learned in the ways of Carbon 14 dating and proving evolution by testing its validity in the laboratory (oops), those stories serve no more purpose. Forcing our Christian young people to defend such silliness is what turns them away from the faith.

The solution, then, is to retain the kernel of the gospel and yield the ground of fanciful stories of God’s creation of the cosmos in six days to the obviously superior creation myths propagated by the likes of Stephen Hawking and the Big Bang Theory.

This all sounds fairly reasonable, I suppose, to those who want to retain some measure of respectability in the world.

But this thinking ignores a very fundamental issue: how is the story of God becoming flesh, living relatively incognito among men, letting himself be killed for the sins of those he created, and rising from the dead, any LESS fanciful than that of a worldwide flood?

To yield ground to the materialistic in the areas of earth-age, life-origins and long-earth geological formations, but to attempt to hold the center of the death, burial and resurrection of the God-man is not just a little bit addled. And don’t think for a moment that the materialist does not recognize this.

What giving up the supernatural — whether creation or the substitutionary atonement — does is evacuate the gospel of its power. Rather than gain respectability in academia, such a move loses more.

Rather than encourage our believing youth to jettison those features of the faith the pagan thinking world finds silly — or resignedly permitting them to jettison the faith entirely — the church should instead teach them why they are true, and instruct them on how to defend them. Not only that, we should also prepare every believer to discern and point out the errors in problematic thinking that many in our world are now accepting with a religious fervor akin to that held by flat-earth proponents, some of which were, interestingly, ‘intellectuals.’

4May2011

Must God make “good” from “bad”?

Written By robfaircloth

The destruction of natural disasters and the exceeding malevolence of human behavior that cause loss of life inevitably raise questions regarding the role of God in them. The outbreak of tornadoes in Alabama and other southern states proves no exception.

Unfortunately, a common response is to turn to books such as When Bad Things Happen to Good People. This is unfortunate because while there are certainly bad things, in God’s economy there are no “good people.”

In tornadoes and the destruction they cause we see the stark reality of how powerful the world is, and how powerful the God who created it, and how weak and helpless we are in the face of such power. Scripture teaches that death — and all the sickness, accidents, and disasters that cause it — are the result of the sin of man. The world groans until God relieves it of its agony, and we suffer the consequences of its groaning.

Scripture also teaches that there are none who are good. There are none righteous. All our righteousness — all our “good things” that justify us before God — are as filthy rags to God (picture used women’s menstrual products). In such condition we all are deserving only of the wrath of God.

It should be no surprise, then, that people die. In fact, all of human history supports the conclusion that people die. Whether we die in our 80s in the comfort of our own bed, or in a car crash at the hands of a drunk driver, or in a tornado when the wall of our house falls on us, we can expect that our physical bodies will die. What should be the surprise to us — sinful people who deserve nothing but the wrath of God — is that God hasn’t already killed us.

The surprise is not that some die, but that any live.

Our inclination in response to such disasters is to soften the impact of what they teach by speaking of God “making something good of this.” We suppose that God’s role — whatever it might be — in such death and destruction is somehow made alright if he brings some “good” from it.

But God need not make good from bad. Not in the normal sense of “good.”

Jesus encountered the same question regarding disasters. Some people had been killed by Pilate and some had died when a tower fell on them (Luke 13:1-5). Jesus anticipates the question we all ask: “do you suppose that these…were worse offenders” than others? As we like to put it, Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?, and the underlying assumption that either those who die in disasters are particularly bad or that God is powerless or evil.

Jesus said that those who died in progroms or falling towers were no worse than anyone else. In other words, everyone is equally bad. All people are equally sinful and equally deserving of “bad things.” Jesus did not explain the role of God, or why the tower fell on these and not others standing ten feet away, or assure his listeners that God would bring “good” from the tragedies.

He did, however, issue a warning.

He used the occasion of natural disasters and human tragedy to say “unless you repent, you will likewise perish.” Death is always at your door. You do not know when your life will be required of you. All men are equally deserving of death, so turn from sin and put your trust in God who alone gives eternal life in Christ. The surprise is that God permits repentance, and that he accepts those who do, in Christ.

Human tragedy is the cause of real human grief. Disasters give rise to the human duty to help restore people and alleviate suffering.

Yet still, repent, and believe the gospel.

11April2011

Morality, Christian ethics and the “fair share”

Written By robfaircloth

There is something wickedly attractive about comparing coffers.

Especially when you look around and see rampant need — need in the federal treasury, need in the state accounts, need down the street — we find it very appealing to look at those who have much (the “rich”) and to suppose that they could do something.

It’s easy, then, when we suppose they could do something, to suppose they should do something. Contemporary social discourse and political expectation have taught us to refer to this should as the “rich paying their fair share.” It’s then not very difficult at all, since they should do something, to require them to do something.  And we have found an ingenious method of requiring the “rich” to pay “their fair share”: the U.S. tax code.

But despite its wicked attractiveness, there is something morally reprehensible about this train of logic and where it leads.

This is true because the “rich” — those the rest of us suppose are not paying “their fair share” — comprise a very small percentage of the three hundred million or so citizens of the United States. And because we set the tax code in large part by the result of majority vote, why, it is not surprising that the majority find it relatively easy to majority-vote the code into compelling the “rich” to give up “their fair share.”

Even the term “their fair share” is disingenuous. What happens in reality is that the majority vote for programs and projects and handouts that they know they will not — indeed cannot — pay for, and as we can see in our present economic situation causes entire states and the U.S. Treasury itself to spend more than what they have. We vote for spending that is not necessary, send the bill to the “rich”, and insult them by referring to it as “their fair share.”

Our nationalistic, centralized government is in part to blame. Rather than contribute our taxes to the local authorities and deal with the “rich” man we know, we send votes to Washington, DC, which then converts them to money (“block grants”) and sends it back to us. It’s much easier to compel the rich guy from the other side of the country to send his “fair share” than it is to look across the table at the rich man from across the street, and tell him that he has too much and we’ve come to collect his “fair share.”

Jesus Christ certainly suggested that we should care for the poor, the widow, the orphan. But he did not direct that charge to governments. Instead, he put that burden on individuals, and he did not imply that they could then obey with other peoples’ money.

Covetousness has been sanctified with relative poverty, and dressed up in a nice majority-rule suit.

8April2011

Hungry? How ’bout an oil tortilla?

Written By robfaircloth

Recent headlines remind us of the fact that the push for so-called “bio-fuels” to replace petroleum — all in the name of decreasing global warming (sorry, “climate change”) — is increasing the cost of food all over the world.

This should be no surprise, really.

When we shuck corn only to put it down our gas tank, and leave perfectly good oil in the ground, it doesn’t take the proverbial rocket scientist to figure out that the prices of both ethanol gas and food will increase. When there is less corn to put down our collective gullet, what remains of it will cost more.

Orthodox religious communities who maintain belief in man’s stewardship of the earth and its resources should seriously begin talking about this, if they haven’t already. It is no stretch to hold that taking the food out of poor mouths in order to fuel automobiles raises serious moral questions. This is especially so when the solution is to use oil for what it’s good for — fueling automobiles, which would free us to use corn for what it’s good for — fueling babies.

Some will say that the scientific evidence is clear and that man-made greenhouse emissions cause climate change. Assuming, arguendo, that the many presumptions and assumptions in this claim are correct, this still leaves the bio-fuel crowd in a curious position: put corn in our gas tanks now to avoid the potential loss of life from a melting glacier some time in the future, while taking corn out of the mouths of the world’s poor now and leaving them to definite starvation and death in food riots.

It is a gross distortion of the creation mandate (Genesis 2) to abandon the use of a peferctly good resource (oil and its by-products) and to mis-use another resource (food) to account for its absence.

6April2011

Does NOT burning the Qu’ran protect soldiers?

Written By robfaircloth1 Comment on Does NOT burning the Qu’ran protect soldiers?

Let’s dispatch from the start one dark cloud over this whole discussion: Terry Jones and his Qu’ran-burning stunt more resemble a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail than it resembles orthodox Christianity.

The sad reality is that while the witch trial in Monty Python was an entertaining spoof, Jones’ “Qu-ran trial” is neither entertaining nor satire, and instead reveals an all-too-real distortion of biblical Christianity.

Even so, the naivete in the media’s insistence that burning a Qu’ran in Florida justifies the slaughter of humans in Afghanistan is astonishing, and, we should begin to suspect, reveals its outright fear.

Top military brass also pleaded with Americans to cease activity such as Jones’s, and while the plea was broadcast on national media, one suspects that the request was made directly to a small church in the State of Florida. According to that official, burning the Qu’ran in Florida endangers soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan. Yet when we consider that soldiers on the ground are in danger by definition, it is difficult to imagine that a bit of fire and smoke and a holy book an ocean away truly increases the degree of risk posed to American military.

What this should reveal to non-Muslims everywhere is the nature of present-day Islam. As John Piper and Denny Burk have said elsewhere, there is a fundamental difference between it and Christianity. In Islam, desecration of the holy book on a different continent justifies the slaughter of soldiers from the same country, soldiers who do not smell of smoke.

Christian Bibles are destroyed or confiscated or mistreated every day.Yet we do not see Christians taking revenge on others for it, or the “Christian government” denouncing the action. Christians are imprisoned, persecuted and murdered every day. Yet we do not see Christian taking hostiges and beheading people, or the “Christian government” even expressing concern about the fact.

What explains the difference in the response of the two religions?

What explains the deference that Western governments and media give to Islam, the “religion of peace”? It is becoming apparent that the respective treatment that religions receive is in direct proportion to the degree of fear that they instill.

29March2011

Common law versus Islamic law

Written By robfaircloth

There’s a reason why it’s called “common law.”

A Florida judge’s recent determination to employ Islamic law (“Sharia law”) in a case before him reveals the further slide away from any consensus among those appearing before United States courts as to what law should be used to decide disputes between us.

This is nothing new. The use of international law and treaties by the U.S. Supreme Court brought it into the limelight when justices suggested that for certain decisions, the precedent of previous Court decisions (the principle of stare decisis) would not govern. What is new is that the favored law of a particular group has been granted privileged status.

To highlight the problem associated with the use of particular religious law, let’s consider a hypothetical example.

For instance, in a state that permits divorce for any reason, or for no reason, suppose that one of the parties suggests to the court that the couple both claim to follow Christ, and did so at the time they were married, and that they accept the Holy Bible as governing the lives of Christ-followers. Suppose also that one of the parties claims that the Bible teaches that a married couple should not separate except in the case of sexual immorality. There is no sexual immorality; therefore, the court should not grant the divorce.

Regardless of the perspective on divorce that any of us reading this take, in our hypothetical example the court handling the divorce — if consistent with the Islamic law decision in Florida — would be required to enter into a theological examination of the Bible for legitimate grounds for divorce. If different than the law enacted by that state’s legislature, the Biblical interpretation would overrule statutory law.

“Common law” (generally, the case law used prior to enacting statutory law) was derived when cases were decided over time using common understandings of the rules and principles that governed a body of citizens. Thus common law — and the statutory law that largely replaced it — become impossible when there are such fundamental differences of opinion about what law should govern the disputes between us.

When I — a Christian businessman — resort to the civil court for the resolution of a commercial dispute, I am yielding to the state’s understanding of right and wrong to decide it, not the biblical rule that a thief must pay restitution plus an additional amount. If a Christian church goes to court to enforce its contract rights as an incorporated entity, it yields to the state’s process for deciding such disputes.

It is legal disaster when a church — Islamic or otherwise — goes to civil court to enforce rights that use different law than that adopted by the state in which it sits. What would happen, under the Florida court’s logic, if an Islamic church went to court with the Christian church down the street? Or if a Muslim sued a Christian?

At this point with the Florida decision, Islamic law has been used to settle an intra-Islamic dispute. The next step is for the court to enforce Islamic law against a non-Muslim.

While the arrival of “all nations” at the shores of the United States makes world missionaries of virtually all Christ-followers, the arrival of multi-national law — “uncommon law” — might portend difficulty for Christian missionaries to freely proselytize those nations.

22March2011

Whose News?

Written By robfaircloth

Coverage of recent explosive and compelling stories around the world raises questions about how news is deemed “news.”

In the most recent cycle, we were exposed to dramatic and compelling images of uprisings and public revolt in various middle eastern countries. But that was only news, apparently, until Wisconsin.

Media smelt the Wisconsin cheese and reported on absconding congressmen, picketing (rioting?) union members, bullets on the grounds, and damage to state property. Comparisons were made, interestingly, between the Wisconsin governor and Egyptian President Mubarek, though by that time Mubarek was “old news.”

Wisconsin’s cheese quickly became moldy when Japan suffered a violent earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster.

Now that Momar Ghadafi (how many ways are there to spell his name, anyway?) provides a composite picture of fallen rock star, favorite villain, and cartoon figure, Libya has loomed large and puts all other world events in the proverbial shadow.

Are people still rising up in the middle east? Are states like Wisconsin still facing drastic budget problems? Is Japan still suffering?

According to the news media, not enough to matter.