"Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning."
C.S. Lewis
"The fingers of your thoughts are molding your face ceaselessly."
Charles Reznikoff
"Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere."
G.K. Chesterton
"Humility enforces where neither virtue nor strength can prevail, nor reason."
Francis Quarles
"Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil."
C.S. Lewis
Resistance Thinking Faith
It is through the Jesus lense the Resistance Thinking seeks to explore truth about the world in which we live. In this faith section you will find articles, news and reivews that will help you explore the complexities of the Christian faith.
We will cover a broad range of topics, including: theology, church, leadership, devotions, classic Christian literature, prayer, everyday faith, apologetics, church history, Christian living, Old Testamnet, New Testament, creation, fresh expressions, epistomology...the list could go on and on!
If there is any topic you would like the Resistance Thinking team to go to work on please shoot us an email. If you have any work that could help us all to be more effective 'Resistance Thinkers' please send it in for our team to review.
"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." CS Lewis
Here is an interesting discussion between Albert Mohler, Kevin DeYoung and Ligon Duncan on the emergence of new calvanism. Regardless of what stance one takes this provides for very interesting food for thought:
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So it seems atheists are feeling stifled from speaking out - re bus ads being stopped. Yet are religious groups so free as this 'heckler' says. Is the feeling of being offensive to people, and therefore not speaking, wrong? Continue the debate online here.
Oh my God, atheists want to speak out
Heckler, March 30, 2009
THESE days, holding an opinion or a belief is far from frowned upon. That is unless that belief is theism, or rather a lack thereof. I find so often, being an atheist, that you must tread carefully around any topic that incorporates some form of higher power so as to avoid offending anyone, yet religious groups are free to openly advertise and to criticise science.
The suppression of atheism extends far beyond this. The churches are allowed soapboxes in the form of TV commercials, door-to-door canvassers, billboards and an Adelaide bus campaign. However, when a non-theistic organisation uses their own funds and attempts to run an ad on a bus celebrating reason, it is deemed inappropriate.
Bill Muehlenberg reviews Nicholas Perrin's book 'Lost in Translation' which addresses the argument that Jesus' real words have been corrupted by the early followers. Bill notes that Perrin counters the arguments of Bart Ehrman (who has a 2005 best seller 'Misquoting Jesus'), answers others who believe Jesus never even existed, and examines the questions raised by the Gnostic Gospels.For other great articles or reviews by Bill check out culture watch.
Lost in Translation? (Nicholas Perrin, Thomas Nelson, 2007, (Available in Australia from Koorong Books)) Culture Watch, Reviewed by Bill Muehlenberg, April 2008
It is common today to question not only what we know about Jesus, but how we know about Jesus. The critics and sceptics argue that we can’t really know the real Jesus, because whatever he said and did has been lost in translation. The early followers of Jesus have so corrupted the original words and deeds that they are beyond knowing.
Many have been taking this line of late. One who has had a New York Times best seller in this regard is Bart Ehrman. His 2005 volume, Misquoting Jesus, has sought to argue that we are left with only doubt and uncertainty about the real Jesus.
Perrin, a lecturer in New Testament at Wheaton College, and former research assistant to N.T. Wright, takes on Ehrman in particular and the sceptics in general in this useful volume. He does so by offering an easy to read account of various themes: history, theology, hermeneutics and textual criticism.
Perrin notes that his journey of faith is the opposite of Ehrman. Perrin started off an agnostic but eventually became an evangelical Christian. Ehrman began as an evangelical but is now an agnostic. Perrin describes his spiritual journey, and along the way shows how most of the major themes of Ehrman and the sceptics are simply mistaken.
Consider the nature of the four Gospels. Are they selective accounts of the life of Jesus? Yes. Does that mean they are therefore unreliable? No. Perrin reminds us that all historians are selective, and therefore interpretive. There is no such thing as purely objective history. But being interpretative does not equate to being fast and loose with the facts of history.
The Gospel writers clearly wrote with a theological purpose in mind. But they also wrote with a high view of history. Theological and historical purposes can combine in the Gospel accounts, with no loss of factual accuracy.
Ehrman tries to make a false dichotomy between seeing the Gospel writings as either the words of God or the words of men. But Christians have always held that they are both. The biblical understanding of inspiration contains both elements, just as does our understanding of the person of Jesus as being both fully human and fully divine.
Perrin also looks briefly at the claims of some radicals who doubt that Jesus even existed. These claims are quickly dismissed. First, no serious New Testament scholar anywhere denies the existence of Jesus. Second, the claim of critics that Christianity simply borrowed from other pagan mystery religions is fraught with danger.
Borrowing always takes place to some degree, but that does not minimise the truth claims of Christianity or imply bare dependency. If Christianity is in fact true, we would expect the faith to “resonate with the deepest longings of humanity,” says Perrin, “using some of the very same imagery that humanity has latched unto in order to express those longings”. Third, the similarities are at best superficial, not deep-seated.
So too are the supposed similarities between the various Gnostic gospels and our canonical Gospels. The biblical Gospels were all penned within the first century, just decades after the life of Christ. The Gnostic gospels were primarily second and third century documents. The Gnostics taught that the body was bad, and the spirit had to be liberated from it. The Christian Gospels teach the importance of the body, and the fact that God became flesh (the Incarnation). Gnosticism teaches salvation by special knowledge and ideas. Christianity says salvation comes by God coming in the flesh, and living among us, dying and rising again.
Perrin argues that Ehrman not only exaggerates the frequency of textual corruptions, but the implications of those as well. For example, we have serious questions about less than one percent of what Jesus said in the Gospel of Mark. And textual criticism is helping us to continue to get a better handle on the original texts. The transmission of the words of Jesus may not be perfect, but it is certainly adequate.
In sum, the journey from the words of Jesus to the Bibles we have today is undeniably a long and complex one. But we can still argue that the words and deeds of Jesus are for the most part faithfully contained in the New Testament writings. There is some static between what Jesus originally said and what we read today. But, as Perrin demonstrates, “Jesus’ voice is preserved in the transmission”.
This is not a detailed rebuttal of the Ehrman book. For that one should consult Timothy Paul Jones, Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman’s ‘Misquoting Jesus’ (IVP, 2007). Instead it offers a much broader look at the issues involved. It is a helpful volume both for believers and unbelievers. Although brief (just under 200 pages), it gives both groups some solid material to use in considering what Jesus is like and what he said, and how we can know that with a high degree of confidence.
Article found at culture watch (Used with permission)
One channel that I regularly watch on YouTube is Bobby Conway's OneMinuteApologist with a large amount of information compacted into a short space of time. Be sure to check it out.
When does criticsm become hate speech? Geert Wilders is now being taken to court for talking about the atrocities of Islam in his short film 'Fitna'.
Silencing Islam's Critics: A Dutch court imports Saudi blasphemy norms to Europe.
Opinion, Wall Street Journal, 21 January 2009
The latest twist in the clash between Western values and the Muslim world took place yesterday in the Netherlands, where a court ordered the prosecution of lawmaker and provocateur Geert Wilders for inciting violence. The Dutch MP and leader of the Freedom Party, which opposes Muslim immigration into Holland, will stand trial soon for his harsh criticism of Islam.
Mr. Wilders, who made world news last year with the release of a short anti-Islam film called "Fitna," certainly intends to provoke. In his 15-minute video, he juxtaposes verses from the Koran that call for jihad with clips of Islamic hate preachers and terror attacks. He has compared the Koran to Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and urged Muslims to tear out "hate-filled" verses from their scripture.
To Hell, With Dante Boundless, James Tonkowich, January 2008 For reasons now unfathomable, as a freshman in high school I read Dante's Inferno. Remembering little to nothing of that first journey through the horrors of Hell, I recently decided it was time to begin the great poem again. This time I wouldn't stop at the frozen center of Hell where Satan, immersed in ice, forever gnaws the great traitors — Judas, Brutus, and Cassius — but continuing on through Purgatory to Heaven. The Divine Comedy is strong medicine about sin, suffering, and salvation.
The Divine Comedy, as you may have guessed, is not a comedy in the sense that Seinfeld or The Simpsons are comedy. It's a comedy in the medieval sense (Dante lived from 1265 to 1321). While a tragedy is a drama with a tragic ending, a comedy is a drama with a happy ending. And the happy ending comes in spite of struggles, pains, and miseries along the way — three things that marked Dante's life.
Born in the prosperous Italian city of Florence, Dante was a great success and the young poet seemed destined to continuing literary, military, and political achievement. Then he publicly opposed Pope Boniface VIII for his expansionistic policies and his role in secular politics. He was accused of fraud and corruption and forced to leave his beloved city along with his family, wealth, and social position, earning himself a death sentence should he return. He lived the rest of this life roaming from court to court, from one patron to the next.
In the introduction to Hell Dorothy Sayers writes: "He had lost love and youth and earthly goods and household peace and citizenship and active political usefulness and the dream of a decent world and a reign of justice. He was stripped bare. He looked outwards upon the corruption of the Church and Empire, and he looked inwards into the corruption of the human heart; and what he saw was the vision of Hell. And, having seen it, he set himself down to write the great Comedy of Redemption and of the return of all things by the Way of Self-Knowledge and Purification, to the beatitude of the Presence of God."
Like other allegories of redemption — A Pilgrim's Progress for example — it is set as a journey and Hell begins with the lament of a wanderer.
Midway this way of life we're bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark wood, Where the right road was wholly lost and gone. (I.1-3)
The next morning, he spies the mountain of God in the distance and begins the long trek out of the valley. But as he labors uphill, three beasts bar his way. They are a leopard "nimble and light and fleet," a lion "head high, with ravenous hunger raving," and a wolf:
"... gaunt with the famished craving Lodged ever in her horrible flank, The ancient cause of many men's enslaving. (I.49-51)
The three beasts represent three categories of sin. The leopard is self-indulgent sin for which the lustful, the gluttonous, hoarders and spendthrifts, and the wrathful suffer in the outer circles of Hell. The lion is violent sins, the second major division of Hell comprising circles for those who committed violence against reason (heretics), against neighbors, against self (suicides), and against God, art, and nature. Finally the wolf is sins of fraud, that is, of willfully deceiving others: seducers, sorcerers, hypocrites, thieves, deceivers, and, in the lowest part of Hell, traitors.
These categories are roughly analogous to the three types of sinners we meet in Proverbs: the self-indulgent simpleton, the self-centered fool, and the malicious mocker.
