This is a free event this Thursday night…check it out and see if it is in your area. Everyone needs good input on money and finances.
Do we have to know everything before we can believe in God?
I spoke to our church this weekend about questions, doubts, and faith. I wanted to share two quotes that I found helpful.
First, “Faith does not feed on thin air but on facts. Its instinct is to root itself in truth, to earth itself in reality, and this distinguishes faith from fantasy, the object of faith from the figment of the imagination.”—Os Guinness
There is a lot of confusion about faith today. But from a Christian perspective, I think Os hits the nail on the head. Faith is rooted in reality. A better synonym would be trust or confidence. Faith is not wishful thinking, it is grounded in experience and evidence.
Second, “There is no way to God that bypasses the call to let go {i.e., to choose to trust Him}. You may have many intellectual doubts, and it is really important to be honest about those, to talk about them and study. However, thinking and studying alone never remove the need to choose. The question of faith is never just an intellectual decision”—John Ortberg
As humans, we all have limitations. We have limitations in energy, time, and yes…knowledge. We all experience doubts at one time or another simply because we cannot know everything about everything. That is equally true of the skeptic and believer. But there comes a time when you have to choose. Everyone ultimately trusts in something or someone–themselves, a friend, a book, a professor, or God. And we all do so–without every question answered. We do our best to have sufficient evidence, but at the end of the day we either commit to the person of Jesus and his way of life or choose another path. Yes, there will be questions along the way, but that is why it is a journey of faith and understanding.
How Much Brain Do I Need To Be Human?
“How much brain do you need to be human?” Or to put it more generally: “What kinds of capacities are necessary for one to be considered a person?” Underlying the former question is another criterion for personhood, that of consciousness/sentience. With the neurologically impaired, the question we are really asking is: “Can someone be a person without being conscious or sentient?” The question of brain activity then is related to how much brain activity is necessary to sustain consciousness/sentience, and is actually secondary to the more basic criterion of consciousness/sentience.” for more….
Bart Ehrman on The Colbert Report (Bible Contradictions?)
If you would like to know what is shaping the undercurrents of belief in our society – follow the comedians. My personal favorite is the Colbert Report. Colbert’s satire is very perceptive and informed.
On Good Friday Colbert had Bart Ehrman on the Report regarding his latest book – Jesus Interrupted – which makes all sorts of claims about biblical contradictions and that Jesus never claimed to be God etc.
Watch and enjoy…”Bart Ehrman explains why the Bible is a big fat lie and Stephen is an idiot for believing it. (06:30)” Colbert actually poses some interesting questions to Ehrman…even in the humor. More about the substance of the claims below.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Bart Ehrman | ||||
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For NT Scholar Ben Witherington’s review of the book, see part 1 and part 2. Also Darrell Bock’s Review. (BTW – Ben was trained by the same person Ehrman was).
Ben’s brief response on a comment on his blog:
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Actually Bart is dead wrong about early Christology, and I think he even knows it. Its pretty hard to miss Phil. 2.5-11, written before any Gospel probably. There it is said not only that Christ is “in very nature God” even before he takes on human form, but then on top of that Paul quotes and applies Isaiah to Christ after the ascension saying he has the name above all names, which very clearly in Isaiah is the name of God. The transfer of the LXX name for God ‘kyrios’ to Christ is clearly enough a statement about his divinity. In addition to which in Romans 9.5 Christ is called “God above all blessed forever”.
Furthermore, the Synoptic Gospels most certainly do view Christ as divine. This is why he is portrayed as Immanuel for example in Matthew’s Gospel, or as the human and also divine Son of Man of Daniel 7 fame who came from heaven to judge the world and will rule in a kingdom for ever (see Mk. 14.62).
Ehrman’s retro arguments about such things don’t even convince most liberal scholars these days, they just say that Paul was divinizing Jesus because they know he had an exalted view of Christ.
As for Colbert, he is a devout Catholic who teaches Sunday school, and is not much interested in making fun of any orthodox Christians.
Happy Easter,
BW3 (end of quote)
On the historical reliability of the Gospels, see Craig Blomberg’s article. For a fuller treatment, see The Historical Reliability of the Gospels 2nd edition.
Here is an excerpt: “Why then are the Gospels not word-for-word alike? Why was more than one needed in the first place? Moreover, the verbatim similarities among the Synoptics are usually taken as a sign of literary dependence of one Gospel on another or two together on a common source. There are a whole host of reasons for these differences. Many have to do with what each author selected to include or leave out from a much larger body of information of which he was aware (John 21:25). Distinctive theological emphases, unique geographical outlines, and larger questions of literary subgenre account for many of these selections and omissions. But even where the Gospels include versions of the same event, verbatim parallelism usually remains interspersed with considerable freedom to paraphrase, abridge, expand, explain and stylize other portions of the accounts. All this was considered perfectly acceptable by the historiographical standards of the day and would not have been viewed in any as errant. But recent scholarship is also pointing out how the flexibility and patterns in oral storytelling would have accounted for many of the more incidental differences as Christian tradition initially passed these stories on by word of mouth.”
On the Divinity of Jesus, see Putting Jesus in His Place.
(HT – Ben Witherington)
Are people the problem or religion?
Is religion inherently dangerous? Oxford theologian Alister McGrath would argue, and I think rightly, that people are the problem; not religion per se.
“All ideals—divine, transcendent, human, or invented—are capable of being abused. That’s just the way human nature is. And that happens to religion as well. Belief in God can be abused, and we need to be very clear, in the first place, that abuse happens, and in the second, that we need to confront and oppose this. But abuse of an ideal does not negate its validity.”
This observation is important because it removes simplistic statements about religion being the root of all evil and violence in the world today. The issues are far more complex because human beings, who posses freedom of the will, are involved.
In the Craig-Hitchens debate, Hitchens kept appealing to the argument that religion is dangerous so God can’t exist….but that doesn’t follow. At most all that follows is that people can be dangerous when they believe deeply in something – money, politics, god, etc.