2010-09-06

DG quotes Edwards on the essential nature of external expression in worship. “Some bodily worship is necessary to give liberty to our own devotion; yea though in secret, so more when with others . . . 'Tis necessary that there should be something bodily and visible in the worship of a congregation; otherwise, there can be no communion at all. (From Miscellanies #101)”. The Importance of Using Your Body in Worship

Bring the Books points to the story of a woman recently attacked by another, who threw a cup of acid in her face, badly burning her. She professes an unwavering faith in God, and it is glorifying to God when someone goes through something like this and blesses God rather than cursing him. However, a commentator on the news story says, “God was watching over you? I have never understood this line of thinking...Why didn't he just prevent you from being at wrong place at wrong time? Or better yet protect you as the bible says he will...if you are faithful!” i) Consider the arrogance of people who think they have such an intelligent angle on issues such as God and His existence, and yet they are unwilling to consider a more thoughtful position might possibly exist on the other sides of these debates. ii) It appears there is some ‘name it and claim it’ going on in the comment. iii) Why is it so horrid and incoherent for the victim to believe that her suffering was part of God’s plan, that God may have decreed it for His own glory and her joy? Thoughts on Acid Victim's Faith in God

Bring the Books posts a potent quote from Wilhelmus a'Brakel: “there are people who neither have knowledge, nor desire, nor do they meditate upon or have discussions about God, heaven, hell, the soul, the covenant, the Mediator, faith, or conversion. Their thoughts do not transcend this earth and do not penetrate beyond that which is visible; of invisible things they cannot speak a word. Is the soul immortal? Is there a heaven and a hell? This they will discover after their death; in the meantime they passively wait for where God will send them. They leave the matter to God, as it is not for them to search this out. They who have the privilege to go to heaven will then be well off; the others necessarily entertain a good hope about themselves. What fools you are!” The Self-Deceived Passive Pagan

Challies comments on the rather undignified conduct of a number of strikers outside a youth detention centre, in light of their ironic sign, “protect the dignity of labour.” See, dignified labor is labor done for the Lord. Giving an honest day’s work, whether it is as a a pastor, a homemaker, a laborer or a youth worker in a detention center is as dignified as one can be. Being a good employee and honoring God through your work—that is God’s recipe for dignity, success and joy. Citing Grudem: “Employer/employee relationships provide many opportunities for glorifying God… When the employer/employee arrangement is working properly, both parties benefit. This allows love for the other person to manifest itself. For example, let’s say that I have a job sewing shirts in someone else’s shop. I can honestly seek the good of my employer, and seek to sew as many shirts as possible for him along with attention to quality (compare 1 Tim. 6:2), and he can seek my good, because he will pay me at the end of the week for a job well done. As in every good business transaction, both parties end up better off then they were before.” Protect The Dignity of Labor!

Burk points out that it is common among Old Testament scholars to assume that the biblical book of Daniel was written in the second century B.C., after the fulfillment of the prophecies in the book. Such will claim an early date for Daniel relies on fundamentalist ignorance. He points to a 1990 essay by Gerhard Hasel that shows the implausibility of the late date in light of evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Jim Hamilton says, “This evidence inclines me to think that those who persist in dating Daniel to the Maccabean era do so for uncritical, dogmatic reasons.” Their religion a priori precludes predictive prophecy. “At any rate, primary source testimony, manuscript evidence, and historical probabilities are not dictating their conclusions.” The real “fundamentalists in this debate are those who are so enslaved to critical orthodoxy that they can’t even consider evidence that contradicts their hypothesis.” Daniel and the Fundamentalists

McKinley @ 9Marks has five ways that young pastors, hired to revitalize a church because older pastors can get better gigs, can cause church turnaround to fail: “Pick a fight (or be drawn into a fight) with a well-loved member of the congregation.  Make immediate, dramatic changes to the Sunday service (especially the music).  Be proud.  Act like you know a lot more than the people who have been in that church and in that community for decades.  Try to effect good reforms (change church polity, implement meaningful membership, begin to practice church discipline) before you have taught on them and convinced people that they are Biblical.  Be impatient.  Overspend your pastoral capital.  Try to lead people before they trust you and are sure that you love them.” Five Ways to Make Sure a Church Turnaround Fails

CMI answers the question of where parasites came from: i) They were created. “As far as their physical structure is concerned, all living creatures—including the most basic and ‘simple’ forms of life (one-celled organisms)—are stupendously complex, sophisticated, computerized machines. Molecular biologist Michael Denton has estimated that if we knew how to build a machine as complex as the cell, it would take at least one million years to build one cell—working day and night, and churning out the parts on a mass production basis”. ii) But then, “Why did God, if He is good and loving, create disease-causing parasites—not to mention all the other disease, violence, suffering and death which we see around us in nature?” The straightforward, biblical answer is that these evils did not exist in the original creation. They came into the world only after the Fall, when Adam and Eve disobeyed God (Genesis 3:14–24; Romans 8:18–25). They were part of the “Curse” (Revelation 22:3). iii) Theistic evolutionists and other Christians who accept the secular belief in “millions of years” cannot give this answer. They believe that God’s method of creation was a process of millions of years of death, disease, violence, suffering and waste; they cannot affirm creation was ‘very good’. iv) It would seem that parasites must have been benign and beneficial in their original form. Perhaps some became parasitic as a result of mutations, and other genetic changes (gene swapping, etc). v) The life-cycle of the parasite is so complex that new genetic information may have been needed; mutations don’t provide this. CMI suggests that God baked this information into the parasites on account of His foreknowledge of the fall, and switched it on post-fall. vi) One could invoke miraculous intervention, though CMI thinks this is unnecessary. http://creation.com/what-about-parasites

T-fan addresses the question, Did Augustine Teach the Sinlessness of Mary- The answer is ‘no’, and T-fan cites a number of Augustine quotes to this effect: “One alone is there who was born without sin, in the likeness of sinful flesh, who lived without sin amid the sins of others, and who died without sin on account of our sins.” Or “so that the belief may not steal upon you that any soul at all, save that of the unique Mediator, was free from inheritance of Adam, that original sin under which we are bound when we are begotten but from which we are freed by our second birth.”

Genderblog has the conclusion of a meditation on Proverbs 31: She Does Him Good (even before she meets him), Part III

Blomberg points out the bankruptcy of the argument from silence posed by atheists who put forward a list of ‘historians’ from around the time of Christ, who don’t mention Christ. i) Many aren’t historians at all (e.g. one is a taxonomist), and the ones who were historians lived before Christ! ii) Josephus (1st century), Tacitus, and Seutonius (2nd century) do refer to Jesus. iii) Which individuals SHOULD have referred to Jesus? The fact is that we no longer have in existence the writings of a single Jewish, Greek or Roman historian who wrote about life in Israel during the first third of the first century. iv) Thus the thing that requires explanation is why so many atheists “buy” this meaningless argument from silence without even questioning whether sources exist in which we should expect to find something about Jesus but don’t. They really aren’t interested in learning truth, only in challenging it. http://www.denverseminary.edu/craig-blombergs-blog-new-testament-musings/when-an-argument-from-silence-becomes-utterly-meaningless/

Roger Penrose, Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, comments  on his different and divergent attitude towards quantum mechanics as compared to Hawking. He writes, “Among Einstein’s difficulties with current quantum mechanics was its leading to subjective pictures of physical reality – as abhorrent to him as to me. The viewpoint of “theory-dependent realism” being espoused in this book [Hawking’s The Grand Design] appears to be a kind of half-way house, objective reality being not fully abandoned, but taking different forms depending upon the particular theoretical perspective it is viewed from.” He continues, “I do not see what is new or “theory-dependent” about this perspective on reality. Einstein’s general theory of relativity already deals with such situations in a completely satisfactory way, in which different observers may choose to use different co-ordinate systems for local descriptions of the geometry of the single fixed over-reaching objective space-time.” But mathematical space-time has complete objectivity. Current quantum theory does present threats to this classic objectivity, and has not yet provided an accepted universally objective picture of reality. But this reflects on incompleteness in quantum theory. Yet the challenge of completing quantum theory poses no threat to the existence of an objective universe. “The same might apply to M-theory, but unlike quantum mechanics, M-theory enjoys no observational support whatever.” http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/bdf3ae28-b6e9-11df-b3dd-00144feabdc0.html

Turretinfan dismantles the claim that early church fathers held to the immaculate conception, a claim made by Romanists. The closest is Ephraim the Syrian, and even this does not address the matter of whether Mary was immaculately conceived. Likewise, you will have trouble if you try to get someone to provide you with a translation of the rest of this hymn, so that you can see the context. This poetical piece would seem to be the earliest reference that can be mustered in favor of the dogma, although it is not explicitly stating that Mary was conceived free from original sin. Alleged Early Testimonies to the Immaculate Conception

Dan Wallace has a helpful post on translations here, answering the question, what Bible should I own? i) Everyone should own a KJV. It has been hailed as one of the greatest literary monuments to the English language, and the greatest literary monument every produced by a committee. Regardless of what you think of the KJV’s accuracy, it is a must for all English-speaking Christians. The only modern translation to come close to the KJV’s lyrical quality is the REB. ii) Wallace recommends the NET (he worked on it). “What makes the NET Bible unique are three things: its philosophy of translation, how it was produced, and its extensive footnotes. The translation philosophy was to combine three different approaches: accuracy, readability, and literacy. The history of the Bible in English actually breaks down into three periods: the KJV was a literary production (following in the footsteps of Tyndale); beginning with the Revised Version of 1885, accuracy was king; beginning with the NIV, readability was of primary importance. The NET Bible’s philosophy of translation was to combine the three periods of English Bible translation. Often these three objectives are opposed to each other. In such cases, the footnotes in the NET give an alternative” iii) He comments, “The ESV is an excellent, literary translation with understated elegance, in keeping with the KJV and RSV. And its study Bible, with articles and notes, is excellent. The NIV Study Bible has very good notes and a very readable translation, but it interprets a bit too much for my tastes. The NRSV is a very good translation, though its stance on gender inclusivism sometimes mars the beauty of the translation and is even, at times, misleading (cf. Matt 18.15; 1 Tim 3.2). The REB is a gender-inclusive translation but it has sidestepped the problems of the NRSV by giving literary power a higher priority.” iv) One myth is that ‘word-for-word’ is better, but language just doesn’t work this way. e.g. idioms are often unique. v) He suggests that every English-speaking Christian get a Bible that is readable, lively, and captures the ‘feel’ of the original as well. What Bible Should I Own (Dan Wallace)

Hays refutes an atheist who makes ad hominem attacks against evangelical scholars. i) The atheist tries to preemptively discredit evangelical scholars by impugning their motives, but this isn’t relevant to the quality of their arguments. ii) If they really ‘didn’t follow the evidence where it leads’, then surely the atheist could easily show how unreasonable their arguments are (which he doesn’t). iii) What does ‘follow the evidence’ even mean? Conflicting evidence leads in different directions. We could (a) suspend belief, or (b) go with the best overall explanation. iv) Christians bring many lines of evidence to bear in reading the Bible: Prophecy. The Resurrection. Archeological corroboration. Undesigned coincidences. The criterion of embarrassment. Early patristic testimony. Concessions by early enemies of the faith. The argument from religious experience. Some people find certain evidence comparatively compelling. This is person variable. v) When a Christian comes to a “problem passage” in Scripture, he evaluates that passage against a larger body of evidence, the total evidence of his belief-system, his web of belief. Hays cites Newman’s description: “the cumulation of probabilities, independent of each other, arising out of the nature and circumstances of the particular case which is under review; probabilities too fine to avail separately, too subtle and circuitous to be convertible into syllogisms, too numerous and various for such conversion, even were they convertible.” vi) Methodological atheism doesn’t just ‘follow the evidence’. It prejudges the evidence [by definition]. When Ehrman says that, as a “historian,” he cannot affirm or deny the occurrence of a miracle, he’s prejudging the evidence. The historical method of “critical” scholars like Price, Ehrman, and Collins isn’t the a posteriori pursuit of the evidence wherever that leads, but the a priori commitment to naturalistic explanations. They only follow evidence when it goes where they want. It’s unsurprising that a book reflecting a presuppositional commitment to methodological naturalism will arrive at naturalistic conclusions. vii) We actually evaluate the arguments of evangelical scholars.viii) The atheist has an unnuanced and inadequate view of the relationship of inerrancy and scholars who defend the credibility of scriptures. They don’t all presuppose inerrancy, etc. ix) Secular institutions also have their unwritten doctrinal oaths. Look at what happens to biology profs. who betray any public sympathy or intelligent design theory. x) Seminary profs. teach at confessional seminaries because they share theological outlook of the institution. No one is putting a gun to their head. They don’t swear by inerrancy because they teach at inerrantist seminaries; rather, they teach at inerrantist seminaries because they swear by inerrancy. xi) Despite intellectual affections as a free thinker, this atheist takes an essentially anti-intellectual posture. Not only doesn’t he evaluate the arguments of evangelical scholars, he doesn’t evaluate the arguments of “critical” scholars. Instead, he has a faith-commitment to the reliability of their reasoning.  Pascal's Wager affirmed

Triablogue has an in-depth post on the textual history of the New Testament, clearing up the oft-repeated Dan-Brown style errors. “The New Testament is over 99% textually pure. As noted NT scholar Craig Evans said in a June 20, 2010 radio discussion on The White Horse Inn, out of the 20,000 lines of the NT, only 40 lines are in serious doubt. This equals about 400 words and none of them affects orthodoxy.” Engwer adds a number of great points, like: We can also judge the reliability of Christian scribes by how they preserved other documents, not just the New Testament. As the Josephan scholar Steve Mason notes, "in general, Christian copyists were quite conservative in transmitting texts". Or, “Many of the objections non-Christians raise against Christianity in modern times depend on the textual accuracy of ancient extra-Biblical sources. For example, when a critic appeals to an alleged contradiction between Luke and Josephus, suggesting that we have a reliable text for Josephus, he's accepting the Josephan text on the basis of less evidence than we have for the New Testament text.” And even Bart Ehrman writes, “The position I argue for in ‘Misquoting Jesus’ does not actually stand at odds with Prof. Metzger’s position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament. ” [Misquoting Jesus, page 252]. Textual Criticism Done Dan Brown Style

Hays comments on the atheistic claim that there is a heavy presumption against the miraculous which an abundance of evidence must overcome to justify belief therein. i) The objection defines a miracle as a breach in the uniformity of nature. And miracles as unpredictable. So they claim anything can happen at any time. i.e. miracles lack causal continuity. ii) This definition doesn’t cover coincidental miracles, those of timing, where the timing is opportune in a way that suggests personal prevision and provision. iii) What makes it a miracle is not merely the event but its conjunction with human need. iv) Is there a presumption against believing that some events are unpredictable? “That would only be implausible if you subscribe to a closed system. So the presumption is only as good as the metaphysical claim which underwrites it. And the past doesn’t create any such presumption, for the very question at issue is whether all future events are inferable from past events.” v) There is a sense in which miracles are predictable. A miracle is predicable in case God predicts a miracle, or promises a miracle, because the agent who ultimately performs the miracle has advance knowledge of his future actions. Are miracles implausible-

JT points to Doug O’Donnell’s new book God’s Lyrics: Rediscovering Worship Through Old Testament Songs, which contains sermons on the five great songs of the Old Testament. In the second part, the book applies the key themes found within these songs: (1) magnifying the Lord; (2) recalling salvation history, (3) rejoicing in God’s just judgments; (4) exhorting us to godliness. Then in the third part O’Donnell provides original song lyrics (to older tunes) for each of the great Old Testament songs. He calls for the theologically trained, (who are gifted poetically) to write songs based on God’s word. Rediscovering Worship Through Old Testament Songs