Spirit and Body

In the same way that Christ speaks from his Spirit to our spirit, he brings blessings from his body to our body.

The former is through the Word, while the later is through the Word made flesh.

The former is through hearing, prayer, and the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit, while the latter is through the incarnation, resurrection, and partaking in the Lord's Supper.

A Wilberforce to Be Reckoned With

Amazing Grace by Eric Metaxas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wilberforce is the embodiment of Chesterton's quip, "The only thing to be done with the ideal is to do it." Wilberforce and his group not only brought slavery to an end in the British empire but also re-christianized Britain with their reformation of manners.

Manners here refers to how man relates to his fellow man. Britain was so barbaric at the time it's hard to imagine that the Victorian Age was coming. The Victorians had their excesses to but it was an incredible improvement over the barbarism of the gladiatorial-esque cruelty to animals, prostitution, and incivility in the streets. By advancing his Christian worldview Wilberforce liberated Britain from Enlightenment racism and paganism.

My only criticism is that the book is short on critique of Wilberforce though there are a few. He comes off as a can-do-no-wrong-hero. Even heroes have their flaws and he would be even more believable if we knew more about them. The book is well written, truly inspirational, and all the more moving because the story is true.


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Just Sanctification

Sanctification is proof that justification has occurred.

Comfortable with Our Creator

Luther once wrote, "When I heard the name of Christ I used to turn pale, but then I clung to his humanity and I was not afraid of his being God." It is Christ who makes us comfortable with out creator.

Shows About Nothing

A student repeated back to me a point I was trying to make in class the other day. He said, "So a well told story is one that's told the way God tells the gospel." To which I could only reply, "Yes! I couldn't have said it any better.

God's story begins with creation (setting), then moves to fall (conflict), redemption (climax), and consummation (resolution). This is the Christian metanarrative or grand story that gives our personal stories ultimate meaning, hope, and a goal for which to strive.

Jean Francois Lyotard famously put it, "Postmodernism is skepticism toward all metanarratives." Post modern stories tend to remove redemption and resolution in favor of distress and despair. There is no hope of improvement for the characters, justice in the face of evil, or redemption through repentance. For instance, the characters in Seinfeld end up in prison discussing the same things they discussed in Jerry's apartment. Hannibal Lector and the Talented Mister Ripley live on. Justice is not done and that's the point: Life is ultimately pointless. As Seinfeld admits a show can be about nothing. Nothing is working together for a greater good. There is no providence, just a demonic anti-providence. See Thomas Hibbs Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture

Yes there are tragedies in the Bible like the Levite and his concubine but they are set in the meta-narrative of the gospel comedy where sad things come untrue.

Before the Fall

G. K. Chesterton on the Fall of Man as a Worldview:

The Fall is a view of life. It is not only the only enlightening, but the only encouraging view of life. It holds … that we have misused a good world, and not merely been entrapped into a bad one. It refers evil back to the wrong use of the will, and thus declares that it can eventually be righted by the right use of the will. Every other creed except that one is some form of surrender to fate. A man who holds this view of life will find it giving light on a thousand things; on which mere evolutionary ethics have not a word to say. For instance, … on those extremes of good and evil by which man exceeds all the animals by the measure of heaven and hell; on that sublime sense of loss that is in the very sound of all great poetry, and nowhere more than in the poetry of pagans an skeptics: “We look before and after, and pine for what is not”; which cries … out of the very depths and abysses of the broken heart of man, that happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory; that we are all kings in exile.

If we were entrapped in a bad world we would not cry for what is not. We would not protest the way things are. We would surrender to what is.

If the world was messed up from the beginning, as all the pagan myths say and Darwinism implies, we would know nothing different and not differ with the way things are. When we do cry for justice and try to right the wrongs we are remembering our origins in a good creation and longing for our return there. We appeal to a lost standard that can only be recovered in Christ.

"Peter on the Pond with No Place for Pride"

“Peter on the Pond”
Sermon by Matt Heckel, PhD
8-31-13


Read Luke 5:1-11 and John 21:1-8

(Attention) Ever wonder what it would be like to be Peter? Crazy, right? Peter lived a crazy life of ups and downs, but he also lived a full life. A life that we are normally scared to live.

(Textual Analysis) Let’s try and relive this story from the vantage point of Peter. Peter is cleaning his nets after a miserable night of fishing. If he could’ve known how it would go, he surely would’ve spent it at home in bed. So Peter is experiencing a sense of loss. He is frustrated. Then he sees a probably most unwelcome sight. A huge crowd following Jesus comes into view. But that will be tolerable if they mind their own business.

But then Jesus just steps in it. Yep, he steps into Peter’s boat and right into his business. Here’s a good word of advise, “Don’t step into a fisherman’s boat uninvited.” Peter must be thinking, “Who does Jesus think he is.” Then Jesus imposes himself on Peter. “Peter, could you push me out a little into the lake so the people can hear me better.” Can you picture yourself as Peter throwing your nets down, walking over to your boat and pushing this preacher out into the lake. You might think, “If he wants a floating pulpit I’ll play along, but he better not get long-winded. I need to get home and crash.”

So the sermon is finally over but we don’t have any record of what Jesus said. Why? Because the most important part of the sermon is about to be lived out. Hearts are going to be revealed and a soul is going to be saved.

Worldview Is Religion

If, as Henry Van Til said, "Culture is religion externalized," then worldview is religion internalized.

Life Is not a Tree but a Forest

Irreducible complexity is the foundational argument for intelligent design (ID) and its critique of Darwinism. The argument was popularized by Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box. Darwin's black box, the thing he couldn't penetrate, was the cell. Today we can see into the cell and know it's more complex than Darwin dreamed, even more complex than our most complex machines. Not only is it complex but it's "irreducibly complex," as Behe argues.

Darwinists assume, for good reason, that nature selects mutations that have survival qualities to be passed on to the next generation. As these mutations build up complexity increases. This is not really controversial. Plague survivors of the Middle Ages passed on their plague resistant genetic mutations to future generations who were naturally more resistant to the plague. When they came into contact with nonEuropeans whose populations had never been exposed to the viruses, the natives suffered plagues of their own. These plagues decimated their populations until nature selected the fit among them to survive and pass on there survival qualities to future generations. This is why the plagues eventually faded.

The problem occurs when Darwinists use the engines of mutation and natural selection to explain all of life in all of its species diversity. They even try to explain the origin of life in Darwinistic terms. It seems however that Darwinism has major trouble explaining the cell and even parts of certain simple cells like the bacterial flagellum. Some bacteria swim because they have a flagellum that propels them like a little outboard motor. The flagellum has multiple moving parts that work together in the propulsion system. None of these parts are favorable or have survival value by themselves but only as parts of the more complex whole. See a diagram here. They could not have evolved in a step by step selection process. The bacterial flagellum is an irreducibly complex system. The rotor doesn't make sense without the stator, bearing, hook, multiple membranes, and flagellar filament that whips like a propeller.

Even more problematic is the origin of life itself. No clever arrangement of inorganic matter will ever produce a living cell. No effect can be greater than its cause. The appearance of higher taxa in what has been called the cambrian explosion is also problematic, because Darwinists are committed to gradualism. Mutations build up step by step until a new species slowly emerges on the tree of life. But life is not a tree with a missing root, but a forest in a miraculous ecosystem.

Maddening Love

Sometimes it is more loving to make people mad, than to make people happy.

Legalizing gay marriage would make a lot of people happy but it would not lead to their happiness. Restraining them would make them unhappy, but might lead to a greater happiness. This is because living in harmony with "nature and nature's God," despite their desires, will lead to true happiness.

Heterosexual people must do this too. They have to resist their desires to be unfaithful to their spouses.  Desires, by themselves, are not a guide to what's natural.

Luther the Monk

The content of Luther's theology is heavily influenced by Augustine's doctrine of grace, which his father-confessor Johan von Staupitz introduced to him in the Augustinian monastery. Luther's theological method came from Ockham and Gabriel Biel who were monks and part of the via moderna tradition in the Catholic church.

Luther's whole quest for a gracious God is a monk's quest. Monks were experts on expiating sin and guilt through works of satisfaction. Luther said, "If there was ever a monk who got to heaven by his monkery it was I." It was the failure of the monastic solution at the time, which led Luther the monk to find the solution in Scripture with help from Augustine.

Another influence on Luther of comes from Renaissance humanism, which taught Luther to approach texts grammatically and historically.

Atheism without Meaning

"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

You can't deny objective meaning with objective meaning.

Why Are Religious People Considered Politically Dangerous?

I recently read Douglas Murray's, "Atheists vs Dawkins. My fellow atheists, it’s time we admitted that religion has some points in its favour." Murray was supposed to be on the side of his fellow atheist Richard Dawkins in a recent debate but ended up arguing against him. It turns out that Murray can't play with Dawkins when he portrays religion as "a force of unremitting awfulness, a poisoned root from which no good fruit could grow." Murray opines, "It seems to me the work not of a thinker but of any balanced observer to notice that this is not the case."

I would argue that Christianity is not a religion like any other because it presents God as graciously condescending to save man rather than teaching man to ascend to God through good works. It was Christianity and its doctrine that all people are made in the image of God and are objects of redemption that brought human rights into the Roman Empire. Women converts were a majority in the early church because they recognized the dignity the gospel brought to them. It was Christianity that ended the gladiatorial games, abortion, and infanticide in late antiquity. It was Christianity that ended slavery during the Middle Ages and again in the British Empire and most of the abolitionists in the US were Christians. It was Christianity that founded the first hospitals and is still the greatest source of charity in the world.

But other religions besides Christianity have obviously done good in the world. Even Dawkins' religion of scientism has been responsible for some good. Dawkins himself is supposedly a very kind and polite man and even a careful scholar when he is not attacking Christianity.

Murray is dead on when he says:

My fellow atheist opponents the other night portrayed the future — if we could only shrug off religion — as a wonderful sunlit upland, where reasonable people would make reasonable decisions in a reasonable world. Is it not at least equally likely that if you keep telling people that they lead meaningless lives in a meaningless universe you might just find yourself with — at best — a vacuous life and a hollow culture? My first exhibit in submission involves turning on a television. 

But then Murray swerves off course:

Religions must give up the aspiration to intervene in secular law in the democratic state. In particular they must give up any desire to hold legislative power over those who are not members of their faith. In much of the world the Christian churches have already done this. Of course there are other religions and places where this separation has not been so nearly achieved. But the concession is vital, not least because the ability to dictate politics or law is the ability that most rightly concerns the non-religious about religions.  

Why is it assumed that only religious people would legislate morality? Why is it assumed that secular law has no moral agenda to legislate? The question is not whether morality will be legislated but which morality will be legislated. Will it be a morality grounded in nature, the way things are, or a morality based upon what we want nature to be?

Why is it assumed Christian morality is oppressive when the historical record shows otherwise? Though Christians have been inconsistent with their founder many times, their movement has liberated the world from tyranny again and again. Christian influence in politics, properly conceived, doesn't impose Christianity on non Christians. It doesn't try to make Christians out of non Christians through the political process. It appeals to something believers and non-believers share in common and that we all know by heart: natural law.

"Bookkeeping Hearts"

"First, confession of sin should be thought of as a matter of tending to relationships, and it should not be thought of as a matter of karmic bookkeeping. You are dealing with people, not ledgers. Unfortunately, many people who are carrying a burden of guilt around have bookkeeping hearts (part of the problem), and they think of confession as though it were 'making a payment on a debt.' This means that wrong-headed confession can make things messier. Confession and forgiveness are functions of grace, not bookkeeping." Doug Wilson

What We Can't Avoid

To say that its "wrong" to legislate morality is a legislation of morality.  

The question isn't whether we will legislate morality, but what morality will we legislate?

The question isn't whether we will tax or not, but what will we tax?

Political Sanity

"For the political activists, we must confront the realization that there is no political solution for the challenge we face. Laws won't do it. For the gospel-firsters, those who keep the gospel sealed off away from our public dilemmas and challenges, we must realize that while politics is no savior, politics desperately needs to be saved." Doug Wilson

The project of renewing Christendom is to answer the call to be the church. As that happens the renewal of the political order is bound to follow suit. "Hello!"

Worthy of Belief

Reason isn't the antithesis of faith but presents to faith what is worthy of belief. In this way, reason is a subset of faith.

Don't Go There!

The step from multiculturalism to relativism is not a necessary one. If we were truly multicultural then we would be comfortable with robust public discussion about religion, morals, and politics. Instead, we chant the mantra, "Don't go there."