eChurch Blog

“Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.”

William Ralph Inge

A few links I found interesting for one reason or another:

The Biblical World – The Theology of Snoopy

Elizaphanian – Of Strategy, Smallbone and the Spanish Train

Gordon’s Blog – Do evangelicals choose their religious faith based on their pre-existing extrinsic values?

Barna Group – Top trends 2011

The Vernacular Curate – Trolls and Blogging

The American Catholic – Vaclav Havel: Requiescat In Pace

Edward Feser – Greene on Nozick on nothing

(In the Feser article he mentions his book “The Last Superstition” which is on my Amazon wishlist. I mention this should anyone suddenly be overcome with a generous Christmassy desire to purchase me a book.

The truth is, and this is where I agree with Scot McKnight on the deeper truth of the matter: the slippery slope falls away on both sides of faithfulness. On the Left side, we fall toward conformity and licentiousness and abandonment of the faith.  On the Right side, we fall toward paranoia, legalism, and a cold and fossilized faith that is really no faith at all.  We cannot trust in the systems of the Right or the Left.  We cannot trust in systems at all.  We have to trust in a Person, not in a Predilection or a Philosophy.  That Person will lead us forward, along the ridge-top above the slippery slopes.

SOURCE

Steve over at Undeception has a very thoughtful and incisive blog post on seeking truth. Steve rightly highlights the danger posed by those who believe they have a monopoly on truth and says:

The greatest threat to Truth comes from those whose confidence that they have it lead them to root out everyone making a counter-claim. This conviction puts me on a collision course with heresy hunters, who in the name of defending the Truth of God have crammed it so tightly into a cage that I can scarcely imagine their having any real affection for it.

One of my greatest fears is to become the person that imagines they have laid hold of all truth and have nothing further to learn. This to me, is death itself. I heartily suspect that in the face of God, we will all be found wanting.

Steve also notes ‘affection’ for truth and this is a salient observation in my mind, as there has to be a love of truth; in fact, 1 Corinthians 13:6 informs us that love itself rejoices with truth.

Steve moves on to look at the interaction between behaviour and truth:

By far the best and most important way to serve Truth is by acting like we believe it, viz. through obedience to what we believe. I believe that the highest, most elusive truth of the universe is Love — so if my life is not characterized by Love-seeking, how can I pretend to be a Truth-seeker?

It’s interesting to note here that Steve alludes to the truth-seeker being a love-seeker. In other words truth should impact on our behaviour towards others. Of course this is echoed in 1 Peter 1:22:

Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for each other, love one another deeply, from the heart.

Steve articulates this thusly:

If I can’t act in love during my tousles for Truth, treating the other person as a child of God no matter how obviously, infuriatingly ignorant they are, then what I am upholding and defending is not Truth but my own pet truths, factoids that I cognitively assent to, at the expense of the greatest truth I know. There is nothing more false than conflating my truth with the Truth.

For me personally the following paragraph is the very crux of Steve’s post:

You see, fighting for Truth so often treats it as a trophy to be won, a public reward for our diligent Truth-seeking. I want to get out of this closed circuit of seeking Truth for seeking Truth’s sake. If we don’t live up to the light we do have – and I hope we can all agree that living a life characterized by loving humility qualifies – no matter how accurately and convincingly we argue for truths, we are not lovers of Truth.

How true.

It would seem to me that far too often, even within the Christian world, the search for truth can become dry, over-intellectualised and argumentative. Of course, for Christians, truth has been exemplified and personified in the person of Jesus: “I am the way and the truth and the life” and in the person of the Holy Spirit: “But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth”.

This truth is to have a profound impact on us:

John 8:32
Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free

And

John 17:17
Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.

I’ve always found it intriguing that the Bible does not necessarily equate the accumulation of facts with truth:

2 Timothy 3:7
always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.

I equate wisdom with truth and I delight in the personification of wisdom in the feminine form in Proverbs:

Proverbs 4:6
Do not forsake wisdom, and she will protect you; love her, and she will watch over you.

Proverbs 7:4
Say to wisdom, “You are my sister,” and to insight, “You are my relative.”

Proverbs 8:1
Does not wisdom call out? Does not understanding raise her voice?

Proverbs 8:11
for wisdom is more precious than rubies, and nothing you desire can compare with her.

And humility is intimately tied with wisdom:

Proverbs 11:2
When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.

The irony would seem to be that the more wisdom and truth we have, the more humble and loving we will become. Or could it be that the more humble and loving we are; the more open to wisdom and truth we become? Either way, based on this, it would seem that I have some way to go.

Here’s a lovely Scripture to end with:

1 John 3:18
Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.

So to the question; what is truth to you?

By the way, don’t feel you have to be Christian to contribute on this one

R Joseph Hoffman is one of the most interesting, honest, thought provoking and knowledgeable of the atheist / humanist camp (I’m not sure which).

As he’s somewhat critical of New Atheism (or as he terms it “E Z Atheism”) he’s often accused by other atheists of queering the pitch and even covertly batting for the other side; which is patently absurd if you spend any time reading his work. He simply highlights inconsistent or lazy thinking and poor behaviour and terminology.

Anyway, he has written a blog post entitled: Atheism’s Little Idea within which he raises a fascinating paradox.

The crux of the paradox is that as modern atheism has consistently belittled the concept of God – invisible sky fairy – and religion, it has belittled its own cause. What’s the big deal in being an atheist if you don’t think the idea of God is a big deal? If you’re opposing an idea you consider ridiculous, insignificant and pathetic, then what does that say of your own cause?

Here’s what Hoffman has to say on this matter:

To be brutal, I cannot imagine a time in the history of unbelief when atheism has appeared more hamfisted, puling, ignorant or unappealing.

Is this because its savants are also described by those adjectives, or because their fans are just being fans, merchandising the cause: t-shirts, coffee mugs, quick fixes, blasphemy competitions, and billboard campaigns? (Axial tilt is the reason for the season: Honest Jethro,  I thought I’d never stop laughing). I mean, who are we unless someone is offended by who we are?  What good is blasphemy if no one is getting their knickers in a knot anymore, for Christ’s sake. How can we “come out” when there’s no one standing outside the closet to yell “Surprise!” at? And, by the way you churchy jerks: we are victims.

Atheism has become a very little idea, an idea that has to be shouted to seem important.  And that is a shame, because God was a big idea, and the rejection of the existence of God was also a big idea, once upon a time.

[.....]

When did atheism cease to be a big idea?  When atheists made God a little idea.  When its idea of god shriveled to become a postulate of a new intellectual Darwinism.  When they began to identify unbelief with being a woman, a gay, a lesbian, or some other victimized cadre.   When they decided that religion is best described as a malicious and retardant cultural force that connives to prevent us being the Alpha Race of super-intelligences and wholly equal beings that nature has in store for  us. When they elevated naturalism, already an outmoded view of the universe, to a cause, at the expense of authentic imagination.

Atheism has become a little idea because it is based on the hobgoblin theory of religion: its god is a green elf with a stick, not the master of the universe who controls it with his omniscient will. –Let alone a God so powerful that this will could evolve into Nature’s God–the god of Jefferson and Paine–and then into the laws of nature, as it did before the end of the eighteenth century in learned discussion and debate.

Read all

Warning: This is one of those ambiguous posts within which I ramble a bit, raise questions and ultimately answer nothing.

I’m a great admirer of Normblog who happens to be an atheist and is always eminently interesting, thoughtful and intelligent. I was intrigued to read his post today entitled: ‘Belief and Choice‘, in which he ponders the relationship between belief and choice:

I think it would be, in general, misleading to talk of sincere beliefs as if they were arrived at by choice. The temptation to do so may be based on the fact that a person’s beliefs can, and sometimes do, change; so they are not just like some permanent, biologically-fixed feature of his or her make-up. But they are also not like anything that can be the object of a free choice – such as, say, whether I’ll have this or that flavour of ice cream (when I like both equally well), or whether I’ll take a holiday in July or in August. If after considering the matter carefully, I have come to the conclusion that there is no God, I cannot but be an atheist. I could pretend not to be one. I could try not to be one – by reconsidering all the best arguments for not being one. But if this doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. I’m stuck with the belief. The same applies to other beliefs: I don’t choose to think that respecting human rights is a better way of relating to other people than violating them; I don’t know how to think otherwise.

I must say that my experience bears out these salient observations.

In my youth, I was a non-believer. I didn’t choose to be; I simply did not – and could not – believe. I was evangelised to by my peers and they answered my questions fabulously; in fact, they had an answer for everything. I could see the benefits of believing and how comforting it must be; however, I simply could not believe. No matter how much force of will I might have mustered, no matter how cogent and persuasive the argument, no matter how much I might have wanted it, I knew, I simply could not believe.

The day the Jehovah Witnesses’ banged on my door, I began my first baby steps in belief. It is an evening that is a little fuzzy to recall; one of the reasons for this is that the JW’s didn’t argue with me, or seek to persuade me, they simply spoke of their faith and the reasons why they believed the world was as it is. The best way I can describe what happened, is that it was akin to a ‘belief switch’ being activated within me.

I just simply suddenly believed in God. No evidence, no powerful arguments, no reasoning, no choice. It happened to me; not by me.

Now don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely no quarrel when a good friend such as Stacy wishes to articulate the reasonableness of our faith; no argument whatsoever. I have now evolved my understanding to accept and appreciate this; however, my faith journey did not really begin with ‘reason’ as such. It was belief and then reason for me.

I now find myself in the curious position in which I can no longer not believe, with exactly the same force with which I could not believe.

I feel I had little choice in all of this.

Does that make me sound deterministic; perhaps. A Calvinistic understanding – of which I subscribed – is a proponent of this very thinking. Does this cause me something of a dilemma when considering the non-believing; of course it does.

We have all experienced the situation in which we have witnessed somebody confronted with irrefutable evidence and yet they refuse – or are unable – to change their belief.

Belief is a strange thing isn’t it.

This quote comes from a sobering and thoughtful blog post written by Cranmer, which is well worth a read in its entirety.

Pope Benedict XVI observed a few years ago that the global financial crisis ‘shows the futility of money and ambition’. He said: ‘He who builds only on visible and tangible things like success, career and money builds the house of his life on sand. We are now seeing, in the collapse of major banks, that money vanishes, it is nothing.’ And he added: ‘The only solid reality is the Word of God’.

Amen to that.

OK, here is the final promised reminder.

Tonight: 9 – 10:30pm (GMT – Weds 9th Nov) is the much anticipated showdown between Dr Calvin Smith – the leading Christian Zionist scholar in the UK – and Revd Stephen Sizer – the foremost Christian anti-Zionist in the UK.

For links from this blog giving you some background information on Stephen Sizer: click here, and for a blog post written by Calvin Smith addressing Sizer, that I featured on this blog back in February 2010: click here.

The debate can be viewed live on Revelation TV and will be held in front of a studio audience in London – wish I were attending!

Sky Channel 581

Freesat Channel 692

Viewers in USA with a ROKU BOX can watch Revelation TV

Online Internet streaming can be found on this link.

This is gonna be fascinating folks and represents an enormously significant and important debate relating to Christian Zionism.

I will say that I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with Dr Calvin Smith in the past, in terms of blogging, and on the telephone, and he has a brain the size of a small planet and a MASSIVE heart for our Lord and the Jewish peoples. I’ll lay my cards on the table and say that I hope suspect Dr Calvin will firmly debunk Sizer. I know some of you don’t like this sort of combative talk, but many of us have been following the antics of Sizer for many years and have been left deeply disturbed by his polemics against Israel, and his associations with some less than reputable folk.

I’d urge anyone even remotely interested in the issue of Christian Zionism; both for and against, to watch this debate, as you will simply not again see these two foremost figures in close combat.

I suspect this will be educational and informative for us all.

In other words, it doesn’t get better than this.

Thanks go to Tim for sending this my way; we’ve been itching to view this and it’s hot off the press. Unfortunately, due to my absolutely rubbish Internet connection, I can’t watch this until first thing in the morning, when for some unknown reason I can stream videos. In the meantime, hope you enjoy!

Following my post yesterday relating to spirituality within health care, I noted the National Secular Society conflate the terms ‘Religion’ and ‘Spirituality’.

Are they right to do this; do ‘Religion’ and ‘Spiritualty’ effectively mean the same thing?

I’m genuinely interested in your thoughts, especially given that Wifey and I appear to have somewhat different ideas on this.

The floor is yours.