Archives: thought

Unravelling ‘scientific’ truth

Thought

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This is the third post in Peter Bolt’s series on the New Atheists. (Read the first and second.)

There are many slippery words—words that appear to mean so many things, you begin to wonder if they mean anything.

Even ‘science’ can be one that gets quite greasy. It seems pretty slippery in some New Atheist discussion. Without knowing much about science—or Christianity, for that matter—some ordinary people feel that one stamps out the other—or, at least, that they are in serious conflict. On the other hand, a whole string of famous intellectuals (e.g. HG Wells, Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, Max Planck, Freeman Dyson, Stephen Jay Gould) have, according to New Atheist Sam Harris, “declared the war between reason and faith to be long over”.1 But Harris is not happy with these intellectuals. He is even less happy with the US National Academy of Sciences, suggesting that science and Christianity should get along, because they are answering different kinds of questions about the world.2 For Sam, this is not good enough; he wants the conflict to continue because, in his mind, science has already won.

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Unravelling truth attacks

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This is the second post in Peter Bolt’s series on the New Atheists. (Read the first.)

The New Atheists cannot be accused of being relativists. But their attacks on Christian truth claims still need some careful relativising.

The New Atheists are not talking to Christians, but about Christians—to recruit fellow secularists in the campaign to silence the Christian voice in the public domain. So Sam Harris, in his Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, New York, 2006), writes,

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Is the church still serious about hell?

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Hell is not a popular subject for Christians and non-Christians alike. However, for Jesus, hell was a very important topic—so much so that much of the information we have about it came from him. In this article, Jonathan Gibson explores several alternative views of hell as well as what the Bible says to form a picture of what hell is and why it matters.1

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Unravelling truth

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This is the first in a series on the New Atheists.

There are many kinds of truth.

This opening statement may cause rejoicing in the hearts of the many relativists who now populate western society. However, the statement is not meant to encourage relativism, but proper thought—and, of course, those two things really don’t go together.

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Why I am an egalitarian

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The issue of gender roles within marriage is one that has become increasingly controversial during the feminist revolution of the last 30 years. It is interesting to read a book like New Testament Nuptial Imagery1 from 1971, where the ‘traditional’ concepts like the submission of the wife and the headship of the husband are simply stated without revision or alternative suggestions.

Only 14 years later, a work like Bilezekian’s Beyond Sex Roles2 is typical of much recent scholarship that has proposed different interpretations of passages like Ephesians 5:21-33. In opposition to the traditional understanding, many commentators like Bilezekian portray their position as ‘egalitarian’ (defined as “asserting the equality of all people”3). Equality of all people, they assert, is a biblical principle demanded by passages like Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”.

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Heaven is for sinners

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Another month, another Briefing! While you are enjoying the fruits of the May issue (on infertility and the ethics of IVF), this next lot of Saturday posts will focus on the topic of the June Briefing: hell, judgement and the Sabbath. (more…)

When does life begin?

Thought

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These Saturday posts are looking at past Briefing articles on ethics, infertility and in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in anticipation of the subject of the next issue of The Briefing. First, we grappled with Michael Hill’s question of how much (and whether) humans should meddle with God’s creation. Then Kirsten Birkett showed us what happens when science and technology, ethics and morality, and human rights rub up against one another. This week, Andrew Cameron deconstructs some of the rhetoric surrounding the 2002 debate in Australia about when life begins:
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Interchange: The God who meets our needs and his Son, the perfect saviour

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David McKay has raised two important issues about the idea of an impassible God that, I think, would naturally occur to many people confronted with the idea. And so we’re going to bump one of Martin Shields’s excellent concerns out in order to highlight another excellent issue raised by David:

One question I have is about the incarnation and exaltation of Jesus. I understand that one of the wonderful benefits of Jesus’ incarnation and exaltation is that God became Man and that Jesus remains forever an exalted Man. He is God but he is truly human. One of the things I take from Hebrews is that we have a great high priest who is a perfect man who is interceding for us. It is nice to know that he had the experience of being a man like us. He suffered and was tempted like us, but he was triumphant over all this suffering and temptation. He never sinned.

But I would have thought that it is important to know that he still feels for us now as an exalted Man. Has he retreated from sharing truly in our experiences and become impassible again? The more I think about it, the more this doctrine makes God to be cold and unfeeling.

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Science and ethics collide

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If you’ve just joined us, this next lot of Saturday posts will focus on the thorny landscape of ethics, infertility and in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in keeping with the subject of the next issue of The Briefing. Last week, Michael Hill worked through the question of how much (and whether) humans should meddle with God’s creation. This week, Kirsten Birkett looks at what happens when science and technology, ethics and morality, and human rights rub up against one another:
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Interchange: When God uses a word, it means what it says

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(This post is the second responding to feedback on Mark’s series on impassibility. Read the first.)

Martin Shields’s second point is, in my view, the most important of all. He argues that God is no Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking Glass:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

(Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Macmillan, London, 1871, chapter 6.)

Most of us agree with Alice that large anthropomorphic eggs sitting on walls don’t get to use words with completely different meanings. Words mean what they mean. And that’s Martin Shields’s second great concern:

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Interchange: Keep your theological frameworks out of my reading of the Bible

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[Update: Corrected the spelling of Martin Shields’s name.]

Martin Shields offered a series of very thoughtful concerns in response to the last post in my series on impassibility. In the process, he raised a bunch of key issues to do with how we read the Bible. His concerns are profoundly important questions that affect far more than the issue of impassibility. So I’m going to offer in these four posts what I think is at stake in Martin Shields’s concerns and why I disagree with him in the hope that the debate might stimulate all of us forward as we live in the knowledge of God.

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Christless Christianity: An interview with Michael Horton

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Has the Church become captive to the spirit of the age? Many believe that Martin Luther’s fears, which led him to write The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, certainly apply to the modern Protestant church. Michael Horton, professor of systematic theology and apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary in California, believes that the church has been taken captive by American culture and its ideals of consumerism, pragmatism, self-sufficiency, individualism and positive thinking. He claims that while the church still invokes the name of Christ, we have precious little reason to believe that we need him. Hence we are moving towards a state that he describes as ‘Christless Christianity’.

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The God of love (3): Impassibility and the possibility of a good law

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(Read parts 1 and 2.)

We have been turning our attention to the question of whether God is impassible—that is, that God is in no way affected by the creatures he has made, and cannot die or suffer. Last time around, we explored how impassibility was a key element in the early Christian understanding of creation—that God made everything from nothing, and did so as a free choice out of pure goodness. This time around, we turn our attention to God’s law. (more…)

The God of love (2): Impassibility and the possibility of a loving creator

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(Read part 1.)

We have been looking at the question of whether God is impassible—whether God is ever the object of other people’s actions or only ever the subject of his own—whether he moves others but is never moved by them. As I suggested last time, this often raises the question for people of whether God has emotions—whether God is moved by what happens to us, good or bad. As it seems to us fairly obvious that God has to have emotions to be able to love, the notion that God is impassible is a prime contender for the ‘Most Unbiblical Abstract Philosophizing Award’. We just know that emotions are everything.
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Where have all the miracles gone?

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Who would you regard as the more significant influence upon your Christian life and thinking: John Stott or Mark Driscoll?

In Sydney, where I live, nearly every­one over the age of 40 has only one answer to that question: through his books and articles, and his occasional visits over three decades, John Stott shaped a generation of Sydney evangelicals. If we add other names like JI Packer and Dick Lucas, it is uncontroversial to say that English evangelicalism has had a profound influence on the thinking, practice and ‘culture’ of Sydney evangelicalism over the past four decades—much more influence than, say, North American evangelicalism, even including the contributions of men like Billy Graham and Bill Hybels. (more…)