Dennis Prager on the Authority of The Book

I listen to Dennis Prager when I get the chance. He is a Jewish Conservative talk show host who is calm, articulate and gracious. He column today in Jewish World Review speaks to the issue of the culture wars and does the best job I have seen in quite some time in defining what the culture wars actually are.

I have grown a bit weary of the secular press characterizing the culture wars as an attempt for a few narrow, fundamentalist, right-wing zealots to impose a theocracy on the rest of the culture, a culture which we are told has been secular since the days of Thomas Jefferson. I am growing more weary of the tendency of many evangelical Christian authors and bloggers to essentially say the same thing, that Christian involvement in politics (read conservative Republicanism) is unbiblical and damages the church. More on that in a later post.

Prager does a great service by providing a bit of clarity. What the culture wars are about is not religion per se, but morality based on a text that is shared across many very different viewpoints:

Is Jesus the Only Savior?

Taking a break from Calvinism for a moment, I have to plug a great book. James Edwards was a mentor to my nephew Troy, who became a Presbyterian pastor, (and leans in the Calvinist direction - but we're still very much on speaking terms!) I had not read anything by Edwards prior to reading Is Jesus the Only Savior? I have to admit I didn't know what to make of the title at first, but after reading it, I suspect it is a book that ought to be looked at by a lot of young college age men who need mentoring, and maybe ought to be a study for high school seniors heading to college.

His book is calm, scholarly, but readable. He takes on the various phases of the "quest for the historical Jesus" by exposing the naturalistic assumptions underneath them. He takes the question further showing that there is a great deal of reason to trust the historical reliability of the New Testament with easy to read, cogent arguments and a judicious choice of compelling evidence. There was new material here that I had never encountered. Josh McDowell and others have produced a volume of information in this regard, but I found items in Edwards book very exciting. Having established the reasonableness of trusting the New Testament, he tackles the central issue - "did Jesus believe himself to be God?"

But what sets the book apart is how he links the rebuttal of "modern" skepticism of the historicity of Christianity with the "after-modern" skepticism about whether Christianity has the right to make exclusive truth claims. This is the epistemological question of the age my sons will have to deal with and I hope I can get them to take a good look at a book like this one.

The one caveat for more conservative evangelicals is that Edwards admits that it is difficult for him to reconcile every detail of the gospels into a perfect harmony, so he does not identify himself as being in the strict inerrantist/fundamentalist camp. Then again, C.S. Lewis was not exactly a fundamentalist and most evangelicals are quite comfortable learning from him.

This is an important, credible and readable book. I hope it gains a wide audience.

Why I am Not a Calvinist - Part 5: Eternal Security

An acquaintance told me the other day that her child was planning to leave a Christian College for another Christian College because of the overbearing nature of the chapel services. She explained that in the denomination with which this college is associated, "they don't believe in 'once saved - always saved'. To this lack of belief in eternal security in part, she attributed what unfortunately sounded like a daily bludgeoning of the students from the pulpit to confess sin and get their spiritual lives straight.

Having spent some time in "holiness movement" circles, I can certainly sympathize. Revivalism, left in the hands of men to create the revival by tactics of mass persuasion, can be a destructive thing. Presumably, by going to a different institution where Christians are "eternally secure", this abuse might be avoided.

I find that the average lay person is often drawn to a Calvinist viewpoint because of the belief in eternal security, the belief that a Christian, once saved from the consequences of sin, can never again be lost. I, if truth be told, have always believed in a slightly limited form of eternal security, but for very un-Calvinistic reasons. In fact, as a young layman, had no notion that eternal security was in any way related to Calvinism.

Why I am Not a Calvinist - Part 4: Logical Possibilities

"The decree, I admit, is, dreadful; and yet it is impossible to deny that God foreknew what the end of man was to be before he made him, and foreknew, because he had so ordained by his decree...Nor ought it to seem absurd when I say, that God not only foresaw the fall of the first man, and in him the ruin of his posterity; but also at his own pleasure arranged it. For as it belongs to his wisdom to foreknow all future events, so it belongs to his power to rule and govern them by his hand" (Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.xxiii.7)

Here is a question. If it is true that God can do anything that is logically possible, that is He cannot create a square circle for example, and if it is true that evil is not the opposite of good but rather the absence of good, and if it is true that goodness is defined as that which corresponds to the character of God, then the following two scenarios are submitted for consideration.

It is not possible for God to create a world where there are beings who have true freedom and no possibility that those beings will choose evil. Hence the free-will defense of the existence of evil makes a certain amount of sense.

It is, however, possible for God to create a universe where beings are NOT free, and where, as a result, none choose evil. Given that scenario, why did God not create such a universe? Why does evil exist? Why did God create a universe in which He decreed that certain men would choose evil?

The answer most Calvinist put forth is that it is beyond our knowledge and wrapped up in the justice and wisdom of God. But once again, if "God not only foresaw the fall of the first man, and in him the ruin of his posterity; but also at his own pleasure arranged it" then what meaning can words like justice and wisdom have?

Why I Am Not a Calvinist - Part 3: Justice

I noted in my last post that from my own personal perspective, Calvinism suggested a God with a completely different character than the one I had long believed in, and for that reason, it caused a huge crisis of faith. As long as the debates about grace and free will were primarily about how works relate to salvation, it always seemed to me that this was one of those debates that could be discussed quietly over coffee and was not worth making a fuss over. But when it came to the point where it appeared God was, by his eternal decree, the "author" of evil, I fell into a state of anguish.

It was in my short stint in seminary that I was introduced to the idea of "compatibilism". This is the suggestion that free will is compatable with determinism, based on the idea that individuals freely choose what they are predisposed to choose by their character, circumstances, psychology, etc. In other words, if I choose A as opposed to B under a given set of conditions, then I will have freely chosen A and will always choose A given the same set of conditions. My own nature, combined with the set of conditions in which I am found, produce a specific result.

In Calvinism, this makes it possible for some to say that God accomplishes his sovereign will by creating human beings with a specific makeup and placing them in the right set of conditions to insure that what they freely choose will be exactly what His design predicts they will choose. The distinction then is between "free choice" - meaning that one chooses between two or more options, as opposed to voluntary compliance - meaning that a person "voluntarily" chooses one and only one possible option.