Andy Stanley, Al Mohler and Scot McKnight

We have apparently come to the place where progressive Christians are open to roundly criticize conservatives who simply speak their mind and portray them as judgmental while being increasingly unwilling to speak against others who pass judgment with extreme prejudice.  

Al Mohler raised a question as one part of a discussion about the megachurch phenomena.  The heart of Mohler’s post was that a generation or two ago, it was suggested in “liberal” circles that Christianity needed to change in order to reach people.  But in a short time, those churches jettisoned essential elements of the faith.  While Mohler praised – yes praised – the conservative bent of many  megachurches and megachurch leaders, he said that the temptation would be strong to water down essential truths for the sake of outreach. 

In this context, he referred to a message by Andy Stanley - "When Gracie met Truthy".  Stanley used a sermon  illustration where two men, both having abandoned heterosexual marriage for a same-sex relationship were told they were disqualified from a service role on a “host team” because one was still married to his wife, not yet divorced.  Stanley did directly speak against adultery – since one of the men was still married, and tied that to disqualification from serving in that position.  But Stanley said not a word about the morality of the same-sex relationship itself and whether that might also disqualify someone from the same role.  His silence on the obvious hot-button issue implied to at least some that had both men been divorced while having this same-sex relationship, they could have stayed in their role.  

So adultery was a disqualification while an illicit gay relationship was seemingly not.     (Read more...)

Savage

I feel compelled to respond to a couple of canards from Dan Savage’s classless tirade that caused Christian students to walk out of a presentation that was supposed to decry bullying.  

Much has already been written about the inconsistency of a speaker on the topic of bullying calling those who had the courage to walk out on his ignorant and foul-mouthed nonsense en masse “wimps”.   One wonders why the organizers of a conference for high school students on journalism would invite a guy who used crass and slanderous intimidation to slander Rick Santorum and licked doorknobs while ill in hopes of infecting Gary Bauer to speak as an expert on preventing bullying, but that is another discussion. 

I’ll not delve into issues of tone, the ethics of his presentation, and speculation about what it is that drives this guy.  I’ll just respond to some specific ideas.

The Lie

It is said by Evolutionary Creation advocates that if Young Earth Creationism is true, then God “lied” by making the universe appear old. In fact the “appearance of age” is one explanation some YEC use to explain the apparent age of the universe. The argument YEC makes is that if God were to create a tree, instantaneously, and someone came along moments later, the someone may have no idea the tree was only seconds old, for a “created” tree would appear to be mature. The same logic would apply for the land masses, earth and the universe itself.

But to evolutionists, Theistic Evolutionists and evolutionary creationists, this explanation imputes to God a “lie”, that he would have left clues in the universe that make it appear to be old when it is not, deceiving…well, scientists primarily… who want to assume the age of something very old can be determined by examining its properties.

It is not my purpose here to defend a particular age for the cosmos. As a conservative Christian, I am not committed to a particular age of the most distant star, or of the necessity of a precise 24 hour day in the creation of planets or land masses, but I am committed to the historicity of Adam and his fall into sin as recorded in the Genesis account. What concerns me here is logic, for this is a curious and horribly inconsistent charge made by EC advocates against YEC.

If find it stunning that EC advocates suggest that

A) God “LIED” if the universe is young when it appears to be old,

B) But there is apparently nothing deceitful about an “inspired” text that indicates absolutely nothing about the alleged irrefutable truth of common descent!

The utter absurdity of that inconsistency ought to be enough to cause any serious reader of scripture to doubt whether EC is the least bit honest with the text of scripture.

What is the greater lie?

Is it the lie latent in a subtle set of clues allegedly buried in inferences made by a few highly specialized technicians; conclusions measured in the long slow decay of radio-isotopes or measurements of the speed of light, each revealed only through sophisticated scientific methods based on philosophical assumptions about the nature of the physical universe?

Or is the greater lie laid out in common human language in story form which explicitly and repeatedly claims that human beings are descended from a single pair whose rebellion is the cause of all death and suffering?

It is often asserted by these sophisticated academics that God revealed the Genesis story to earlier pre-scientific peoples because they would not have been sophisticated enough to comprehend common descent. Really?

Were the men who lived in the age that built the pyramids really so incapable of higher level thinking that a story of creation which simply suggested all living beings came from earlier creatures would have been incomprehensible to them? Is it more credible that instead God reveals to them a story that all humans descended from a single pair?

Oxford Ethicists OK Killing Live Infants

Follow up to my last post. The UK Telegraph publishes today an article justifying infanticide. As I indicated in my previous post, there is no discussion at all of the medical facts of fetal development. Only this:

“We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.”

How much "value" is "some" value? At what point does society determine that the young individual who can be legally killed is "capable of attributing to her own existence" this undefined "value".

This is pure use of language to say nothing. And it comes from the science establishment, from the Journal of Medical Ethics at Oxford.

Any wonder why common decent folk don't trust the scientists?

Science Deniers

A label often attached to those who doubt either Darwinism or man-made global warming is “science-denier”. If one questions either the assumptions or the conclusions of either of those narratives, one is assumed to be anti-science, as if disagreeing with a conclusion was the same as losing all contact with reality. But I have to say in the dispute about a number of issues, I have a strong suspicion it is not really about the science. Why?

Because I have a pretty direct example of agendas driving conclusions in spite of evidence coming from the other side of the political and religious spectrum.

The Fall of Man and the Rise of Science

Two Interesting reviews of a book by an Oxford guy. here and here.

The book is “The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science” and the Oxford guy is Peter Harrison.

I'm intrigued by the book, and will likely buy it, but I have to say I find this thesis vaguely familiar. Francis Schaeffer outlined a similar viewpoint decades ago.

There are a few distinctly Christian presuppositions about the universe that many argue were necessary for science as we know it to come into existence. The first is often cited and understood by Christians in the ID and Creationist camps. It is simply the idea that the universe is orderly and that our brains can apprehend that order.

Gilberson's World

Karl Gilberson, formerly of Biologos and author of “Saving Darwin” has penned a little testimonial at Frum Forum to plug his new book “The Anointed.”

Michelle Bachman has stated that Francis Schaeffer had an influence on her in days gone by. Karl Gilberson recalls his own similar background and evangelical heritage and proceeds to paint Bachman and pretty much all conservative evangelicals as uneducated dunces. He directly names Schaeffer, James Dobson, Ken Ham and David Barton as “anointed” ones whose status in the evangelical community gives cover to anti-intellectual and dishonest dissemination of an alternate and defective standard of truth.

He takes a mild swipe at Schaeffer’s goatee and knickers. Of Dobson he sarcastically notes that he “had a PhD in child development and thus knew what he was talking about.” Of Ham who does not have a PhD, he snarks “Very few evangelicals grow up without hearing some trusted authority—perhaps even with a PhD—tell them that the age of the earth is an “open question.” It all boils down to the charge that conservative Evangelicals are trapped in an alternative “parallel culture” with its own standards of truth, where the statements of “anointed” leaders - whose only claim to authority is that the unsuspecting sheep think they have a special gift - trump rational analysis of truth claims.