STORY: Have you ever been made to feel unsure something that you thought was obvious, but are led to doubt? I once saw a film of a classroom in which the teacher asks the children to put their had up if they think Mexico is north or south of the United States. Everyone except one kid put their hands up for north. After looking around confused, the one child puts his hand up as well. The experiment was supposed to show that peer pressure is so powerful that it will get us to give up even the most obviously true beliefs. All the children except one were told to put…
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How Many Meanings Does a Sentence Have?
A declarative sentence is said to express a proposition. Propositions have truth-values: they are either true or false.[4] Furthermore, the truth-value of a proposition is objective. It is true or false whether or not it is believed by anyone. The alternative to thinking that propositions have objective truth-value is self-refuting. This is clear from the following dilemma: Either propositions have objective truth values or the proposition expressed by the statement, “no propositions have objective truth values,” has no objective truth value. Clearly, the proposition expressed by the statement “no propositions have objective truth values,” has an objective truth value. It cannot be both true and false, something in between or neither…
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A Case for Punishment
“Lock ’em up!” Punishment, in our culture, conjures up images of a Dickensian, authoritarian and bleak society, one marked by shouting and hitting. While there is no doubt that evil people use punishment as an excuse for cruelty, I’d like to suggest that punishment itself is morally justified. Much as I’d like a world without punishment, I don’t think we can have it if that same world has moral evil in it. So, I’d like to go against the grain: punishment is right, not always and not every kind and certainly not with hatred in the heart, but justified in a fundamental way. Actually, I’d like to go a tad…
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Christian Cultural Criticism And The Way of Death
“This is the end” Jerry Falwell This is my first experience of an American culture war. And it’s a heated one. In a war like this the voice of the cultural critic is an important one and, for the Christian, a calling, a calling to talk frankly about sin and doom. And after the recent murders perhaps we should listen. Such a task is not novel or a side effect of early twentieth century fundamentalism. Calling out a culture on its sin has been the job of Christians since the church began. Apart from the Bible, which has a lot to say about sin, The Didache, written in the first century, had…
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Israel and the Church in Ephesians 2:11-22
Ephesians 2:11-22 shows the relationship between Jewish and Gentile believers in the church. But what does that mean for Israel? Does the creation of the “one new man” mean that Israel, as a nation, has no more part to play in the plan of God in history? In the following I argue in the negative. Gentile believers and Jewish believers are united as one body in the church at this present time–the church age–and that the basis for unity is the abrogation of the Law of Moses through the death of Christ. The unilateral promises made to ethnic Israel need not be taken up into the creation of the church,…
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Sermon: Jonah
MAIN IDEA: God’s sovereign and compassionate grace bends the strongest of wills and melts the most calloused of hearts. Jonah by Nikki Loy The prophet, Jonah, if you can imagine him, sits at his desk weeping the tears of a forgiven sinner. He has been broken by God’s sovereignty over his life and he has been melted by God’s loving kindness. His story is one of complete collapse in the face of his sovereign and merciful God. He has had his hard will broken and his cold heart won. The Lord has upended him, called him from his home to break him, to realign his will and melt his heart.…
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Sermon: Haggai
Once I sat on a beach and watched my wife, Sarah, fly a kite. The kite was broken and was wet (it had fallen into the sea several times). I had long since given up, but Sarah kept going. She kept picking it up, fixing it, throwing it into the air, and watching it break that little bit more. I had no hope. This thing is dead, I thought, why bother with it? We’d be better off getting a new kite. Perhaps you feel like the kite. You are broken, tired, and wet from whatever troubles life has thrown your way. In a sense you have quit, given up on…
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Inerrancy – It’s Not That Complicated
The recent Evangelical Theological Society conference was about biblical inerancy. Some are for it, some are against. What strikes me is that the doctrine, while raising all sorts of questions, is not that complicated. So let me have a shot at a simple defense. The first thing to realize is that we know God because God reveals himself to us. Revelation is “God’s disclosure of His nature and His will to mankind.” There are two kinds of revelation, general and special. General revelation is general information about God – he exists, he is powerful that is generally available to all human beings. In Scripture we learn that all Creation reveals…