withallyourmind.net

For those not aware, a debate took place on March 28 between New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman and apologist/philosopher/theologian William Lane Craig at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. I’m still not quite sure how, but this was forwarded to me:

Subject: Ehrman/Craig Debate Transcript
Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2006 11:02:22 -0700

Dear Friends,

Here is the link to the debate transcript at the Holy
Cross website:

http://www.holycross.edu/departments/crec/website/resurrdebate.htm

Since Ehrman is not permitting the publication of this
debate, could you help to make this address known,
perhaps providing such a link at any websites you are
involved with?

Thanks,

Bill Craig

I was greatly encouraged by this article over at the Boundless Webzine which discusses a recent book by Philip Jenkins (Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State University) called The Next Christendom: The Rise of Global Christianity. The article (following Jenkins’ book) criticizes and rebuts the commonly heard doomsayers, from the secular humanists to the far-left ‘christians’, who insist that Christianity is on the decline and will never survive so long as it holds onto its ‘pre-scientific’ supernaturalism. The problem with this view is that it’s false. Christianity is steadily growing (or at least staying the same) in the United States, and it is exploding throughout the second and third world. Jenkins writes:

Viewed from Cambridge or Amsterdam, such pleas make excellent sense, but in the context of global Christianity, this kind of liberalism looks distinctly dated. It would not be easy to convince a congregation in Seoul or Nairobi that Christianity is dying, when their main concern is building a worship facility big enough for the 10,000 or 20,000 members they have gained over the past few years. And these new converts are mostly teenagers and young adults, very few with white hair. Nor can these churches be easily told that, in order to reach a mass audience, they must bring their message more into accord with western secular orthodoxies.

Here are some of the statistics he has compiled:
* In 1900 less than 10 percent of Africans were Christians. Today the number has surged to over 47 percent.
* In 1949 China had only 4 million Christians. Today the number stands at about 82 million. That’s over a 20x increase, even factoring in the country’s total population growth. Former Beijing bureau chief for Time magazine David Aikman projects that within a few decades 1 in 3 Chinese could be Christian.
* Christian faith is also on the rise in South America. Many South American countries report a catholic majority and a charismatic form of Protestantism is growing most quickly, sweeping whole cities with revival.
* The spread of the faith in Korea has been just as astounding. Forget Saddleback. Seoul is now home to the world’s largest church. And Korean Christians are not content with mere domestic growth. Christianity Today reports that now “Korea sends more missionaries than any country but the U.S. And it won’t be long before it is number one.”
* Jenkins estimates that by 2050 there will be 3 billion Christians and non-’white’ Christians will outnumber ‘white’ Christians five to one.

The conclusion of the article:

I question their motivations. I wonder if their “predictions” are anything more than wishes in disguise. After all, those hailing Christianity’s immanent demise also tend to advocate an aggressive secularism while longing for the day when religious belief will be expunged from public life. Call it wishful thinking.

Whatever the cause, it’s still going on. Right now somewhere in America a professor is sketching out the soon-ending “Christian Era” before a class of credulous freshmen. On some radio show there’s an “expert” opining about the decline of Christendom.

And meanwhile thousands are hearing the gospel for the first time and responding in faith.

Of course we Christians aren’t surprised. We remember that someone else made a prediction long ago. Standing before his disciples with fire in his eyes Jesus promised to build his church. The gates of hell couldn’t stop it, he told them. Nothing could. Nearly 2,000 years later 2 billion people the world over claim to follow the Carpenter from Nazareth. I guess He wasn’t kidding.

I listened to a wonderful lecture last weekend (and I intend to listen to it several more times) by Vinoth Ramachandra entitled Who is Jesus Christ for Us Today?. I was intrigued and convicted by his condemnation of today’s Christians, especially in America, for believing only in a “God-of-the-Gaps”. I had previously only heard this term in connection with the scientific fallacy of saying “God did it” whenever something seems on its face to be unsolvable (or difficult to solve) by natural means. Ramachandra, however, pointed to another way that Christians confine God to the gaps by pushing His influence and importance to the edges of our existence and only appealing to Him when our own knowledge or resources fail. The principle way we do this is by making the imaginary divide between sacred and secular. We imagine that how we perform our occupational duties, participate in the larger culture, and spend our money are unaffected and in a separate realm altogether from what we ‘believe’ or sing about in our churches on Sunday. We want our pastors to teach us how to think about the Bible and what it says, but only insofar as it refrains from making us uncomfortable by daring to put limits on how we spend our leisure time or which way we vote. And we do evangelism by selling a spiritual experience that both begins and ends with the one-time utterance of a simple prayer that makes everything right.

Contrary to these things, what the Bible calls us to is a complete submission of our entire beings to be used for God’s glory and the spread of His kingdom. To be a Christian is not to have a one-time experience and then be done with it. It is to be a follower of Christ, the God who became Man in space and time and stood for justice and mercy in a culture that was short on both (much like ours). And this changes everything. As George Grant has said, Jesus’ emphasis in the Great Commission was that “we need to make disciples who will obey everything that He has commanded, not just in a hazy zone of piety, but in the totality of life…when the Christian’s task is limited to snatching brands from the flickering flames of perdition, then virtually all Christian influence is removed from the world.” (Micah Mandate, p. 54) Christians are called to be salt and light - to preserve and to season, and to expose the darkness of, the world in which they live. And if we are ever going to fulfill this calling, we must recognize that we are not called by a God-of-the-gaps, but by the God who created and is at the center of everything.

I know this is a lengthy quote, and I admit that I took it directly from Jollyblogger. But it’s a good one. From The Divine Conspiracy, pp. 62-63.

We should, to begin with, think that God leads a very interesting life, and that he is full of joy. Undoubtedly he is the most joyous being in the universe. The abundance of his love and generosity is inseparable from his infinite joy. All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and depth and richness.

While I was teaching in South Africa some time ago, a young man named Matthew Dickason took me out to see the beaches near his home in Port Elizabeth. I was totally unprepared for the experience. I had seen beaches, or so I thought. But when we came over the rise where the sea and land opened up to us, I stood in stunned silence and then slowly walkd toward the waves. Words cannot capture the view that confronted me. I saw space and light and texture and color and power . . . that seemed hardly of this earth.

Gradually, there crept into my mind the realization that God sees this all the time. He sees it, experiences it, knows it from every possible point of view, this and billions of other scenes like and unlike it, in this and billiions of other worlds. Great tidal waves of joy must constantly wash through his being.

It is perhaps strange to say, but suddenly I was extremely happy for God and thought I had some sense of what an infinitely joyous consciousness he is and of what it maight have meant for him to look at his creation and find it “very good.”

We pay a lot of money to get a tank with a few tropical fish in it and never tire of looking at their brilliant iridescence and marvelous forms and movements. But god has seas full of them, which he constantly enjoys (I can hardly take in these beautiful little creatures one at a time).

We are enraptured by a well-done movie sequence or by a few bars from an opera or lines from a poem. We treasure our great experiences for a lifetime, and we may have very few of them. But he is simply one great inexhaustible and eternal experience of all that is good and true and beautiful and right. This is what we must think of when we hear theologians and philosophers speak of him as a perfect being. This is his life.

I wasn’t able to talk about it much until everything became official, but FSU has hired five new senior philosophy professors for next fall: Michael McKenna, Michael Bishop, Randolph Clarke, Justin Leiber, and Marie Flemming. These appointments should rocket us up at least into the top 40 philosophy departments, and with the trio of McKenna, Clarke, and Al Mele, we should easily become the top department in the nation for free will.

Sorry, guys. After reading this story about how Jesus really walked “on an isolated patch of floating ice,” I think I’m going to have to give up my faith in the reliability of the gospels. And I’m so proud that the discovery came from my own school. (end sarcasm)

Here is the reaction of one of my friends upon reading the story: “The absurdity of academia seems to precede all attempts at satire. No word from the scientist on how it is that Jesus managed to walk on a slab of ice all the way from the shore to a boat during a wind storm. Next up, I show how the disciples visions of a post-crucfixion Jesus arose from a rare disorder that generates after-images of entire human beings!”

Although I no longer consider myself a Pentecostal, I have spent about half of my life belonging to Pentecostal churches and, despite the problems I have with several areas of Pentecostal theology, I think there is much that non-charismatic evangelicals can learn from their Pentecostal brothers in Christ. I especially value the fervor for missions and evangelism and the desire to live a life completely in submission to God that I see in many of my Pentecostal friends. One thing, though, that has always bothered me about Pentecostalism is its almost universal (at least in my experience) lack of emphasis on systematic theology and the life of the mind in general. I was very pleased, therefore, when I came across this interview from Christianity Today. The interview is with Rick Nanez, an Assemblies of God minister and missionary to Ecuador, who wrote the book Full Gospel, Fractured Minds?. In the interview, he critiques the prevailing anti-intellectualism and is honest about why Pentecostalism is especially vulnerable to it, although it is definitely a problem for much of today’s Church.

This man has my whole-hearted support, appreciation, and prayers for his work. We all stand to benefit from the increase of more logical and biblical ways of thinking.

(HT: The Christian Mind)

I don’t know when it officially happened since it isn’t listed on the main website, but Stand to Reason’s weekly radio show has now been made into a podcast. I can’t reccomend Stand to Reason’s radio show, or any of their resources, highly enough. *Joy!*

…Christianity is, and has always been, and always will be, not just essentially a religion of hope, but in itself, the most stupendous hope the world has ever known. Only Incarnate God would have dared to hold out to us all, mere men and women of every sort and condition, sweet mongols and pundits and professors and beauty queens, the sick and the well, the stupid and the clever, those who stumble equally with those who lend an arm, whoever and whatever we may be, a hope of being involved in a destiny set in eternity and encompassing the universe. Imagine telling caterpillars that they are destined to become butterflies. No A-levels needed, not even literacy tests, the only qualification being faith in becoming a butterfly, and lo, the poor crawler is flying, the worm has sprouted wings!

- From Malcom Muggeridge, Christ in the Media, pp. 44-45

There’s an interesting post by Doug Groothuis over at his blog Thoughts of a Constructive Curmudgeon in which he argues that football is intrinsically violent and baseball is, among other things, morally, aesthetically, and intellectually superior, and therefore football should not be supported whereas if a sport must be supported (or watched or played), baseball should always be given priority. I don’t necessarily agree with his conclusion, but he makes some points that really got me thinking. I highly reccomend the read as an exercise in critical thinking. All I know for sure is that football is more fun to watch, and basketball is superior in every way to any other sport.