withallyourmind.net

During my residency in emergency medicine in Orlando, Florida from 2000-2003, I attended Northland, A Church Distributed, a megachurch pastored by Joel Hunter. I gladly recall my time spent there as a time of edification, growth, and being drawn closer to God. It was an uplifting experience for me and my family.

So, it was with sadness that I read Hunter’s recent statement explaining his view of President Obama’s first 100 days in office. Hunter gave the benediction at the 2008 Democratic National Convention (which I have no problem with, by the way) and is one of President Obama’s spiritual advisors. Hunter stated that he believed that Obama was…

… displaying wisdom and balance in his approach to the moral and controversial issues.

Acknowledging that he does not agree with all of Obama’s positions, he states he is not disappointed with the actions of Obama on cultural and social issues thus far. I believe Pastor Hunter is sadly mistaken and is, unfortunately, misleading other Christians on this issue. Obama’s actions thus far on social and cultural issues have been abysmal. His actions on embryonic stem cell research, the Mexico City policy, and health care workers’ rights of conscience are morally reprehensible. I pray that Pastor Hunter will change his mind and see that his endorsement of the president’s social agenda is mistaken and that this agenda is responsible for the death of many innocent human lives.

HT: Between Two Worlds

Al Mohler, commenting on the recent news concerning the morning-after pill links to this New York Times editorial which begins this way:

In a further break from the Bush administration’s ideologically driven policies on birth control, the Food and Drug Administration has agreed to let 17-year-olds get the morning-after emergency contraceptive pills without a doctor’s prescription. It is a wise move that complies with a recent order by a federal judge, based on voluminous evidence in F.D.A. files that girls that young can use the pills safely. (emphasis mine)

Note the description of the policies of the Bush administration as being ideologically driven. There is no question as to the veracity of that description. The problem with it is that it implies that the policies of the Obama administration and of the New York Times are non-ideologically driven. It is a subtle attempt to discredit and demean a point of view with which the New York Times disagrees. As Mohler points out, there are no serious discussions of public policy which are free from ideology. Ideology is defined as:

a: a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture b: a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture c: the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program (Mirriam Webster Online)

An ideology is a set of beliefs, aims and ideas, especially in politics. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things (compare Weltanschauung), as in common sense (see Ideology in everyday society below) and several philosophical tendencies. (Wikipedia)

It is obvious that Obama and the New York Times both have a set of political beliefs, aims and ideas which guides their political agenda. Don’t fall for the constant attempts liberals to paint conservative opinions as somehow ideologically driven, yet maintaining that there’s are free from ideology. It is a fallacious attempt to make their ideas seem better or more rational. Mohler states:

Whenever anyone (including this writer) claims that a policy reversal means a break from someone else’s “ideologically driven policies,” it simply means that one ideology is replacing or modifying another. The New York Times is the central media organ of the secular left. It is as ideologically driven as any other sector of this society. Furthermore, the idea that any serious policy discussion can be free from ideology is a farce. The editors of The New York Times merely prefer their own ideology to that of the Bush administration, yet they write this editorial as if they have come from their own private planet of ideological purity.

C. S. Lewis, in World’s Last Night and Other Essays, writes about the difference in questioning whether God exists and actually coming to believe that He exists:

… there is no parallel between Christian obstinacy in faith and the obstinacy of a bad scientist trying to preserve a hypothesis although the evidence has turned against it. Unbelievers very pardonably get the impression that an adherence to our faith is like that, because they meet Christianity, if at all, mainly in apologetic works. And there, of course, the existence and beneficence of God must appear as a speculative question like any other. Indeed, it is a speculative question as long as it is a question at all… To believe that God – at least this God – exists is to believe that you as a person now stand in the presence of God as a Person. What would, a moment before, have been variations in opinion, now become variations in your personal attitude to a Person. You are no longer faced with an argument which demands your assent, but with a Person who demands your confidence.

The New Statesman contains an article by writer A. N. Wilson titled, “Why I Believe Again.”

Wilson describes his “conversion” experience from Christian faith to atheism 20 years ago as a Dasmascus Road type of conversion. His re-conversion to Christianity was a more gradual process. His story is an interesting and enlightening one. He initially found in atheism the certainty which he desired but lacked in his Chrisitan experience. It was not too long, however, that the doubts which had plagued him as a Christian, clouded his complete confidence in atheism.

My doubting temperament, however, made me a very unconvincing atheist. And unconvinced…

This creed that religion can be despatched in a few brisk arguments (outlined in David Hume’s masterly Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) and then laughed off kept me going for some years. When I found myself wavering, I would return to Hume in order to pull myself together, rather as a Catholic having doubts might return to the shrine of a particular saint to sustain them while the springs of faith ran dry.

For Wilson, it was not so much arguments like the cosmological or teleological arguments which caused him to abandon his atheistic confession, but it was what an atheist must give up if he is to be a consistent, confident atheist. It was music, love, language, and morality which provided the foundation for his return to Christianity.

Do materialists really think that language just “evolved”, like finches’ beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally?… No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest – which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits…

When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love. It is not that (as they believe) they have rumbled the tremendous fraud of religion – prophets do that in every generation. Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue.

I haven’t mentioned morality, but one thing that finally put the tin hat on any aspirations to be an unbeliever was writing a book about the Wagner family and Nazi Germany, and realising how utterly incoherent were Hitler’s neo-Darwinian ravings, and how potent was the opposition, much of it from Christians; paid for, not with clear intellectual victory, but in blood. Read Pastor Bonhoeffer’s book Ethics, and ask yourself what sort of mad world is created by those who think that ethics are a purely human construct. Think of Bonhoeffer’s serenity before he was hanged, even though he was in love and had everything to look forward to.

I’d recomment reading his entire story.

HT: Cadre Comments

The following links will take you to parts 3 and 4 of Ben Witherington III’s review of Bart Ehrman’s recent book, Jesus Interrupted. (Parts 1 and 2 were linked to in a previous post.)

Part 3 and Part 4

Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent

New Testament Scholar Ben Witherington has provided a two-part review of Bart Erhman’s recent book, Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them). Here are the links:

Bart Interrupted: Part 1.

Bart Interrupted: Part 2.

Here’s a snippet from Part One in which Witherington describes the nature of the Gospels:

The Gospels are not, and never were intended to be inspected as if they were ancient photographs of Jesus taken with a high resolution, all seeing lens. On the contrary these documents are much more like portraits, and portraits always are selective, tendentious, perspectival. Let me illustrate this point.

One of my favorite Impressionist painters is Claude Monet, and I really love his series of painting done of Rouen Cathedral. These paintings were done in the late 1890s and they depict the front face of the Cathedral from slightly different angles of incidence, and in different lighting. But in each case it is recognizably the same cathedral with the same basic shape, from the same basic frame of reference. Let us suppose for a minute then that the Gospels are like these paintings. Now it would be totally pedantic to have an argument that went as follows: “In this painting Monet depicts the color of the front façade of the cathedral as being gray, but in this picture he paints it as being a yellowish shade, and in this picture a pinkish shade.” Which is it? Surely one must be right and the other depictions wrong.” Of course the proper response to this silly discourse is that they are all right, because they attempt to depict the appearance of the building at different times of day from slightly different angles. And no art critic in their right mind would think of suggesting that one painting was in error compared to the other. My point is simple. The Gospels are not works of modern biography or historiography and they should not be evaluated by such canons.

It looks like Witherington will have more to say about Ehrman’s book in future posts.

El Greco, The Resurrection, 1596-1600

Sandro Botticelli, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 1490-92

Matthias Grunewald, The Crucifixion (Central Panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece), 1515