Filed under philosophy …

Feb 09 2013
Bible, Discipleship, Faith, Jesus, leadership, philosophy, politics, Religion, Theology, wisdom, Work, Worship

James White – The Christian Mind (iDisciple conference WCAUK)

James Emery White – The Christian Mind

What is the modern (non Christian) mind?

1. MULTI-TRUTH

Pluralism. God’s like a mountain, all the religions are paths up the same mountain, and the names of God are all the same summit. Go to the multiplex, or home to Netflix, all those choices. This is NEW! Peter Berger – sociologist said Religion used to provide a sacred canopy over all of culture. Now that’s replaced by millions of umbrellas to stand under.

With the increase of options comes lots of choices of truths, all equally valid.

But if everything is true – nothing is true.

‘It’s raining.’ Either it is or isn’t. There’s a match with reality.

These days comparative religion teaches what is held in common with all religions. But you can’t be a Buddhist Christian. Ask the Dalai Lama! Their truth claims are opposite. It’s two different mountains. Same with Islam etc.

So, either you say ; someone’s right

or someone’s wrong

But you can’t say they are ALL right. That’s intellectually dishonest.

  1. TRUTHINESS

Facts don’t matter. How you feel matters. You can create truth for yourself, despite the facts. If I can convince a majority of others that’s true, it is. (Follow link for more)

2. WIKIALITY

We create our own reality, and that becomes fact for us all. There is no truth outside of what the majority want it to be. If we say 2 + 2 = 5 for us, then it does.(Follow link for more/source)

3. MISTAKERS

Nobody is a sinner. nobody sins. Sociology and psychology has pushed sin out. We are just mistakers. Or in fact there’s something good about why we did it. ‘I’m sorry you got offended…’ Nothing is wrong, wicked or evil – so..

4. MORAL RELATIVISM

Anything goes. If it makes you happy, morality is a personal choice and opinion. If you’re not hurting anyone – except judgmental people of course. They are the only wrong ones. Look at Christian Smith’s work on this.

Why contrast this mind with the Christian mind?

Well this is a little disingenious. The fact is – the modern mind has BECOME the Christian mind! We are UNDISCIPLED here!

When Jesus restated the Shema (when quoting it verbatim as a Rabbi was essential) he ADDED in loving God ‘with your MIND…’

Paul was clear how change happens. Romans 12. RENEW the mind. Continually don’t let the world adjust you so much you fit into it without thinking. We are mirroring it, not challenging. This is diabolical.

Christians have to retain a prophetic voice. that has to come from a prophetic MIND.

Prov 23:7 As a man thinks in his heart – so is he.

Harry Blamires, ‘There is no longer a Christian mind.’

We have to start thinking about the big issues of our day in the light of our faith. Not having a compartmentalised mind. Where over here you have your work life, here’s your daily reading, here’s a tweet, here’s a show… and your thinking about one doesn’t link to the other things.

So you can be a Christian, but not let that reflect that in how you think about science. About films you see, social media. Do you integrate these things in terms of a Christian worldview?

Eg., where did we come from?

There are actually very few answers.

By chance (Naturalism)

We don’t exist (Hindu)

We were created

If we believe the latter, then there is meaning, and someone outside of us to whom we are accountable and from whom we derive value. Look at how MLK challenged unjust laws in his letter from a Birmingham Jail. It was based on the value of humanity based on a law above human laws.

John Stott said our battle is ‘a battle of ideas.’

We take captive every THOUGHT to make it obedient to Christ.

OR we think like everyone else.

Thomas Cahill – ‘How the Irish saved civilisation.’ As the Roman empire fell to barbarism, the Irish took up the Labour of copying western literature. This was then taken back to Europe and they saved it! Without this Christian mind, they would also have lost the ability to think. By the way, Islam would have taken over Europe then too.

There are few Christian warriors of the mind these days. Most retreat into personal piety or good works. We follow someone who died at 33. Don’t live a life that doesn’t offend people, if we don’t live as if we don’t care if we’ll die, we will be impotent.

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Jan 12 2013
Apologetics, Atheism, Bible, Christianity, Faith, Father God, Friends, Heaven, history, Jesus, leadership, philosophy, Religion, Theology, Worship

J. John puts down Darwin the dog (humanely)

aCPuQ

 

 

I met with my friend @canonjjohn this week and was interviewed by him on my life story for UCB TV. The guy is a force of nature! Always a great encouragement.

I subscribe to regular updates in my email from him (available free from the Philo trust) and was amused, informed and challenged by this one that arrived today -

New Year, New Atheism, New Challenges
12 Jan 2013

It’s rather a scary thought that we are already over one eighth of the way through the twenty-first century. And even though year seems to follow year at an increasingly rapid rate, our culture changes even more speedily. One feature of the last decade that shows no sign of going away has been the rise of the ‘New Atheism’. It’s easy to dismiss the New Atheism as no more than a warmed-up version of old-fashioned humanism and in terms of substance there is little new. What is truly novel and troubling is the movement’s aggressive and bitter hostility to religious faith in general and Christianity in particular.

A fascinating revelation into where things are going with the New Atheism is to be found in a website www.kidswithoutgod.org, created to help children and parents live ‘a life without God’. Actually, the very existence of the site is significant. For years atheists have been saying how unfair it is of Christians to teach or – as they charmingly term it – ‘indoctrinate’ our children about God. In the past sceptics used to claim that children should be left to make their own decisions on matters of belief. Well this website suggests that such guidance is now buried: it is apparently legitimate to teach children about ultimate values.

There is actually a great deal of unintended amusement to be found on the site. So, for instance, children are introduced to a dog called Darwin. Darwin tells us that he is a ‘humanist’. At this point isn’t any smart child going to wonder why Darwin isn’t a ‘doggist’? Actually, it may simply be that Darwin the dog is stupid because reading on we are told that he only believes in things that he ‘can see in the real world, like friendship, and being nice, and learning’. Well, when I last looked friendship, niceness and knowledge were actually invisible. It’s also a little unfortunate that Darwin’s exclusion of anything ‘unseen’ prevents him from believing in such rather useful things as electricity, scent, sound waves, X-rays, infinity and gravity. This tripping up over logical shoelaces is all rather embarrassing given the New Atheism’s claim that it is seizing the intellectual high ground.

Another feature of the site is the way in which it inadvertently reveals some of the gaping problems in atheism. One of the difficulties in talking to children is that you have to use plain language and plain language allows very little scope for the sort of fancy wordplay that atheists can use to cover over difficulties. Such problems are highlighted when the site’s authors attempt to give children a moral code. Darwin the dog suggests that his young readers might like to follow his principles. (He doesn’t actually call them ‘principles’ presumably because as a dog sympathetic to modern worldviews he knows better than to try and impose his values on others; instead they are ‘things he has promised to do’.) There are seven of them:

  • “I promise to be nice to other people, just because it’s the right thing to do.”
  • “I promise to help take care of the Earth, because this is our home and we need it to stay healthy and safe.”
  • “I promise that I will think about the questions I have, and learn as much as I can about how things work.”
  • “I promise that before I say something or do something to another person, I will stop to think about how I would feel if somebody else said that or did that to me.”
  • “I promise that I will always tell the truth and take responsibility for my own actions.”
  • “I promise that I will help those who are sad or angry by being a good friend to them.”
  • “I promise to eat healthy, get plenty of sleep and exercise, and practice good personal hygiene.”

Why is ‘being nice to other people’ the ‘right thing’ to do? Says who? If the only basis for morality is evolution then why not push and shove your way to the top and, in the process, make sure that your genes get circulated as widely as possible? Why ‘be a good friend’ to those who are sad or angry? Doesn’t evolution demand that we walk over life’s losers? I could go on.

Yet beyond all the accidental amusement it provides, ‘Kids without God’ is a troubling website. You do not have to go far in it to find Christianity ridiculed and misrepresented. For all the proud claims that atheism is about truth there is no attempt at discussion, only distortion and sneering innuendo. What this website does present is a much-needed reminder that as Christians we are, like it or not, being increasingly drawn into a bitter conflict with the New Atheists. Traditionally, most Christians have adopted a bemused, live-and-let-live attitude towards atheists. That attitude was something that we had assumed was mutual. Yet it is now plain that for the New Atheists, the world has changed and tolerance is not a virtue. Christians are now clearly seen as an enemy to be fought and beaten.

At this point it is easy to shrug and say that the Church has faced such challenges before and survived them. Yes, it did, and God is greater than all the powers of this world put together, but it is worth remembering that the Church survived because Christians were prepared to pay a heavy price. The followers of Christ lived better, thought better, cared better and, quite often, died better than their opponents. Will the same be true of us?

Agapé,

Revd Canon J.John

www.philotrust.com

 

 

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May 11 2009
1 Comment
Bible, Christianity, Church, credit crunch, Faith, Jesus, justice, Manchester, philosophy, politics, poverty, Prayer, Religion, Theology

The problem of evil

Preparing for a short talk tonight as part of our course for people with questions about God, tonight’s the big question. Theodicy. A posh way of saying, “Justifying the existence of God in the face of evil and suffering in the world.”

On February 15 1947 Glenn Chambers boarded a plane bound for Quito, Ecuador to begin his ministry in missionary broadcasting. He never arrived. In a horrible moment, the plane carrying Chambers crashed into a mountain peak and spiralled downward. Later it was learned that before leaving the Miami airport, Chambers wanted to write his mother a letter. All he could find for stationery was a page of advertising on which was written the single word “WHY?” Around that word he hastily scribbled a final note. After Chambers’s mother learned of her son’s death, his letter arrived. She opened the envelope, took out the paper, and unfolded it. Staring her in the face was the question- “WHY?”

That is the big question: people are asking it all the time. Today my city mourns the senseless death of another 16 year old boy in some awful pub shooting.

Some of the people who are asking why are Christians who puzzle over the question of the existence of a good God side by side with evil and suffering as a consequence of it. They’re standing by a hospital bed somewhere right now praying, ‘Why God? Why did this happen?’

Other people are genuinely asking the question because tragedy and pain, but they don’t have such a clear faith but tend to articulate it in less reverent tones, ‘God- if you’re there at all- why don’t you do something to help?’

And there are those groups of people who use the question as an atheist bombshell against belief in God. A man called Pierre Bayle coined the phrase ‘the argument from evil,’ as a philosophical stumper; that if there really were an all-loving, all powerful God, surely he would destroy evil. Since evil is not destroyed, God must not exist.’

For some people, the creation of a world where even one child dries in pain can never be justified in the light of a loving God’s existence. The equation “God = good + omnipotent [yet] evil exists” just can’t add up. They see it as inconsistent and positively irrational, so they justify unbelief.

Dr. Billy Graham once famously declared, “I know my own heart and its deceitful power. I know that outside of the restraining grace of God, there is no evil act I could not commit within thirty minutes of leaving the platform.”

We bewail the evils of world terrorism, global greed, environmental destruction- rightly so. But what about the evil resident in our own hearts?

The film Nuremberg, is about the infamous trials of former Nazi leaders by the International Military Tribunal. In one powerful scene, Nazi defendant Hans Frank is attempting to explain his actions to an Army psychologist.

Frank explains, “I tried to resign as Governor General of Poland. I did not approve of the persecution of the Jews. Anyone reading my diaries, they will know what was in my heart. They will understand that such things I wrote about Jews, the orders I signed, they were not sincere.”

“I believe you, Frank…. yet, you did do those things. How do you explain it? I don’t mean legally; I’m not a lawyer or a judge. I mean how do you explain it to yourself?”

“I don’t know,” replies Frank. “It’s as though I am two people: the Hans Frank you see here, and Hans Frank the Nazi leader. I wonder how the other Frank could do such things. This Frank looks at that Frank and says, ‘You’re a terrible man.’”

“And what does that Frank say back?”

Frank, appearing to plead for understanding, replies, “He says, ‘I just wanted to keep my job.‘”

Nobody would justify such atrocity, while recalling the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “If only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

It’s a strong word isn’t it? Evil. Some will read it and say, “Speak for yourself, I’m a good person.” If I were the standard of goodness then you’re probably entitled to say that, but what if the standard is the holiness of God? A God who commands our love and obedience, and self-sacrificial love for our neighbour? A God who has put himself on record as declaring that if you or I break just one commandment once, it’s as though we’ve broken them all!

People are now rightly angry at the debacle of MPs troughing at expenses and ripping off the tax payer. The revelations continue each day. Outraged letters bemoan their lack of example.

For a prank, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once wrote to several of his friends the note, “All is discovered! Flee while you can!” All but one left the country.

Despite all this, we can know a God who passionately loves us, forgives and restores us. Do you know him? A God who went to a cross himself to pay the price for every wrong or shameful thing we’ve ever done, thought or said. Do you know him? A God who knows us at our worst loves us better than any human being ever loved us. The only God who can give us strength to resist temptation, deception, fear and guilt. Do you know him?

Someone said, “Jesus didn’t come to rub sin in, he came to rub it out!”

He doesn’t wait to condemn you. He wants to love you. Just like so many ordinary people in our city of Manchester who are discovering these truths, I invite you. Come and know him.

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