Evangelical Realism

Chuck Colson believes that President-Elect Obama needs our prayers.

[T]he new President will surely need our prayers because he and his administration face huge, serious challenges to the health of our nation and to peace in the world—challenges that, in my opinion, neither he nor any government on earth will have the power to overcome without divine aid.

How has America come to this point? Why is our economy on the brink of disaster? Why is our culture so utterly depraved?

He forgot to add, “And why has it become this way after eight years of leadership by a conservative Christian administration and unprecedented Christian control over laws and constitutions at the state and local level?” But perhaps that question would have ended up being rhetorical.

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(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, chapter 11.)

Geisler and Turek are trying to persuade us that the NT writers would never mislead us. This week’s argument: we can trust what they tell us because they included “embarrassing details and difficult sayings of Jesus.

The New Testament writers are also honest about Jesus. Not only do they record self-incriminating details about themselves, they also record embarrassing details about their leader Jesus, that seem to place him in a bad light…

This is certainly not a list of events and qualities the New Testament writers would choose if they were trying to depict Jesus as the perfect, sinless God-man. Nor are these qualities congruent with the Jewish expectation that the Messiah would come to free them from political oppression. … The best explanation for these embarrassing details is that they actually occurred, and the New Testament writers are telling the truth.

You might think from the above that the New Testament writers had actually confessed to seeing Jesus sin or otherwise behave in a way that contradicted the conclusion that he was the divine Son of God. Guess again!

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In a post entitled “Can Atheism Be Justified?” Donald Sensing writes:

If atheists are true to their own creed, they must admit that the entire concept of human rights crumbles to dust according to that same creed. Dawkins, Wilson et. al. have no “right” to denounce religion, they just have the ability or power to do so. If persons are not “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights” (in the words of a famous Enlightenment rationalist), then “rights” is nothing but a flatus vocis. The concept of rights then really means nothing but “who wins.” So by their lights, atheists are able to speak out (in America, anyway, not in Saudi Arabia) and attempt to persuade others only because the rest of us let them.

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Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars, I give you a modern day prophet:

Sarah Palin told Dr. James Dobson of “Focus on the Family” that she is confident God will do “the right thing for America” on Nov. 4.

Dobson asked the vice presidential hopeful if she is concerned about John McCain’s sagging poll numbers, but Palin stressed that she was “not discouraged at all.”

“To me, it motivates us, makes us work that much harder,” she told the influential Christian leader, whose radio show reaches millions of listeners daily. “And it also strengthens my faith because I know at the end of the day putting this in God’s hands, the right thing for America will be done, at the end of the day on Nov. 4.”

It’s nice to see that at least someone on the Republican side can still make predictions that come true. God has spoken, and we do indeed have the right man heading for the White House. Read the rest of this entry »

As we mentioned last time, there are artists who can sculpt some rather attractive (if prosaic) wood sculptures with a chainsaw, but in the hands of a klutz, a chainsaw is a danger to everyone, especially the wielder. We continue our look at Chapter 14 of TIA, which Vox entitles “Occam’s Chainsaw,” with a look at his attempt to hack up “The Argument from Fiction.”

This argument states that because the Bible and every other sacred text is wholly man-made and as fictitious as anything written by Shakespeare or any other classic from the literary canon, there is no reason to take them seriously, much less base moral systems or societal structures upon them. The problem here is that the Bible has not only proven to be a more reliable guide in many instances than the current state of secular science as well as an accurate historical document, but sometimes a better predictor of future events than the experts on the subject. I bought Euros back when they were worth just over ninety cents on the dollar because of the eschatological interpretations of the Book of Revelation that the European Common Market would one day become a single political entity, the endless vows of the European elite to the contrary notwithstanding. Now, the EUR/USD rate is bouncing around 1.36. Maybe it was just a fortuitous coincidence, but on the other hand, if a northern country shows signs of invading Israel, let’s just say I won’t hesitate to short their currency.

Just for reference, let’s look at the part of the Book of Revelation which predicts that the European Common Market would become a single political entity whose currency would start out low relative to the dollar and then rise in value (again, relative to the US dollar):

Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born.

I can’t help but think that if the Wall Street financiers had only followed the sage financial advice in those two verses from Revelation 12, our economy wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in today.

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