Roman's Road to Salvation Is About King Jesus

Help me think this through.

The type of evangelism I was reared up on as a youthful and on fire evangelical was what has been called the Romans Road to Salvation. The basic idea that needed to be communicated to our hopeless victim was that they could in now way earn their way to heaven. They could not please God if they tried. If they have sinned once in their life, broken one little commandment, then they might as well broken them all. The Roman’s Road traces it like this, “there is no one good, no not one” (Rom 3:10), “because all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23), and the “wages of sin are death…” (by which we meant hell) this is the gloomiest point in the whole tale, the bottom of the bottom, but it’s at this point – when their heart has fallen into their stomach and you have them sweating great big beads of fearful sweat drops – that you offer them hope, “but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 6:23). At this point, and with a little bit of prayerful prodding, the now hopeful friend is ready to exclaim like the crowed in Acts, “What must I do to be saved?” at which point you take them to the last stop in their Romans journey, “If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom 10:9). Then you lead them into the Sinners Prayer, after which you two go off to find a church to split somewhere.

But if Scot McKnight, Trevin Wax, and N.T. Wright are correct, and the apostolic gospel is not justification by faith, not the Romans Road to Salvation, not the Four Spiritual Laws, then what does that mean for our evangelizing. To word it positively, if the gospel is – strictly speaking – the narrative of Jesus Christ particularly as it was documented by the Four Evangelists, then what does that mean for our evangelizing?

It would be difficult to find in the Gospels anything that looks remotely close to the Romans Road to Salvation, and if all we had were the gospels – as some of the earliest communities we can assume did – what would our evangelizing look like? The gospels do speak of repentance – particularly out of the unrelenting mouth of John the Baptists – but interesting enough, this is one element that is included in our evangelizing that is not included in the Romans Road to Salvation. There is no mention of repentance in any of the common passages cited. Then if we ask “why repent?”, the Gospels give a different answer than most people do when they evangelize. The Gospels tell us to repent because the Kingdom of God is near (or in some cases, has arrived). Can you imagine adding that element to your evangelizing? Most people would think that to be a very odd thing to say to someone whom you are trying to convince to pray/ask Jesus into their heart. You don’t repent because of the nearness or arrival of the Kingdom of God, you repent because you are a sinner separated from God, everybody knows that. Besides, in the Roman’s Road Paul says nothing about the Kingdom of God, so neither should we, right? Wrong. First, we’ve slyly moved back into the position of comparing the Gospels to Romans rather than the other way around. Remember that the Gospels tell the gospel. So we should say, if the Gospels don’t gospel the Romans Road to Salvation, then should we. But putting that aside for the moment, whoever said that Paul did not have the Kingdom of God in mind even in our favourite Romans Road to Salvation passages?

Have you ever asked yourself what – in Romans 6:23 – did Paul mean by “in Christ Jesus our Lord”? Of course not. It is usually not apart of our gospelling or evangelizing. Our main point is to tell people that they need to accept Jesus into their hearts to receive eternal life. But that’s just it. Because we don’t pay close enough attention to Paul, what our main point is and what Paul’s main point is are not the same thing. This begs the question as to whether we are even gospelling Paul’s gospel when we evangelize using the Roman’s Road to Salvation.

When Paul says “in Christ” he is saying “in the Jewish Messiah” or, to put it more pointedly, “in the King”. This is Paul’s “Kingdom of God” language. Jesus is the long awaited Israelite king, and standing in the line – as the climax in fact – of the Israelite kings tradition, it means that those who are in his Kingdom are represented by him as the King. This is what Paul means by “in Christ”. Jesus is eternal life. Jesus is ‘the Life’ (John 14:6). If we are “in Him” then we partake in that eternal life. Not only that, when Paul says “in Christ Jesus our Lord” what he is saying is that yes, Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, but because Israel’s God is also the God of creation, to say that Jesus is Israel’s Messiah also means that he is Lord – i.e. King – of the rest of creation as well.

All of a sudden it is not about saying a prayer and asking Jesus into our hearts. Rather it is about making a conscious decision, a declaration of allegiance, that Jesus is Lord and with it a deep conviction that he is the first fruits of the New Creation (“if you confess with your mouth [a declaration of allegiance] that Jesus is Lord [read: King] and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead [i.e. first fruits of the New Creation], you will be saved” (Romans 10:9).

If we approach Paul’s gospelling in this way, it aligns well with the Gospels. Notice, it’s not about getting people to say a Sinners Prayer so that they can feel a conscious relief and breathe a sigh of security that they are going to heaven. This is an important point to make because this type of “gospelling” creates would-be “converts” – nominal Christians (and make no mistake about it, we’ve create an entire community of them and stuffed them into our churches). It has long bothered me that Jesus called the disciples the way he did. No Sinners Prayer. No confessions. No – dare I say – even repentance, at least not the emotional altar style we are used to. Rather, he called individuals – in fact, he called nations – to follow him. He called them to be disciples, not converts. Disciples. The Romans Road to Salvation, if understand and preached as I just suggested, does not create nominal converts. It creates disciples. It summons people to join a Kingdom and to become a new creation. This changes everything about their being. It changes the way they think and move and talk and act and live and play and work and love and fight… it changes everything.

Mondays With Wright

“The disciples wanted a kingdom without a cross. Many would-be “orthodox” or “conservative” Christians in our world have wanted a cross without a kingdom, an abstract “atonement” that would have nothing to do with this world except to provide the means of escaping it.”

N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus - p. 173

Obedience and Belief

“Only the believing obey, only the obedient believe”.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer -

Christian Minimalists

Evangelicals have become experts in finding a thousand new ways to ask the same question, “What is the least one has to do to become a Christian.“ That’s our defining question. We’ve become masters at theological and soteriological minimalism. We are the ones who have boiled the entire glorious Gospel down to a single phrase, a simple emotive transaction, or some silly slogan. It is time for a new generation of Christians, committed to apostolic faith, to declare this minimalistic, reductionistic Christianity a failed project! It is wrong to try to get as many people as possible, to acknowledge as superficially as allowable, a Gospel which is theologically unsustainable. We need to be reminded of the words of Søren Kierkegaard, in his Attack Upon Christendom, where he declared, “Christianity is the profoundest wound that can be inflicted upon us, calculated on the most dreadful scale to collide with everything.”1 We, on the other hand, have made entrance into the Christian faith painless and almost seamless. In the process, we have managed to produce as many nominal Christians as Christendom ever did. If the liberal project taught us that denying Apostolic Christianity renders the Gospel inert and non-reproducible (note rapid decline of mainline churches), evangelical, minimalistic Christianity has taught us that the Gospel cannot be reduced to a bite sized piece for mass consumption.

The Gospel is about the in-breaking kingdom and the New Creation that claims the whole sphere. Christians can’t simply choose to play in one small corner of the chessboard – you have to play the whole board, or you will lose. The Gospel must be embodied in a redeemed community and touch the whole of life. That is why the Wesley brothers set up class meetings, fed the poor, wrote books on physics, gave preachers a series of canonical sermons, catechized the young, preached at the brick yards, promoted prison reform, rode 250,000 miles on horseback, preached 40,000 sermons, superintended orphanages, were avid abolitionists, and wrote theologically laden hymns for the church, etc. You see, they were capturing every sphere with the Gospel. The New Creation does not simply break into one little square on the chess-board – it crashes into the whole of life! If Wesley teaches us anything, it is that salvation is not something which is merely announced to us, it is something which God works in us – the forceful intrusion of his holiness into our history.

Brothers and sisters, it is time for us to capture a fresh vision of the great meta-narrative of the Christian Gospel for our times! The bumper sticker “God is my co-pilot” will not get us there. We have, in effect, been criss-crossing the world telling people to make God a player, even a major player in our drama. But the Gospel is about being swept up into His great drama. It is about our dying to self, taking up the cross, and being swept up into the great theo-drama of the universe! Christ has come as the Second Adam to inaugurate the restoration of the whole of creation by redeeming a people who are saved in their full humanity and called together into a new redeemed community known as the church, the outpost of the New Creation in Adam’s world. Discipleship, worship of the Triune God, covenant faithfulness, suffering for the sake of the Gospel, abiding loyalty to Christ’s holy church, theological depth, and a renewed mission to serve the poor and disenfranchised – these must become the great impulses of our lives.

Timothy Tennant, Bumper Sticker Christianity

COMMUNITY

Community is the place where the person you least want to live with is always there.

- Henri Nouwen -

Believing is Doing

Protestantism has created some odd heresies. One of these is an elaboration of justification as by “faith alone” that renders the works, i.e., the everyday life of a Christian, inconsequential. For the Pauline letters in the NT, nothing could be further from the case. Paul’s missionary goal is to bring about, not faith alone, nor even faith in Christ per se, but “the obedience of faith” (Rom 1). Paul celebrates the Thessalonians’ work of faith (1 Thess 1).

The reality into which Christians enter is not merely a different set of heart thoughts (I now believe in Jesus) but a whole new sphere of life.

The paragraph ends with Paul’s affirmation that God has freed us–we are now in the kingdom of the beloved son. Not merely freed from condemnation, we are now freed to learn, to grown in the knowledge of God. Not merely free to learn, we are free to act in accordance with what we know.

To be one who exists in Christ is to have a life defined by a certain kind of actions. This is not merely the repetition of “belief” in Christ, but a whole life lived so as to please our God and Father.

J.R. Daniel Kirk

Living in God's Story

As we enter into God's Story as narrative, a whole new world is opened to us. One of the most significant things that happen when we enter into God's Story is that we begin to get a sense of God's entire interconnected narrative, and we see how it intersects with our own stories. The narrative, in turn, clarifies our place in God's Story and helps us take the focus off of ourselves and aim it toward God and his desires for the World.

This is in direct contrast to what much of Protestant Christianity in America has focused on for the last several decades. Churches have highlighted an individual and personal faith, pointing toward personal devotions, personal evangelism, and personal growth as benchmarks. This way of thinking contributes to the idea that "God is part of my story." Thus, the goal becomes motivating people to make room for God in their own stories and let God play a bigger part. In other words, make God more central.

This seems like a noble focus in some ways - and it's one that I had for a long time. But now I can see that it's backward. Not only does this way of thinking place my own story as the centerpiece of my life, but it also leads me to a never-ending struggle to put God first. Spiritual formation becomes individual process, focused on spiritual disciplines, solitude, and surrender. And while disciplines, solitude and surrender have their place and importance, viewing them so centrally creates a limited perspective.

We need to stop trying to fit God into our lives and stories and realize that God desires us to play a role in his Story instead. As subtle a difference as it may seem, the shift in perspective changes everything. When we see ourselves as a part of God's Story -- as opposed to God being part of our story --it awakens us to live in a broader reality, to live for and contribute to something bigger than ourselves.

Michael Novelli, Shaped by the Story

Evangelism and Social Action

“If we are engaging in the work of new creation, in seeking to bring advance signs of God’s new world into being in the present, in justice and beauty and a million other ways … then at the centre of the picture stands the personal call of the gospel of Jesus to every child, woman, and man.”

N.T. Wright

“The proper model is not (1) to see mercy as the means to evangelism, or (2) to see mercy and evangelism as independent ends, but (3) to see both word and deed, evangelism and mercy, as means to the single end of the spread of the kingdom of God. To say that social concern could be done independently of evangelism is to cut mercy loose from kingdom endeavor. It must then wither. To say that evangelism can be done without also doing social concern is to forget that our goal is not individual “decisions,” but the bringing of all life and creation under the lordship of Christ, the kingdom of God.”

Tim Keller

The Path of Christianity

Christianity was born in Israel, only to be taken to Greece and morphed into a philosophy. From there, it was taken to Rome and made into an institution of civil power. Eventually, it migrated to Europe where it was developed into a culture. Later still, it was brought to America and made into an entrepreneurial business enterprise.

- Sam Pascoe -

Trusting the Bible vs. Trusting Human Reason

A thoughful post by James F. McGrath

I have often encountered fundamentalists who made the antithesis referred to in this title, placing themselves in the first part and me in the second, of course. And so I thought perhaps it might be worthwhile sharing a brief thought on this subject.

The contrast is utter bunk.

Let me explain why. There are two main reasons why the oft-repeated contrast between “the Bible” on the one hand and “human reason” on the other is nonsensical. The first is that human reason cannot be bypassed when it comes to the Bible. To give just a couple of examples, without human reason, you would not have English translations of the text. Without your own human reason, you could not make sense of words on the page. And your human reason is involved in making sense of the words you read. Otherwise there would be no need for translations – you could study the Hebrew and Greek text and, in spite of not knowing the languages, understand, because human reason is not required for this process.

This leads to the second main point. Many fundamentalist readers of Scripture will tell you that they do not “interpret” the Bible – they merely read it.

This claim too is utter bunk.

Their human reason (or “skill” as interpreters, to put it another way) can be seen quite clearly kicking in when Jesus tells them that they must give up all their possessions to be his disciples. It is visible kicking into action when Paul’s language about justification by faith apart from works of the Law is allowed to trump those passages that depict judgment on the basis of works. It is there when someone claims to know that the six days in Genesis 1 are literal but the dome is a metaphor.

But apart from these obvious instances, it is there all along, because apart from “human reason” there is no reading and no comprehension.

I have yet to encounter a fundamentalist who was able to actually demonstrate what would admittedly be an impressive trick: reading without using their brains. I always try to remain open to changing my mind, and so if you are able to do it, please do show me how. But if when you read your EEG does not flatline, then please stop pretending things are otherwise.

And if you would say that the act of bypassing human reason occurs not in the process of reading, but in the choice of putting your faith in the Bible in the first place, it may indeed be the case that you ignored reason when doing so. But that ought to worry you, not provide comfort, because it is possible to ignore reason and place one’s faith in just about anything. And unless such a person at some point is willing to allow reason its proper role, then it is unclear how anyone, even God, would be able to get through to them and persuade them to think differently. And to be in that situation ought to be worrying, not reassuring.

Quote of the Day

The individual books of the Bible themselves do not have the same audiences. That is, the "Y-O-U" of each book is often different from each other. Ken Schenck

It is a simple point, and for many of us it is obvious and may even seem scarcely worth mentioning. But it needs to be mentioned because a lot of readers miss this crucial insight. Not only should we not treat the Bible as written to ourselves, we also should not read the Bible as though it were addressing the same people throughout. And that means that we ought not think that we have discovered "the Bible's answers" when similar-sounding things are said in multiple places. Because the same thing, said in a different context, can have different connotations.

Christian Living

Learning to live as a Christian is learning to live as a renewed human being, anticipating the eventual new creation in and with a world which is still longing and groaning for that final redemption."


Tom Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, 223

Monday with Wright

Remember the slogan of Melanchthon in the sixteenth century: it isn’t enough to know that Jesus is a Savior; I must know that he is the Savior for me. I agree with Melanchthon, but I think we have to say it the other way round as well. We must today stress that it isn’t enough to believe that Jesus is “my Savior” or even “my Lord”; you must know who Jesus himself was and is. Without that, merely saying that we have Jesus “within our heart” or that we “have a sense that Jesus loves me” or whatever can easily turn into mere fantasy, wish fulfillment. That has happened before, and it will happen again, unless it is earthed in actual historical reality.

In order to know that you’re not just making it up, not fooling yourself… you must be able to say that this Jesus, who we know in prayer, this Jesus we meet when we are ministering to the poorest of the poor, this Jesus we recognize in the breaking of the bread, this Jesus is the same Jesus who lived and taught and loved and died and rose again in the first century. We must believe and confess that he did indeed inaugurate God’s kingdom, die to bring it about and rise again to launch the consequent new creation. We must know who Jesus himself actually was and is.

Generations of skeptics have swept Jesus aside in their efforts to prove that Christianity is a dangerous delusion. Richard Dawkins is only one of many examples. We have to be able to provide proper, well-grounded answers. N.T. Wright, Jesus, Paul and the People of God

Pop Quiz

Below are four quotes. Each is from one of two sources: the Bible or the Koran, although, just to make things interesting, there’s also a chance all four are from one book. Two were edited for length and one of those was also edited to remove a religion-specific reference. Your job: identify the holy book of origin. Ready? Go:

1) “. . . Wherever you encounter [non-believers], kill them, seize them, besiege them, wait for them at every lookout post . . .”

2) “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

3) “If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, ‘Let us go and worship other gods’ . . . do not yield to him or listen to him. Show him no pity. Do not spare him or shield him. You must certainly put him to death.”

4) “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”

All right, pens down. How did you do?

The first quote is from the Koran (9:5) and the other three are from the Bible (Matthew 10:34, Deuteronomy 13:6-9, Numbers 31:17-18)

Monday with Wright

“When the church is seen to move straight from worship of the God we see in Jesus to making a difference and effecting much-needed change in the real world; when it becomes clear that the people who feast at Jesus’ table are the ones in the forefront of work to eliminate hunger and famine; when people realize that those who pray for the Spirit to work in and through them are the people who seem to have extra resources of love and patience in caring for those whose lives are damaged, bruised, and shamed; then it is not only natural to speak of Jesus himself and to encourage others to worship him for themselves and find out what belonging to his family is all about but it is also natural for people, however irreligious they may think of themselves as being, to recognize that something is going on that they want to be part of. In terms that the author of Acts might have used, when the church is living out the kingdom of God, the word of God will spread powerfully and do its own work.”

- NT Wright, Surprised by Hope

Monday Morning Humor

A lot of church members who are singing "Standing on the Promises" are just sitting on the premises.

New Creation

Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world. It is time, in the power of the Spirit, to take up our proper role, our fully human role, as agents, heralds, and stewards of the new day that is dawning. That, into the new world, God's new world, which he has thrown open before us.

N.T. Wright -- Simply Christian, p. 237

Humor in Bible Translations

“It’s time to lighten up!

Check out the following translation in the ESV:

There will be two women grinding together. One will be taken and the other left. (Luke 17:35, bold added)

Perhaps to Lady Gaga’s Grammy winning Bad Romance.

(Notice how the ESV’s sibling, the NRSV, avoids this by adding “meal” .)

St. Augustine on the Bible and Science

Saint Augustine (A.D. 354-430) in his work The Literal Meaning of Genesis , provided excellent advice for all Christians who are faced with the task of interpreting Scripture in the light of scientific knowledge:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience.

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for a non-Christian to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.

If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

Why Aren't Young Earth Creationists also Geocentrists?

During a discussion a few years ago, a friend made a statement that really made me think and, I have yet to provide an adequately answer. It went something like this:

Young Earth Creationists (YECs) ardently defend a flat, slavishly literalistic interpretation of Genesis, without regard to language, ancient culture or, most importantly, modern science. Yet, curiously, in their view of the cosmos, they reject the literal view of scripture and rely upon modern science. The bible describes the relative motion of the earth and sun 67 times. In 100% of these, the earth is either said to be fixed, or the sun and stars are said to translate across the heavens. There are none that refer to the earth as moving. Calvin was convinced that geocentrism was biblical. Luther was convinced of the same, as well as St. Augustine. In fact, you will not find one single interpretation of scripture that departed from a geocentric cosmology prior to the Renaissance, when man, observing the heavens, proved that the earth orbited the sun.

What gives the YECs the authority to dismiss 1500 years of exegetical tradition and replace it with a secular scientific understanding of the solar system? Do they have some special insight into the text that Luther, Calvin, and Augustine didn't possess? Have they discovered some hidden passage or exegetical insight that proves their interpretations wrong? No. The only information they have that Christians in the first 1500 years of church history lacked is the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo. In other words, their only reason for rejecting 1500 years of church history and a literal interpretation of scripture is, (gasp) evidence gained from man's wisdom.

My first response to this statement was that the passages in question were merely figures of speech and not literal. But, when he asked how I knew that without accessing knowledge outside of scripture, he had me.

God Plans to Remake Creation, Not Burn It

I’m convinced that for many Christians, their idea of redemption lines up more with ancient Greek philosophers than with what the Bible says. The ancient Greeks taught that it meant being rescued from the physical and the material, especially from our bodies. But God’s idea is the rescue of the material, not rescue from the material. He’s going to transform this present world into the world to come, so that voices in heaven shout, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ” (Rev. 11:15). Likewise in the Lord’s Prayer we see that God’s ultimate goal is for earth to become like heaven—“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). His mission is to bring the culture of heaven to earth.

When it comes to this world’s future, God will follow the same pattern he engineered in Noah’s day, when he washed earth’s surface clean of everything perverse and wicked but did not obliterate the planet. God isn’t going to annihilate the world; instead, he’s going to renew, redeem, and resurrect it through Christ.

That’s why Christianity ultimately is not about isolated individuals “going to heaven,” contrary to what many believe. That’s not the Bible’s primary storyline. God is up to something much bigger and much more tangible than that. He uses Christians to bring heaven into this world, transforming this broken world and making things right. God cares about the created order. Environmentalists make the mistake of turning the environment into a god, while Christians often make the mistake of thinking God doesn’t care about the environment. Both perspectives miss the mark.

In Jesus, God is at work regaining, restoring, and extending all that Adam ruined and forfeited by his disobedience. Christianity is about Christ making everything sad come untrue, straightening out everything that’s crooked, and correcting every injustice. As the second Adam achieves for us no less than what the first Adam enjoyed, and much more. He came to succeed where the first Adam failed. We won’t simply go back to the perfect garden; we’ll enjoy a whole new incorruptible world.

- Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace: God’s Relentless Pursuit of Rebels, 131, 132

Linguistics Undermines Scriptural Truth

This is not simply a question of upholding the truth of the Biblical account of the Tower of Babel, however important that might be. Skeptics are quick to object that the story cannot be taken literally, pointing to alleged conundrums of logic such as the problem of how husbands and wives communicated after the confusion of tongues. What these willfully ignorant critics miss is the obvious fact that, even within the same country and linguistic context, husbands and wives clearly speak different languages that hinder communication anyway. In my view, it is most unlikely that husbands and wives noticed any difference after God confused the tongues.

Skeptics also object that languages have continued to evolve since the time of the Tower of Babel. But this is mere microevolution. We sneer at anyone who claims to speak French, or Italian, or Romanian, or Portugese. They speak Latin, and their claims to speak distinct languages are mere attempts by the godless regimes of these nations to undermine the truths that we courageously uphold.

Our primary focus is on the idea of irreducible information contained in languages, not only semantically but grammatically. Is it really conceivable that human beings, who (since the Fall) are naturally lazy, developed on their own a complex grammar such as that found in German, or that they invented a language with multiple tones such as Cantonese or Hausa? The trend is clearly towards simplification. The complexity of language can only have come about through divine intervention.

The godless linguists, on the other hand, would have us believe that language can come about in stages and develop from a simple proto-language to a complex language with all its grammatical structures and extensive vocabulary.

But we will - sorry, what's that? Yes, dada is here. Sorry, that was my young daughter. She keeps interrupting me at crucial moments like this. Go find MAMA, MAMA. Now, where was I? Oh yes, languages simply CANNOT develop in stages, any more than human beings can. Each individual language, like each individual human being, must be brought into existence fully formed.

James McGrath, Exploring our Matrix

Chritianity and Climate Change?

I noticed an ad yesterday seeking papers for an upcoming conference entitled Religiion and Climate Change. This made me stop and wonder why people think that their religious beliefs gives them a unique insight into climate change? I was reading a book earlier this year that described Jerry Falwell and other Evangelical leaders advocating a certain position about the causes of climate change. Now, I have no problems with religious people having opinions about all sorts of things, but what I don't get is how it's tied to religion. Yes I am a Christian, and that informs a lot about how I see the world. However, it doesn't give me a lot of insight into the effect of different chemicals in the atmosphere and their sources. What is a uniquely Christian about our views on climate change? Does the Bible actually have anything to say on this matter? Really?

Good Hypocrisy

“We must, then, make a distinction between different kinds of hypocrisy. The Pharisees’ hypocrisy consisted in doing things in order to get human praise, and in concentrating on the small, finicky matters of obedience in order to avoid the big ones. But there is nothing wrong with the hypocrisy (so-called) that struggles to obey God’s commandments whether it wants to or not. In fact if we do not do that, then we are becoming Pharisees ourselves. We are setting a higher value on what others think (that sincerity is what counts) than on what God thinks (that obedience, or the desire and struggle for obedience, is what counts).” (Small Faith, Great God, N.T. Wright, p. 98).