Category: Scripture
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Matthew 13: Divine unDesign
Jesus says the kingdom is like a field where the farmer planted grain, but his enemies planted weeds. When the busybody farm hands asked to uproot the weeds, the farmer said “no, you’ll just kill the crop.” The field is the world. So Jesus is telling us, again, that God intentionally lets the world appear…
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Matthew 5:45: God avoids the appearance of design
“…so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For He makes His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.” So God’s indiscriminate love makes it look like there is no moral actor behind natural law.
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The Layers of Intelligent Design
First, the primordial cosmos: the earth was “without form and void”. This is not something other than matter. (You actually can’t imagine something other than matter. Even when you imagine energy, you create a picture drawn from visible aspects of matter.) What God made was, rather, unorganized matter. The language suggests “random” – the only…
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John 9: Jesus talks about design
The sermon today really was about the healing of the blind man in John 9, though it might be hard to see that from these notes: 1. Man chose a random universe. If this part is left out, the rest makes no sense. And this is the part secularists insist on leaving out, so that…
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Globalization and St. John’s Apocalypse
The dissolution of national identities derives inexorably from the Biblical view of the human heart. This trend over long history is not a Judeo-Christian prescription; it’s just a description. It is men who drive history, not something outside us. Technology is just the storehouse of men’s tools. And men make tools to, first, survive,…
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Genesis 2: Eve’s curiosity
Eve’s sin was to prefer the exploration of the world to obediance to God, taking the evidence of her senses as the final arbiter on good and evil. And the context of the incident is important: Eve could explore 99% of the universe with impunity. This freedom to explore a rational universe accounts…
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Inerrancy or Silence
When the church abandons the belief that the New Testament is inerrant, it eventually runs out of anything to talk about. This slippery slope has no bottom; you fall forever. I acknowledge lots of problems with the traditional discussions of inerrancy, mostly for the same reason the effort to define _how_ Jesus is present in…
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“conscience” in Hebrews 9.14
When we hear the phrase “purified conscience” our Western reflex is to think of sin, or guilt. Sin, if we have a Judeo-Christian background, or just guilt if our reference is more generically secular. Religious or not, our experience is that something bad gets “on” the conscience, and must be removed. Not so, here. …
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“…a complicated theological justification for why we should do the exact opposite of what Jesus said.”
“No matter how trivial, simple, and painless a saying of Jesus might be, there is always someone out there with a complicated theological justification for why we should do the exact opposite of what Jesus said.” From a comment on an old blog post; the site is long dead.
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Conspiracy Theorists and Intelligent Design
1. The uncritical attribution of malignant design I know a man who is paranoid. I don’t mean he is sometimes anxious that others are out to get him, or that he is occasionally dramatic about threats. No, he is paranoid, which means he observes a phenomenon, and then projects onto the unseen backstage of that…