Month: July 2024

Book Plunge: The Lazy Approach To Evangelism

What do I think of Eric Hernandez’s book? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Meh. I don’t feel like writing this now.

Okay. Maybe I should.

First, this is a sort of introduction book. I would consider it an advanced form of Tactics combined with I Don’t Have Enough Faith To Be An Atheist. If you’re been familiar with apologetics for awhile, you won’t find much new here, which is okay. If this is your first go at learning and you want to go do evangelism, this is a great start.

To begin with, Hernandez critiques how we do evangelism. Our evangelism is often based on our experiences and our emotions. “Go out there and tell them what Jesus has done for you!” “Go out there and tell them about the joy you have in Christ!”

What’s the problem with this? Consider that one day you are at your house and your Ring tells you you have visitors at your door. You see these two nice looking men in black paints and white shirts with name tags on. They ask if you have some time to talk about God.

You agree and invite them in and before too long, they tell you that the Holy Spirit has spoken to them and given them a testimony that Joseph Smith is a prophet and in these last days God has revealed His will through the Mormon Church. They know this because they prayed and God gave them a burning in the bosom. They tell you you can have the same experience by praying with a sincere heart to see if the Book of Mormon is true.

You say you already have a relationship with Jesus and you talk about how your life has changed because of Jesus.

“Wonderful!” they reply. “We don’t want to take that away from you! We just want to offer you something deeper!”

Now if your argument here is just your experience, on what grounds can you deny them theirs? Especially since they haven’t denied you yours. They have even affirmed your experience!

There are other groups you could encounter. You could encounter Sufi Muslims who tell you about the joy of Allah. You could encounter New Agers who tell you about finding out about their past lives and that they are really gods and they are one with the universe. The problem with your experience is it is yours and everyone else has one as well.

Hernandez rightly points out that we need to have reasons for what we believe. We can’t just go on an emotional high. Besides that, many of us make horrible decisions both when we’re feeling great and when we’re feeling awful. You shouldn’t say “This left me feeling great, therefore it’s true!” It could be true, but it is true on other grounds.

From here, Hernandez goes on to deal with other worldviews. He focuses on atheism, agnosticism, skepticism, scientism, postmodernism, and naturalism. I would have liked to have seen interaction with other religions and new age beliefs, but one cannot cover everything. He gives you some brief information about the worldviews and then tells about general replies.

He calls his approach the lazy approach because it is more a method of asking questions and letting the person who makes the claim back the claim. It is not really lazy at all. It just seems like you don’t have to do a lot of studying. On the contrary, you do, but with this method, if you don’t know about something, you can just ask and see if it logically holds up.

At this point, Hernandez starts giving arguments for God. I really didn’t find this section convincing as most of these arguments I reject from a Thomistic perspective. While I do think the universe had a beginning, classically, the Kalam did not depend on that. Also, I disagree on the moral argument when we are told that the good is God’s nature. That doesn’t really explain anything. If I want to say “Hernandez’s book is a good book” what does good mean? “Hernandez’s book was a book like the nature of God?” All you have done is given me the phrase good, which hasn’t been defined, and replaced it with God’s nature, which also hasn’t been defined. When we say God is good, what do we mean? That God is His nature? It becomes meaningless.

A Thomist like myself would say the good is that at which all things aim such as Aristotle told us and then show the correlation between goodness and being. God is good because He is the fullness of being and has all perfections in Him. Something is good insofar as it fulfills the nature of what it has and since God’s nature is to be, then He fulfills what it means to be.

But I will be fair. These are starting points. They’re good ones. They’re where I started.

Finally, he ends with the resurrection argument largely using the minimal facts approach. I know some people criticize that approach and I’m not interested in that debate, but it is effective for evangelism and I think most of us would agree that if someone comes to Christ through the minimal facts approach, we should rejoice.

So in the end, this is a good book if you’re starting out. It is one I would encourage for a church small group or Sunday School class on evangelism. I would also recommend it for college and seminary students studying how to do evangelism. Give it a try.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

Book Plunge: Christian Body — Genesis 9

What does the story of Noah and the vineyard have to tell us about nudity in the Bible? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Frost doesn’t say much about the story in Genesis 9 which is understandable. The story involves Noah drinking a vineyard and getting drunk and lying down naked. Ham sees him and tells his brothers who walk in backwards and cover up Noah so they won’t see their father’s nakedness.

I do agree with Frost that this is not talking about moral behavior entirely. Very few of us would think it is an important exhortation in the Bible that if you ever learn your father is sleeping drunk and naked you should walk in backward with your brother and cover him up. Let’s hope that this wasn’t a common problem in ancient Israel, or anywhere else for that matter.

Yet when we read the story and read that when Noah woke up we can be confused. He lays a curse on the descendants of Ham? Why? He saw his Dad naked. Perhaps embarrassing, but didn’t he do what he should have done by telling his brothers and having them take responsibility?

A Western reader might think so, but here I agree with Frost again in that something more than voyeurism is going on here. Gagnon suggests that this is a case of male-on-male incest. Not only is this incest, it is incest involving one’s own father. You can read his article covering this and other issues for free here.

Thus, the story is stressing that this is where the problems with the Canaanites began. With Moses being the author, he would have known about these people and he is stating this is their history. It goes all the way back to their ancestor Ham.

So that’s a wrap then. Right?

Not yet.

I have stated that there is a difference between the private and public sphere of life. Noah wasn’t just asleep and naked. He had done so in a way that was disgraceful to him and to see his nakedness would be to take advantage of him. It would be to bring shame upon any who did so. Hence, Shem and Japheth properly honor their father. They don’t just walk in and throw a blanket on him. They come in backwards so they can make sure that they don’t even see their father naked.

Were they just prudes who didn’t appreciate the beauty of the human body? No. They were sons who honored their father and knew his nakedness was not meant to be put on display for them.

Frost says that there is no “Thus sayteh the Lord here”, but I wonder what such a “Thus sayeth the Lord” could even be about. I do agree with him that nudity is not the main point of the passage. It is about the history of the Canaanites starting with their ancestor Ham and how this started right after the flood.

Next time we look at this book, we will discuss Exodus 20:26 and how a priest was to approach God.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Book Plunge: Christian Body Genesis 2-3

What does the Bible say about nudity? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

So some chaos broke out on Facebook Friday when an apologist friend of mine came out in favor of Christian Naturism. Some of you might be thinking “Love of nature. What could be wrong about that?” Nope. This is a Christian embrace of nudity. One book he mentioned as having an impact was this one. Being concerned about this decision, I decided to look into it.

So the book starts with a look at the account of what happened in the Fall of Man. The author, Aaron Frost starts off saying we all have social conditioning we are unaware of. Of this, who would disagree? He also says we must consult Bible historians and scholars to see what is going on in the text. Again, agreement.

He talks about how he served in different cultures as a missionary and they had different standards about clothing. Yes, but we care about what was ancient Israel’s standard about clothing? How did they see it?

Frost looking at it says that modesty is not in consideration in the account and shame is never mentioned. The problem is this is a Western way of reading the text. It is the idea of “The text doesn’t mention shame, therefore there is nothing shameful.”

On this, we have the firm data. For the ancient Israelites, nudity was shameful. As Pilch and Malina state about Israelite women:

Public nudity inevitably meant “shame” for them, for their chastity was compromised: their physical body was no longer exclusively the property of their husbands.

Pilch, John J.. Handbook of Biblical Social Values, Third Edition (Matrix: The Bible in Mediterranean Context 10) (p. 119). Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

In Israel, clothing was a signifier of social status. Consider how Tamar tears her robe after her half-brother Amnon rapes her. Why? Because that was a robe for virgins to wear. How did the Israelites know which women in the battle against the Midianites hadn’t slept with a man? Their clothing.

This didn’t just apply to women. As Pilch and Malina again say:

The Hebrew Scriptures relentlessly censure nudity, which was hardly the case in Greece (Thucydides I.vi.4–6). Although God presumably made Adam and Eve naked, they became aware of it with the shame of being discovered as sinners (Gen 2:25). God’s first act of mercy to them was to cover them with garments of skin (Gen 3:21). Thus nudity became inextricably linked with sin and “shame”.

Pilch, John J.. Handbook of Biblical Social Values, Third Edition (Matrix: The Bible in Mediterranean Context 10) (p. 118). Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Nudity was unacceptable in the presence of God. Priests had to have special clothing to make sure no hint of nudity was there. This is not because the human body is ugly or horrible. It’s because of how one is positioned in the society. You approached a king wearing your best. You did the same with God.

Getting back to Frost, he asks if it was improper for Adam and Eve to see each other naked in the garden? Absolutely not. In the privacy of their own homes, it’s also not improper for husbands and wives to see each other naked. Part of the Edenic state is that there was no shame.

Frost does say that there are no thorns or predators or harsh temperatures in the Garden. Maybe not in the Garden, but what about the rest of the world? Am I to think if man had never fell that when they got to the Sahara it would be a pleasant experience, or if they went to the North Pole they could go sunbathing and skinny dipping? The text only deals with one area and if we want to talk about not taking assumptions with us, we should not assume the whole world was like the garden.

After this, Frost writes about how Eve took of the fruit and gave it to her husband to eat. He says for the first time they felt bold defiance against their creator. After that, they experience a horror they never had before. They experience feelings of guilt, shame, and fear.

Excuse me? Where is that in the text?

On p. 24 of Pilch and Malina’s book cited above, they say that our idea of feelings and emotional states of biblical characters is anachronistic. Conscience was not an inner voice saying “You’ve been a bad boy.” It was instead the voice of others condemning them. Consider David for an example. When did he know he had sinned with Bathsheba? When Nathan said those words to him of “You the man!”

Thus, all that Frost says here is anachronistic. It is being read into the text.

He then says they stitched fig leaves together to cover their reproductive organs. Well, the text doesn’t say that they covered those, but that is a fair assumption to grant and it is one that intertestamental writers shared. Consider Jubilees 3.

  1. And when she had first covered her shame with figleaves, she gave thereof to Adam and he eat, and his eyes were opened, and he saw that he was naked.
  2. And he took figleaves and sewed (them) together, and made an apron for himself, and ,covered his shame.

Now some of my fellow Protestants could say “But that’s not Scripture!” to which I say, “Irrelevant.” The point of the writing is to show how Jews saw it. The reproductive organs were to be reserved for husband and wife and not for the public. It would be treating what is sacred as it was common.

Frost tells us that modern readers think they know very well why they hid. It is an assumption that is brought, but it is not stated in the text. Unfortunately, Frost doesn’t tell us forthrightly what this assumption is. It’s like he assumes the assumption. Weird, isn’t it?

At the start, I don’t think it was from one another. For one thing, hiding doesn’t make sense. What would happen? “Eve! You turn around and count to ten and I’ll hide and then I’ll count to ten while you hide.”

That being said, something married men and men who even cohabitate with a woman know well often is many women even in marriage cover their bodies. Many men don’t understand why their wife can come out of the shower and have a towel wrapped tight around them. Many of those men have no such insecurities around their wives.

So who were they hiding from?

Ask any parent who has small children. If the parent comes into the house and the vase is broken and a baseball is next to it, the children are hiding. God comes walking through. The children hide. Foolish to think you can hide from God? Yes, but all of us are foolish before God many times thinking we can’t trust Him, worrying about matters, etc.

Frost’s contention for why they did this? Satan told them to! Satan told them their nakedness was shameful! Where is that in the text? NOWHERE! Satan tempts Eve to eat the fruit and after that he is completely silent. The idea that Satan did this helps Frost with his interpretation, but it’s not rooted in the text.

Besides, if Satan did this, then one would think one of the first things God would do is correct their misconception. He never does. If anything, He enables their decision by putting together clothing for them.

Something we have to consider is the text only has two human beings in the garden. We don’t know what would have happened had children been born in the garden. Would Adam and Eve wear clothing then so that their children wouldn’t see what was meant for husband and wife alone? The text doesn’t say. Do we think Adam and Eve would be having sex together while a young Cain and Abel watched on? Hard to picture even in an Edenic society.

Frost says God gives them garments but says nothing about modesty to them. As if that needs to be explicitly stated in the text! He also never states how they are to grow food and tend gardens in a world of thorns and thistles. He never tells Eve how to raise children when she will give birth with increased pain. (I am leaving aside questions of the age of the Earth and other such matters like pain before the Fall.) A Western society thinks this needs to be spelled out. An Eastern one understands it’s a waste of time and writing to point out what everyone already knew.

Frost says the couple would need more protection than they did in the garden because the sun was hot, the nights were cold, and thorns were there and animals could have venom.

So was the sun not hot before?

Were nights not cold before?

Were there zero thorns in the world before?

Were there zero poisonous animals before?

These are all assumptions Frost brings to the text.

Frost goes on to say in approaching our issues today that:

The plain, unaltered body has been reduced to smut and outlawed from ever being honored appropriately. The human body, as it stands naturally, is now strictly reserved only for pornography and kept that way by Christian influence in government as if that must be how God wanted things to be.

Frost, Aaron. Christian Body: Modesty and the Bible (p. 38). UNKNOWN. Kindle Edition.

Well, no.

For one thing, no one is saying nudity in itself is sinful. The Lord even in ancient Israel knew in some cases, it was a necessity, such as, oh, I don’t know, having children? People would also still have to bathe and wash their clothes. Both could involve nudity. Nudity itself isn’t the problem.

The problem is the context nudity is in.

If you go to the doctor and he says take off your clothes and you’re nude, we understand that is fine. If you go down to main street and take off your clothes and sit on a park bench, that isn’t fine. The context is what matters. If you are in the privacy of your own home and want to go nude, go ahead. In public, no.

And what is pornography? It is pictures of evil sexual sin which is made just to arouse people. Pornography demeans the human body by treating what is sacred and making it common. It also blurs the line between the public and the private spheres. That which is meant for privacy becomes public. (Never mind also that many caught in the industry are victims of sex trafficking.)

He then asks shouldn’t we speak against this perversion that the body is something shameful? Shouldn’t we speak out that the body shouldn’t be covered up? Shouldn’t we speak out against the natural body being inappropriate.

Again, all of this confuses the public and the private sphere. For an Israelite, to be naked in public was shameful. This is the case going on when God regularly says that He will expose the nakedness of His enemies or when David’s men go to speak to a foreign king and get their pants split and their beards shaved and are told to stay where they are until their beards grow back.

None of this says the body in itself is shameful, but it does say the nudity of the body is meant for the private sphere of life and not the public sphere, much like sexuality is. Sex in the Bible is a good and beautiful thing. A man having sex with his wife in the privacy of their home is good. A man having sex with his wife in the middle of a shopping mall is not.

Frost tells us that the Bible tells us temptation is caused by lust and that is the choice of the living dissatisfied with God’s way.

Again, no. As the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament says:

This group denotes desire, especially for food or sex. This desire is morally neutral at first, but philosophy, holding aloof from the sensory world, regards it as reprehensible, and in Stoicism epithymía is one of the four chief passions. Epicurus distinguishes between natural and illicit desires, subdividing the former into the purely natural and those that are necessary to happiness.

Gerhard Kittel, Gerhard Friedrich, and Geoffrey William Bromiley, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1985), 339–340.

The word means desire. It can be right or wrong. 1 Tim. 3:1 speaks positively of it saying if a man desires to be an overseer, he desires a good thing. James is talking about sinful desires we do have inside of us. It is not just lust in the sense of looking at a member of the opposite sex.

Frost says the Scriptures never say clothing prevents lust or that nakedness offends God. For one thing, I don’t know anyone making this claim. If clothing prevented lust in every way, then teenage boys would not be struggling with lust when they see a cute girl at school. She’s wearing clothes after all.

Second, once again, it is a Western mindset to think this has to be spelled out.

Third, to some degree, they do. The less a woman wears, the more a guy is prone to go crazy over her.

Frost is taking a Western mindset to the text and demanding it spell out everything. We might as well say “The text never tells us to diet and exercise regularly, so we shouldn’t do that.” “The text never tells us to wash our hands before meals, so we shouldn’t do that.” Picture how that last one would go.

“God created dirt and dirt is good and God said a man working hard and laboring is good. Man is meant to work. Why should a man remove that good dirt that God created on this Earth before he eats a meal?”

Frost tells us the solution to porn is not to cover the body but to show an example of good and godly people who are not overpowered by the sight of God’s creation and appreciate one another with dignity, honor, and respect.

First off, good luck with that.

Second, if you become so desensitized to God’s creation that you are no longer aroused by the nakedness of a member of the opposite sex, then I think you have a bigger problem. We were designed to want the bodies of the opposite sex and when we do, our bodies are also functioning properly.

Third, the real solution is to change the way we view sex and sexuality and realize that what is meant for privacy should not be public. We need to have a higher view of sex.

He finally ends saying that the fig leaves were the first decision Adam made with a corrupted mind. Unfortunately for Frost, God nowhere condemns this description and even furthers it by making clothes Himself for the couple. Also, it is worth pointing out that Frost said we should consult scholars and historians of the Bible, but I count nowhere in this section where he has done so. He has argued entirely from his perspective alone.

Next time we look at this book, we will discuss Genesis 9.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

 

Book Plunge: The Myth of the Divinity of Jesus Christ Part 6

What about God in the Old Testament? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Iqbal now turns to the Old Testament. The first part worth noting is when he talks about how Mark 1 quotes Isaiah. Iqbal points out that this quotation is actually a combination of a quotation from Isaiah and Malachi. He ignores that there is actually scholarship on composite quotations which occur not just in Jewish and Christian writings, but in writings in greater Greco-Roman antiquity.

He also says Jesus never refers to Himself as the Son of Man. This is a strange argument because it assumes the only way He can is if He comes out and says “I am the Son of Man.” He also rarely says “I am the Messiah.” One example that shows Jesus saw Himself as this figure is in Matthew 19 when He tells the disciples that they will sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. It’s thought to be authentic since He says the twelve will which would be problematic with what Judas did. The question is, “If the apostles sit on twelve thrones, where does Jesus sit?”

There is some discussion on what the word Echad means. He does say that it can refer to a compound one, but sometimes it doesn’t.

Okay.

But sometimes it does.

Thus, just saying echad isn’t sufficient to show that this is a one that is absolutely solitary in nature. You can point out that there are many cases where this doesn’t happen and yet, that doesn’t matter. Each time it is to be interpreted based on the context of that passage.

He also asks why it refers to three in the case of God if that is the case. Why not three?

Because three persons is the number revealed throughout the Bible….

He says that the plural means the plural of majesty. In some cases, I am open to that entirely. In some cases, it doesn’t apply. Why should I think echad refers to a plural of majesty? Iqbal gives me no reason to think so.

He also says that Paul explicitly says he didn’t get information from the original apostles of Jesus on the gospel. He ignores that in Galatians 1, Paul speaks to them and presents the gospel to make sure that his race had not been run in vain. I can’t help but wonder if Iqbal has ever truly read the New Testament for himself.

So once again, we have a Muslim who tries to argue against the Trinity and really demonstrates he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. When dealing with these arguments, I tend to hit only the highlights….errr…..lowlights? It would be too much to go over every argument and some of them have been done over and over again and I try to trust on newish arguments that I have not dealt with before.

But, there are other books, so we will soon begin going through another such book sometime to see what else Muslims have to say on the topic.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

Book Plunge: The Myth of the Divinity of Jesus Christ Part 5

Can the Trinity withstand examination? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

You know a chapter is not going to go well when this is one of the earliest points you see.

1 + 1 + 1 = 1.

It gets worse when you see Iqbal describe this as a great challenge.

No. It’s an ignorant one. It also assumes that every Trinitarian mind in history has never noticed that 1 + 1 + 1 = 3 and somehow at all the biblical councils that this basic fact escaped notice. As someone who loves math, let’s try a different one.

1x + 1x + 1x = 1y.

You would have to know what X and Y are to answer this one. Either way, this is also NOT a description of the Trinity anyway. The Trinity is not that if you add up three persons, you get one God, as if each person was a part of God. Ugh. No person of the Trinity is 33.3% God. Each is 100% God. What you have in the Trinity is three persons that each fully share a divine nature.

He goes on to quote their “Messiah” as saying:

As far as the Christians are concerned, they are clearly opposed to the Oneness of God, for they believe in three ‘Gods’— the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Their explanation, that they believe ‘three’ to be ‘one’, is really quite absurd. No sane person can be expected to accept such flawed logic, especially when the three Gods are considered to be permanently self-existing and each is thought to be a complete God in Himself. What kind of arithmetic is it that shows them to be one, and where is it taught? Is there any logic or philosophy that can explain how beings which are permanently three can be counted as one? It is only a deception to argue that this is a mystery which human reason cannot understand, for human reason clearly understands that if there are three perfect Gods, they will have to be ‘three’ and not ‘one’.

No, no, no, and no. All that is being done here is a straw man. Monotheism is ESSENTIAL to the Trinity. Muslims start from their failed misunderstanding, argue against that, and then proclaim victory.

Iqbal claims the Trinity was invented by Tertullian. Actually, Theophilus used the term Trinity before Tertullian did and neither of them had to explain it, which indicates it was something known to their audience. I do not expect the apostles to be quoting the Creed of Chalcedon immediately after the resurrection. They were too working out and understanding what Jesus told them. Acts 10 indicates Peter didn’t even understand that Christianity had to go to the Gentiles.

He then refers to a Muslim who asked a pastor that if he wished to pick up a pencil on the table, would he call his friends for help. The pastor thought that was crazy, understandably so. The Muslim then said that if God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit all could create the world it seems strange they should work together.

Because?…..

All three were involved because it was an act of love on the part of all three. All three do everything together. This is an appeal to ignorance. “I don’t know why God would do it this way, therefore He didn’t.”

So once again, close out another chapter entirely disappointed.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

 

The Myth of the Divinity of Jesus Christ Part 4

Does Jesus have the attributes of God? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Early on, Iqbal brings up two passages of Scripture to show Jesus was not omnipotent.

John 5:30 — By myself I can do nothing; I judge only as I hear, and my judgment is just, for I seek not to please myself but him who sent me.

And

Mark 6:5 — He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them.

With the former, what does he expect Jesus to say? “I do everything on my own and I make judgments the way I want to regardless of the Father?” This is a claim of strong unity with the Father. He is saying “When I judge, it is the judgment of God. When I act, it is the act of God.”

As for the latter, it seems strange to think Jesus’s ability to do miracles depend on faith when in the Gospels, His followers weren’t expecting His resurrection and yet, there it was. We can grant Muslims don’t believe in the resurrection, but that doesn’t change that it is in the Gospels and thus they are primary sources for Christian doctrine. What is going on is Jesus is responding to loyalty there. Since the people don’t welcome Him and want Him, He doesn’t do many miracles there.

Iqbal also says God does not pray to anyone, but this assumes that God is unipersonal, which is the statement under question. If there are at least two persons who are God, what is wrong with one of them “praying” to the other one? This is especially the case since Jesus was fully human. Iqbal needs to show why this is a problem and not just assume it is.

He then looks at what Warfield said about how Jesus acted in both His humanity and His deity. This is certainly true, but then Iqbal jumps to full Nestorianism saying that this means Jesus had two persons in Him. That was a position the early church called heretical. (And interestingly, could have been the kind of Christianity that Muhammad was most in contact with.)

He also says one idea also among Christians is that Jesus laid aside His powers based on Philippians 2. No. That’s known as the kenotic heresy nowadays and you will not find it espoused, at least by Christians who know what they’re talking about.

He then has D.A. Carson being quoted arguing against this in The Case for Christ and then treats it as if Carson is saying he doesn’t know how to explain the incarnation. Unfortunately, I do not have my copy of the book with me, but I do remember Carson goes on to explain what he thinks is going on in this passage. Strange that Iqbal doesn’t show that part.

Iqbal also stresses that Jesus never says “I forgive you” but “Your sins are forgiven” and saying that Jesus is saying the forgiveness comes from God. Yes. And? This is something a Trinitarian has no problem with. What is unusual is Jesus pronounces forgiveness even without a person actually repenting (Hard for that paralyzed man to repent) and acting as if He is the temple Himself where the presence of God dwelt.

He goes on to list eleven signs Jesus was a human, which no one is disputing. One is that Jesus died on the cross, but God cannot die. When people present this to me, I ask them what it means to die. If they say it means the person ceases to exist, then yes, God cannot cease to exist. But if that is the case, then what happens to passages like Colossians 1 that say the Son holds all things together? The Son could never cease to exist. If instead it means, the soul of Jesus left the body of Jesus, then we have no problem.

It’s odd to see that he says Jesus is guilty of falsehood. In one case, Jesus says to the thief that the thief will be with Him in Paradise, but Jesus went to hell for three days. I take hell to be best understood as the realm of the dead. I do happen to think Jesus did go to Paradise with the thief. Iqbal also talks about Jesus’s harsh language like calling the Pharisees broods of vipers. Statements like this are allegedly unbecoming of the Son of God. We are not told why this is.

Finally, there’s the idea Jesus got prophecy wrong. Just do a search on this blog for Preterism and what I have said about it. There are far too many to link to.

We’ll continue next time.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

The Myth of the Divinity of Jesus Christ Part 3

What kind of Son of God was Jesus? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

We’re returning to this book so let’s see what a Muslim has to say about this topic.

Iqbal starts quoting the Qur’an on how Jesus was a messenger like those before Him.

Here it is clearly stated that Jesus, the Messiah, was only a messenger of God like other messengers of God who had come before him. He was a human like them and this is simply based on the fact that it is the way of God to send messengers to his people, not His literal “divine sons”. Had that been the case, sons of God in the literal sense would have always appeared before and even after Jesus.

Iqbal, Farhan. The Myth of the Divinity of Jesus Christ (Kindle Locations 882-887). Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama`at Canada. Kindle Edition.

I honestly can’t make heads or tails of what he is saying here. The best I can gather is that Iqbal thinks that Jesus is one divine son of many and God would send many more. This is nothing that Christians believe in that sense. Angels can be called sons of God, but certainly not in the same way that Jesus is the Son of God. John 1:18 kind of clinches for us that Jesus is the one and only.

Iqbal later in this chapter talks about the I AM statements and says “People say I am” all the time in the Bible. This is true. If we had an apostle saying “I am hungry”, no one would take that as a claim of divinity. The question is how are the phrases used by Jesus and what do they mean? John 8 has a clear usage in the end of Jesus taking the divine name upon Himself. Other usages have them speaking of Him in glorious terms.

Going back to John 8:58, Iqbal says that Christians have to go to Jesus’s enemies. We don’t say Jesus’s enemies explain what Jesus meant. We say that they understood what Jesus meant. The meaning was clear.

He later goes on to give out the same claim of Gospels being written decades after Jesus’s death and Paul never meeting Jesus. Of course, the book that was written about 600 years after the time of the ministry of Jesus by someone who never met Jesus either is completely reliable with what it says about Him. No. There is no interaction with something like Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.

He does say that many prophets claim to be doing the works of God, which is true. Why is it that Jesus’s should be different? The difference in Jesus is the emphasis was on Himself. Jesus saw Himself as greater than the Sabbath, greater than Jonah, greater than Solomon, and as a walking temple. Jesus said He did miracles by the finger of God meaning the Kingdom was among the people.

So that’s it for this entry. There is some other stuff in here, including claims of dreams and visions from their “Messiah”, but nothing relevant to the topic. We’ll continue next time.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

Saint Or Antichrist?

Are either of these accurate? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

In light of the recent assassination attempt, something humorous is both sides are using the Bible to try to back a point. The left is using this as proof that Trump is the antichrist. The right is using this as proof that Trump has an anointing of God on him. I’m not going to say either of those positions is false, but I am going to say the arguments I see being made are just horrible.

So let’s start with the easier one.

You all know I’m an orthodox Preterist so I wouldn’t be reading this in any futurist sense at all, but for the sake of argument, I’m going to take a more dispensational approach. To begin with, the Bible doesn’t say that about the Antichrist. It says that about the Beast. Now aren’t those the same person? They could be, but Revelation never says that they are. That is an assumption that is brought to the text.

For the second point, I am not saying that what happened to the president is a mere matter, but put it in proper context. The overwhelming majority of us that had a bullet graze our ear would survive. That is not surprising. What makes the Beast surprising in the text is that his wound is fatal and yet he survives it. (It’s also one of his heads as the beast has multiple heads, but again, I’m assuming a more dispensational approach here.)

About the only way you would die from a bullet to the ear is if you had hemophilia and your blood couldn’t clot properly. The fact that Trump survived this is not incredible. Had it hit him full on as it would have if he had not turned his neck and yet he survived would indeed be incredible. (And even still, it would not show he was the Antichrist.)

That one’s fairly simple, but the right side coming from evangelicals is more complex.

In the Bible the concept of blood on the right ear (Leviticus 8:22-24 and 14:28) serves as a visible mark of consecration, signifying that the person is dedicated to God’s service and has been set apart for a specific purpose. This act represents a physical and spiritual transformation, preparing the individual for their sacred role. Here’s a breakdown of the significance:

*Right ear: The right ear represents hearing and obedience. In ancient times, the right ear was considered the most important ear, as it was the ear that heard the words of God.

*Blood: Blood represents life, sacrifice, and atonement. In this context, the blood is a symbol of purification and consecration. *Consecration: Consecration means to set something or someone apart for a specific purpose, making it holy and dedicated to God. In this case, the blood on the right ear signifies that the person is being set apart for a sacred task or role.

*Priestly consecration: In Leviticus 8, the blood is applied to the right ear of Aaron and his sons, consecrating them as priests. This act sets them apart as mediators between God and the people.

*Purification: In Leviticus 14, the blood is applied to the right ear of the person being cleansed, symbolizing their purification and restoration to the community.

It’s really embarrassing to see evangelicals sharing stuff like this.

For one, yes, the right ear was anointed, but so was the thumb of the right hand and the big toe of his right foot. This was also an intentional act. No Jew today would accept being shot at to get the blood of someone. It was also done to consecrate someone as a priest, which is not the office that Trump is running for.

For Leviticus 14, it is for atonement, but it is the blood of an animal. Also, there is to be anointing oil placed on the body parts as well, and it’s the same parts of the body. In both cases, we only have one body part so this does not apply.

There are some who are saying that it was divine intervention that caused Trump to move when he did to avoid the bullet. Maybe. We don’t know. I am one who thinks it is foolish to speak when we do not know.

For those who are playing pin the tail on the Antichrist, please stop. It’s embarrassing. Yes. There have been some predictions made about Biden like that and if Kamala Harris starts running, they will be made about her. They have been made about most every political figure and every tyrant and they have all been wrong. (Aside from Nero as the beast which I hold was entirely correct.)

I am a conservative who votes that way, but I try to knock down bad arguments wherever I see them. The antichrist argument is a bad argument. The right ear anointed argument is a bad argument. If anything, the evangelicals making arguments like the above are the most embarrassing since they should know better.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Is Love Love?

What is love? (Baby, don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me, no more.) Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

“Love is love!” is often what people in support of the LGBTQ+ groups say. It sounds simple. How could you respond to something like that? Love is not love? I saw someone actually say at an event in the comments recently “Love isn’t love!” Well, that’s wrong, but does that mean the other side is right?

A lot of Christians hear a saying like this and think that they can’t really argue against that. Who is opposed to love after all? Isn’t love good? Isn’t God love.

Let’s replace it with another saying.

Cats are cats.

Now would anyone want to dare say that cats aren’t cats? What else could they be? However, what if I said cats are cats, therefore, this:

Is the same as this:

Are there similarities? Yes. Are there relations? Yes. Despite that, when I go to bed at night, there’s only one I want jumping up on the bed with me. Meanwhile, if you go to the zoo expecting to see the bottom one and you see the top instead, you’ll be thinking the zoo isn’t bringing in all these interesting species.

Both of these are cats, yes, but both are not the same kind of cat. We have to break down what that means. My Shiro, for instance, is a Turkish Angora largely. My parents have a cat that is a Himalayan. As someone who loves cats, every day I ask my Echo device what the cat breed of the day is. Somedays, I do get something like a lion. Most days I get a breed of housecat.

You could fill in the gap with several items. Dogs are dogs. Books are books. TV shows are TV shows. Movies are movies. Sports are sports.

The Greeks had four different words for love.  Many of these we celebrate in our society. I don’t know anyone who is opposed to friendship. We can say there are some people you shouldn’t be friends with, but we are not opposed to friendship in general.

Agape love is usually seen as God love and while there are people who don’t believe in God, many would not oppose the idea of something like loving your neighbor as yourself. They could say that if a Christian thinks God loves them, they’re wrong, but good for them. Family love is more familial love. This is the kind of courtesy you have for a complete stranger just because they’re a fellow human being.

Now we get to the last one, erotic love. Very few people are probably anti-sex altogether. That includes we who are Christians. It’s one of the reasons we get married as well after all. Christians have books and resources too on how to have a good married sex life.

At the same time, that doesn’t mean everyone celebrates every kind of sexual activity. Let’s start with an obvious one. Children. The overwhelming majority of people says children should not be involved in sexual relationships. Pederasty is still largely condemned, though if society keeps going the way it is going, that won’t last much longer.

How about another one? Rape. You can love women and you can love sex, but if you force yourself on a woman against her will, then that is wrong. Yes. I know rape is about power, but it is also an act of sex as well and one we condemn.

Most sex is celebrated today. I am not saying I celebrate it, but let’s face it. On a sitcom or drama, the question often thought is “Will they or won’t they?” It used to be “Will they get married?” but nowadays it’s “Will they have sex?” It’s usually celebrated when they do. I am not agreeing with it. I am just saying the reality is real.

Yet despite that, do we really think we should live in a culture where we celebrate and encourage ALL sexual activity even if it is consensual? Do we want to celebrate couples forming one-night stands and not forming long-term relationships? Do we want to oppose men and women forming lifelong covenants called marriage?

After all, something that sets sex apart from every other activity out there is it alone can produce new life. That means with it comes responsibilities and risks as well. Seeing as life is a good (Although sadly, many think life in the womb is not a good but a problem to be dealt with), we encourage relationships that are capable of bringing that new life into the world and raising it. Thus, we encourage marriage as a form of stability for raising new life.

This is the love as a society that we should be promoting the most. No other relationship can do this. Some might say some incestual relationships could, but those blur the family lines and also are prone to more genetic harm to the child. That is why societies promote married love. It is not because the people feel good about themselves. It is not because they have their identities affirmed. It is because that alone produces children and society depends on its members having children.

Note in all of this I have not said same-sex sexual relationships are immoral. (though I think they are) I have said simply that they are not the same as married opposite-sex relationships. This is also why the idea of redefining marriage is so problematic. It has been compared to the bans against interracial marriage in the past, but the problem here is that race has no affect on the sexual behavior. Men of all races are still men and women of all races are still women. The races are interchangeable in the relationship. It is not the same with the person’s sex.

By the way, along those lines, if one can say they are the wrong sex and identify as another, what could stop someone from identifying as a different race? I am fully white, but what if I said I was born into the wrong race and I feel like a black man? If anything, race is much more on a spectrum than sex is.

So is love, love? Yes, but it needs to be broken down and not treated as a cliche. Cliches tend to stop thinking and our society needs more of it.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

Is DEI about to DIE?

Is it in its last days? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

With the assassination attempt of Donald Trump, he has passed being in the bullseye, but DEI has not. Suppose you have been living under a rock somewhere. In that case, DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, which means focusing on every single minority group out there to exclude the majority in virtue signaling. It also means ignoring minor details for jobs like, oh, ability, experience, and other little stuff like that. Do you help fulfill the quota for sex, sexual orientation, and race? Welcome aboard!

A lot of it was going on with the Secret Service at the attempt being publicly seen to have huge problems and a lot of it was with what people saw the women doing who were part of the Secret Service. This isn’t just men who have been saying this. Women have been saying it too. One woman couldn’t reholster her pistol and the women were asking what they were doing and where they were going. (See here.)

This is not to say that women can’t do this job. I’m sure some could. There are some women out there who are great shots with guns. However, Donald Trump is a big man and if you are going to shield him, you need to be as big as he is. If you also don’t know what to do in a situation like this, you are more of a liability than you are an asset at that point.

The director of the Secret Service has come under fire for wanting a quota of 30% women by 2030 and for also remarks about the dangers of a sloped roof. We also know the assassin was in sight for thirty minutes before anything happened. Why wasn’t anything done?

It might not be any coincidence that shortly after this, Microsoft decides to axe an entire DEI team. At this, I rejoice. Loyal readers know I am deeply interested in the gaming community and nowadays, many of us are dreading new games coming out. Why? Because of DEI. We’re not getting games. We’re getting a political lecture.

Consider also the case of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. The Assassin’s Creed games have been known for historical accuracy in the past. Some people thought it could be used to rebuild Notre Dame after the fire. Now this new game is the first one set in Japan and who is upset about it the most?

The Japanese.

They even have a petition out demanding Ubisoft desist in making the game immediately. A lot of it centers around the character Yasuke. Now he is a real historical figure, but he is being made out to be much more than he was. He was an attendant to Nobunaga, but he was not officially a samurai.

There were plenty of Japanese figures that could be chosen, but Ubisoft decided to ignore all of those. Why? DEI. Oh. This black man who the Jesuits brought over is also supposed to be capable of being LGBTQ+. Yep. That makes sense.

Besides, in the game, the assassin is supposed to be able to blend into the crowd. Kill the target, then hide immediately before people realize what has happened. How will this go in Japan? “So the guy who stabbed the victim? Anything distinguishing about him that sets him apart from everyone else?”

Japan says this is a misunderstanding of Japanese culture and the role of the samurai. They also say it will lead to Asian racism. Besides, how do you make a whole game out of a character that we only have a  few scant documents about?

Gamers have been so sick of this that now we have a website set up to deal with this. DEIdetected.com. If your game has the influence of companies like Sweet Baby Inc. involved, we don’t want them. More and more gamers are going to retro games because they can play games without being lectured on politics that way.

The LGBTQ movement is also getting tiresome for gamers. There are plenty of LGBTQ people who just want to live their lives in peace. When you start putting it in everything, everyone gets tired of it. Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League has been a massive failure and yet they are introducing a new character, Victoria Frias. Who is she? Mrs. Freeze and surprise, surprise, she’s a lesbian.

I watch the videos people make complaining about this. I don’t see anything that indicates to me that these are staunch evangelical Christians. They’re just people who want to play games without politics.

It’s not just games that are having this. Movies that go DEI are not being popular. The usual claim is that many men don’t want to see movies with strong women. Sorry, but I think the Alien franchise and Kill Bill and others did just fine. For the gaming world, there was no uproar when it was discovered that Samus Aran in Metroid was a woman. No one complained about Tomb Raider. (If anything, most men loved Lara Croft. I wonder why….)

Also, consider a TV series like The Acolyte. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a viewer score of 15% (As of the time of this writing). People who are fans of the series tell me that it is completely out of sync with what George Lucas started and dumps all over the franchise. It is simply pushing a woke agenda.

Contrast this with a major motion picture success last year, The Super Mario Bros. Movie. I rarely see movies due to low income now, but I made sure to see this one. I saw in it a love letter to the fans of the game that focused on facets of the game even going all the way back. Spike from Wrecking Crew is even a semi-prominent character in parts of the movie. I even made a video responding to Grace Randolph on it. (I also have someone on campus who is going to teach me about YouTube editing and producing videos so Gaming Theologian should be back soon.)

What makes great games and movies and TV shows successful? Simple point. They are fun. We enjoy them. We don’t go to these to get told that we need to celebrate diversity or that white men are the spawn of the devil. We go to them because we want to have fun.

If you do it right, you can still get a message across in a fun story. There are several fandoms of Narnia and the Lord of the Rings today and yet both of these series are teaching a Christian way of the world. However, both writers made sure that they were making good stories. Most Christian media today is “Hi. We have to point out to you that this is a Christian movie explicitly so we have to have one scene with a cross where we spell out the gospel entirely because you might miss it otherwise. Also, every Christian will be a charming and lovely character and every non-Christian is completely evil.” It doesn’t work when the Woke do it either where every LGBTQ or minority character is completely awesome and every cis straight white male is evil. Most people at the beginning of The Acolyte said the villain will be the straight white male.

If you are to have characters that are “diverse” in a game or movie or TV show, it needs to be natural and relevant to the story and not forced or artificial. I think of Barrett from Final Fantasy VII. He was a black man who was certainly very gruff, but he also had a great love for his daughter and would do anything to help her out. Many of us liked the character.

Consider comic book characters as well. There is a push to often take established characters who have had a history of having romances with the opposite sex, and all of a sudden make them same-sex attracted. If you want to have a superhero who is same-sex attracted, knock yourself out, but make your own. Don’t throw out a character’s entire history just because you want to shoehorn an agenda into it.

However, if you want to write that story, what the fans want is not diversity for the sake of diversity. What they want is a good story. Yes. Believe it or not if you aren’t a part of these worlds, people who read comic books and play video games care about good stories. We want narratives that hold together. We want heroes we can love because they’re heroes and villains we can seek to take down because they’re villains. We don’t mind some shades of grey where it’s hard to tell who is a hero and who is a villain and we don’t mind it when we have a hard time deciding what the right moral choice to make is. That makes it more authentic for us in many ways.

What will Microsoft do about DEI in the future? I don’t know, but I have high hopes. I have high hopes the time has come for DEI to D-I-E. It has been a kiss of death to series that it has been in. Get back to making great entertainment again.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)