Category: Apologetics

Jesus and Moral Issues

Can you separate Jesus from morality? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

As I said yesterday, I have been reading Machen lately and something he said in a work of his was about how we have pulled away from what he calls the “supernatural Jesus.” Now I have said before about my beef with the term “supernatural“. However, I do know what he’s saying. This is a Jesus who is seen as more or less just a great moral teacher, perhaps highly enlightened, but He certainly wasn’t divine in any way and definitely didn’t rise from the dead.

However, as we have moved away from this kind of Jesus, so with that has gone much of our moral standards in society. Many people even today do not want to speak ill of Jesus. Of course, some people do, but Jesus is still by and large a respected figure in our history. (Setting aside the crackpot position that says Jesus never even existed.) Few would want to ascribe malicious intent to Jesus.

A lot of people do like the morality of Jesus to some extent, which is quite odd when one thinks about it since really, His morality is often quite difficult. I would find it easy to go through life and not commit adultery with a woman. I find it extremely difficult to go through life without looking at another woman with lust. It would be easy to go through life without murdering a brother of mine. It is far harder to go through life without anger toward him.

Jesus did change this and so you had a society soon that was changing rapidly with a people who were practicing sexual chastity, love for their fellow man, and tremendous self-sacrifice. When a plague came through the Roman Empire, the physicians fled, but the Christians stayed and tended to the sick. The Christians didn’t have the science to know how a plague worked, but they were unintentionally giving themselves some immunity to the sickness by staying and facing it to help the sick.

We have been trying an experiment to take the teachings of Jesus and somehow exclude the man of Jesus from them. Yes. This teaching is quite quaint and we like it, but we don’t need that extra baggage with it. We don’t need all this nonsense of miracles and resurrections obviously. Let’s just go with the teachings and live by them.

This experiment has been a failure.

Inevitably, Jesus’s teachings are bound up with His person, authority, and character. It’s not just that Jesus taught great truths, but He also lived them and lived them perfectly. Jesus didn’t teach these as great suggestions either. He taught them as commands and He insisted that it was only by His power that one could live them out.

Naturally, we all have strengths and weaknesses. Some of us could be very generous by nature and yet struggle with a temper. A man could be extremely peaceful and wouldn’t hurt a fly, but he struggles with the sight of the beautiful women who he passes by regularly. In our society, we have often said that we like the idea of tolerance and non-judgmentalism, which are really not the message of Jesus, but we don’t really care for messages on sexual chastity. (Isn’t it funny how those two go together also?)

However, virtue is not a buffett where you take what you want and reject the rest. You have to take all of it. Try to separate one part of Jesus’s teachings from the whole and you have the overemphasis of one trait with the neglect of another. Part of this is because of the separation of Jesus from His lifestyle as if Jesus is just incidental to His teachings.

Perhaps we can’t dispense with the miraculous Jesus after all.

Now if you have a resurrected Jesus who speaks with authority and can forgive one’s own sins so one can live out love and forgiveness in others, the system works a lot better. Jesus did not come just to teach us all how to get along. Yes. He wants us to live well and have life, but He wants us to be forgiven and free as well.

Ultimately, you have to accept the bad news of Jesus, you are a sinner in need of salvation, before you can truly live out the teachings. If you do not realize how much you are forgiven, you will be incapable of loving the way He wants you to. This can be a struggle for many of us. I see myself as the guy who grew up avoiding pornography, drugs, alcohol, staying chaste until I was married, etc. It is easy to look and say “I’ve lived a good life and don’t really have major sins to deal with”, but I need to realize that in many cases, I struggle with pride and other inner sins that could be far worse in a sense and yet, I am forgiven.

Every sin after all is ultimately divine treason. It is denying one or more attributes of God and saying that you should be on the throne. I am one who has excessive worrying and anxiety and it’s tempting to want to be in control of my own life and panic about even seemingly minor decisions. If I am guilty of divine treason, which I am and which you are as well, isn’t it a wonder we are forgiven? What person says to someone else “I forgive you for wanting me dead and acting on it.”?

If we don’t go by the strength of Christ and the Holy Spirit, then we have to do that from within. Now this does not mean that non-Christians cannot be loving people. They can be. It means that this is a struggle for all of us because our natural tendency is to love ourselves more than others. Even the suicide loves themselves more despite their thinking of how awful they are. They seek their good above that of others though trying to tell themselves everyone else will be better off without them.

The early Christians were able to love greatly because they knew that they had been loved greatly. Take that away and it all falls apart. They knew they were loved greatly not because Jesus was some nice man who was really enlightened and said they were special. It was because Jesus was the divine man who had risen from the dead and had the authority to forgive them for all they had done.

Christianity cannot be reduced to just a set of ethics. It is an entire worldview. Removing the miraculous Jesus removes the batteries and the system doesn’t work.

If our culture is to recover, the only way to do that is to return to the original system which worked fine. That is the real miracle-working Jesus who rose from the dead and forgives sins. Any other Jesus won’t do.

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

The Pastor As Scholar

What is the link between the academy and the pulpit? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I have been reading the works of J. Gresham Machen for a class and last night, I was reading some of his sermons and was noticing how in-depth they were. He comes from a Calvinistic perspective so I didn’t agree with everything, but I knew he was working to substantiate his points. The sermon was rigorous and yet Machen spoke with a pastor’s heart.

I went to bed that night wondering why that was and I decided ultimately that there is a need for pastors to be scholars. If not a scholar, at least training in higher education to give the best of your mind to the church. Many people think that all that is needed to be an effective pastor is to just have a lot of passion for the things of God.

However, Scripture tells us in the epistles especially about the qualifications of a pastor. A pastor must be equipped in sound doctrine and be able to refute those who contradict. While some of these are said for deacons and elders, surely if they apply to the lesser offices of the church, they apply to the greater.

If you don’t have a strong background of information, you will more often than not draw from your own experiences and your own life to preach a sermon. How many times can a sermon end and you know a lot about the life of the person behind the pulpit, but you don’t know as much about Jesus? That doesn’t mean that you can never talk about your life experience, but it shouldn’t be your main source.

After all, if you have to speak sometime, you will draw out of whatever you have. If all you have is yourself, then you are going to have a shallow sermon. If you have a deep reservoir of theology, Christology, apologetics, church history, philosophy, Scripture, etc. then you will have plenty to draw from.

Years ago I attended a church where we had the educational hour before the sermon, which was like our version of Sunday School. There was more than one Sunday when two minutes or so before class began, no exaggeration, they didn’t have a teacher, and they would ask me to get up and suddenly speak on something, for an hour. No problem. I remember one Sunday I said, “Not a problem. We’ll talk about the five ways of Aquinas.”

If you have this kind of background, you can do this kind of thing. Whatever you think of Tim Keller, and I don’t say this as endorsement or condemnation, he did say something once that someone knew when he hadn’t prepared a lot for his sermon because he would talk a lot more about C.S. Lewis. That is an example of what is being talked about here. Many a pastor could have talked about himself and his own life, but Keller saw himself as well enough acquainted with Lewis, and he might be, that he could speak about him instead.

Every pastor in church needs to have either gone to seminary and got an education or is going to seminary. We are training up our people to fight a war and we don’t need just people who feel good. We need people who know what they’re fighting for and why. We need pastors who are scholars to equip laymen to be warriors.

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

I Was Not Assigned

What is at stake with our words? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Last week, there was an announcement made at the chapel service here at NOBTS about free flu shots being given out for students. All we had to do was go to the student center and there would be some nurses there ready to give us our shots. Being one without health insurance now (Financial realities of being a seminary student), I decided to go and get one.

Now this was a Christian hospital organization that was giving out the shots and so they had to ask me several questions, which I understand. I get the legal requirements. I don’t blame them and I realize the sad reality of what many businesses are going through, but as an individual, I did take a firm stand.

So in the middle of the usual questions that I expect, I get the one of “What is your gender identity?” I consider this to really be a nonsense question. Identity has no purpose here. How I feel about myself does not affect what I am at all. I can feel like I’m a cat and it’s not going to change I’m a human. For a more realistic example, as one going through a divorce, I can feel numerous negative things many times. Those things are not true. Many Christians can struggle with feeling God doesn’t love them. Doesn’t make it true. The reason many people commit suicide is often connected with a negative feeling about them or their future that just isn’t true.

I am a man. That is it. I can take a look at my body and the way that I came out and realize that yes, I am a man.

My next question I was asked was “Were you assigned that at birth?”

At this I think my eyes glare, not in anger at the nurses. They have to do their job. It’s in anger that this question is on here. I gave a direct answer. “No. I was born a man.” I realize we could say I was born a boy who grew into a man, but the sex that I was born as was not something that was just decided. It was known when I was born.

I also realize some people can bring up people who are intersex, but intersex and transgender are two very different things. One is a very physical condition and we have never sought to change our laws and society based on this condition. The other, transgenderism, is a psychological delusion and we are changing our society and laws to play along and real people are being the victims.

Friends. This is a hill we cannot budge any on. This is about a battle for reality itself. I consider the far-left movement in our society to be in a war against reality and trying to eliminate any idea of male and female. It’s as if we are being pushed into a political monism.

The biggest aspect of this battle to watch is our words. I will use longer and clunkier terminology to avoid granting any grounds to the other side. I will not speak of a “same-sex marriage.” A marriage by definition is the unity of a man and a woman. No. Something like polygamy doesn’t change this, though it is wrong, as it is just one man with several women, but the man-woman aspect is there. The same would be for one woman with many men.

When you say “same-sex marriage” you are speaking of a contradiction. You are speaking of a man-woman unit that is not man-woman. If we also make the definition of marriage fluid, we can make it to mean anything and then it means nothing. Why limit it to two people? Why make it consensual? Why make it lifelong? The word marriage has to mean something specific.

I prefer to not even speak of a homosexual anymore. It makes homosexual more often an aspect of the person’s identity and surely that won’t change. It becomes something innate. I will easily instead speak of a person with same-sex attraction. What is central here is that this is a person.

We must absolutely watch people who want to control our words and tell us there are things we cannot say. We have seen part of this when any monitoring is done of questions about vaccines or the 2020 election. Even if you think both of those are crazy conspiracy theories, it would be better to have them talked about and the ideas discussed. Shutting down discussion on any topic convinces more often people who think there is a cover-up.

Keep in mind that in 1984, the goal of the editing of the language was not to come up with new words. It was to eliminate as many words as possible. Control the words people say and you can control the ideas that they are allowed to think about.

The language war is essential.

No. I was not assigned male at birth. I was born that way. I could jack up my body with as many hormones as doctors say and mutilate it with surgical procedures, and I will look like I am playing a part, but it won’t change reality. Barring the return of Jesus Christ, I will die a male. Nothing will change that.

There is too much at stake. Whenever you encounter language that is meant to shape what you think, do not give an inch to it. If you have to use long and clunkier phrases, that’s fine. I would rather do that and be minorly inconvenienced than give in to fake reality and be majorly inconvenienced.

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

 

To A Friend Struggling With Faith

What do you do when you want to throw it all away? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

People on Facebook have been talking about someone who has said they just can’t believe in Christianity anymore even after years of being in apologetics and producing media on this. Now a number of people are coming out with their own views on the matter, which I understand and I don’t condemn. Some are blaming Calvinism, which I don’t care for, or presuppositionalism, which I also don’t care for, but i think there is something else going on here.

Now with so many people entering into this discussion, why am I jumping in? Do I think I have something to contribute that others do not? Indeed, I do, and this is not because of anything arrogant, but it is because of similar life circumstances. I can contribute that I have been through divorce as this person has.

Divorce is betrayal and rejection through and through. It is a pain that stabs at me every day still. Imagine what it is to think someone loves you so much that they want to share every aspect of themselves, nay, their very lives with you, and then in the end they reject you. You, the totality of you, all that is you, has been cast aside. You have been declared no longer worth it.

Now we all know theoretically that our identities should not be determined by other people, but you are a fool if you think that this doesn’t hurt. This leads to pain. Intense pain. I have said before there were times I would be ready to go to bed at night and see a bottle of Benadryl and briefly think, “You could.” I never came close, but it was there. There were some times I did think maybe I should check myself into a hospital for a few days. Again, never did.

I can say on my end, that I have a hard time today trusting people. I can say my thinking gets caught up in difficulties from time to time. I plan to date other women, but I also worry about self-control now seeing as I have been there before and as a divorced friend told me, “It’s easy to move on auto-pilot.” This is all real.  I also realize some people will look at me with a scarlet letter.

I fully understand if at those times it feels like God has abandoned you.

My friend wrote also about the Christian subculture and this is something I have the biggest problem with. People treat prayer like they can pray for an hour and it just comes so easily. People treat Scripture as a magic book and it’s such a joy to read every day and you learn something new. People talk about how you are supposed to feel as a Christian and that you are supposed to hear from God regularly and speak as if you have some secret hotline to God.

It’s individualism, and it’s a cancer in the church.

When people talk like this and suffering comes, they don’t know what to do then. After all, if your Christianity has been based on your emotions before, what happens when those emotions turn negative? When you don’t have them, what do you want? Do you want the emotions, or do you want what the emotions signify?

When I was married, there were times I had a deep feeling of love for my wife. There were also times that I did not. However, I always had a deep love for her. Today, I still want the best for her. The feeling was nice when it was there, but it wasn’t part of my diet to be expected.

What happens though if I focus more on the pointer instead of the reality the pointer pointed to? I am pursuing a feeling. It is like an addiction. If I have that feeling, then I love her. If I don’t, then I don’t. That leads to chaos. Would I want my love for my ex-wife to be based on a feeling?

The same can happen when we look at it in reverse. How do I know God loves me? If I base it on a feeling, what happens when that feeling goes away? Does God no longer love me? In the end, am I pursuing a feeling as a way of certainty?

I understand when my friend spoke about how if his son wanted comfort and to know that his Dad loved him, he would give it in a moment. I get that. It makes sense to us. It is easy to look at Matthew 7 and see about a son asking for bread or a fish. Doesn’t that apply here?

No. In Matthew 6, Jesus had been talking about food and clothing. The same is still going on in Matthew 7. Jesus is talking about provision for daily staples. This is not to say that God cannot give other things and that He doesn’t, but those are not promised.

So what if God did do what we ask and provided for us an experience of His love every time? Could we not get caught up in ourselves more? Could we not get caught up in experiences? What happens when that experience fades into the past? Do you need another hit.

The thing is, if I want to know if God loves me, and I understand that struggle, I need to trust what He has already said. It is written large in Scripture. How do I know I am one of His? Because I am trusting Him. I am not perfect, but I am striving.

What about pain? Pain can be the crucible that gets us more like Jesus. I can say that every pain I went through was horrible, when I was going through it. Years later, I look back and I am thankful I went through it. I suspect some time in the future, I will say “That divorce was horrible when I went through it, but I am a better and more holy man for it.” Hopefully, that will be when I am married to someone else. Maybe I will even have some of my own children with her.

I do want to say though that I get the silence of God. The problem is not really God, but it is a Christian subculture that is rooted in experience. Let’s also point to another sad reality about divorced people. We are quickly often isolated.

You used to do things with other people as a couple. It wasn’t you got together with your friends so much as you and your spouse got together with other couples. Those couples can like to hang out with you then, but, and I’m not saying everyone did this, when you become single, those couples can go away. Christians can also look at you in church as a lesser Christian.

Not only that, you have to explain your divorce so often to everyone. Divorce is treated like it’s the unpardonable sin and every time you have to repeat it, you live it all over again. The church is too often ready with condemnation instead of consolation. We are to mourn with those who mourn and weep with those who weep and when you are going through divorce or suffering with it, you are mourning and weeping. I am thankful some people did just that. I am thankful that I found DivorceCare. I am thankful I had people who had been divorced who walked with me through it and I hope someday I can do the same for someone else walking through divorce.

To my friend, I hope I got a lot of what is going on correct, not because I want to be right, although I do, but because I want you to understand that I can relate. I also see you are asking the question about Jesus and who He is and I think that is a great place to go. It’s really hard to say anything negative about Jesus and I think really looking at who He is is the way to go.

I also encourage you to not believe anything just to believe it. I have not done that with my Christianity. For every position I have a strong stance on, I have a litany of reasons for why I embrace it. There are some issues I don’t argue and I just don’t care about. (Calvinism vs. Arminianism being one of them.) Don’t believe anything just to be consistent or to fit in with the people or look good in popular culture.

Be real. If things suck, say they suck. If you are angry with God, be angry. No sense hiding it. If you want to cry, then cry. Mourn. I had a friend come by on my next to last day in Georgia who was in the area when I found out I had to clear out because of the divorce and he saw me bawling my eyes out and never thought less of me for it.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out and talk if you need it, and I encourage this to everyone else. Before trying to win someone back to Christianity, just be a friend. Listen. Care. Besides, I suspect if you do this right, the Christianity will fall back into place anyway.

I understand the crickets, but I am also thankful for them. They have caused me often to go back to what is more foundational and not transitory. They have pointed me to what I really believe and what it is rooted in and not being based on feelings means I have a firmer foundation I can rely on when things get hard, and they do.

Here for you, if you need me.

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

Book Plunge for Fun: Mollie McQueen Is Not Having A Baby

What do I think of Lacey London’s second novel in this series? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

The first book in this series I found intriguing enough that I wanted to go on and see where the author would go from there. Not only was the story good, but the characters were written in such a way that there seemed to be a personal investment on my part in them. In the first book, I was sure it would end positively, but I wanted to make sure the main character of Mollie saw what a disaster a divorce would be and there were a lot of good lessons about marriage along the way.

Now with this second book, many of the same characters are brought back. The investments go deeper and many loose strings are tied together. I wonder how much of this so far the author had in mind from the start.

Not only that, but with the return of the therapist figure of Evangelina Hamilton, there was also the return of a course for one of Mollie’s single friends with the goal being to find the one. I am quite certain if this course existed here and it was ran the same way, I would try to do whatever I could to sign up. Just now thinking about it, I consider it interesting the first step in the course was to get a new wardrobe, just after I went to the free Swap Shop here on campus with some friends to update my wardrobe and yes, for the same reason, to meet women.

Of course, there was material about how to behave on a date and two very opposite men doing the dating. How that turns out is going to be left for interesting readers to discover. There are a number of twists and turns one would not expect, but that make the story interesting.

The main theme though throughout is that Mollie thinks she might be pregnant and this while her husband is away on a business trip and she doesn’t want to take a pregnancy test to confirm or disprove until he returns. At the same time, she has a DIY project to do on her house and she gets the help of her brother-in-law who is trying to win the heart of her sister. How these work out is again something else I won’t spoil.

What is confusing about the main theme is that it doesn’t really read like the main theme. It’s there in the background and it looks like the main focus is on the dating course as Mollie helps one of the guys in it as his friend and sponsor. I found this story much more interesting than the baby story.

From a Christian perspective, there is a lot of good advice in here for relationships again, but Mollie does have a belief throughout about the way the universe is working things out. I often find this way of thinking so many people have odd, as if the universe, a non-personal entity, is intervening personally in the lives of people. One can say theism is nonsense if they want, but one can at least understand how a theist can see a personal deity intervening in the lives of people in the universe.

At any rate, I have started the third of five books now. I look forward to seeing what is in this one.

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

Thanks To Our Veterans

How do we honor those who have given so much? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Today is a day that we remember our Veterans. I fear in our country we are moving away from that. My boss at the post office at the seminary, which is not an official government post office, hence we are working today, and I realized just a while ago that I forgot that the mail won’t be coming in today. That saddens me that I lost track of that considering my boss and I are both very politically minded.

It’s one of the realities that it’s easy to take certain ideas for granted. We who are Americans live in a country where we can’t imagine anything being any different. Reality will always be the way it is. This country will always be here. I have no guarantee of that. One generation can change everything and more and more I get concerned that that generation has come.

But I don’t give up either. Chesterton said the last thing the pagan Roman Empire did was become Christian, and I keep hoping we could be on the verge of an awakening. Perhaps we have to hit a rock bottom. I don’t know the future, but it is a hope.

Either way, the reason we have lasted so long and any time we will last in the future is because of our veterans. If we did not have people willing to fight for this country, we could not have a country. Such people can be thankful they still can go home and be with their families, but they also have no guarantees of that when they go into battle. They can leave home and have no guarantee that they will be coming back.

I make it a point that whenever I see someone who was in the service out in the public,  I thank them for their service. The same applies to our policemen. There is utmost respect for those who are willing to take a bullet or any other form of death so I will be less likely to. It takes guts. Anyone who is entering this kind of field knows that they can lose it all.

So today, we say thank you.

Courage should be a virtue we as Americans celebrate. It was something that led to the founding of this country. Our founding fathers risked their lives so that we could live free. Signing the Declaration of Independence was essentially putting a target on them. They knew it. They did it.

We are the major beneficiaries of that action. We live in a nation of great freedom today, a freedom that must always be defended, a freedom that I fear is more and more in danger. If we take it for granted, we are only making it far more likely that we will lose it.

If you are one of our veterans reading this, thank you. If you see a veteran today, thank them. They are fine men and women who should get to enjoy a day dedicated to them.

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

(Also, I want to let anyone know that if you are interested, I have started a substack for political thoughts. There will naturally be some overlap on both sites, but the substack is a paid service and I wanted to go as cheap as I could on it which is $5 a month, but if someone becomes a Patreon at $2 a month and wants to be a subscriber, I will give a gift subscription.)

 

Book Plunge: Saturday Morning Mind Control

What do I think of Phil Phillips’s book published by Thomas Nelson? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I have been doing some studying lately in the concept of Christian paranoia over how most every new invention that comes along is something that is going to destroy our children for the next generation. The problem is this happens so many times. It is my desire to find common themes and what can be done when new mediums come up. After all, we don’t want to just follow culture everywhere and jump on every bandwagon, but at the same time we want to be wise and discerning, including with entertainment content.

Phil Phillips writes from a perspective of a therapist in dealing with the issue of TV which he often calls The Box. Certainly, Phillips’s desire is noble and can be applauded. Watch what your children are watching and be aware of it. Try to understand what is going on. He doesn’t say to throw out TV altogether, but he does encourage a vested interest in what your children are doing.

This is something I wholeheartedly agree with. While my Dad and I watch TV together often, including shows like Smallville and the Flash, and we as a family watched Monk and House and other shows like that, but when it came to games, I have often been the lone gamer in my house. Parents. If you have children who are gamers, they would like to see you take an interest in that just as much as you take an interest in your children who play sports.

On p. 54, he does say one main reason that some kids don’t become aggressive in light of what is seen on TV is because of parents. This is the most important insight in the book. It deserves to be recognized by all. If you are raising your children well and teaching them good and evil and giving them a biblical worldview especially, they are far better equipped. I have played games all my life and I am not at all an aggressive person.

However, Phillips does indeed engage in paranoia and many of the rules seem arbitrary. For instance, does a show have more than three weapons on it? If this was followed, you could not watch The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.

I also wondered throughout at times how you could explain the Bible in this position. The Bible has a lot of violence in it and yes, a lot of sexual content. We don’t grant the Bible an exception just because it’s the Bible. If we do that, we are engaging in double-standards.

Phillips does have a bibliography in the back, but the problem is many times in the book, he does not cite sources and does not tell where something is specifically found. Sometimes he will say something like “A boy said X.’ What boy is this? How can I speak to him?

He also sometimes gets his material wrong. For example, he says about Ninja Turtles and this when discussing the cartoon that Splinter was a rat and then became a humanoid rat, but fans of the show know that in the cartoon, Splinter was a human first. In the movie, he was a rat first. (82) He also says Smurfette was a male smurf who became female, but in reality, Smurfette had been created by Gargamel in the show. This is the danger of that if you get something basic wrong, why should I trust you on the others?

He is also vague on what is meant by aggression. It is never defined and sometimes it looks like it is always to be avoided. Sometimes aggression is a good thing. We need to be aggressive, but for Phillips, it looks like there is never a good time for aggression.

The same problem occurs with violence. Phillips is the kind of person who will have a problem with something like Looney Tunes and is convinced that too often children will believe everything on the box is real. Of course, this is where parents need to monitor and discuss, but eventually, children do grow up and realize these things aren’t real and just enjoy them as fantasy.

In looking at the Super Mario Brothers Super Show, which I know very well, he speaks about a three-headed snake that says “Stomp ’em, Tromp ’em, Crush ’em” and of characters being spoken of as belch brains and these are not the kinds of values we want our children to emulate. Good thing that it’s the VILLAINS who do this on the show. Would Phillips really want a show where villains show the behaviors we want to be emulated in society? (p.81)

He gets more bizarre about this show when he starts talking about occultism in cartoons and says that even Mario has a dance, which he connects dancing with the occult. You can do the Mario. You can think the Mario show is the dumbest show ever but you can look at the dance at the end easily and tell that Lou Albano is not leading children into occult practices with a dance.

He uses She-Ra as an example of how She-Ra even cries for an enemy because he was given life and wasted it. When he dies, no one would care. Honestly, this reads as if Phillips is condemning this when I find this admirable. We as Christians should all be sad for those who are given the gift of life and waste it. (120)

Phillips lists several shows he says have problematic and occult themes in them, many of which are just incredibly odd to see. My Favorite Martian should be avoided since it involves UFOs. G.I. Joe should be avoided because it’s too violent.  Other shows to be avoided for various reasons are The Munsters, Star Trek, Lost In Space, Dr. Who, Smurfs, Gummy Bears, My Little Pony, Scooby-Doo, and The Archie Comedy Hour. (125-127)

There is a little said on video games, and much of it convinces me that Phillips doesn’t understand video games well. Still, that is minor so I will save that for other works. The emphasis here is still on cartoons.

In conclusion, Phillips means well, but I think his approach will lead to only helicopter parenting instead of teaching children wise discernment skills so they can make decisions apart from their parents that will be for their true good. The goal of a parent is to work themselves out of a job. This doesn’t mean that they play no role in the lives of their children as I can still talk to my parents regularly and go to them for advice, but I certainly don’t need them to make decisions for me anymore, as it should be.

Christians. Avoid paranoia. The problem is not the medium. The problem is discernment.

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

Book Plunge: Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America

What do I think of Jeff Ryan’s book published by Portfolio? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I like to listen to audio books while I’m out walking around and I am always interested in learning books about the gaming industry, something I’ve been a part of all my life. This one was a book about the invention of Super Mario and what he has done since then. The book goes through several chapters and many of them have a name that is a reference to a Mario game, though certainly not the focus of that chapter, a rather punny idea.

Mario is in many ways the unlikely hero in the book. Imagine you had a blank slate before you and you were sitting down to create a hero. What would you make? Someone like Batman, Superman, the Hulk, Iron Man, etc. is understandable. How many people went with pudgy little plumber in overalls that can jump on enemies’ heads and throw fireballs?

Yet that is what was created.

Of course, the first major game we think of with Mario was Donkey Kong. Mario had other games even before Super Mario Brothers and even Mario Brothers, but Donkey Kong had him there as the main protagonist largely going by Jumpman. Then a shock came in the sequel, Donkey Kong Jr., where it turned out that Mario was the villain.

From there, Mario went on to star in Super Mario Brothers and the world could not get enough of the plumber or his family. The story is the same for the most part, but the adventures keep changing. Bowser kidnaps the Princess. Mario goes and rescues her. Sometimes there have been variations of this, most notably Super Mario Brothers 2 which was a remake of Doki Doki Panic with Mario added in, and also even Super Mario RPG where Bowser and Mario joined forces to rescue the Princess and even after rescuing her, joined forces to defeat the villain Smithy.

For good or evil, Mario is stuck with Nintendo and Nintendo is stuck with him. Mario has far more games to his credit than anyone else and it’s easy for Nintendo to slip out a remade Mario game even years or decades later and still have it sell like hotcakes. Mario has arrived branded on everything and if there is any athlete who has the name Mario, what nickname does he get? Super Mario.

Ryan in this book takes us through all this history including the war with Sega and then after that, the battle against Sony and Xbox. It stops shortly after the Wii. I found this interesting saying the future would definitely have to include consoles with bodily motion involved and yet the next big one after the WiiU that Nintendo made was the Switch. This I consider a wise move since Nintendo has had great success in the portable market and the Switch combines both of them.

Mario is a hero for everyman. He doesn’t really excel at anything, aside from perhaps his ability to jump, but he is still the guy who is unlikely and yet going out every day to save the Princess and battle a lizard king who is often much bigger than he is. (Especially since so many games end now with a giant Bowser.) Mario has indeed conquered America.

If you are a fan of gaming, I recommend getting this one. If you want to know about the history of Mario, I also recommend this. I found this a quite enjoyable read and wanted to listen to it more and more. For we who are Christians, it reminds me we need to be in the gaming market as well and producing good games people, not just Christians, will want to play. We don’t need to create some fantastic superhero with an incredible story. An ordinary plumber can do.

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

 

Things To Remember On Election Day

What should we keep in mind today? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

So as we go out and vote in America today, here are some points I want to keep in mind.

First, we should be wary about the possibility of marrying our theology to our politics. Everyone wants their side to win, but it does not mean that if our side loses, then that means the end has come. Now it could be that God is bringing judgment by corrupt political leaders and so God’s will is still being done. However, the great danger we can think is that if our side doesn’t win, then it’s game over.

Let’s keep something in mind. Even if America were to fall someday, and most great nations do, the gospel will go on just fine. America needs the gospel, but the gospel doesn’t need America. The gospel will go on just fine. It could be surprising to consider, but some great locations where the gospel could be central could be a Middle Eastern nation or even China. In countries where the church is persecuted, it tends to rise up more and more and get stronger.

Second, do go and vote. You can go and play your part and you have that freedom in this country. Just consider how much it would have meant to early Christians under wicked Roman rulers if they could somehow vote out of office a particularly brutal Caesar and replace him with someone who would be kinder to their cause. Our freedom to vote is a great gift in America.

Third, whatever the outcome of today, Jesus is still on the throne. Perhaps you get the leaders you wanted. Okay. Consider it a blessing and then go and do the work of the gospel. Suppose instead the other side wins. That just means the challenge level has been upped and the church can prosper under persecution.

Fourth, this also means that whatever happens, your marching orders have stayed the same. Are you still called to go and spread the gospel in some way? Yes. Are you to love your neighbor as yourself still? Yes. Are you called to be a servant of Christ still? Yes.

One thing i try to avoid in any case is fearmongering. To get into my politics a little bit, when the Coronavirus came about, I made it a point to not buy into hysteria over it. I still see that as a wise choice. I try now to actively avoid places that still require wearing a mask.

Fear is something that a lot of us are addicted to. We have a steady diet of fear that is given to us and when people are afraid, they’re much more easily to fall to whatever is told them. This can often lead to some kind of disaster being created and then the party talking about that disaster is insistent that their solution is the only solution to it and if you don’t agree with that, then you don’t care about the cause.

Go out, vote, pray for he best, but remember Jesus is on the throne still and your marching orders are still the same.

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

Hard To Love

Who is it hard to love? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I was at the New Orleans library Saturday to pick up some books for research purposes. While there, I saw a book by Joyce Meyer on display about loving people who are hard to love. That idea stuck with me a bit, You want to know who is hard to love?

You are.

Yes. You.

Look at yourself. Look at all your faults and failures. Look at all your annoying habits and quirks. Look at all the ways you can regularly mess things up and hurt those around you. You are hard to love.

“Not I! I am a great person! I am easy to love!”

If you think that, you are a prideful person and, well, hard to love then.

“Okay. So thanks for slamming me in your blog. You’re not any better!”

Absolutely right! As someone in the dating sphere now, I do think about that. Sure, I have friends who point out my positive traits but there’s a lot of negatives. I don’t know anyone who goes out there saying “I would really like to find a nerdy theological gaming apologist on the spectrum in his 40’s.” I could list a number of my faults and annoying quirks. I know I am a very hard person to love.

Yet here’s something else. I have said that because of so many negative traits others have, we have a hard time loving them. It would seem then that if we eliminated those traits, then people would be easy to love. Right?

Well how about Jesus?

Is He easy to love? If He was, we would all do a whole lot better at keeping His commandments. We don’t. We struggle and sin against Him every day. At those times, we love ourselves more than we love Jesus, and we ourselves are very hard to love.

Also, if Jesus was easy to love, everyone would have done so. However, Jesus got crucified. People who are loved by everyone do not get crucified. Jesus is the best person who ever walked this Earth, and He is hard to love.

Naturally, this goes to the Trinity entirely. Every person of the Trinity is hard to love. If they were easy to love, the history of Israel would be quite different. If God was easy for us to love, we wouldn’t have all the struggles of the flesh that we constantly have. However, we regularly fail in our love for God.

So let’s review here. We have said that people like ourselves are hard to love because of all our faults and failures. We have also said that God is hard to love, despite Him having no faults and failures. It seems that it is hard to love everyone. Yet what is the common reason that makes it hard to love people?

Us.

When we fail to love someone, it is not because of a deficiency in them, no matter how real that deficiency is. It is because of one in us. Can’t love your neighbor? Your neighbor might need to change and in reality, they definitely do, but it is not their fault if you find them hard to love. It is yours.

That’s also good news because that means it is yours to change. It is your power to repent and seek to change and learn to love. You learn to love others, yourself, and God.

Admitting the problem is the first step. It is you. It is me. We are the ones that we can change the most and we need to get started.

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