Anglican Mainstream

By Albert Mohler

Professor Giberson asserts that to believe in the truthfulness and historicity of the entire Bible is to paddle in an “intellectual backwater.” Christians committed to biblical authority should ponder that statement deeply, even as they keep paddling.

The folks at BioLogos continue with a fierce intensity to press their case for theistic evolution. In so doing, they are making the arguments that are essential to their case that Christianity and evolutionary theory are compatible. The arguments they are now making are integral to their cause, and they are amazingly, even breathtakingly candid.

In a recent article series responding to atheistic scientist Jerry Coyne, Professor Karl Giberson of Eastern Nazarene College rejects Coyne’s insistence that evolution precludes theism. Coyne, one of Darwin’s most ardent defenders, seems to operate under the quaint idea that Christians are marked by belief in an interventionist God and a confidence that the Bible is true.

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By Hilary White, LifeSite News

In unscripted remarks in his opening day address to the Synod of Bishops of the Middle East on Monday, Pope Benedict XVI denounced “forms of life touted by the public opinion today for which values like marriage count for nothing” as “false divinities that must be unmasked” and thrown down.

Pope Benedict linked the destruction of marriage with religiously-motivated terrorism and drugs. “Today, marriage does not count and chastity is no longer a virtue,” he said. “The power of terrorist ideologies that carry out violence in the name of god, anonymous (financial) capitals that dehumanize man, drugs … These ideologies that dominate and that are imposed forcefully are false divinities that must be unmasked, because they are not God,” the pope said.

“These gods must fall, and must become what is written in the letter to the Ephesians: Dominion and powers fall and become subjects to the one Lord Jesus Christ.”

Benedict is well known for frequently adding off-the-cuff remarks in his addresses that experienced Vatican watchers have learned often reflect the pope’s most essential ideas.

He warned the assembled Middle East Catholic bishops, “Outward foundations falter because the inner foundations falter, the foundations of moral and religious faith from which the right way to live follows. And we know that faith is the foundation and, ultimately, the foundations of the earth can not falter, if faith, the true wisdom, remains firm.”

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From Jackie at StandFirm 

It’s one of the more famous Bible stories. While fleeing from their Egyptian masters, the Israelites reach a dead end at the Red Sea and are almost assured death or a return to slavery. But, the story in Exodus goes, God parted the waters allowing the Israelites to cross, and collapsed the waters on the Egyptians when they tried to use the same passage.

Now, according to new computer analysis from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the miracle may not be as impossible as some detractors think. The study, published today in the online journal PLoS ONE, finds that strong, persistent winds could offer a physical explanation for the event. 

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By Stephen Glover, Mailonline

[...]  This was a much more successful visit than the Roman Catholic hierarchy had dared to hope.

But I have a feeling it was more than that. In a manner wholly unlike our home-grown clerics, the Pope spoke to the soul of our country, affirming eternal moral verities which our own political and religious leaders normally prefer to avoid.

In essence, he has been asking us to examine what kind of country we want this to be.

He warned Britain not to lose sight of its Christian heritage in its ‘multi-cultural’ and ‘aggressively secular’ modern society.

Politicians should not try to ‘silence’ religion by discouraging public celebration of its most important festivals, notably Christmas.

Nor should they enact legislation which forces Christians to act against their consciences.

He reminded us that ‘Britain stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God’, and reflected how it was ‘deeply moving to recall how many of your fellow citizens sacrificed their lives’.

The excesses of secularism and the perils of ‘atheist extremism’ were themes to which he returned again and again.

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From the Iona Institute

A new poll in The Irish Times today finds that 57pc of the public believe that cohabitation before marriage results in more stable marriages. However, the facts show the opposite, namely that couples who live together before they marry are a third more likely to divorce than those who don’t live together first.

By Kathleen Gilbert, LifeSite News

All legal recognition of "alternative" means of pursuing a family life, such as homosexual "marriage" and civil union laws, threatens to undermine the true model of marriage as the permanent bond of one man and one woman for the procreation of children, said Pope Benedict XVI on Monday.

The pontiff said that “the Church sees with concern the growing attempt to eliminate the Christian concept of marriage and family from the consciousness of society."

"The Church can not approve legislative initiatives involving a reappraisal of alternative models of married life and family. They contribute to the weakening of the principles of natural law and so the relativization of all legislation and also the confusion about values in society," said the pontiff in an address to the new German ambassador to the Holy See.

The pope said that, "Marriage is manifested as a lasting union of love between a man and a woman, which is also always oriented toward the transmission of human life," noting that such a bond "requires a certain maturity of the person and a fundamental social and existential attitude."

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By Professor John Lennox, Mailonline

There's no denying that Stephen Hawking is intellectually bold as well as physically heroic. And in his latest book, the renowned physicist mounts an audacious challenge to the traditional religious belief in the divine creation of the universe.

According to Hawking, the laws of physics, not the will of God, provide the real explanation as to how life on Earth came into being. The Big Bang, he argues, was the inevitable consequence of these laws 'because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.'

Unfortunately, while Hawking's argument is being hailed as controversial and ground-breaking, it is hardly new.

For years, other scientists have made similar claims, maintaining that the awesome, sophisticated creativity of the world around us can be interpreted solely by reference to physical laws such as gravity.

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By N T Wright, Touchstone

Reflections on a Master Apologist After 60 Years

I once found myself working closely, in a cathedral fundraising campaign, with a local millionaire. He was a self-made man. When I met him he was in his 60s, at the top of his game as a businessman, and was chairing our Board of Trustees. To me, coming from the academic world, he was a nightmare to work with.

He never thought in (what seemed to me) straight lines; he would leap from one conversation to another; he would suddenly break into a discussion and ask what seemed a totally unrelated question. But after a while I learned to say to myself: Well, it must work, or he wouldn’t be where he is. And that was right. We raised the money. We probably wouldn’t have done it if I’d been running the Trust my own way.

A Great Debt

I have something of the same feeling on re-reading C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. I owe Lewis a great debt. In my late teens and early twenties I read everything of his I could get my hands on, and read some of his paperbacks and essays several times over. There are sentences, and some whole passages, I know pretty much by heart.

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Shofar Joburg newsletter editorial

Lately, the strangest thing has been happening to me. I keep seeing children in the faces of adults I pass by.

Now I don't mean this in a freaky "I see dead people" kind of way. It's more like God has baptised my eyes with grace so that when looking at a drunk beggar on a street corner, or someone being bundled into the back of a police van I see in their faces a 6-year-old child. But I really SEE it. I see a little face filled with hope, innocence and promise and my heart at once swells, and crashes, with such compassion and such pain. I see a little one who lost hope, who was suffocated by the forces of this world.

I thought it was just my imagination at first. Until, while watching a secular TV series, I heard the cop in the show saying how when she shoots someone, at the point of death she sees not the face of a hardened criminal but of a small child, about 6-years-old, looking at her as if to say "Why, why did you do this to me?". Her partner responded by saying that it's the hardest thing in their line of work, to know that every bad man you shoot was once someone's little boy.

And then in a Philip Yancey book I read about how when God looks at us He sees his children. Something clicked inside of me.

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In June Wayne Grudem will be in the UK to encourage biblical thinking about why and how Christians should speak out on moral issues. The tour comes at a time when Christian beliefs are increasingly squeezed to the margins

From Christian Institute

Thursday  24 June
5.30pm – 7.00pm
London
St Helen’s Bishopsgate (EC3A 6AT) (1)

Friday  25 June
7.30pm – 9.15pm
Liverpool
Bridge Chapel (L19 4XR)

Saturday  26 June
10am – 1.30pm
Sheffield
Christ Church Fulwood (S10 3RT)

Monday  28 June
10am – 1.30pm
Cambridge
Eden Baptist Church (CB1 1ER)

Tuesday  29 June
7.30pm – 9.15pm
Peterborough with Stuart Townend (2)
Kings Gate (PE1 4YT)

Wednesday 30 June
7.45pm – 9.15pm
Chessington with Stuart Townend  (2)
The King’s Centre (KT9 2GZ)

1 Event will follow the Evangelical Ministry Assembly (EMA).

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[...] Singer, it seems, finally falls foul of the problem which affects many atheists, that they just do not want to act like one. A world without human beings is, for Singer (if you’ll pardon the pun) inconceivable, even if the only justification for its continuation is the blind hope that “things can only get better”.

By Karen McVeigh, Guardian

The campaign, which aims to reach 40 million people, shows a scan of a foetus with a halo above its head. It will feature on billboards over Christmas and reads: "He's on his way: Christmas starts with Christ."

From The Telegraph

An ultrasound picture of Jesus in the womb – complete with halo – is to be used for a Christmas advertising campaign.

The ChurchAds.net image, with the words ''He's on his way'' is the latest in a series of Christian Christmas advertising campaigns and follows an image last year of the nativity as a bus stop.

Francis Goodwin, chairman of ChurchAds, said: ''This is the kind of thing proud 'parents-to-be' show their friends and family – passing round the scan of the baby, or even pinning it up in the office.

''Our poster reflects this new way of announcing the news of a new arrival and places the birth of Christ in an ultra-contemporary context.''

The Rt Rev Stephen Cottrell, the Bishop of Reading, said: ''For many parents pregnancy gets real when you see the image from the ultrasound scan. It tells you something is actually kicking off.

''We've got so used to the tinsel wrapped cosiness of the carefully packaged 21st century consumer-fest Christmas, that its astonishing reality – an actual pregnancy, a God come down to Earth – is easily missed".

By Dennis Prager, Front Page Magazine

One of the many beliefs — i.e., non-empirically based doctrines — of the post-Christian West has been that moral progress is the human norm, especially so with the demise of religion. In a secular world, the self-described enlightened thinking goes, superstition is replaced by reason, and reason leads to the moral good.

Of course, it turned out that the post-Christian West produced considerably more evil than the Christian world had. No mass cruelty in the name of Christianity approximated the vastness of the cruelty unleashed by secular doctrines and regimes in the post-Christian world. The argument against religion that more people have been killed in the name of religion than by any other doctrine is false propaganda on behalf of secularism and Leftism.

The amount of evil done by Christians — against, for example, “heretics” and Jews — in both the Western and Eastern branches of Christianity — was extensive, as was the failure of most European Christians to see Nazism for the evil that it was. The good news is that Christian evils have been acknowledged and addressed by most Christian leaders and thinkers.

But there were never any Christian Auschwitzes — i.e., systematic genocides of every man, woman and child of a particular race or religion. Nor were there Christian Gulags — the shipping of millions of innocents to conditions so horrific that prolonged suffering leading to death was the almost -inevitable end.

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From Premier Christian Radio

Peter Hitchens is a writer and regular columnist for the Mail on Sunday. Unlike his atheist brother Christopher, Peter is a committed Christian having himself been an atheist in younger years.

His new book "The Rage Against God" challenges the anti-theism of his brother and the 'new atheism', taking as its starting point a debate they both took part in two years ago.

He debates with atheist Adam Rutherford, a scientific broadcaster and writer, on whether society can function without a God-given moral compass at its centre. They cover issues such as faith, secularism, the church, atheist states and abortion in this wide ranging discussion.

Listen here

From Ruth Gledhill, Timesonline  By Clifford Longley

All three party leaders carefully explained to the nation, half way through one of the live television debates before the election, where they disagreed the Pope.

The fact that they all felt it necessary to give this particular demonstration of 'not doing God', to adapt Alistair Campbell’s famous interruption when Tony Blair was asked a question about his faith, perhaps confirms that they shared Mr Blair’s fear that to speak otherwise was to risk being branded a 'nutter' – or worse still, of offending the aggressive secularism of the London metrosexual intelligentsia by being seen as pro-Catholic.

More to the point, however, they didn’t tell the nation how much they agreed with the Pope, which would have been more interesting.

They didn’t say they’d all had copies of Choosing the Common Good, a pre-election document from the Catholic bishops of England and Wales, or that all three had responded warmly to it.   Read here

By Fr Edward Tomlinson

History teaches that placing complete trust in man-made philosophy has terrible consequences. Joseph Stalin proves this point for he did not set out to be a tyrant but to create a better world. Indeed he was so completely convinced that socialism was the way in which to create utopia on earth that he grew blind to all and any other perspectives…it is this that led to his downfall.

In sophisticated language we would say he became a ‘millenarian’ –one who believed he could usher in a period of peace and prosperity through a great political shift. We might also call him a ‘Gnostic’ for his belief that he and other ‘enlightened’ souls could usher in a higher state of being. And so he dedicated himself to establishing socialism in his native land and in the early days he was happy. Decay only arrived when Stalin was forced to face failure. When utopia was not established he, and those he had convinced, grew deeply frustrated. Unable and unwilling to concede that socialism was the problem and thus blind to truth they created a scapegoat and it was this that led to dire misery and death in the dastardly gulags.

We love to think that the left and right wings of politics are radically different but that is simply not true. Both are man made philosophies and both are unable to create utopia on earth because that demands the transformation of multiple souls, something I would argue requires deep, personal and living faith. Which explains why, in Adolf Hitler, we can tell an almost identical story to that of Joseph Stalin. He too found a political system (albeit very different to Stalin’s) that captivated his imagination and made him blind and deaf to other perspectives. He too persecuted all dissenters of his creed and he too was at first happy to usher in his brave new world. But predictably he also grew deeply frustrated when utopia never materialised and so he made the Jews his scapegoat and the horrors of Auswitch became a reality.

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They tell the truth but do not rant at abortionists and gay rights activists. They control their tongues and lungs not because killing babies and killing marriage is right, but because their goal is to change hearts.

Third brothers ask pointed questions, and here are ones for each of us to answer:  Am I a younger, elder, or third brother? Can we, through God's grace, leave behind elder- and younger-brotherism?

A classic from Marvin Olasky World Magazine (28 February 2009)

Part of the evangelical problem is knowing which brother we are, 

As Tim Keller points out in The Prodigal God (Dutton, 2008), the parable of the prodigal son should have a plural in its name: sons. We all know of the younger brother's libertine living, but the elder brother has a more subtle problem: He is self-righteous and lacks joy.  Read here

A wickedly witty satire, The Loser Letters: A Comic Tale of Life, Death and Atheism chronicles the conversion of a young adult Christian to atheism. Amid the many current books arguing for or against religion, social critic, and writer Mary Eberstadt's The Loser Letters is truly unique: a black comedy about theism and atheism that is simultaneously a rollicking defense of Christianity.

…So You see, one other reason for my own former resistance to Secularism and Atheism – and a big reason why many other believers resist us too – was just this: it seemed plain as the ring in my nose that the so-called Sexual Revolution, which is celebrated to a man (again, not a typo; more on that later too) by every Atheist, turned out not to be the benign bacchanal everyone said it would be; it was not the nonstop party of so many panting descriptions; it was not even the "Love Shack" of the B-52's; it was instead, from the point of view of many of the believers, proof that Secular so-called morality once unleashed would do some real damage in the world.

I mean, even Christians can count on their fingers, You know, about things like the number of peers from broken homes who seemed to have "issues" that the ones from intact homes didn't; the number of girlfriends unhappy about their abortions, their sexually transmitted diseases, their inability to treat men as dispos-ably as they were treated themselves; the number of men who turned out to make particularly crappy boyfriends because they'd been around the block one or ten or twenty too many times; the number of marriages split by the kinds of things consenting adults do when they're consenting with people outside of it – all just for instance.

Does any of this sound familiar? I'm sure it doesn't, because it's a part of sexual reality that Atheists never mention! But that's exactly why I'm harping on it. If our Movement is really going to go around arguing that the sooner we get rid of all those rules, the happier humanity is going to be, we're going to get blown away by this kind of counterevidence. Read here

From The Christian Institute

In June Wayne Grudem will be in the UK to encourage biblical thinking about why and how Christians should speak out on moral issues. The tour comes at a time when Christian beliefs are increasingly squeezed to the margins.

Wayne Grudem is the author of bestselling Systematic Theology and is prominent in the ESV Bible translation team. Sign up today to receive reminders about events on his UK tour.

Details here