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Review: The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Part IV

Published by Thainamu June 26, 2008 in Book Reviews. 4 Comments

Part 4 of 4 - Appendix on Bioethics and my reflections

Links to earlier parts of this review: Part I, Part II, Part III

Francis S. Collins ends his book with an Appendix chapter about bioethics, especially bioethics relating specifically to the rapid progress in understanding of the human genome. He talks about his first hand experience in dealing with an extended family who were part of an experiment to isolate the gene for a certain type of breast cancer. We all think that an understanding of genetics could do wonders for treating disease, but the non-medical implications that the families and doctors had to deal with in this case were considerable. For instance, should a woman have a preemptive double mastectomy if she learns she has the bad gene? Should children be tested, and what should their options be? How does one deal with “survivor guilt” when one sister has the bad gene and the other doesn’t?

He goes on to other issues that come up when we can learn about our own genetic predispositions to disease. Some examples: Who gets access to our genetic info, and what will they be allowed to do with it? Would insurance companies discriminate on whom they will cover? Will our life-style change if we learn about our own predispositions?

He covers cloning in detail, and devotes a few pages to the “when does life begin” question. He brings up a case that I personally have seen, where Christians who believe that life begins at conception turn a blind eye to the process of in vitro fertilization which often destroys embryos and most certainly leaves thousands in frozen limbo.

Lastly, he talks about the idea of “my genes made me do it.” He presents evidence that, yes, there are psychological traits that statistically do run in families, but strongly puts forth that these traits are “genetically influenced, but not hardwired.”

My Reflections on the Book
First of all, in regard to this appendix, I’ve often felt like, for several decades, humans have had the scientific and technological expertise to create situations way beyond their ability to deal with the implications of those situations. The burgeoning field of genetic medicine is just one more example of this. At this rate, I wonder what things my grandchildren will have to deal with–probably things I can’t even imagine.

I very much enjoyed reading this book and re-reading it as I wrote this review. I had known of Collins’s work for some years, so it was good to read his autobiographical story. I suppose the big idea that I come away with is that which I wrote about in part 3, my views on the creation of the world. This book has given me cause to think that maybe an interpretation of Genesis 1-2 that is not literal would be possible without doing damage to one’s faith in scripture or the saving work of Christ.

Ironically, my father comes to mind. He was not a believer during my growing up and teen years (though he always attended church as a way to shut my mother up). He was not an educated man, just high school, but he liked to read the newspaper. I remember having some weird conversations with him as he read news items about finding humanoid fossils, etc. He believed the scientists, and that made him more disbelieve what he was hearing at church. He was one of those people for whom a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 was a stumbling block to faith.

A final green-light thought that reading this book brought me to: if evolution is true and continuing, I wonder what would happen if humans manipulate the world such that the unfit will survive as well as (or instead of) the fit?

Review: The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Part III

Published by Thainamu June 16, 2008 in General and Book Reviews. 14 Comments

Part 3 of 4 - Faith in Science, Faith in God

Part 1 of this review may be found here and part 2 here.

The third main section of the book gets to the nitty-gritty of the current controversies that we hear so much about when Christians (or atheists) get together to talk about evolution and faith in a personal God.

Chapter 6 starts as an introduction and retells the story of Galileo who suffered under the church for daring to accept the Copernican idea of a heliocentric solar system. Collins’s point is that even though Ecclesiastes 1:5 actually says “The sun rises and the sun sets, and then hurries back to where it rises” that doesn’t mean we have to throw out either the Bible or science because it was discovered that the earth actually goes around the sun. Of course, his next point is that he thinks many Christians are doing just that when it comes to evolution.

Chapters 7-10 were the most interesting to me. They are a discourse on four different responses to the way people think about the theory of evolution and faith in God, with a chapter dedicated to each:

Chapter 7–Option 1: Atheism and Agnosticism (When Science Trumps Faith) Collins is not all that sympathetic with today’s aggressive atheists. He never speaks unkindly, but he comes down pretty hard on the likes of Richard Dawkins whom he thinks gives evolution a bad name. He points out that one of Dawkins’s favorite ploys when ragging on Christians is to set up a straw man which he then attacks with such relish that one wonders if there isn’t a personal, rather than scientific, agenda hidden in his attacks. After all, pure science would know better than to speak about a topic–the existence of God–that it cannot prove or disprove with its own methods. Collins points out that evolution has become the current touchstone of atheism after its own evolution starting with materialism in the Enlightenment, then rebellion against governmental-religious authority in the 18th century, to Sigmund Freud’s thinking that the idea of God is just wishful thinking. Collins does not put evolution in the same bucket with atheism though many Christians do.

Collins is somewhat more sympathetic to agnostics, granting that at least agnosticism is entirely compatible with evolution as a scientific theory. However, he thinks that many agnostics are that simply because they have been too lazy to make a full consideration of the evidence for and against a belief in God.

Chapter 8–Option 2: Creationism (When Faith Trumps Science) I will have to admit that this chapter may have been the most meaningful to me in some ways because I am one of many evangelical believers who was taught as a young child that if you don’t believe in a literal reading of Genesis 1 and 2, then you’re going to hell. Collins speaks to Creationists–specifically, Young Earth Creationists–with kindness and compassion and yet says their position is entirely untenable from a scientific point of view. He gets right to the crux of the matter when he says that Creationists first and foremost are serious about their faith and about the Bible, and that they are concerned that accepting non-literal interpretations of Bible would be the top of the slippery slope into disbelief. One very interesting point he makes is that the ultra literal interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 has arisen in the last 100 years largely as a reaction to Darwinian evolution.

I consider myself to be a strong evangelical believer, and I have a scientific mind too (though I am not a trained scientists, just an armchair one). Therefore I found this quote rather striking, seeing myself to some degree (from page 177):

Young people brought up in homes and churches that insist on Creationism sooner or later encounter the overwhelming scientific evidence in favor of an ancient universe and the relatedness of all living things through the process of evolution and natural selection. What a terrible and unnecessary choice they then face! To adhere to the faith of their childhood, they are required to reject a broad and rigorous body of scientific data, effectively committing intellectual suicide. Presented with no other alternative than Creationism, is it any wonder many of these young people turn away from faith, concluding that they simply cannot believe in a God who would ask them to reject what science has so compellingly taught us about the natural world?

Chapter 9–Option 3: Intelligent Design (When Science Needs Divine Help) Collins points out that the Intelligent Design movement (ID) is only 15 years old and its emergence coincided with a series of judicial defeats to the teaching of creationism in US schools. Even so, Collins says that from his viewpoint as an evangelical believer and a biologist, the movement deserves a good look. Collins reviews the main ideas of ID, and talks quite a bit about Michael Behe’s work.

He ends up rejecting ID for reasons both scientific and theological. His scientific objects are that without a time machine, the idea that irreducible complexity was brought on by an intelligent creator is unverifiable. He then gives a few technical examples where irreducible complexity has actually later been proven to be reducible. Theologically, he rejects ID because it is a God of the gaps idea, where God is asked to step in in places where science has thus far failed. He also thinks that ID portrays God as a clumsy creator, having to intervene at times to fix up the work he started in the past but didn’t quite get right.

In summary, Collins says that “The warm embrace of ID by believers, particularly by evangelical Christians, is completely understandable, given the way in which Darwin’s theory has been portrayed by some outspoken evolutionists as demanding atheism.” Yet he rejects it.

Chapter 10–BioLogos (Science and Faith in Harmony) It was some years after becoming a believer that Collins came to the point where the shrill voices of the points of view of the previous three chapters persuaded him to grapple with the controversies himself. This time came when he was in the thick of studying genomes and observing how interrelated all living things were at a molecular level:

I found this elegant evidence of the relatedness of all living things an occasion of awe, and came to see this as the master plan of the same Almighty who caused the universe to come into being and its physical parameters just precisely right to allow the creation of stars, planets, heavy elements, and life itself.

His position is called theistic evolution, but he wants to call it BioLogos instead. (There may be problems with the term ‘theistic evolution’ but I doubt his new name will catch on.) He gives a list of six things that generally define a theistic evolutionist starting with an ex-nihilo creation and ending with humans who have a spiritual and moral nature.

He readily agrees that theistic evolution cannot prove that God is real–saying no logical argument can do that–but he finds this position the most satisfying way to be both a scientist and a believer in the Christian God. Again he takes up the matter of reading Genesis 1 and 2 as some kind of figurative language instead of as “an elementary textbook of astronomy, geology, biology and anthropology.” And while he does posit a non-literal reading of certain passages of scripture, he doesn’t go along with “liberal theology that eviscerates the real truths of faith.” He ends the chapter with “The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshiped in the cathedral or in the laboratory.”

Chapter 11 ends this section and is again more autobiographical. Collins relates stories of God’s work in his life and gives a more detailed personal testimony of his journey out of atheism into a personal faith in the Christian God who forgives sins.

Next week, the last part of this review which will cover his appendix on bioethics.

Review: The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Part I

Published by Thainamu May 28, 2008 in Book Reviews. 11 Comments

The Language of God: a scientist presents evidence for belief
by Francis S. Collins
Free Press, Simon and Schuster
2006, 295 pages
Amazon link

Part 1 of 4 - Introduction and the Chasm Between Science and Faith

Most of you have probably heard of Francis Collins. If you haven’t heard of him as a evangelical Christian who believes in evolution, at least you’ve heard of him as the head of the Human Genome Project. His list of degrees, accomplishments and publications is impressive from a purely secular view, but his story of how he came to faith as an adult and how he relates faith to the study of human genetics is impressive too. The title of his book comes from a speech given by then President Bill Clinton on June 26, 2000 when it was announced that the first draft of the human genome had been assembled. Clinton said,

Today we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God’s most divine and sacred gift.

Chapter 1 of this book is Collins’s autobiographic tale of how he came to faith. Collins’s parents were homeschooling free thinkers. Growing up only vaguely aware of the idea of God, he began college as a lazy agnostic (”In fact, my assertion of ‘I don’t know’ was really more along the lines of ‘I don’t want to know.’” p.16) and gradually became a full-fledged atheist while studying physical chemistry at Yale. After taking a course in biochemistry he got excited about studying medicine and found a way to combine his love of mathematics with his new interest in medicine by studying genetics. At the age of 26, a patient asked him about his religious beliefs. This question haunted him until he felt compelled to make a full investigation into religion, fully expecting to find no rational reasons to believe and thus to reaffirm his atheism. He dug into a survey of the world’s religions and eventually made a visit to a local Methodist preacher who gave him a copy of CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity.

Lewis’s point that struck closest home to Collins was the discussion of right and wrong and the moral law. Collins returns to this idea often throughout his book–that man has something inside of him that knows there is a right and a wrong. (One negative reviewer pointed out that Collins should have mentioned that recent ideas in evolutionary biology claim this perhaps universal idea of the existence of right and wrong is just one more thing evolution has brought the human race.) It was the realization that the moral law points to a God and that this God is holy which soon led to his conversion:

I had started this journey of intellectual exploration to confirm my atheism. That now lay in ruins as the argument from the Moral Law (and many other issues) forced me to admit the plausibility of the God hypothesis. Agnosticism, which had seemed like a safe second-place haven, now loomed like the great cop-out it often is. Faith in God now seemed more rational than disbelief. (p.30)

Chapter 2 was written for skeptics. Collins gives a brief and very readable explanation about how he worked through each of these four rather common objections we hear from unbelievers:

Isn’t the idea of God just wishful thinking?
What about the horrible things have been done in the name of God and religion?
How could a loving God allow so much suffering in the world?
How can a rational person believe in miracles?

Next week: Part 2 of 4 - The great questions of human existence

The Next American Civil War

Published by Kenneth Martens May 21, 2008 in Politics and Book Reviews. 27 Comments

Empire cover art Empire, by Orson Scott Card
Tor Books, 2006
352 pages
Amazon.com link

Spoiler warning: This article discusses plot details about Orson Scott Card’s novel Empire. If you intend to read the book and don’t wish to know too much about what happens, you may wish to skip this article.

What will spark the next American civil war? That was the question posed to science fiction writer Orson Scott Card by Donald Mustard of Chair Entertainment. Chair wanted to develop a game based around an American civil war, and asked Card to figure out how that war might happen. Card gave it a shot. The result was Empire, a thriller novel published in 2006.

The Blue and the Red
Card looked at America. He found no divisions that have “the geographic clarity of the Mason-Dixon line.” But civil wars need no boundaries. The greatest division in America today is liberal vs. conservative, Democrat vs. Republican, blue states vs. red states. That’s the conflict that flares into a shooting war in Empire.

But, as Card knows, blue states aren’t really blue and red states aren’t really red. The divide only grows distinct when we compare urban centers to the rural areas. Urban blue, rural red. With this kind of geographical dispersal throughout the United States, a shooting war isn’t likely to happen spontaneously. No, it requires a conspiracy.

The Conspiracy
Here’s how it happens in Empire. A liberal billionaire (think George Soros) secretly finances a private military. He bides his time, waiting to overthrow the US government. Meanwhile, a disaffected Army general plans his own right-wing coup. When unknown terrorists assassinate the President and Vice-President, the general seizes the opportunity; but his move is premature and the coup fails. In response, the liberal militia invades and occupies New York City, declares the US government to be illegitimate, and claims to be the only true government of the people. To avoid civilian casualties, the new US President (formerly Speaker of the House, as per the rules of succession) opts not to send the US military into New York City. The nation endures a tense standoff between the revolutionary forces and the US government; every day that the standoff continues, more liberal states and cities pass resolutions recognizing the rebellion as the legitimate government of the US.

Could it really happen?
Card’s basic premise is that the left-right divide in America is sufficient to lead to civil war. But is this realistic? I think not. Even Card recognizes that the average American isn’t radical enough to wish his political enemies dead. Most Republican don’t think that Democrats are evil, and vice versa. That plays out in Empire. The only significant violence is caused by the private militia that invades New York City. There is no massive violence and bloodshed between Americans. The rest of the nation sits around waiting to see what happens; a few city councils and state governments pass resolutions, but nobody takes up arms. Republicans don’t murder their Democratic neighbors. Liberals don’t lynch conservatives. In the end, after the rebellion collapses, the Republicans and Democrats even get together and–in a show of bipartisanship–nominate the same man for President.

Neither left nor right
If the left-right divide is the biggest problem in America today, the nation is strong. Is there anything that could flare into civil war in America? I can’t think of anything. Do you have any ideas?

Terror in the Mind of God

Published by Kenneth Martens May 8, 2008 in Religion and Book Reviews. 14 Comments

Terror in the Mind of God cover art Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, by Mark Juergensmeyer
University of California Press, 2000
243 pages
Amazon.com link (3rd edition)

Reviewer’s note: This book review is about the first edition of Juergensmeyer’s book Terror in the Mind of God published in 2000. The third edition published in 2003 incorporates information from the September 11 attacks. I have not read that revised edition. This book review only covers material in the 2000 edition of Juergensmeyer’s book.

In his 2000 book Terror in the Mind of God, Mark Juergensmeyer explores the relationship between religion and violence. He begins by examining a number of case studies, including

Radical right-wing Christianity in America
Protestant-Catholic issues in Northern Ireland
Jewish terrorists and assassinations in Israel
Islamic terrorism
Sikh violence in India
The Tokyo subway nerve gas attack

In all these cases, Juergensmeyer notes that the sects that turn to violence are marginal and are not accepted by the mainstream religions to which they claim affinity. On the other hand, the mainstream religious community can often understand the motivations of the terrorists, if not approve of the methods.

Juergensmeyer identifies several key qualities that tend to lead to religiously-motivated violence:

A worldview that interprets history as a cosmic war between good and evil. The struggle is not against earthly institutions, but against heavenly powers. Often this happens when a culture fears for its existence, like the Sikhs fear becoming subsumed into India’s dominant Hindu culture.
The unavailability of other options, such as the democratic process, to achieve one’s goals.
The satanization and dehumanization of enemies, as when Islamic fanatics paint America and all Americans as evil, or when radical right-wing groups in America refer to all non-Aryans as mudpeople.

As for the terrorist acts themselves, Juergensmeyer interprets them as performance violence. They are not intended to directly achieve one’s goals. They are symbols of a culture war. When Paul Hill murdered an abortion doctor, he wasn’t expecting to significantly reduce the number of abortions performed in America; rather, he felt compelled to act to send a message that abortion is murder, and that deadly force is justified to defend the unborn.

The weakest part of Juergensmeyer’s book is when he tries to interpret terrorism as a form of male sexual aggression. That, and his continual attempts to paint Timothy McVeigh as a religiously-motivated terrorist. I have just read two McVeigh biographies, and Juergensmeyer is deliberately misrepresenting McVeigh’s motives for the Oklahoma City bombing. It is true McVeigh had contact with the radical Christian militia groups–notably the Christian Identity movement–but Juergensmeyer does not distinguish between contact and motivation. He sprinkles his book with unspecified comments about McVeigh’s associations and links to Christian Identity–links which are often nothing more than an innocuous phone call, but you wouldn’t know that from Juergensmeyer’s insinuations. Then he goes into detail about Christian Identity’s stated motivations for religious violence, and makes the unwarranted assumption that McVeigh shared those motivations.

I don’t know why Juergensmeyer felt he needed to stretch the truth about McVeigh. Not all terrorism is religiously motivated, a point which Juergensmeyer admits more than once. There are plenty of other terrorist incidents that can be legitimately tied to Christian Identity groups, so there is no need to conjure up a fictional version of McVeigh. It calls Juergensmeyer’s credibility into account. Even worse, in his public speeches Juergensmeyer is now apparently using McVeigh as a counterpoint to Osama bin Laden, claiming that McVeigh is as “Christian” as bin Laden is “Muslim.” That’s a lie, of course. McVeigh’s motivations were wholly secular (although his crime was enabled and encouraged by a fringe group of Christian lunatics), whereas bin Laden’s fatwa against America specifically uses religion to justify violence.

The Reason For God, Part 1

Published by Bryan April 1, 2008 in General, Book Reviews and Christian Books. 0 Comments

Last month Timothy Keller’s book The Reason For God was released. I was first introduced to Tim Keller when I listened to the audio of his speech at the 2006 Desiring God Conference. Although there were many good speakers at the conference (including Mark Driscoll and John Piper), Tim Keller’s speech stood out for me above them all. However because I do not spend a lot of time listening to sermons (I prefer to read books) one thing that has disappointed me about Keller is that he hasn’t written much. The only thing I had read by him before this book was his chapter from Worship By The Book was quite good, but also quite short. Therefore when I heard that he was working on a book on apologetics I became quite excited.

Due to school work, I didn’t end up buying the book until March, and finishing it off last week. Over the next few weeks I will be posting thoughts and reflections on specific parts of the work, but first I want to talk about the book in general and dive into the method Keller uses.

An Overview
Keller divides the book into two sections. The first section is negative apologetics, that is, he responds to a variety of attacks on the Christian faith. The second section is mainly positive apologetics - building up a case for the Christian God. There are generally five main ways of conducting apologetics and Keller’s book broadly fits into the field of Van Tillian Presuppositional Apologetics (if one wants to be more specific I think he would be closer to John Frame then Greg Bahnsen). What then does this mean for someone who is reading this book? What should a reader expect?

Keller’s method involves looking at a person’s position and examining if it is consistent or not. In the first section he takes an argument such as “How Can a Good God Allow Suffering?” and attempts to show that the reasoning behind the argument is either inconsistent, or relies on a Christian understanding of the world. In the second section he starts with Christian presuppositions and shows how the God of scripture is both consistent and believable.

This approach has both advantages and disadvantages. If Christianity is the only consistent worldview (which I don’t believe Keller claims in the book, but several who follow a similar method do) then it is a very powerful method of attack on non-Christian worldviews. Even if it is not the only consistent worldview, by examining other’s claims for consistently one will often find that they are inconsistent or worst yet, rely on Christianity.

For those who have never thought much on their worldview before, this will often come as quite a surprise and give them pause to think. On the other hand, this method can, at times, become quite philosophical and too abstract for some to follow. Worse yet, if someone has put a lot of thought into their worldview, a Christian dialoguing with them may not be able to find inconsistencies with it where they expect to see them.

Reconciliation Through Dialogue
To mitigate these issues, Keller appears to employ two basic strategies. First off, he only sets out broad arguments against certain worldviews (such as an evolutionary worldview). Secondly, unlike the combative way this approach has been used before, Keller comes off seeming to want more of a dialogue then a debate. Although there is no doubt that he believes the Christian worldview to be correct, he is not wanting to push it on someone, but instead engage in a discussion about it and let people make their own decision.

Although the discussion in this book can revolve around some very deep theological and philosophical issues, Keller does a really good job brining in other thinkers who have written in detail on these subjects in works the average Christian will never consider reading, and explaining them in such a way the average reader will understand. That is perhaps the greatest strength of this work; nothing totally new is put forward, but what is out there but often unreachable is brought into reach.

In the next entry in this series we will begin to look at some of the specific arguments that Keller puts forward against common objections to the Christian faith.

Ladies, Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride?

Published by Thainamu March 31, 2008 in General, Book Reviews and Christian Books. 37 Comments

Always a bridesmaid??

In her book Get Married: What Women Can Do To Help It Happen, Candice Watters speaks to single Christian women who are past college age, want to be married, but aren’t. (I expect that hardly anyone reading this review fits in that category, so you may want to quit reading here and go check ESPN.com for the latest basketball scores instead.)

In her discussion of what Christian marriage today is like she makes these observations:

Most Christians are meant to marry (that is, God’s call to a life of celibacy is rare).
God is the one who invented marriage, not some frustrated young woman in a church singles’ group.
Marriage is not just the private business of the couple, it involves the entire community.

She urges single women to examine their attitudes:

Men might be jerks, but remember you’re fallen, too.
Don’t assume marriage is not worth the trouble because your parents divorced.
Don’t be embarrassed because you want to marry, and don’t hesitate to publicly say that you want to marry (that is, don’t give in to the common pressure to act like you’re perfectly happy single, if you really aren’t, and avoid the idea that mentioning marriage will scare a guy off.)
Don’t overdo the independence.
Don’t let a past broken heart stop you from trying again.

To the single woman who wants to marry, Watters sprinkles these bits of practical advice throughout her book:

Live a godly life, devoted to loving and obeying God.
Stay out of debt.
Watch your attitude about men so it doesn’t become too critical.
Openly express your beliefs about marriage.
Be a good steward of everything you own—your body, time, money, attitude.
Stay far away from premarital sex—it isn’t going to help you marry well.
Don’t procrastinate, assuming that it is as good to marry at 32 as it would be at 22.
Don’t aim so high—not every one marries their “soul mate.”
Develop a multi-generational network of people who may be able to introduce you to potential gentlemen.
Include your parents in your network, and ask them to pray with you about finding a husband.
There may come a point in a relationship when you have to force the issue—don’t let a guy hang around too long without stating his intentions.
Don’t stay in a going-nowhere relationship, even if it means being alone for a while.
Pray boldly. Don’t pray like you’re apologizing for wanting the good thing God created.

When you find a guy you might be interested in, treat him this way:

Ask him about the dreams he has for his life.
If you honestly can, communicate to him that you believe in him.
Don’t expect 100% maturity in a 25 year old man. Instead, look for aptitude and an attitude that is willing to grow in maturity.
Instead of asking, “Is he worth the risk?” ask, “Will we be able to serve God better together or apart?”

Picky, Picky

Probably the part of this book that I found most interesting was Watters’s discussion of “soul mates.” She points out that today’s young woman is often admired as someone who is highly educated, has a high paying job, drives a safe car, and lives in a safe place. As such, she doesn’t need a man in the way a woman of yesteryear needed one—she doesn’t need protection, she doesn’t need provision, she doesn’t need status. Really, all the independent Christian woman really needs is a best friend to meet her deep emotional longings. (Oh, and she needs sex, too.) And so, she looks for a hott man to marry who could meet all her emotional needs, who knows those needs without her having to tell him, and who makes her feel good. Because she can take care of all her other needs herself, she’s looking to find a husband whose main purpose is an emotional one—and I say, good luck with that! If you get a chance to read only part of the book, I’d say the 6-page subsection of chapter 8, “Aiming Too High,” is probably the best part of the book.

Hell’s Best Kept Secret

Published by Kenneth Martens February 27, 2008 in Book Reviews and Christian Books. 30 Comments

Book review: Hell’s Best Kept Secret, by Ray Comfort
Whitaker House, 1989
192 pages
Amazon.com link

Modern Evangelism Neglects the Law
In Hell’s Best Kept Secret, Ray Comfort explains why traditional evangelical methods of preaching the gospel result in an eighty to ninety percent backslider rate. Modern evangelism preaches a man-centered gospel, presenting Jesus as the answer to worldly problems: come to Jesus and you’ll have a happy, fulfilled life. So what is Hell’s best kept secret? The preaching of the Law. Without an understanding of the seriousness of sin, the sinner still views himself as a pretty good person. Unless and until the sinner experiences a genuine conviction of sins, his conversion is a false conversion. Without conviction, there can be no repentance; without repentance, there is no saving faith.

The Four Step RCCR Method of Witnessing
Comfort explains a four step method for witnessing to unbelievers.

Relate - Begin by making smalltalk or by discussing something mundane. The idea is to take a genuine interest in the person you’re talking to. Engage them in conversation and put them at ease.
Create - Find an opportunity to swing the conversation to spiritual matters. Giving someone a tract can be an easy method to do this, or you can do something as simple as asking “Do you have a religious background?” If you are alert for opportunities, you can work it into the conversation naturally:

Let’s suppose that you’ve been discussing with a friend the problem of increased violence within our society. You decide to swing to the spiritual by saying, “What this nation needs is a return to Christian principles.” [page 93]
Convict - Use the Ten Commandments to lead the sinner to an understanding of the seriousness of his sin and of its consequences.
Reveal - When you see evidence of conviction of sins, then you reveal the good news of the grace offered by Christ’s sacrifice.

The step that modern evangelism skips is the conviction step. This is an incomplete presentation of the gospel. Without preaching the Law, the sinner does not know he is in danger of eternal punishment. Once he understands the Law, his sin is revealed to him, and he understands the need for a savior.

Conviction of Sin vs. Fire and Brimstone
It is critical that the sinner understand that the consequences for sin are reasonable. If you just preach fire and brimstone without explaining the Law, the sinner may turn to Jesus out of fear of hell, but he won’t really believe that he deserves hell. He will be a bitter convert, and there will be no genuine repentance.

Continue reading ‘Hell’s Best Kept Secret’

Book Review: Reaching Single Adults

Published by Jasen Tracy January 28, 2008 in Religion, Book Reviews and Christian Books. 9 Comments

The author of Reaching Single Adults: An Essential Guide for Ministry is Dennis Franck, who is a long time Singles Pastor in the Assemblies of God denomination. He does manage to keep his denomination’s particularities out of view however. The book is aimed at helping Evangelical churches to retain their single adults and to reach out to unchurched singles. The need for this book stems from the fact that singles are less likely to attend church than married couples.

Franck does a good job in providing an overview of the diverse single adult demographic. He gives five categories (some of which can overlap):

1) Never-married
2) Divorced
3) Widowed
4) Single parent
5) Separated (they are living as a single even if they legally aren’t)

These groups can have widely different needs and outlooks, and thus the challenge facing singles leaders is immense. Older, windowed singles often don’t identify themselves by their singles status, and there’s quite a bit of difference between a divorced 45 year-old who has kids with a never married 25 year old who doesn’t have kids.

Another strong point of the book is Franck’s contention that singles need biblical teaching that addresses issues from the singles perspective. This often is not done during the Sunday morning sermon, and sometimes it’s not easy or perhaps even advisable to do so in that environment.

Criticism
Franck’s general philosophy appears to be “build it and they’ll come.” He notes that churches that have ministries for single adults have more single adults attending their church than churches that don’t have singles’ programs. It may be true that singles programs help attract singles to churches (an assumption Franck makes while offering little support for it), however it’s precisely churches that already have a significant number of singles that are likely to start singles programs. Churches with few singles are not very likely to see impressive growth in the group simply by starting a targeted ministry.

Furthermore, I’m a bit leery of this marketing type of approach of determining a sub-group and then launching programs for it. I do think some group meetings are good, but many churches need to do a better job of integrating singles in to the life of the church as a whole. Franck is not against singles participating in the whole life of the church of course, but it’s a very minor focus of the book.

The stat that 44% of American adults are single is proclaimed on the book’s back cover and is quoted throughout the book. This is quite a bit misleading however as it is arrived at by counting everyone over the age of 15 as an adult. The reason given for this definition is that some states allow marriage at 15.

Franck spends over half the book discussing various models of singles ministry and all the people and resources that are needed to run them. It becomes quite a bit repetitive at times, and the ideas are often not that useful for smaller churches. For instance, a church of 300 people is not likely to be able to support a Singles Pastor, nor be able to field a large team of volunteers to assist in such a ministry.

Final Opinion
How churches interact with singles (and the somewhat overlapping young adult group) is an issue that I’m interesting in. However, I didn’t find this book very useful or interesting, and would probably only recommend it to someone who was planning to start a singles ministry at their church and who had never lead anything before.

Evil And The Justice Of God

Published by Bryan January 8, 2008 in Book Reviews and Christian Books. 16 Comments

Evil And the Justice Of God is a small book (165 pages) written by NT Wright and put out by IVP in 2006. In my ongoing investigation of Wright’s theology, I picked it up just after Christmas and finished it last week. Like all the Wright’s works that I have so far read, this one is quite lucid and enjoyable to read. Because everyone from RC Sproul to Trevin Wax have already reviewed the book, I won’t write a full review, but focus on what I view as the most important things Wright lays out in the book.

The book discusses exactly what the title says. It is not a book that goes into philosophical explanations as to why evil exists in a world created by a good God, but instead focuses on what God has been doing, and will do, about evil. It may seem strange to write a book about evil and God and not look at the huge dilemma of why there is evil in the first place, but Wright wants to discuss only what scripture says on the subject and doesn’t believe that scripture provides a full philosophical answer as to why there is evil.

Although it is unsatisfying, I must agree with Wright that there is not an answer as to why evil exists like the philosophers demand from scripture. The three main ideas commonly put forward (Free Will, God uses evil to glorify himself, and a needed contrast so one can truly see how good God is) may all be able to be drawn out of portions of scripture, but when you come to scripture with this question, you’re looking for an answer to a question that isn’t really asked in scripture. You can make scripture say something on the subject, but it will never be a full answer.

What scripture does quite clearly offer to the question of evil is a narrative of what God is doing about the problem. Throughout this work Wright uses the Christus Victor atonement theory as a way of reading scripture. In the OT, evil entered the world, as seen through both human action and natural disasters. To deal with this problem, God has again and again used a punishment and remnant “method”. He flooded the earth, but kept Noah; He destroyed Babel but raised Abraham; He sent plagues on the Egyptians but used Moses. This continues throughout the OT and into the NT. From this Wright understands God to be preparing the way for Christ, as all of these examples foreshadow what Christ will eventually do - but he will actually succeed.

Noah was to be the beginning of a new sin free race, but he failed and fell into sin. Israel was to show the world what a people of God were to live like, but they worshipped the golden calf. King David was to be God’s righteous king, but he turned out to be an adulterer and murderer. All this, however, leads to Christ - who actually accomplished the victory over evil like only the Son of God could. He began the destruction of evil which will be finished when the Kingdom of God comes in power (It’s here, but not here yet).

The other important thing that Wright does which flies in the face of the recent questions and comments about evil, is continue to point out that evil is not just something out there in the world, but is something that each and everyone of us are involved with. Although I may not agree 100% with his politics, Wright is right to point out that after 9/11 when all the fingers were pointing at Muslim extremists and crying evil, we forgot that (although our own actions do not result in destruction of the scale of 9/11) much of what we do is just as evil in God’s eyes, not to mention the “evilness” of Western civilization as a whole (War, abortion, drugs, apathy…etc).

Wright wants to make the problem of evil both a very personal thing and a world wide phenomena. Most people, in practice, pick one or the other, but with Wright it has to be both if Christ’s atonement is to be seen in it’s true glorious ramifications. He died to overcome the evils of war, floods, and dictators, but also of lying, gluttony, and sloth.

Zeal For Truth