Pete's Blog

My warm thanks go out to Kibonge for his help with this entry.

As most readers of this blog probably know, I'm traditional. My default is to keep the way we've always done something unless there's a reason to do otherwise, as opposed to defaulting to do something new unless there's a reason to keep the old ways.

Having this default, now that most Christians seem to be disillusioned with the word "religion" it got me thinking about why that is, considering that, in itself, it's a perfectly good word.

To begin with, I recognize that people aren't throwing out the perfectly good word "religion" in its original meaning, but are actually throwing out the word that our society associates with other meanings. Here are the two ways that I hear "religion" used in a negative way:

1. Ritualism and legalism. (Kibonge was really helpful with this. I hadn't identified the association between religion and ritualism before, but as soon as he mentioned it, I was in complete agreement. Very insightful.) In doing evangelism I've heard loads of people say that they're spiritual but not religious. Interesting. I think they're saying that they're not going through the rituals of an organized religion in order to practice their spirituality. When John MacArthur criticises "religious people" in his sermons, he's talking about Mormons, Catholics and pew warmers who think that going to a weekly worship service will help them get into a good afterlife.
   
2. Pharisaism. (In my experience, people have often used the word "legalism" where I think they mean "pharisaism.") In the gospels, the Pharisees were adding rules to the Law. In fact, they were breaking the Law in doing so, "You shall not add to the word that I command you" (Dt. 4:2). When I hear someone like Mark Driscoll use the word "religion," or more often, "religious people," he's talking about people who add unbiblical rules to people's lives. An example of who Driscoll would be talking about would be American fundamentalists. They have rules like you're not allowed to dance, smoke, go to movies, play cards, listen to John Piper sermons, etc.
   

Finally, I'd like to talk about good religion. The origin of the word "religion" etymologically comes from the Latin word "religio." That word breaks into two components: "re" which means again and "lig" which means to bind or to tie. So "religion" means to reconnect (i.e., with God). That's exactly what Christianity is. Humanity is fallen, and through Jesus, we're reconnected with God.

Also, in defense of the word "religion" being good, consider that James uses it in such a way that implies that religion is good. "If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person's religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world" (Jm. 1:26, 27).

This is not to say that either Mac or Driscoll are wrong in their usages. Language evolves. For example, consider the expression, "used to," as in, "It used to be summer." If you use the original meanings of each of these words' original meanings, the sentence is nonsensical. But it's come into our language. Likewise, the word "religion" has evolved in its meaning.

But, I think as Christians we should remember the original meaning. If for no other reason, because James does, and we don't have a better word for it yet in English.

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I'm not done posting on Narnia yet. I really shouldn't make promises on my blog.

Anyway, I think this little quote can't hurt this post, even though it's unrelated:

"That's the worst of girls," said Edmund to Peter and the Dwarf. "They never carry a map in their heads."

"That's because our heads have something inside them," said Lucy.

-C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, p. 370. This is a single volume of all seven books, published by Harper Collins. It is from Prince Caspian, chapter 9.

"Logic!" said the Professor half to himself. "Why don't they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. . . ."

-C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, p. 131. Emphasis added. This is a single volume of all seven books, published by Harper Collins. It is from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, chapter 5.

Its logic is identical to Lewis' argument for the deity of Christ. It goes something like this: In the gospels, Christ claimed to be God. (E.g., in John 8:58 Jesus implied He was the "I AM" of Exodus 3:14, He received worship without rebuke [e.g., Mt. 28:9], He forgave sins [e.g., Mk. 2:5, cf. vv. 6-12], He had authority to state that Old Testament law was fulfilled [e.g., Mt. 19:8, 9; Mk. 7:15-19].) This leaves only three options: either He's a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord of heaven. (Skeptics pushed back against this argument saying that these aren't the only three options. They claim that a fourth option may be posited: that Jesus' claim to divinity, or His existence itself, were legendary. I agree with them, but it doesn't help their case.)

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe came out in 1950, where Mere
Christianity came out in 1952. That caught my interest at first, thinking, I wonder whether Lewis first formed the Lord, Lunatic, Liar argument in Wardrobe and then flushed it out more completely in Mere Christianity. Then I remembered that Mere Christianity was based on a radio series he did.

I love the Chronicles of Narnia. I've never found any book (or books) such a page turner. Highly recommended.

Over the next week I'm going to post at least twice more on little passages in the books. Stay tuned.

"You see friends," he said, "that before the new, clean world I gave you is seven hours old, a force of evil, has entered it; waked and brought hither by this son of Adam." The beasts, even Strawberry, all turned their eyes on Digory till he felt he wished the ground would swallow him up. "But do not be cast down," said Aslan, still speaking to the Beasts. "Evil will come of that evil, but it is still a long way off, and I will see to it that the worst falls upon myself. In the meantime, let us take such order that for many hundred years yet this shall be a merry land in a merry world. And as Adam's race has done the harm, Adam's race shall help to heal it. Draw near you other two."

-C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, p. 80. Emphasis added. This is a single volume of all seven books, published by Harper Collins. As you might guess, given how early in the volume this passage falls, it is from The Magician's Nephew, chapter 11.

It's been a real joy reading this book. I forgot how interesting fiction can be to read.

Oh, memories :)

So come and talk to me

On my computer screen

The best years of our lives

Aren't as easy as they seem

To get the girl and make the grade

It's all a show, it's all a game

And I would lose it if I played

But anyway

You go out on Friday night

I'll stay in but that's alright

Cause I have found a clique

To call my own.

The first few are kind of boring, but it does a good job of being fair; criticing Republicans and Democrats. I like that it shows Vice President Biden’s stereotyping, and President Obama’s lack of knowledge of the United States. (Obama’s last one kind of reminded me of a Palin slip.)

In one previous blog entry, I introduced the category of biblical types. This morning I finished reading through Ezra. In 9:1, 2 Ezra describes how the Jews were sinning severely against God by practicing racial intermarriage. So Ezra called all the people together to address them on the issue (10:7, 8). Here's what followed:

Then all the men of Judah and Benjamin assembled at Jerusalem within the three days. It was the ninth month, on the twentieth day of the month. And all the people sat in the open square before the house of God, trembling because of this matter and because of the heavy rain. And Ezra the priest stood up and said to them, "You have broken faith and married foreign women, and so increased the guilt of Israel. Now then make confession to the LORD, the God of your fathers and do his will. Separate yourselves from the peoples of the land and from the foreign wives." Then all the assembly answered with a loud voice, "It is so; we must do as you have said. But the people are many, and it is a time of heavy rain; we cannot stand in the open. Nor is this a task for one day or for two, for we have greatly transgressed in this matter. Let our officials stand for the whole assembly. Let all in our cities who have taken foreign wives come at appointed times, and with them the elders and judges of every city, until the fierce wrath of our God over this matter is turned away from us." Only Jonathan the son of Asahel and Jahzeiah the son of Tikvah opposed this, and Meshullam and Shabbethai the Levite supported them. (Ez. 10:9-15)

Let me start by saying that I don't completely understand what's going on here. Ezra's just commanded them to "Separate yourselves from the peoples of the land and from the foreign wives," yet the Jews respond that they can't do it themselves because it's raining. I guess that when Ezra commanded them to "make confession to the LORD," he meant do it corporately.

That aside, it's so interesting that the people said, "Let our officials stand for the whole assembly." It reminded me of Israel asking Moses to intercede for them:

Now when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled, and they stood far off and said to Moses, "You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die." (Ex. 20:18, 19)

And then there were priests who were ministers on behalf of the people before the Lord:

The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, "If anyone sins and commits a breach of faith against the LORD by deceiving his neighbor . . . and has realized his guilt and will restore what he took by robbery or what he got by oppression or the deposit that was committed to him or the lost thing that he found or anything about which he has sworn falsely, he shall restore it in full and shall add a fifth to it, and give it to him to whom it belongs on the day he realizes his guilt. And he shall bring to the priest as his compensation to the LORD a ram without blemish out of the flock, or its equivalent for a guilt offering. And the priest shall make atonement for him before the LORD, and he shall be forgiven for any of the things that one may do and thereby become guilty." (Le. 6:1-2, 4-7)

As I read the Old Testament, in light of the New Testament's revelation of Christ's role as mediator (1Ti. 2:5), I realize that the idea of one party going between two other parties (in the above examples) is a strong OT type that Jesus eventually would come and put Himself between His people and God.

The reason evangelism's so difficult is because it's impossible for a Christian to tear a nonchristian from their idols. As John Calvin said, the human heart is "a perpetual factory of idols." Without knowing it, nonchristians love their sin. (Fortunately, God is able to crush a man's idols and reveal Himself as the true God to be worshiped: "For God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ" [2Co. 4:6].)

Atheists, deep, deep down realize that if God exists, He's their Creator, and Creators always have sovereign rights over their creatures, so the only way to submit to their own idols (themselves) is to deny His very existence.

"[Men] by their unrighteousness suppress the truth" (v. 18). "[A]lthough they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened" (v. 21).

A young British mother says her prematurely born son was left to die last October by doctors because he fell two days short of the minimum requirement for care.

 

Sarah Capewell's son, Jayden, was born 21 weeks and five days into her pregnancy, but physicians said he needed to be at 22 weeks gestation in order to be treated, she told The Daily Mail in a Sept. 9 article. He lived for nearly two hours without medical assistance. She is seeking a review of the guidelines followed by National Health Service (NHS) hospitals in such cases.

 

Jayden, who was born at an NHS hospital in Norfolk, was breathing without help, had a strong heart rate and was moving his arms and legs after his birth, said Capewell, 23.

 

She told The Daily Mail she pleaded with a pediatrician, saying, "You have got to help." The doctor said, "No we don't"

 

While she was having contractions, a chaplain visited her to make plans for a funeral for her yet-to-be-born son, Capewell said. "I was sitting there, reading this leaflet about planning a funeral and thinking, this is my baby, he isn't even born yet, let alone dead," she said, according to the newspaper.

The other day I was listening to an informal debate between a nonchristian and a Christian over alleged contradictions in the Bible. In it, the atheist said that if Matthew really was an eyewitness of Jesus, he wouldn't have needed Mark's account of Christ in order to write his own.

This assumes Markan priority, that is that Mark's was the first of the three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) written, and that Matthew and Luke base their gospels on Mark.

Suppose it's true (and it might be, see below). Put yourself in Matthew's shoes. He has Mark's gospel, which was written for Gentiles in Rome, in his hands, and he wants to write something to tell the Jews in Palestine about Jesus. They probably haven't read Mark's gospel (otherwise he wouldn't have needed to write his own), so he starts with the first gospel and adds to it. Matthew was an eye witness of Jesus so he knew that the material in Mark was authentic. Why re-invent the wheel?

Indulge yourself in an illustration. Suppose you are a student in a campus ministry. You've been on a summer project before, and you think you'll go again. You know, though, that one of your friends already sends his supporters a somewhat regular update email.

Much to your excitement, you and he just saw someone come to faith and get baptized. In your excitement, you really want to tell everyone. And you see that your friend's already sent out and update email relating the story to his network. You ask his permission to share it with your network, and he has no problem with it. So you keep his part, and add how you felt throughout the entire event of explaining the Gospel to this new Christian, maybe leaving out of few of the personal details your friend put in his update email. You're more observant than your friend, so you actually add 70% percent more content to the email than what your friend had originally included. You then send it out.

This is pretty similar to what I think happened with Matthew and Mark.

A valid question the skeptic could have asked would be why God included so much redundant material by including three synoptic gospels instead of just one. Why did God inspire His Word this way? It's an interesting question, that's for sure, but it has zero impact on the credibility of either Matthew or Luke.

I don't have any hypotheses as to why God inspired the gospel accounts in this way. But I also don't know why He ordained history in the way it is currently unfolding, and I think He has just as much authorship over the history of the world as He does in the Bible. The point is that there is indeed mystery in the Christian faith, but mystery doesn't invalidate the authenticity of the faith.

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I hold to Markan priority as well. There was a time when I desired for Matthew to be the first synoptic gospel (i.e., Matthean priority), but that was when I was uncomfortable with the Q-hypothesis.

It's been a few years since I abandoned this view, so I don't completely remember how I came to be uncomfortable with the Q-hypothesis. I'll explain what I can remember soon enough, but I'll first explain the Q-hypothesis.

Once you start with Markan priority you need to explain why there is so much overlap in Matthew and Luke that is absent in Mark. You can't really explain this by saying Matthew used Luke or vice versa because they're too dissimilar and there's too much in Matthew that's not in Luke, and there's too much in Luke that's not in Matthew. So you introduce the possibility that there was another source that the two of them relied upon. Called it Q, short for Quelle, German for source. Q can contain more than the overlap in Matthew and Luke that's not in Mark, but it contains at least that much.

So, in summary, Mark wrote a gospel. And someone wrote a document that was a collection of sayings that today we call Q. Matthew and Luke, each writing independently of one another, used both Mark and Q to write their gospels.

I once found this unappealing because I thought that any reliance on an outside document weakened the authenticity of the gospels we have. I don't know where I came up with this thought. It was certainly unjustified.

So, rejecting the Q-hypothesis (again, irrationally), I thought that it was a nifty idea to say that Mark relied on Matthew, and then Luke had access to both. However (not to imply I know Greek), scholars say that Mark has the poorest Greek of the three (maybe of the New Testament) so it's not likely that he relied on either of the others.

Like I said, though, I don't know Greek. So I would need to hear that argument from a scholar.

A friend once told me that he thought it seemed implausible to hold to Matthean priority because you'd expect someone to add to an account, not reduce the account. That made me seriously begin to question whether I could legitimately hold to it.

Then I came across Dan Wallace's work. I'd already been reading his blog (he's an occasional contributor to Parchment and Pen), and I came to respect him because he took a strong stand on the unscriptural nature of John 7:53-8:11, where it seemed like some were giving stances, without defending them, and others weren't talking about it. Since then, he's been super helpful in me forming my views about what the Bible is and how it came into existence. Specifically, his article on the Synoptic Problem was what made me finally decide that I was okay with the existence of Q. I highly recommend the article.

The following are the first ten terms of a sequence:

1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 6, 12, 22, 37, 58, . . .

Same idea as the other sequences. Describe the pattern of the sequence. If you use a search engine, please don't submit it in the comments.

If it hasn't been solved by Thursday I'll give a hint. Also, if you ask a polar question (i.e., a yes/no question), I will probably answer it if it relates to this sequence.

I'll post the solution on next week's sequence.

Last week's sequence (5, 7, 13, 19, 31, 43, 61, 73, 103, 109, . . .) was the greater of a pair of consecutive odd numbers that are both prime. E.g., 101 and 103 are consecutive odd numbers, and they're both prime. The latter, 103, is the greater, so it is in the sequence. E.g., 5 and 7 are consecutive odd numbers, and they're both prime. The greater, 7, is in the sequence. (The lesser, 5, is also in the sequence because it and 3 are consecutive odd numbers that are both prime, and 3 is less than 5.)

Greg Gilbert on the 9Marks (Mark Dever's ministry) blog recently wrote an article about the trend of the absence of penal substitutionary atonement in modern Christian books. He would know. As he describes in the introduction of the article, he is one of the main book critics for 9Marks.

Here's part of the conclusion:

At the end of the day, and really in the face of all the comments to the contrary, Scripture makes it clear that the cross—that is, the death of Jesus in the place of sinners, taking the punishment they deserved—must remain at the center of the gospel. We cannot move it to the side, we cannot replace it with any other truth, and we cannot reimagine it as something less offensive than it really is. Otherwise, we present the world with something that is not saving, and that is therefore not good news at all.

I've already shared it in Google Reader, but it's so good that I wanted to try to give it a bit more of an audience, small result as that might be on my part.

When you're sitting by yourself in a public place, say a cafeteria or at a conference, and someone you like whose company you enjoy sees you but does not sit next to you, instead of feeling rejected, consider it a compliment. He considers sitting next to you a place of honour.

"[D]o not sit down in a place of honor, lest someone more distinguished than you be invited by him, and he who invited you both will come and say to you, 'Give your place to this person,' and then you will begin with shame to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit in the lowest place." (Lk. 14:8-10)

Of course, if you consider it in this manner, your next course of action must be to go to that person and insist he sit with you, in the place of honour.

"[W]hen your host comes he may say to you, 'Friend, move up higher.'" (Lk. 14:10)

Update: I struck the word "like" at the beginning of the entry in favour of a more explicit mean. Since "like" in English can carry the meaning of romantic interest (though it hadn't occurred to me when I first wrote the post), I decided, when I did realize how it sounded, to change it.

The following are the first ten terms of a sequence:

5, 7, 13, 19, 31, 43, 61, 73, 103, 109, . . .

Same idea as the other sequences. Describe the pattern of the sequence. If you use a search engine, please don't submit it in the comments.

If it hasn't been solved by Thursday I'll give a hint. Also, if you ask a polar question (i.e., a yes/no question), I will probably answer it if it relates to this sequence.

I'll post the solution on next week's sequence.

Last week's sequence (0, 4, 9, 8, 25, 13, 49, 12, 18, 29, . . .) was the sum of the squares of the prime divisors of the index (with multiplicity). E.g., 1 has no prime divisors so a(1)=0. E.g., 10 has prime divisors 2 and 5 so a(10)=2²+5²=29. E.g., 24 has prime divisors 2 (with multiplicity 3) and 3 so a(24)=3(2²)+3²=21.

Isaiah 9:6: "For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace."

The four titles we get here for Jesus list, again, as

1. Wonderful Counselor,
   
2. Mighty God,
   
3. Everlasting Father, and
   
4. Prince of Peace.
   

First, I'd like to admit that I've wondered before what it means for Jesus to be the "Everlasting Father." If I were a modalist (i.e., someone who denies that God is simultaneously three distinct persons [not one at a time]), I'd jump all over this verse. The Trinity is not fully revealed in the Old Testament as it is in the New Testament. So, given that the Old Testament is types and shadows of New Testament realities, I'm willing to be satisfied in saying that Isaiah was describing this future man as a father of sorts, without confusing Him with God the Father.

Anyway, here I'm musing over titles 2 and 4. It's interesting that Isaiah calls Jesus "Mighty God," only later to say that He's a prince. What does every prince have? A king! So the natural reading of this verse has Trinitarian overtones.

When I say "natural reading," I say that recognizing it's possible that in the Jewish literature of Isaiah's day, to be a prince might have meant that person was the primary leader, not the king. But until shown otherwise, a prince is a son of the king.