Christian Living, Biblical Studies, Religion, Spiritual Growth, Theology
John Beeson
The Faith of Unbelief

Bart Ehrman has perhaps done more to undermine the credibility of the Bible than anyone else in my lifetime. But his story didn’t begin that way. Ehrman is a New Testament scholar and skeptic. Ehrman grew up in a Christian home, attended a conservative Bible school, and then found his way to a liberal seminary where his faith in the God of the Bible unraveled. That seminary happens to be the seminary I would attend a couple of decades later.

For Ehrman, everywhere he looks he sees holes in the biblical story. The inconsistencies that he sees have led him to determine that he cannot trust in the God of the Bible.

The Faith of Unbelief
Christian Living, Culture, Spiritual Growth
John Beeson
Don't Numb Your Feelings

“Don’t listen to your feelings; remember what Jesus did for you!”

“Don’t be guided by your feelings; listen to what God commands you to do!”

In just the past week, I heard both of these warnings. Two very different Christian speakers urged their audiences to shut down their feelings. These admonitions resonate. They contain truth. It is correct that our feelings don’t override truth, nor do our emotions negate what God has done. Neither do our feelings give us an out for what God commands us to do.

Don't Numb Your Feelings
History, Spiritual Growth, Suffering, Wisdom
John Beeson
Lord, Reach Your Justice Down

I had outsized emotions as a child. Games, especially, would get the best of me, whether cards or boardgames or sports. In response to a stroke of bad luck, a hot surge of anger would erupt, followed quickly by tears and then embarrassment.

Emotions are God’s gift to us in many ways. They are one of his kind ways of showing us where our deep attachments lie.

Our son started his freshman year at the University of Arizona this fall. It’s been a great experience for him, but not without its adjustments. The climate of a secular school is quite different than the Christian school he graduated from

Lord, Reach Your Justice Down
Culture, Generosity, Nature, Relationships
John Beeson
Marshmallows and Friends

Most have heard of the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment. In 1970, psychologist Walter Mischel invited kids into his lab. A child was offered a marshmallow that they could eat, or, if they waited until the researcher returned, they were given a second marshmallow. About one-third of the kids waited approximately fifteen minutes for the additional reward.

The study then tracked those children over time and found that children who waited for the second reward tended to have higher SAT scores and lower body mass indexes. Later tests have challenged those outcomes, but it hasn’t stopped parents everywhere from running the experiment on their kids, often with humorous results.

Marshmallows and Friends
Christian Living, Culture, Politics
John Beeson
Uprooting Our Political Identity

Happy election day!

In 2016, data scientists Eitan Hersh and Yair Ghitza analyzed data among registered voters to determine how often Democrats and Republicans married. They learned that 9% of marriages had the spouses registered in the two parties. Over the next four years that meager number would drop precipitously, down to 4%.

 As Jonathan Haidt and others have successfully argued, the ideological disparity between FOX News and CNBC are child’s play compared to the engineered social media algorithms that create hermetically sealed echo chambers for our political views.

Uprooting Our Political Identity

Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. Welcoming the World’s Oldest Babies: Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra shares a moving story of embryo adoption and the consequences of modern technology and fertility, “Nearly 30 years ago, Lydia Ann and Timothy Ronald were conceived in a fertility clinic. Hours later, they were frozen.”

  2. Come Thou Long Expected Judgment: Jonathan Warren Pagan reminds us to look forward, not just backward this Advent season. Advent hope is preeminently about hope for the return of Jesus. Even now, in the Advent liturgies of the Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox churches, the prayers and Scripture readings have a laser-like focus on the judgment of Christ that is to come. This message doesn’t align with the affected excitement and coziness of secular Advent or Christmas.”

  3. Social Anxiety and the God Who Held Mary: Lara d’Entremont always has great stuff. Here she shares about her social anxiety and Christmas. She shares, “God must have rows of my bottled tears by now—tears that I shed over my anxiety where I begged him to take it all away. Yet the anxiety remains. I don’t understand why, and in those moments of looking at my life and wondering why God’s hand has not lifted the anxiety from me, doubt has snaked around my heart. Where is God’s love? Why has he abandoned me?”

  4. Christianity Today’s Playlist: Some nice gems here.

  5. The Gospel Coalition 2022 Book Awards: Lots of good stuff here.

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

  1. Let the Global Church Give You Perspective: This is really helpful advice from Trevin Wax. He begins, “Stay connected to the global church if you want to hold on to orthodoxy…and if you want to hold on to your sanity.”

  2. God Does Not Despise the Small Things: Ed Welch begins, “Zechariah 4:10 says, ‘Who despises the day of small things?’ Indeed, everything we do is a very small thing.”

  3. Does God Give Us Only What We Can Handle? My friend Caroline Albanese reflects on a tumultuous three years in her family’s life. She says, “All these events took place in rapid succession. The emotional toll on our family is incredible. Suffice to say, the weight on our souls has felt absolutely unbearable, and we’ve been clinging to Christ for dear life.”

  4. Does ‘Love the Sinner Hate the Sin’ Still Work? Carl Trueman explains how the cultural shift to expressive individualism creates an argument where this posture is intolerable. He clarifies, “The old chestnut of “love the sinner, hate the sin” simply does not work in a world where the sin is the identity of the sinner and the two cannot be separated even at a conceptual level. In a time when the normative notion of selfhood is psychological, then to hate the sin is to hate the sinner.”

  5. Escape from Kabul: Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra tells the story of Christians fleeing Kabul, Afghanistan in this gripping podcast. Despite facing persecution and as the country implodes, they still shared Jesus with so many. But, how?

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1.      The Rise in Transgenderism and Bisexuality: Joe Carter reports that, “Notice that only 6.8 percent of women identified as lesbian or bisexual, yet more than double that number had engaged in same-sex sexual contact. The phrase ‘bi-curious’ has come to be used to refer to such people who are “interested in having a same gender sexual experience without necessarily labeling their sexual orientation as bisexual.’ Social contagion is the only adequate explanation for why so many women have become bi-curious in such a short period of time.” 

2.      The Apostle Paul Was a Widower: Denny Burk explains his position, “’It is good for them to remain… as I am.’ ‘Remain” means to continue on in a certain state of existence. In their case, that state was one of widowhood. And Paul says “as I am.” This suggests that Paul is putting himself into the same category that they are. But it is not a category of singleness in general but a category of widowhood in particular. It is for this reason that many interpreters—including myself—believe that these words imply that Paul was previously married.”

3.      Old Testament Law Did Not Require a Woman to Marry Her Rapist: The idea that OT law required a woman to marry her rapist has been used often as a bully club against the ethics of the Bible. After establishing that the word should not be should not be translated ‘rape’ Katie McCoy explains the purpose of the law, “Under Hebrew law, a man was forbidden to exploit a woman as an object of pleasure. He was held accountable publicly for his indiscretion and held responsible for her future wellbeing. In other words, he couldn’t use her and lose her. Far from exploiting or oppressing women, this passage shows that biblical law held men accountable for their sexual behavior.”

4.      The Pope is Popular, But Not Impacting Roman Catholic Growth: Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra reports, “A Pew Research Center survey released today found ‘no evidence of a rise in the share of Americans who identify as Catholics [22% in 2012 vs. 20% in 2017], and no indication of a Francis-inspired resurgence in Mass attendance [41% weekly in 2012 vs. 38% weekly in 2017].’”

5.      How to Dance to Attract Girls: Rhett teaches Link how to dance in a way that attracts women based on a scientific study. Hilarity ensues.

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