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

Apologetics

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. 11 Things You Might Think are in the Bible, But Really Aren’t: #11 is particularly insidious.

2. Bible Reading and Church Attendance Drops During COVID-19: Barna just released a report that confirms what I’ve been hearing anecdotally: many are spiritually floundering during this season. The reality is that 2020 has just sped up the decline in basic spiritual disciplines.

3. Let Bible Reading Get Back to Basics: To that end, Jen Wilkin suggests five basic tools that can assist your Bible reading. I particularly appreciate her suggestion to keep a Bible timeline.

4. Christian, You Are Able Not to Sin: Zach Howard turns to Augustine for advice when we enter this familiar place, “Sinning as a saint can cause two opposite (and equally) wrong reactions. On the one hand, we can respond with prideful presumption in our power to overcome sin. On the other hand, we can react with helpless despair in the face of our persistent sin.”

5. Were the Gospels Meant to be Taken as Historical Narrative? Do the gospels fail the test of providing historical attestation? Timothy Paul Jones responds to to Reza Aslan's accusation that the gospels, "are not, nor were they ever meant to be, a historical documentation of Jesus’s life. They are testimonies of faith composed by communities of faith and written many years after the events they describe."

6. Iceland: The Land of Fire and Ice: Who wants to take a trip with me?!

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. The Virus Changed the Way We Internet: Unsurprisingly, since COVID-19 changed our lives a month ago, our internet habits have changed significantly. The NY Times looks into the data including the fact that Zoom usage is up over 300% and visits to ESPN.com are down over 40%.

2. What Skeptical Scholars Admit About the Resurrection Appearances of Jesus: New Testament scholar Justin Bass says that even cynical scholars admit that the followers of Jesus saw something. One scholar says it this way, “I know in their own terms what they saw was the raised Jesus. That’s what they say, and then all the historic evidence we have afterwards attest to their conviction that that’s what they saw. I’m not saying that they really did see the raised Jesus. I wasn’t there. I don’t know what they saw. But I do know that as a historian that they must have seen something.”

3. When Loneliness is Your Closest Companion: Kimberly Wagner talks about a chance encounter with a widow. It began, “I don’t cook much anymore, my husband past away a year ago, and my life is so different now. So very different . . .” Her voice trailed off to a past era of joy and companionship. My voice went soft, “I’m so very sorry.” And those four small words invited her to share more."

4. Historical Objects that Tell the Story of Easter: This is a great post by Tim Challies that grounds the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in archaeological findings. The Alexamenos graffiti is so cool.

5. Stories of God’s Rescue: We were able to celebrate baptism at New Life this Easter. Here are the tear-inducing stories of those who God rescued.

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Can We Trust the New Testament Documents?

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Can We Trust the New Testament Documents?

The last two weeks we have considered whether it might be plausible to trust the Bible audacious claim, that it is the word of God.

The final response to the challenge is to address the reliability of the manuscripts. Can we trust that the Bible we have in our hands resembles the original writings of the disciples? Is it true as Bart Ehrman said that there are 400,000 errors in the early biblical manuscripts?

Let’s respond to this important challenge.

Let me provide some explanation: the Bible was written by hand and then sent to the intended recipients via the Roman mail system. Let’s take the gospel of Luke, since we’ve previously read from the beginning of his gospel. Luke wrote out his account of Jesus’ life and then sent it to a man named Theophilus. Theophilus then read the gospel and was likely so amazed that he decided to have a scribe make copies of the letter to send to his friends so he could share the story with them. Copies of those manuscripts were made and then copies of those copies and so on and so forth. We don’t have in our possession any of the original manuscripts of the New Testament. We don’t have the first gospel that Luke wrote. But what we do have are many of the copies of a copy of the original.

How in the world can we trust the documents we have, then?

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What Reasons are there to Believe the Bible?

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What Reasons are there to Believe the Bible?

Last week we began considering whether it is possible to believe the Bible is true.

The outspoken atheist and author Sam Harris once said,

“Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else… Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.”[i]

Can we trust the Bible? Do Christians believe the Bible with “no evidence whatsoever”? What is the evidence that it is trustworthy?

The challenge that is made against the Bible is that it isn’t a trustworthy historic document. We can’t trust that the history the Bible purports to tell is accurate.

These are serious questions and they deserve thoughtful responses.

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Why Should I Believe the Bible?

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Why Should I Believe the Bible?

Let’s not soft-pedal this. Christianity’s claims about the Bible are patently absurd.

Let’s pause and consider Christianity’s claim. Christians claim that we have in our possession a book that contains a message from the Creator of the universe to us. The book we are talking about was written in a time period roughly between 4,000 and 2,000 years ago. To claim such an ancient book has any relevance whatsoever for a modern reader is an absurd enough claim, but to claim it is the word of the source of all life itself? That is hard to believe.

Isn’t this book written by human beings full of legends? Isn’t it full of contradictions? Hasn’t it been proven false?[i] How can we possibly trust that it is the message God has for us?

Let me make the stakes of this conversation completely clear. If we can’t trust the Bible, then it’s a book that might have use for historians or perhaps to be read alongside Aesop’s Fables. But if it is the Word of God, we ought to devote ourselves to this book. If God really wrote a message to us, then every person is duty-bound to take this message seriously.

The skeptic’s challenge is that the Bible is a story, it is not reliable history. I’m going to respond to this challenge with seven responses. The first will be shared in this post, the following six in the next two weeks.

The most important question regarding the trustworthiness of the Bible is whether or not there was a man named Jesus Christ who lived in the first century in Palestine, who claimed to be the Messiah, who died on a cross and rose again. The trustworthiness of the Bible stands or falls on its claims about Jesus of Nazareth.

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Isn't the Bible Full of Contradictions?

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Isn't the Bible Full of Contradictions?

Atheists.org begins its post on Biblical Contradictions[i] with this statement: “It is a central dogma of all fundamental Christians that the Bible is without error. They teach this conclusion by “reasoning” that god cannot be the author of false meaning and he cannot lie. Is this true? If written by a perfect being, then it must not contradict itself, as a collection of books written by different men at different times over many centuries would be expected to contradict each other.”[ii]

It’s a well-stated premise. I heartily agree. If the Bible’s forty authors who wrote the Bible over a span of approximately 1,500 years and three continents contradict one another (and let’s be honest, how could that kind of motley collection of authors not contradict one another!) it would be a sure sign that the Bible is a human, not divine document. The Atheists.org post goes on to list its top 15 contradictions in the Bible.[iii] Those are:

1)      The Permanence of Earth: we are told “the earth abides forever” and that it will be “burned up.”[iv]

2)      The Holy Lifestyle: should we celebrate “with a merry heart” or be sober-minded in our living?[v]

3)      Seeing God: have some seen God face-to-face or have none?[vi]

4)      The Sabbath Day: we are told that the Sabbath day is to be kept holy and later that “every day is alike.”[vii]

5)      Personal Injury: is “eye for an eye” punishment the rule, or non-retaliation?[viii]

6)      Circumcision: are we to be circumcised or not?[ix]

7)      Family Relationships: are we to honor our parents or to hate them?[x]

8)      Incest: is incest blessed or disallowed?[xi]

9)      The Power of God: is God all-powerful or is his power limited?[xii]

10)   Trusting God: does trusting God bring us blessing or difficulties?[xiii]

11)   Human Sacrifice: are human sacrifices encouraged or forbidden?[xiv]

12)   Punishing Crime: does the punishment of sin fall upon the children of the offenders or not?[xv]

13)   Temptation: can God tempt or not?[xvi]

14)   Resurrection of the Dead: can those who die be resurrected or not?[xvii]

15)   The End of the World: was God supposed to return quickly when the New Testament was written or not?[xviii]

Let’s deal with these apparent contradictions with three responses.

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