Look out for the safes!
Posted on 04/25/2005 10:30:48 AM PDT by Tribune7
How Faith Is Lost
I want to begin with a story about an experience I had over twenty years ago, in 1980, which gives motivation for why I am doing this. I had just become a Christian about a year earlier. While walking on the streets of Chicago one day, I met two young men. I was only nineteen at the time, and they were in their early twenties. I started engaging them with the claims of Christ, talking to them about what Jesus meant to me and what he should mean to them. They had had a bit too much to drink and as I talked, they started mocking me. But after a while they broke down in tears.
It turns out these men were graduates of Wheaton College and were now students at one of the seminaries in Hyde Park. Hyde Park is where the University of Chicago is, and there are about seven theological schools there. I think they were in their first year. But they had lost their faith, and now they were literally crying. They told me, “We wish we could believe the way you do, but we can’t anymore.”
What happened to their faith? After all, they had gone to Wheaton College, one of the premiere evangelical Christian colleges in the country, and now they were in seminary. Yet in a very short time their faith seems to have disintegrated. Since I have been through the educational curriculum at a mainline seminary (Princeton), I would propose that there are two things one gets at a seminary like theirs that will undermine one’s faith.
First, you get biblical criticism. You are taught that the Scriptures are a hodge-podge of various historical source documents put together by a religious community for various theological purposes.
(Excerpt) Read more at designinference.com ...
ping
As a 20 year old undergrad at the University of Chicago, I participated in a graduate seminar on Acts and most of my classmates were students from Hyde Park seminaries.
I wound up having to defend orthodox Christianity in there every day against Christophobic Ph.D students.
What struck me then and still strikes me to this day is how ignorant many of them were.
One of the classroom arguments that went particularly well for me one day was when a Methodist woman claimed that St. Paul was lying when he said that he was a Roman citizen because "he says in Romans and elsewhere that he's a Jew."
I told her than in the 1st century it was quite common to be both a Roman citizen and a Jew and she literally laughed at me and the rest of class more or less chuckled at me in sympathy with her.
Then the professor said that I was actually correct and that St. Paul "may well have really been" a Roman citizen.
That has come to pass. The ratcheting comes from the materialistic animal being backed into a corner. The materialists are losing big and they are desperate because they have no convincing argument with which to stop the blood loss.
The biggest hangup which most people have with God and religion is usually called "the problem of evil", i.e. how does an omnipotent and loving God allow the hardships which we see in our physical world. There are several similar and related problems, such as if the son of god actually came to this world 2000 years ago, how did the American Indians go 1500 years without ever hearing about it? Again, how does an omnipotent and loving God create the creatures of Pandora's box, biting flies, mosquitos, ticks, fleas, chiggers, and disease vectors?
There are a few others. All such questions basically hang on the question of what the word "omnipotent" is supposed to mean. Most people view it as meaning "having all the power which anybody could imagine", and it is that definition which leads to conundrums and breakdowns of logic. A more rational definition would be "having all the power that there actually is", and THAT definition does not lead to conundrums.
That view says that the spirit world and our physical realm are strongly separated, at least in our age of the world, and that the two are orthoganal to eachother and that the spirit world actually has little if any real power to act within our realm; that we in fact might have originally been put here to PROVIDE the spirit world with some degree of instrumentality in this physical realm. THAT of course would require solid and reliable communications between the two realms, which we do not presently have.
That view also says that on the day that Christ was born into our physical realm, he was subject to all of the same physical laws which we are subject to, including not being able to get from Israel to Mexico or Kansas without airplanes.
That view also says that a loving God simply did not create the creatures of Pandora's box. The best evidence we have at present is that the engineering and re-engineering of complex life forms was some sort of a cottage industry or something like that in past ages and that more than one pair of hands was involved, and that whoever was responsible for the existence of biting flies, ticks, and chiggers, is not anybody we need to worship, to say the least.
Most theological liberal rely on carefully crafted arguments that leave out roughly half the facts.
When presented with their conclusions based on their selective set of "facts" their logic can seem straightforward.
It's what they don't tell you that makes all the difference.
How strange. I've been informed a number of times that Intelligent Design has nothing whatsoever to do with religion or with gods. What's up with that?!
Excellent point! Libs in general simply don't believe there is such a thing as good and evil; too black and white for them. They need more 'nuance' (read wiggle-room)!
Shhhhh..
That's just what they say in court, under oath.
9 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, 10 Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.
Yet, so many Christians claim they are exempt from this by "grace".
Thanks for the ping!
The first section agrees with my view that for Christians to swallow evolution, they also have to discard the teachings of the Apostle Paul, and the redemption of Jesus for our sins if they want to be consistent.
In evolution, there is no sin for which Jesus came to die.
I look forward to reading the rest of the article. Thanks, Tribune!
The something good which you want to thank God for is the kingdom of heaven. This place is just a sort of a test.
We have science, the IDers do not. The ratcheting comes from their attempts to put a skirt of scientific legitimacy on the pig of creationism and teach it to kids as a fact.
If you get it, don't try to read it cover to cover all at once. It's worth going through in small doses, digesting it as you go.
I wouldn't put it that way. It generally is associated with a case for Christ. However, it doesn't have to be. One could be persuaded that a washing machine has been designed without knowing exactly who built it.
Look out for the safes!
It is easier for a believer in a loving God to explain the evil than it is for a beliver in accident to explain the good.
Some who have suffered greatly believe in a loving God quite deeply.
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