Fear and Trembling

One of the most underrated benefits Christ brought to us during His earthly life is communication of God’s character and intentions. Some quotes from Jesus: “… I do nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught me.” John 8:28 “I speak of what I have seen with my Father…” John 8:38 “For I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment—what to say and what to speak.” John 12:49 “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. “ John 14:10 Christ came to tell us some important things.  Now for a story. I sat downstairs in the University of Tennessee’s Student Center in a little café called “The Rafters.” I often went there to study. I find it easier to study with a lot of commotion around me. I don’t know why, I just do. I could not help but overhear a lively conversati...

I have just read a post over at Kevin DeYoung’s blog that I find interesting. He laments some of the things that have bothered me most about the “Young, Restless, and Reformed” (YRR) movement. He takes careful aim at the one item that has bothered me most of late: the fact that many in this movement seem to downplay denominational ties. DeYoung writes: …it’s better to live in a specific ecclesiastical room instead of in the hallway of evangelicalism…We need to learn to be good churchmen, investing time in the committees, assemblies, and machinery of the church. We need to publicly celebrate and defend important doctrinal distinctives (e.g., baptism, the millennium, liturgical norms) even as we love and respect those who disagree. We should delight in our own histories and confessions, while still rejoicing that our different vehicles are ultimately powered by the same engines of the Christian faith–justification, the authority of Scripture, substitutionary atonement, and the glor...

A recent Christianity Today article gives this quote from Alvin Plantinga: …if you are a naturalist and think that we have come to be by evolutionary processes, then you will think that the main purpose of our cognitive processes, our mental faculties, is survival and reproductive fitness, not the production of true belief. Evolution doesn't give a rip about whether your beliefs are true. It only cares whether or not your actions are adaptive, whether they contribute to your fitness. From the point of view of evolution together with naturalism, you wouldn't expect that our faculties would be really adjusted to truth or aimed at truth. They would just be aimed at fitness. But if this is true, if our minds are aimed at mere survival, not at truth, then it's not probable that our minds should be reliable—that is, produce an appropriate preponderance of true over false beliefs; and if that is so, then one who believes both naturalism and evolution should reject the though...