And now ... this (Sept. 24/25)

Did anyone get raptured yesterday? Anyone?

According to Joshua Mhlakela, a South African pastor, the Rapture was supposed to take place yesterday. Mhlakela claims he had a visit from Jesus, who personally revealed that he would come for his church on September 23 or 24, aligning with this year's Rosh Hashana. The Rapture prediction got traction on social media, mainly TikTok.

Mhlakela claimed to be "a billion percent sure" of his prediction. Perhaps he should have exercised just a little more skepticism.

At least he just outright lied and claimed Jesus told him. So we can be thankful we didn't have to wade through something like the late Harold Camping's impenetrable math proofs to find out he was full of bull.

I Begg your pardon?

Recently, in an interview, radio pastor Alistair Begg (host of the Truth for Life program) recounted a conversation he had had with a Christian lady, whose grandson was going to marry a transgender woman. She didn't know whether she ought to attend the wedding. Begg counseled her to attend the wedding and provide a wedding gift.¹ Social media blew up, as social media is wont to do, with Christians roundly condemning this advice. The American Family Radio network also announced that it was dropping his program.

On plant confessions and "non-human persons"

Rod Dreher is my favourite apostate. And, if he happened to lift my title for a recent blog post about Union Seminary holding a plant confession in chapel, then I'm also flattered. (It also could very well be that in my quest to write original post titles, what I find terribly witty is really just blindingly obvious.)

The "cockamamie piece" in Sojourners that Dreher is reviewing, by Cláudio Carvalhaes, raises a good question:

When we confess to plants, to forests, to each tree, every meadow, to birds, fish, rocks, animals, rivers, and mountains, we repent, mourn and reconnect ourselves to a much larger web of life, made of people, animals, creatures, and ecosystems that we have lost, taken away from our common home.

This understanding demands a reinterpretation of democracy. When are we going to consider the seeds and the panther and the zebras and the cows and horses as part of our democracy?

[Why I Created a Chapel Service Where People Confess to Plants]

By "good question," I mean apropos. In fact, it's kind of a stupid question. Seeds and cows are not capable of participating in democracy; everybody knows that. At best, we would have a sort of benevolent hegemony where we humans decide what's best for the ficus plants and wombats, and lord it over them with or without their consent.

I say the question is apropos because not long before I ran into Dreher's post, my roommate and I were perusing the list of registered political parties in Canada, in anticipation of the upcoming national election. At the top of the (alphabetical) list was the Animal Protection Party of Canada. The APPC claims to be "Canada’s only true multi-issue party because we are inclusive of all species. We cannot talk about any societal structure without including all affected by public policy." Their platform includes amending the Criminal Code to recognize animals as "non-human persons." What the author of the Sojourners article wants to do in church, the APPC wants to do in government. Fortunately, with (by my count) only 17 candidates running, the APPC is as unelectable as any other single-issue fringe party.

None of which is to say I don't care for the earth or its animals. Care for creation is perhaps the one place in my politics where I would tend to the left rather than the right. I think climate change due to the combustion of fossil fuels is a real thing. I regard it as a problem that should be solved, though, rather than a portent of impending doom. The Chicken Little-ism that says we have only 10 years before irreversible damage is done, on the other hand, is laughable. (It's always 10 years until Climate Armageddon, and has been for decades.) We should be listening to climate scientists, not pundits, politicians, and adolescents, even though they don't look as cute berating the United Nations.

I didn't come by my views by listening to Al Gore, Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, or Greta Thunberg; I got them from Francis Schaeffer, whose book Pollution and the Death of Man¹ rightly says the things in the natural world have intrinsic value and are worthy of our respect, because God made them and put them there. Our relationship to the world is expressed in the creation mandate: "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it" (Genesis 2:15). We are not merely one species amongst the many that populate this planet, nor are we its masters, having the right to "conquer" and exploit nature's resources as we please. God is the earth's master; we are his caretakers, entrusted to cultivate the earth. If our lax environmental policies cause the extinction of, say, the rhinoceros, then to that extent we have failed as caretakers. On the other hand, if the radical policies of groups like the APPC are put into effect and cause the rhinoceroses to flourish but humanity to go extinct, we have also failed. If I ever have children, I want to leave them a world in better condition than I found it. If we have environmental sins to confess, it is to God, who entrusted us with his creation to care for it. We won't get absolution from the plants.

Footnotes

¹ Francis A. Schaeffer, Pollution and the Death of Man: The Christian View of Ecology (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1970). I own the 1992 Crossway edition, with an added concluding chapter by Udo Middelmann.

The Law of Indistinct Induction

There's a kind of bad argument you see a lot from Fundamentalists trying to defend their extrabiblical holiness standards (KJV-onlyism, no CCM, no women wearing pants, etc.). It crops up so often, I figured it had to be part of some secret fundamentalist creed that I was not allowed access to. Some years ago, I formalized this article of faith like this:

If one Christian approves of a behaviour about which the Bible is silent or ambiguous, but which another, Fundamentalist Christian disapproves of, it is not a mere difference of opinion. Rather, the Fundamentalist shall infer that it is a tacit admission that the first Christian knows the behaviour is sinful, and furthermore, he secretly desires to commit even greater sins.

The shorter Shorter Catechism could put it thusly:

If a Christian has less strict standards than a Fundamentalist, that is the same as having no standards at all.

When I came up with this article circa 2012-13, I put it to the regulars at a now-defunct incarnation of the Fighting Fundamental Forums to give it a name. Ultimately, the suggestion that won out was The Law of Indistinct Induction.

Some practical examples (that I have actually seen):

• If you don't accept that the King James Bible alone is God's word for English-speaking people, you will accept anything as God's word: not only the NIV, but the New World Translation used by the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Book of Mormon, the Quran, Playboy, and comic books. (Yes, all of those have been suggested to me at some time as the only logical consequence of rejecting KJV-onlyism.)
• If you believe it is permissible for a Christian to have a glass of wine, then you must believe it is permissible for a Christian to get falling-down drunk, or even to use marijuana or harder drugs.
• If you would wear a swimsuit at the beach, what is stopping you from wearing it to work or to church?
• If you prefer not to wear a necktie to church, you would probably be happy coming naked if you had the chance. (The prospect of nude or nearly nude churchgoers seems to preoccupy them, for some reason.)

It's bad theology on multiple counts. As a transparent my-way-or-the-highway assertion, it's a textbook example of a false dichotomy. To my mind, it's a variation on the Fundamentalist mindset that all biblical doctrines are equally important: if a moral standard can be reasoned (or even reasonably inferred) from the Scriptures, it must be defended with all the fervour of St. Nicholas defending the Trinity at the Council of Nicaea by slugging Arius. There's no acknowledgement that the Bible may permit a certain amount of latitude for practices where it is not entirely clear—or even those where it is clear, such as permitting someone to decide for himself whether to drink wine.

This isn't really apropos of anything. To be honest, I can just never remember "The Law of Indistinct Induction," but it's such a common bad argument, I wanted to put it somewhere that was easily found.

Bless me, Ficus, for I have sinned

So this happened on Tuesday:

Today in chapel, we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor.

What do you confess to the plants in your life? pic.twitter.com/tEs3Vm8oU4

— Union Seminary (@UnionSeminary) September 17, 2019

I must admit, I don't confess to plants. I do, however, confide in them. I told an aloe vera yesterday, when I read this tweet, that I thought "progressive Christians" weren't quite right in the head.

When St. Paul wrote:

although 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. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. (Rom. 1:21-25)

he had pagans and idolators in mind. I don't know whether he would have foreseen that a major Christian theological seminary would have followed in their footsteps. Union Seminary began life as a Presbyterian institution, then a non-denominational one, and now its mission is "training people of all faiths and none who are called to the work of social justice in the world. . . . Union actively reforms itself in response to the changing needs of the world and an evolving understanding of what it means to be faithful."

Put another way, Union Theological Seminary has abandoned the seminary's mission of training ministers of the Gospel in theology, and now conforms itself to whatever worldly thinking represents the spirit of the current age. The insanity of turning away from God and turning to earthly idols has taken many forms. Today, it means confessing to plants, which do not hear, cannot understand, do not care about, and will not grant absolution for, your sins. Only God can do that, and he is not in need of plants to do his work for him.

Pete Buttigieg tries to define when life begins

Last week, South Bend, Indiana mayor and Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg said on a radio talk show that he supported abortion on demand right up to birth.

In a September 6 interview on The Breakfast Club, Buttigieg told host Charlamagne Tha God: "There’s a lot of parts of the Bible that talk about how life begins with breath."

A lot? Not really.

Do a search on the words "life" and "breath" (and derivations) on BibleGateway, and you come up with 15 verses. (I used the English Standard Version; other English translations may produce somewhat different results.) Of these, the majority use breath as a figure of speech representing life itself: for example, "Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life [i.e. that was alive] died" (Gen. 7:22). "Breath" also represents the shortness of one's life (e.g. Job 7:7), or the end of it (e.g. Ishmael, who "breathed his last and died" in Gen. 25:17). So we can dismiss these verses, as they neither prove nor disprove when human life begins.

That leaves us with three passages using the word "life" and "breath" that we can infer associate the beginning of life with the first breath.

In Genesis 2:7, "the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature." Of course, "the man" is not all men: specifically, it refers to Adam, the first man. He was made, not born: God fashioned him out of inanimate matter and breathed life into him. So Adam is a special case; his origin story is not typical of all human beings. We wouldn't argue that all women are made out of a man's ribs, just because Eve was made from one of Adam's, would we?

Perhaps Job 33:4 is more helpful to Buttigieg's argument. Elihu, Job's friend, says to him: "The Spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life." Here, at least, Elihu is a normal man, not the prototype of the human race. But note what he tells Job only a moment later: "I am toward God as you are; I too was pinched off from a piece of clay" (33:6). Neither Job nor Elihu were actually fashioned from clay. He is speaking poetically, not literally, about their common descent from Adam. So it's safe to say verse 4 is also figurative. This passage does Buttigieg no good, either.

We're left with Revelaton 11:11: "After the three and a half days a breath of life from God entered them, and they stood up on their feet." These are the two witnesses that prophesy to the world before the Beast kills them. Then, three and a half days later, they are miraculously resuscitated and raised into heaven. Revelation is a book of apocalyptic literature, meaning it couches its message in symbolism and metaphor. The whole book is, in fact, a supernatural vision, not something that has literally occurred in the real world. It is not a good idea to establish a firm point of doctrine based on this passage. Plus, like Adam, the two witnesses are a special case, not the norm.

I have seen one other passage used by the Left, for example on the Christian Left blog, in defense of the assertion that life begins with the first breath:

I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them. But there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, "Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live." So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army."

However, like the passage in Revelation, this one proves nothing. First, it's a vision: an image Ezekiel was shown that represented the restoration of the nation of Israel following its exile by the Assyrians around 722 BC. Second, even assuming for the sake of argument that these bones had real existence, then again, they were miraculously brought back to life. This is another special case, not the typical birth of ordinary human beings.

Buttigieg, who identifies himself as an Episcopalian, has gone to heroic lengths to rationalize his positions as the only acceptable option for professing Christians. All he does is betray the terrible theological foundations of so-called "progressive Christianity." His exegesis of the Bible is execrable. Worse, it's cynical. He seems to think that Christians are stupid and gullible, and all it takes to "guilt" them into line is to quote a verse or two from the Bible.

The Democratic Party has, for some reason, been labeled the "party of science" over and against, supposedly, the Bible-thumping, climate change-denying, women's healthcare-defunding Republicans. Science tells us when human life begins: a new, genetically distinct human being comes into being at conception. The unborn human organism is undoubtedly alive: it is organizes, adapts to its environment, grows and develops, consumes nutrients, and so forth. And it is incontrovertably human, because it has human DNA inherited from human parents. Why won't Pete Buttigieg and the Party of Science defend life based on scientific definitions? Because i's not about science, but politics. The Leftist political dogma of "reproductive justice"—a euphemism for abortion, which is neither reproductive nor just—trumps objective truth. Simple as that.

Friday in the wild: April 25, 2014

It's been a while since I've done an edition of FitW (let alone blogged anything at all, for that matter). However, in light of a few recent current events, I felt moved to post something, centred around the theme of same-sex "marriage."

Christians are often asked, "Why are you so obsessed with homosexuality?" My answer is, "Because homosexuality is the wedge issue by which a secular society is trying to vilify and marginalize Christians." Or, as a friend on Facebook has also pointed out, it is actually a sex-obsessed society that is demanding answers from us. (Similarly, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler has said that the media frequently contacts him for an opinion.) It makes you wonder who is really obsessed, doesn't it?

And now . . . this - Mar. 11/14

Your best take now

You know what I'm having trouble feeling right now? Sympathy.

An estimated $600,000 was stolen from Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church this weekend in Houston.

According to a statement sent to church members, someone allegedly stole cash, checks, and credit card information from the church safe, reported the Houston Chronicle, one of the first of many media outlets to cover the story.

[Full Story]

For some reason, I am most strongly reminded of this verse from the Bible:

[H]ow can someone enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man? Then indeed he may plunder his house. (Matt. 12:29)

It was easy to clean out Osteen's church. There wasn't a strong man around.

I do feel for the people who have possibly had their banks accounts or credit cards compromised. As for Osteen himself, well, maybe if the prosperity-gospel huckster had had more faith, this wouldn't have happened. I'm sure the poor soul will have to go a whole extra week before he can polish his solid-gold house again.

Perry Noble on abortion: Swing and a miss

Pastor Perry Noble of the South Carolina megachurch NewSpring is no stranger to intemperate and ill-advised remarks. This Monday, he did it again, with a blog post criticizing a planned boycott of Girl Scout cookies by some pro-life Christians, because of a supposed connection between the Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA) and Planned Parenthood (PP), the largest provider of abortions in the U.S.

First,Noble prefaces his remarks by affirming that he is indeed "unapologetically pro-life" and that denying that human life begins with conception is "nothing more than intellectual dishonesty." I commend him for doing so, because if that affirmation were not there, I would have no idea he was pro-life from his unfortunately muddy thinking

Thank you for calling and sharing, and shall we take our next false prophet, please? (Harold Camping, 1921-2013)

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
- T. S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

Harold Camping, the discredited former radio preacher who doubled down on a false end-of-the-world prediction and lost, is dead.

[T]he California preacher who used his evangelical radio ministry and thousands of billboards to broadcast the end of the world and then gave up public prophecy when his date-specific doomsdays did not come to pass, has died at age 92.

Family Radio Network marketing manager Nina Romero said Harold Camping, a retired civil engineer who built a worldwide following for the nonprofit, Oakland-based ministry he founded in 1958, died at his home on Sunday. She said he had been hospitalized after falling.

[Full Story]

Most people's knowledge of Harold Camping and his nonsense probably doesn't go back much farther than 2010 or 2011, when his infamous prediction of the end of the world on May 21, 2011 became international news. As many date-setters are wont to do, when that prediction failed, he "discovered" an error in his calculations, and revised his prognostication for October 21 the same year. And yet, here we all still are.

I first became aware of Camping when I chanced to tune in Family Radio on my shortwave in 1992 or 1993. I listened to his "Open Forum" call-in show every now and then. Apart from hyper-Calvinist leanings and a tendency to prefer "spiritual" interpretations of the Bible to straighter literal ones, he was a voice of relative sanity on the madness that is Christian shortwave radio. However, he had recently published two books, Are You Ready? and 1994? in which he predicted the end of the world on or about September 6, 1994. This subject began to dominate his airtime. When the 1994 prediction also failed, declared an error in his calculations and revised it for one year later. (Two years later, I was still finding the odd copy of 1994? on Christian bookstore shelves!)

Camping's tendency toward allegorical theology and date-setting went back years earlier, though. In his 1970 book The Biblical Calendar of History, Camping asserted that the world was created in 11,013 BC, based on an unorthodox reading of the genealogy of Noah (which I discussed here). Camping subsequently claimed that exactly 13,000 years later, on May 21, 1988, the Church age came to an end. The Holy Spirit had departed all organized Christian churches, which were thereafter under God's wrath. Coincidentally—or perhaps not—this was about the same time that Camping was removed from teaching Sunday school at his Christian Reformed church because of his increasingly eccentric theology. He left that church altogether a few months later. Camping encouraged his listeners to leave their churches and form loose fellowships in which they listen to Family Radio instead (from which he also expelled all programming that supported the continuation of the church). In the early 2000s, between failed Rapture predictions, this was the teaching that Camping was most notorious for.

And then, some time in 2009, it came out that Camping was doing it again: he had announced that the end of the world would occur on May 21, 2011. This date is very significant because it comes exactly 23 years after May 21, 1988, as well as exactly 722,500 days after the Crucifixion on April 1, AD 33. 722,500 is the square of 5 × 10 × 17, which are (according to Camping) "enormously significant spiritual numbers." No, I don't get it either.

Predictably, as was the case in 1995, 1994, and 1988 (which, I have come to understand, was yet another possible date for the Rapture, if only Camping hadn't discovered it years after the fact), nothing happened. Camping had unambiguously left himself no way to weasel out of this prediction when it failed again, and so he became a laughingstock, both in the church and out. It didn't make matters much better when he tried to weasel out of it anyway, claiming that the May 21 event was "spiritual" and that the really-and-for-true end of the world was on October 21. Well, that wasn't true either. In the meantime, he also suffered a stroke that effectively ended his public ministry.

After October 21, 2011, Camping finally clued in that something was fundamentally wrong with his methods, and issued an apology before disappearing into a well-deserved obscurity. On the occasion of his death, however, Family Radio's note whitewashes the fact that he (and they) swindled his followers out of millions of dollars used to promote the apocalypse that never was. Many of these people sold possessions, quit their jobs, or went on the road for the sake of promoting Camping's message. I wonder where they ended up?

There's a reason that James said teachers needed to be careful about their teaching because they would incur a stricter judgment (Jas. 3:1). Harold Camping did not fight the good fight, and he abandoned the faith years ago for all manner of apostasy: for example, annihilationism, modalism, adoptionism, and hyper-Calvinism. His doctrine and date-setting led many Christians to follow him into the ditch, and drove Family Radio, a once-legitimate Christian ministry, into the ground. They still want to eulogize him. I think I'll take the advice of the Who, instead: let's forget him, better still.

Same-sex marriage and the church

One of the fundamental themes in the apologetics of Francis A. Schaeffer is the way that radical new ideas influence society. In his earliest books, such as Escape from Reason, he argues that as a general rule, ideas begin in the academy (particularly in the humanities, such as philosophy), then work their way out into the arts and music, and spread into the general public. Finally, they come into the church.

This is the stage that has now been reached on the gay-rights front, particularly on the issue of same-sex marriage and benefits. Even 20 years ago, the idea of two men or two women actually marrying would have been practically unthinkable. Now, it is generally accepted by nearly everyone that same-sex marriage is a Good Thing, while opposing it is "homophobic." Last week's U.S. Supreme Court decisions concerning the Defense of Marriage Act and California's Proposition 8 essentially repudiated the traditional view of marriage as backwards and bigoted. By contrast, the time between the Emancipation Proclamation and the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which prohibited discrimination based upon skin colour) was just over a century. And that is for a cause that virtually all rational people today accept as a great good! The rapidity with which same-sex rights have been accepted is almost preternatural. (In my opinion, this is primarily due to a full-court press by the primary agenda-setters in the public mind—the media and the entertainment industry, who speak with a nearly unanimous voice in favour of gay rights, something that would not necessarily have been true for previous generations.)

Now, advocacy for same-sex marriages is finding its way into the churches. I don't mean merely the liberal churches, such as the United Church of Canada or the Episcopal Church, where no leftist cause célèbre ever went uncelebrated. We would expect that kind of thing from institutions who abandoned the faith for social activism ages ago. I mean evangelical churches, where the authority of God's word is still supposedly held in high regard. The official position of my own church, for example, is that marriage is an exclusive covenant relationship between one man and one woman. It is enshrined in the statement of faith. Nonetheless, I know of a handful of people within the church who are no longer convinced that the bible teaches this. Maybe some of them never were truly convinced.

For anyone who claims to believe in the authority of Scripture, this is simply untenable.

Wednesday cruci-fiction

There are two constants on the fundamentalist liturgical calendar. One occurs in late October, as Hallowe'en approaches: the Annunciation of the Evils of Trick-or-Treating. The other takes place in the spring: the Epiphany of Good Wednesday.

Yes, Good Wednesday: the belief that Jesus' crucifixion had to take place on Wednesday, and not on Friday as tradition (read: Roman Catholic) has maintained.

I'll grant this: These folks take the authority of the Bible seriously, unlike, arguably, the majority of Christmas and Easter Christians who come to church a couple times a year to assuage whatever guilt they have, and can't be bothered to think these things through the other 363 days of the year. It seems to me, however, that the Wednesday crucifixion thing just doesn't work, and I think a better case can be made for the traditional view.

Some years ago, the only people you would have seen making this kind of argument were from Sabbatarian sects, such as the Seventh-day Adventists or the various groups that grew out of Herbert W. Armstrong's teachings. It's clear why they would advocate for a Wednesday crucifixion: they want to undermine the foundations of Sunday worship in favour of their Sabbatarian theology. Christians gather together on Sunday because that was the day Jesus rose from the dead. I don't see why any group of Sunday worshippers would want to copy their arguments, however; I guess it has something to do with a suspicion of all things Roman Catholic. Just because it's traditional doesn't necessarily make it wrong, and if our timeline of Holy Week is based more on some kind of "Romophobia" than exegesis, then we've started off on the wrong foot.

Hazardous Materials: G. A. Riplinger's toxic waste

I have mentioned offhand in the past that I do not own a paper copy of G. .A. Riplinger's influential KJV-only book New Age Bible Versions. I have, however, read the thing: in the early 1990s, a notable online fan of hers made a hypertext file of the book available on his BBS, presumably with the blessing of the author. (As a point of interest, that makes NABV the first ebook I ever downloaded; it would be about a year before I got access to the WWW and discovered Project Gutenberg.) Since I refuse to fatten Riplinger's wallet, the only way I will obtain hard copies of her books is if a) I happen to encounter them in a used bookstore, or b) a KJV-onlyist, concerned with this vital deficiency in my library, offers to remedy it at his own expense.

Well, this week, b) happened—though it wasn't a KJV-onlyist, nor was it NABV. An on-line acquaintance had two copies of Riplinger's more recent missive, Hazardous Materials (Ararat, VA: A.V. Publications, 2008), and offered one to me. It arrived yesterday, and I promised to give it a good home. Although I probably won't get to read it through for a little while, I did spend a few minutes last evening flipping through it. So this post is not a book review, but just a few first impressions based on a surface-level skimming.

Barack Obama, theologian

Everyone's a theologian, as one of my pastors occasionally says. We all believe something about God. The real question is whether you're a good or bad one.

Barack Obama spoke last Thursday at the annual National Prayer Breakfast, as is traditional for American presidents since Eisenhower. In his speech, he described how his Christian faith drove his policies, particularly his economic ones. For example:

[W]hen I talk about shared responsibility, it's because I genuinely believe that in a time when many folks are struggling, at a time when we have enormous deficits, it's hard for me to ask seniors on a fixed income, or young people with student loans, or middle-class families who can barely pay the bills, to shoulder the burden alone. I think to myself, if I'm willing to give something up as somebody who's been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that’s going to make economic sense.

But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus's teaching that "for unto whom much is given, much shall be required." It mirrors the Islamic belief that those who've been blessed have an obligation to use those blessings to help others, or the Jewish doctrine of moderation and consideration for others.¹

Earnestly contending for the doctrine of the omniimpotence of God

(Or, reason #2,827 why Molinism sucks.)

I saw this article from William Lane Craig excerpted first on Triablogue last week. In the intervening week, it's made the rounds around to the usual suspects in the blogosphere as well. So, as usual, I'm a little late to the game. Nonetheless.

Craig is a Molinist. Molinism is a philosophical attempt to reconcile the biblical truths of divine sovereignty and human moral agency. Not only is this an unnecessary exercise, it seems to me—if I believe in scriptural inerrancy, then I am bound to accept both, given that both are taught unambiguously in the Bible—but it simply isn't a very good one. Molinism claims that God knows what choices free creatures would make in any set of circumstances, and so, out of all the possible worlds, he created the one in which everyone freely made the moral choices that he wanted them to. Put another way: God (being a gentleman who would never barge in) must not affect the will of the creature directly, but he will herd the creature into the necessary circumstances to obtain the desired free-will choices.

That's some "freedom."

And tomorrow is Saturday

And, not surprisingly, still wrong.

It's Friday, Friday, all gonna die on Friday

It's October 21: the no-really-for-real End of the World as predicted by doomster Harold Camping and his Family Radio organization.

Anybody dead yet? I mean, other than those of you that an actuarial table could guess about?

Didn't think so.

Can't wait to find out what Camping, Family Radio, and their remaining followers—whom I presume to be fairly sparse by now—have to say this time. As I noted a few days ago, Camping's certainty about the end of the world appears to have waned somewhat, and his prognostications are filled with an increasing number of weasel words. The question remains, then: Will Camping finally admit that he was wrong, and repent of 20+ years of misleading Christians? Will he simply allow today to pass in silence? Or will he, once again, refuse to acknowledge his error, discover some new "truth" in the Bible that he has previously overlooked, and recalculate for yet another Judgment Day still in the future—which date, in all likelihood, he will not see from this side of eternity, thus saving himself a fourth round of embarrassment?

For the record, I wrote this on Oct. 19 and set it to post today, Friday, October 21. The world has not ended today, nor will it. In the 0.00000000000000001% chance that I'm mistaken, I'm willing to look very silly for eternity. I am just that confident. Chew it, false prophets.

Captain Camping rides again . . . probably

Yes, it's only 15 days left to the "This time I really, really mean it" Judgment Day on October 21. And Captain Camping isn't letting something silly like a debilitating stroke stop him from keeping on purveying his end-of-the-world heresy. In a recent audio message posted on the Family Radio, he said:

We would have not been able to be used of [God] to bring about the tremendous event that occurred on May 21 of this year, and, which probably will be finished out on October 21 that's coming very shortly. That looks like it will be, at this point, it looks like it will be the final end of everything.

We must believe that probably there will be no pain suffered by anyone because of their rebellion against God. This is very comforting to all of us because we all have children, and we have loved ones that are dear to us that we know are not saved, and yet we know that they'll quietly die, we can become more and more sure that they will quietly die and that will be the end of their story. Whereas the true believers will quietly receive the new heaven and the new earth. . . . [T]here's going to be no big display of any kind, the end is going to come very, very quietly, probably within the next month it will happen, that is, by October 21."

[Source]

A few notes:

• Harold Camping, you weren't used of God to bring about the "tremendous event" of May 21. There was no tremendous event on May 21.
• That's an awful lot of weasel words: It "looks like" the end of the world will "probably" happen "within the next month." In fact, it's a far cry from the sloganeering that accompanied the "tremendous event" itself: "The Bible guarantees it!" trumpeted Captain Camping and his billboards. Doesn't sound like much of a "guarantee" this time around, does it?
• No pain? Whatever happened to all the tremendous upheavals and earthquakes that were supposed to accompany judgment day? I would think those would cause a not inconsiderable amount of pain and suffering. Now it's just going to "quietly" happen with "no big display." I suspect that Captain Camping is still trying to weasel out of his inevitable failure: having predicted that no big signs will accompany the end of the world, therefore when no big signs occur on October 21, this will of course be proof that the end of the world has indeed happened. ("Spiritually," of course!)

Seriously . . . Harold Camping, you lying weasel, just shut up already. You're only making it worse for yourself.

Signs of the times

A hair-thin electronic patch that adheres to the skin like a temporary tattoo could transform medical sensing, computer gaming and even spy operations, according to a US study published Thursday.

The micro-electronics technology, called an epidermal electronic system (EES), was developed by an international team of researchers from the United States, China and Singapore, and is described in the journal Science. . . .

The wireless device is nearly weightless and requires so little power it can fuel itself with miniature solar collectors or by picking up stray or transmitted electromagnetic radiation, the study said.

Less than 50-microns thick - slightly thinner than a human hair - the devices are able to adhere to the skin without glue or sticky material.

[Full Story]

It's in Revelation, people!!

Finally, Science! has given us the ability to make a mark on the hand or forehead. The One World Government and cashless society so clearly spelled out in the book of Revelation is surely almost upon us. Indeed, prophecy is being fulfilled, in the very pages of our newspapers.

I've something to see, can't help myself, it's a new religion

A few days ago I received the latest number of "The Riplinger Report," the occasional email newsletter of KJV-only spinmeister (meisteren?) G. A. Riplinger. The lead article was an announcement of "[o]ur new KJB evangelist, Stephen Shutt":

Our outreach is expanding with our radio show, hosted by KJB evangelist and missionary Stephen Shutt (who is married to our daughter Bryn Riplinger Shutt). . . .

Stephen worked in Christian radio for over three years and was functioning as the station's chief operator, when he left to serve the Lord as a KJB evangelist for us and a missionary for Bearing Precious Seed and Local Church Bible publishers of Lansing Michigan.

The last I heard, the evangel was still repentance and faith in the living Christ, who died and rose from the dead to redeem sinners. I've met plenty of KJV-onlyists over the years for whom the "perfectly preserved Word of God for the English-speaking peoples" was their first article of faith. But I think this the first time I've met someone who openly proclaimed himself an "evangelist" and a "missionary" for the cause. Riplinger has been grinding away at the same street organ for ages, and she's gone further and further off the rails with each book.

In any case, the "good news" of the King James Bible is not the Gospel of Christianity. It's a new religion. We could call it KJVanity. Chop off the first two letters, and it's not far off the mark.

Meanwhile, in the same newsletter, Riplinger promotes a petition "to alert publishers that we do not appreciate their tampering with the spelling and orthography of the KJB." Apparently, some publishers have taken it upon themselves to revise the text to Americanize or modernize the spelling. Horrors!

It's amusing. KJV-onlyists continually harp on the "copyright" bandwagon, asserting that God's Word should not be copyrighted, and the KJV (unlike the modern versions) carries no copyright, so it can be printed and distributed freely. Yet when a publisher actually treats the KJV like a public-domain document, suddenly Riplinger and her trained monkeys act like it should be copyrighted and they are the de facto copyright holders, dictating to editors what they may do with the text. You gotta laugh.