CADRE Comments

Introductory note from Jason Pratt: see here for the previous entry; and see here for the first entry of the series. (It explains what I'm doing, and how, and contains the Johannine prologue.) Dinners and Proposals (7 and 6 days until the end...) Now entering Jericho (says the Scholar, on the way westward to Jerusalem), He was passing through. And look!--a man whose name is called Zaccheus, and he was chief of tax collectors (for the area) and he was rich! Yet he sought to see who Jesus is, and was not able for the crowd, for he was short in height. [Plotnote: also indicating that the crowd had no respect for him, despite (or because!) of his position in the community.] Now running on ahead, he climbed up on a mulberry-fig, in order to see Him, seeing that He would be passing through that way. [Plotnote: a relatively short tree with very thick foliage; Zaccheus is trying to hide from being seen by the crowd, so that he will not be mocked by them. Moreover, this probably takes pla...

In a comment to a post about Calvinism, PuritanLad suggested that Jude 4 supports Calvinism. Apparently, he offered it as evidence of double predestination -- the belief that God not only unconditionally predestines some people to heaven but that he unconditionally predestines the rest of humanity to hell. Setting aside the ultimate merits of this doctrine, what are the merits of using Jude 4 to support Calvinism? Here is the relevant verse: For certain persons have crept in unnoticed, those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ. Jude 1:4. Apparently, PuritanLad understands this verse to mean that God specifically ordained and caused some people to pervert the Gospel and work hard to turn people away from Christ. I find this problematic from a few different perspectives. It seems to be counterintuitive in light of other verses. Is God really workin...

Dr. Steven Collins, The Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project, Jordan; Dean of the College of Archaeology, Trinity Southwest University, has taken a few moments to drop a comment to my earlier post I wrote entitled The disputed location of the City of Sodom . In that post, I referenced an article published by Bible and Spade which made the case that the City of Sodom had to be south of the Dead Sea and compared it to the work performed by Dr. Collins who claims that the City of Sodom is a now-partially excavated site called Tall el-Hamman to the north of the Dead Sea. I wrote a second comment on June 4, 2006, entitled Why believe Sodom is located North of the Dead Sea? in which I concluded: I will be interested to see how Dr. Collins' excavations of the site of Tell el-Hamman progresses and whether he finds more signs of a firey end to that city in the future. I will also be most interested in reading the entire Bible and Spade article that fills in the details about the 10 reasons th...

Kevin Rosero, a CADRE member, has put forth a lengthy new article examining the failure of Early Doherty's Jesus Myth proposal to explain Christian origins. The article is Earl Doherty's Christianities . From Rosero's Introduction: Earl Doherty proposes that the original Christians proclaimed a Jesus crucified in the heavens, never seen on earth by human eyes. This essay will examine his contention that these original sects gave way entirely to Christians who proclaimed Jesus to have been witnessed on earth. I will also be examining Doherty’s claim that another group of Christians worshipped only God in heaven and did not worship Jesus Christ in any form. My basic finding is that his alternative history of Christian origins is full of contradictions and grave problems from start to finish. Chief among the problems is that orthodox Christians who were deeply concerned with heretical ideas about Christ appear to know nothing about Doherty’s proposed beliefs. The article is ...

So, now it's come to this in our present world? During the last run-up to the Super Bowl we saw story after story about Tony Dungy and Lovey Smith, the coaches of the Indianapolis Colts and Chicago Bears, respectively, and how they were both strong Christian men. I remember reading where Tony Dungy is loved by fans and his team. Now, of course, he has become a demon for some for daring to suggest that marriage should be a union only between a man and a woman. A fairly straight-forward account of this matter can be found in the Houston Chronicle : Tony Dungy is a deeply religious man who puts his faith first in his life, even above family and football. So his support of a proposed gay-marriage ban likely surprised few. What was surprising is the Indianapolis Colts' quiet coach shared his position publicly, sparking discussion about the impact of the Super Bowl winner's comments. Dungy caused a stir Tuesday when he accepted the "Friend of Family" award from the cons...

The following is a post sent to me by contributor J.L. Hinman. For whatever reason, he is having difficulties signing onto Blogger, so I am putting this up for him with just a small amount of editing. BK ================== Atheists have of late been harping on the slavery in the Bible issue. I just got through dealing with the post of an unusually ignorant one who claimed that Christianity contributed nothing to the progress of Western Civilization! I can't believe people are so ignorant they are still spewing such tripe. This person tried to make an argument, with no backing, that the direction of social progress is away from religion! Religion is riding high at this juncture in human history. Not only has it produced a paradigm shift in medicine but it has also produced a paradigm shift in philosophy. One might have thought that philosophy would be the last area in which religion could score big, in reality, however, its really leading the way thanks to Plantiga and the back to G...

Theology is not my thing. Give me history or apologetics, even some mild philosophy. But given the apparent growth of Calvinism among younger evangelicals, I have found the old Arminianism v. Calvinism debate more interesting of late. Because of that interest, I recently commented on a post over at the Triablogue blog. In addition to doing some fine apologetics work, most of the bloggers there are staunch Calvinists. In any event, the title of the post referred to "free will" and associated that term with Arminianism. This can lead to some confusion, though it is very understandable as the debate has been framed by such terms for many decades. It would probably be more accurate to say that Classical Arminianism affirms "freed will." That is, man in his natural state is unable to choose to follow God and therefore is in exactly the same state that Calvinists call "Total Depravity." But unlike Calvinists, Arminians believe that God has extended, t...

One of my co-bloggers, J.L. Hinman, author of the very fine Metacrock's Blog recently showed me some data which some atheists are using to support the claim that atheists are smarter than Christians. He pointed me to a website where it measured the average IQ of a country and correlated it to the statement from a Pew survey of the percentage of people who said that religion was "very important" to them. Thus, in Angola, 80% of the people said that religion was very important to them, but the average IQ was a lowly 69. In Bangladesh 88% of the people said that religion was very important to them and their IQ was higher but still only an average of 81. Meanwhile, the three highest IQ countries were Korea, Italy and Germany with average IQs of 106, 102 and 102, respectively. In those countries, the percentage of people who thought that religion was very important to them were 25%, 21% and 27%, respectively. What conclusion can be reached from these statistics? Well, some m...

I tend to find prayer studies interesting, but not necessarily because they prove or disprove the effectiveness of prayer. First, such tests generally attempt to study the effects of prayer rather than necessarily of God. Second, to gauge whether God answers prayers is an attempt to study the actions of an intelligent actor, aware of the study, who may have His own reasons for affecting the results of the study. In any event, the latest study was done by Arizona State University and was published in the reputable journal, Research on Social Work Practice : A Systematic Review of the Empirical Literature on Intercessory Prayer , David R. Hodge. From the abstract : Perhaps surprisingly, many social workers appear to use intercessory prayer in direct practice settings. To help inform practitioners' use of this intervention, this article evaluates the empirical literature on the topic using the following three methods: (a) an individual assessment of each study, (b) an evaluation ...

When this stops being a topic of interest, I'll stop writing about it. However, until that time, I will (at minimum) be referencing you to articles that I find interesting that come across my e-mail. Today, there are two. The first comes from Michael Heiser, Dear Professors and other Bloggers I’d like to report something of potentially great interest with respect to assessing the Jesus tomb theory offered by Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino (and, by extension, James Tabor). Many scholars have demonstrated the glaring weaknesses of this theory with respect to the inscriptions, the names themselves, the shaky logic, etc. And despite the clear, coherent response to the statistical framework and analysis offered by my friend Randy Ingermanson , the public continues to be bludgeoned with the “improbability” of it all. Well, it appears that having the names of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Matthew, and Martha (“Mara”) on ossuaries at one location isn’t as improbable as Jacobovici, Pell...