CADRE Comments

[Note: The contents page for this series can be found here. The previous entry, Chapter 50, can be found here. ] [This entry constitutes Chapter 51.] If God is going to maintain all the various balances in His creation, while still working to His utmost to help effect our salvation from our own sins and the sins of our predecessors, then He will have to go about it within our history--not merely within the stories we tell ourselves (although He will do some work along those lines, too), but within the real natural reality we inhabit as synthetic creatures. This means He will act within a historical context, and it will be a context of His choosing: designed and guided, even 'tweaked' by Him to fit His plans; but also incorporating the choices of the people, the families, the nations, who will be a part of this particular story of history. But those people will not be sock-puppets. They will be real people; they will be fallible, even though God works with them to the best of ...

[Note: The contents page for this series can be found here. The previous entry, Chapter 49, can be found here. ] [This entry constitutes Chapter 50.] God must come to us, to give us the best possible chance of understanding Him. Not only in the ministry of the Holy Spirit to every person, inspiring and judging us in fair-togetherness, but even more directly than that, more obviously as a Person than that, more able to reveal the truth of His character in action we can see, not merely hear in our hearts. That doesn't mean we necessarily will understand what is happening; we might still make our own honest mistakes about it, or we might still try to fudge our way around it to protect some inflamed sense of our own self-importance. But this leads to a number of questions about the act of God I am now considering: what should I mean by God coming to us, each of us, personally, in this manner? Well, there have been odd tales, throughout history, all over the world, about encounters ...

[Note: The contents page for this series can be found here. The previous entry, Chapter 48, can be found here. ] [This entry constitutes Chapter 49.] What shall God do? The devils have betrayed His love; and do betray those He loves. Yet, as the eternal ground of all reality (including theirs), still being intrinsically Love in His own unique and independent self-existence, God still loves the rebel angels. The humans have betrayed Him, too; and are betrayed in turn by higher tormentors; and also betray whosoever they themselves can find to have power over. Yet, still, God loves them, too. God will do what He can, to mitigate the suffering that His beloved children cause, in their quests to affirm their own self-importance. Such a quest will always involve perverted suffering: for to make suffer, in pain or in pleasure, is to exhibit power over; and so to exhibit power over, in any perverted way, will be to make suffer. Yet God has given them such power that they pervert. And although...

In this series of posts I want to record some quotes from Craig Keener's The Historical Jesus of the Gospels which I have found of value in answering apologetic challenges. I have decided it would be most useful to post these excerpts in a Q&A format, allowing quotes from the book to directly answer questions people sometimes have about the reliability of the Gospels and how much we know about the historical Jesus. Doesn't the fact that the authors of the Gospels were biased towards Jesus make them unreliable as sources for his life? Contrary to what modern writers sometimes suppose, 'bias' did not make biographies into novels. We take bias into account when we read works of ancient biography or history, yet at the same time we depend heavily on these sources to understand the persons about whom they are written (both because they are the only sources available, and because comparison shows such works to preserve substantial information). If this is true for other ...

I'm greatly looking forward to Jerry Walls and David Baggett's forthcoming book Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality . I have always thought that C.S. Lewis was right to center his apologetic in Mere Christianity on the moral argument, because the voice of conscience seems to be a particularly appropriate way for a personal God to reveal Himself. Here are just some of its strengths: 1. Obligation is a relationship that obtains between persons, so we would expect the Christian God to penetrate our awareness through our sense of moral duty. 2. Conscience is a divine communication channel that is widely accessible: even if people cannot appreciate the subtleties of a metaphysical argument for God's existence, they can certainly hear the still, small voice urging them to do right, to follow the way of life and wisdom. 3. The existence of a genuine, objective moral order in the universe would be very hard to square with atheistic naturalism. It is not the sort of thing...

"I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." ~ Mahatma Gandhi Yes, it is the battle of the ages: Christianity versus Christ. And virtually everyone agrees that Christ wins hands down. After all, almost everyone likes Jesus Christ. But Christians? They're judgmental! They're hypocrites! They do very unchristlike things! So, liking Jesus is easy because he taught love and forgiveness. Christians, on the other hands, talk about love and forgiveness, but many neither forgive nor love all that much, right? So, one can follow Christ without being a Christian, right? Gandhi was right when he said, "…to be a good Hindu also meant that I would be a good Christian. There is no need for me to join your creed to be a believer in the beauty of the teachings of Jesus or try to follow His example." This is, in sum, the argument made in an article in the Washington Times by Frank Raj entitled Gandhi glimpsed Christ, reje...

A topic that has been bounced around this blog over the years is the question of whether atheism is a religion. I, for one, have set out my reasoning for saying that it absolutely is a religion in a post entitled Why I Believe Atheism is a Religion . Needless to say, my opinion was not well received by the atheists who (at that time) were readers of the blog. They objected that atheism is not a religion for several reasons. This morning, however, I read an article in the newspaper that led me to conclude that not all atheists share the beliefs of the readers of this blog. The article entitled, Army group says there ARE atheists in foxholes , describes a group of atheist soldiers (who in an incredibly poor rip-off are calling themselves Military Atheists and Secular Humanists, i.e., MASH) who have formed a group to advocate to meet as a group on base at Fort Bragg. Personally, I think that they should be allowed to meet on the base. I mean, I don't know what they would meet about. I...

Update links on the topic: Jim Davila at PaleoJudaica.com has posted a more complete version of the correspondence here . It features a number of interesting links on the topic, as well as Peter Thonemann's own recent commentary on the topic. Jim's further ruminations on the question "if one is fake are others necessarily fake?", which are similar to my own below, can be found here. Original update post {g}: As Bill Kesatie reported here on the Cadre Journal a few days ago , a collection of "70 or so 'books', each with between five and 15 lead leaves bound by lead rings, was apparently discovered in a remote arid valley in northern Jordan somewhere between 2005 and 2007." (The quote is from a related BBC article referenced by Bill; please see the link above for other related links in his original post.) Yesterday, March 31st, an email began circulating around ( which has been verified by Daniel McClellan on his site here ), written by Peter Thonemann...

[Note: The contents page for this series can be found here. The previous entry, Chapter 47, can be found here. ] [This entry constitutes Chapter 48, "The Story From Theology"] In the four previous sections I have analyzed dozens and dozens of metaphysical propositions-- over 600 pages worth! --deciding for various reasons between them, building and shaping a metaphysic, and arriving at what Christians have historically called ‘orthodox trinitarian theism’. I have arrived there without reference to scriptural authority or claims of special revelation; right or wrong, any sceptic could in principle arrive here, too, by following out the logical trail in regard to data commonly accessible to any of us. I am a trinitarian theist, and this is why I would be a trinitarian theist, even if there was no such thing as historical Christianity, or scriptures to seek out testimony on. I worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Su...

The contents page for this series can be found here. The previous entry, concluding Chapter 46, can be found here. This entry constitutes Chapter 47, and ends Section Four. This chapter mainly reiterates and spells out in some more detail how I arrived metaphysically at the conclusion that rebel supernatural entities exist, but it also arrives at the conclusion that these devils need the same help any of us sinners do: to be saved from their sins. This is a very controversial position; and I can't quite figure out where plausibly to split the chapter into two entries, either. So, to avoid posting an extra-long chapter on a controversial topic among Nicene trinitarians, seeing as this journal is dedicated to ecumenical Nicene apologetics (what trinitarian affirmers of the Nicene Creed generally agree on instead of what we disagree about), I have posted the whole chapter, about 16 pages, to a thread at the Evangelical Universalist forum instead (where I have been posting these Sword...