Those old-fashioned Christians

One of the favorite arguments used against Christianity is that we are "old-fashioned." People will say, "Come on, it's time to join the 21st century and leave those antiquated ideas of the Bible behind." The assumption is that society is always getting better and that the latest ideas are always the best ideas.
This was what Karl Marx said of Communism and what Adolf Hitler said of Nazism, but those ideas waned in influence. This is what people said in the hippie culture of the 1960's when so many young people were advocating free sexual love and drugs. Obviously, those ideas did not last. They only left millions of people dead and lives wasted.
C. S. Lewis called it "chronological snobbery" to assume that because something is out of date, that it is discredited. He said we should ask three questions about an "old idea"
1. Why did this idea go out of date?
2. Was the idea ever refuted?
3. If it was refuted, by whom, where and how conclusively?
If a person cannot answer these questions, he has no right to reject an idea just because it's old, or old-fashioned.
I love what Billy Graham said when somebody said he had taken Christianity back 100 years. Referring to the New Testament era, Graham said, "I was hoping to take it back 2,000 years."

Letter from a homosexual struggler

Below is a letter I received a while back from a friend of mine, a former minister of another denomination, who struggles with homosexuality. I met with him and befriended him during a crisis time in his life, when he lost his church because of his homosexual activity. He believes homosexuality is wrong, and wants to change, but it is hard. He now lives in another state, so we don't meet together any longer, but we still correspond from time to time.
He has given my permission to quote him. To protect his identity, I have waited a while to publish his letter, and I have edited some of the names and personal references. What he says needs to be heard by the conservative, evangelical church.
Here is part of his letter:

The priest at a local [name of denomination] church recently contacted me regarding a position at his parish. Shortly after leaving [name of church] Church, that parish had advertised for an administrator. I had applied since I needed work as well I figured that making sure the yard got cut, the toilets flushed, etc. wasn't out of the bounds of my abilities and the limitations of my"situation." Well, he and I talked back then, but the position was only a part-time thing and I needed full-time work, so it ended there. Lo and behold, he called recently and asked if I was interested in working in Christian ed for them. I explained to him my status and all and he still wanted to talk to me. He said he felt led to pursue this with me. He knew a little of what had happened, but, of course, not all the dirty details. Even after that second talk, he still wanted to pursue things. He and his leadership are willing to take the risk involved, and, even though this would only be a part-time position and requires me to continue to work full-time at [name of department store], I really would love to feel useful again. It's so difficult to go day by day feeling totally useless and insignificant, and walking around as an example of failure in ministry. I would be working on a consultant basis and not as a regular employee as another way to distance the parish from any negative reactions as I'm sure the grapevine will begin its work once it filters out.

I know that on several levels you might think this a bad idea, bad for the church as a risk, bad for me as someone who is still so wounded and fragile, bad for me someone so much more conservative (at least in belief if not in practice) from this priest, etc. I am taking all that in account, but both my counselor in [name of city] and my ex-wife [name] have been very positive about the way this is structured and all as a means of bringing me back to the land of the living.

One thing in this has been hard to swallow in this however. It has been the "liberals" and gays that have been the most practically helpful to me in [name of city].
It was a gay business owner who first gave me a job and a place to live, another gay [name of business] is providing me a place to live now, the manager of [name of department store], which employs some openly gay managers and salesmen, has been just great about my schedule and all, and it's a pro-gay priest who is giving me a chance at ministry again. What kind of message does that send, Bob?

He asks a good question, doesn't he? If we are going to say that homosexuality is a sin, are we willing to help the sinner change? Or will he find that the only person who really cares about him are those who consider homosexuality a normal lifestyle?

"The Shack"

The Shack by William Paul Young is the "buzz" book of the year. Young basically "self-published" the book with his own publisher, Windblown Media, and now it has sold over a million copies, mostly by word of mouth.
The book is a deeply emotional story about why God allows suffering. I believe that Young does an excellent job in answering this question in the novel, which is probably why it has sold so well. Young imagines that a man named Mack who gets a note from God, asking him to return to the shack where his young daughter had been murdered. The man does, and finds answers to his questions and doubts about God's goodness.
However, some things about the book trouble people. I know one church library in Mississippi that has banned the book, and LifeWay Christian Stores sells the book but asks readers to read it with caution. Why?
Read the rest of this review in the first comment below...

There is no God-- wait, yes there IS a God!

I have heard Antony Flew's name many times over the years, because every time that I would read about a Christian apologist, it seemed that Antony Flew's name would come up as his atheist antagonist. So you can imagine my surprise when I opened my newspaper in December 2004 and read the news that Antony Flew had changed his mind and decided that he DID believe in God. What a Christmas gift to the Christian world! But what it really true? I later read that while Flew now believes in God, he has not accepted Christianity. I wondered, what caused this change, and where was he now in his thinking?
Thus I read Flew's new book There Is A God, with great interest to know what caused such an outspoken atheist scholar to change his mind. I was not disappointed.
While the book is only 160 pages (plus two appendices by other authors), it is thorough and deep in its content. Flew tells his own story of how he, the son of a Methodist minister in Britain, became an atheist out of disillusionment with how God could allow evil, particularly as he saw the atrocities in Nazi Germany in World War II. Flew went on to become a professor of philosophy and a writer of many influential books espousing atheism, teaching in universities in Great Britain, Canada, and finally in the United States, where he now resides. He followed the thinking of skeptics like David Hume, arguing that we must presume atheism is true and believers must prove there is a God.
So how did this atheist scholar convert to theism? Flew explains that one belief he has always held led to the change-- his belief in the words of Socrates: "We must follow the argument wherever it leads." (p. 22). As he debated and argued the issues with Christians, he gradually changed his mind as he "followed the argument" for three basic reasons, which form three of the chapters of the book:
1) The laws of nature indicate they were designed by the Mind of God. Flew quotes Paul Davies: "even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith the existence of a lawlike order in nature" (p. 107).
2) The finely-tuned universe that delicately balances life indicates it was designed by a Creator for us. He points out, for example, that if the speed of light or the mass of an electron had been the slightest degree different, then no planet would be capable of human life (p. 115).
3) The origin of life itself, with the amazingly complex communication systems of DNA cannot be explained by materialistic evolution, and only make sense if designed by God.
In addition to these three major reasons, Flew also cites the big-bang theory as scientific evidence that the universe had a beginning (p. 136). As for the problem of evil, Flew leaves the question open, but prefers the popular Christian explanation that "evil is always a possibility if human beings are truly free" (p. 156).
So has Antony Flew become a Christian? The best answer is not yet, but he is leaning that way. He says, "I am entirely open to learning more about the divine" (p. 156) and then he expresses his admiration for the person of Jesus Christ and the intellect of the apostle Paul, saying that if you want an omnipotent God "to set up a religion, it seems to me that this is the one to beat!" (p. 157).
The book has an appendix by Roy Abraham Varghese, giving a critique of the "new atheism" of bold writers such as Richard Dawkins. Appendix A is good, but even better is Appendix B by N. T. Wright, which explains why we should believe in Jesus Christ. Wright convincingly argues for belief in the authenticity of the Gospel accounts of the resurrection of Jesus Christ in a way that impresses Flew himself as "absolutely fresh." (p. 213).
I would agree. As much as I enjoyed Flew's book, I must say that Appendix B by N.T. Wright was worth the price of the book. My prayer is that Antony Flew will finally follow the argument of Wright as it leads him to embrace the claims of Jesus Christ on his life.