Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary

Does loving your neighbor require that you agree with them?

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From apologist Jonathan Morrow.

Excerpt:

We live in an interesting, ever-changing, and challenging day. As Christians, learning to navigate such a reality can be very confusing and intimidating. In one of Jesus’ central teachings, he commands us to love our neighbor (cf. Mark 12:31). And while we can and should often do this by meeting physical needs, there is another vital, but often overlooked, application of this passage. We need to stand up for the possibility of truth. We need to protect the endangered species of honest disagreement concerning the nature of reality. Today a not so subtle battle is raging from newspapers columns to college classrooms concerning the nature of tolerance. There are 2 competing definitions:

  • False Tolerance: We can make no judgments at all about the truth of others’ beliefs.
  • True Tolerance: We allow others the freedom to hold beliefs which we judge to be false.

If we cannot tell our neighbors or ourselves the truth about reality, then we cannot really love them. Because love involves seeking another’s highest good, and goodness is anchored in reality (after all, the truth sets us free). We must fight the false tolerance that seeks to intellectually bully our culture into agreeing that every viewpoint (especially when it comes to religion and morality) is equally valid. We must speak up in love for the possibility of truth. Loving our neighbor requires this.

Loving someone doesn’t mean telling them lies to make them feel good so that they will like you and you will feel good. That’s not love, that’s selfishness.

Commentary

Clay Jones: why does God allow suffering?

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From apologist Clay Jones. (H/T Apologetics 315)

Excerpt:

Since I teach on why God allows evil, I often talk about Job. I have learned that many Christians have missed a major lesson of that book, if not the major lesson. Although many rightly conclude from Job that we should be humble when it comes to why God allows this or that suffering, there is something else amazing found in the book’s beginning.

In the first chapter we learn that Job is the wealthiest man in the world, renowned, and that he worships God.

But then we are told of a great contest in Heaven.

One day the angels presented themselves before the Lord and Satan came along with them and the Lord asked Satan:

“Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?” Then Satan answered the LORD and said, “Does Job fear God for no reason? Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.” (Job 1:8-11)

Here Satan contends that Job only serves God because God has given Job everything Job wants and that If God didn’t give Job what he wanted then Job would rebel.

Well, the Lord tells Satan that Satan can destroy all the things Job enjoys. Soon disaster kills his family, marauders steal his possessions, Satan afflicts him with boils, and Job’s wife tells him to “curse God and die.”

And here’s the question I ask my students: “what was the only thing that Job had to do to humiliate Satan in front of God and all God’s servants?”

Read the whole thing to get the answer.

Commentary

Are evangelical Christian women the new feminists?

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Rep. Michele Bachmann
Rep. Michele Bachmann

Here’s an interesting article from the Washington Post. (H/T Lenny from Come Reason)

Excerpt:

Religion historian Marie Griffith has been watching this shift, and recently wrote an essay titled “The New Evangelical Feminism of Bachmann and Palin.” She caught all kinds of heat from feminists on the left who say that neither Bachmann nor Palin, whom some have dubbed “the spiritual heads” of the tea party, can remotely be regarded as their conceptual colleagues.

While Griffith agrees that these women do not resemble traditional feminists in their political views, she believes that they have captured the hearts and minds of conservative Christian women in a historically significant way. Two generations ago, a conservative Christian woman would have been encouraged to have babies and keep house; work would have been seen as an economic necessity, not a higher calling.

“Now,” says Griffith, director of the new John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, “I really see evangelicals taking hold of that view that women can speak about righteous godly things, just as men can. They can make an impact on the world. Not only that, they should make an impact on the world.”

Nance points out that the abortion wars used to be fought by men. Today, the most prominent antiabortion warriors are Christian women, most of whom have young children.

It’s their focus on motherhood, I think, that makes these new Christian feminists so appealing to millions — their unflinching insistence that their families come first, that even the most ambitious among them occasionally have spit-up on their blouses.

Palin has her entourage; Bachmann, her brood, which includes that staggering number — 23! — of foster kids. Nance describes taking a call from a member of Congress while in her car with a baby screaming in the back seat. “Sir,” she said, “you’ll have to listen to the baby crying — or you can wait.”

Remember though that Michele Bachmann took time out from her career to homeschool her 5 children, so family comes first. Michele has denied that she is a feminist, and I agree with her. To be a feminist in the traditional sense, you have to favor state-run day care, state-funded abortions, selfishness, premarital sex, contraception, no-fault divorce and gender neutrality. Feminists also oppose marriage, limited government, personal responsibility, fathers,  and husbands. I don’t think that Michele Bachmann is a feminist in any way whatsoever. She is a woman, her way of life is being threatened, and it’s all hands on deck.