Category Archives: Mentoring

Mentoring

Brit Hume is interviewed about his public witness for Christianity

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Here’s the interview from Christianity Today. (H/T Muddling Towards Maturity)

Excerpt:

Do you think your experience becoming a Christian after your son’s death has led you to be emboldened to talk about your faith publicly?

I ought to be willing to do that. I don’t want to practice a faith that I’m afraid to proclaim. I don’t want to be a closet Christian. I’m not going to stand on the street with a megaphone. My principal responsibility at Fox News isn’t to proselytize. But occasionally a mention of faith seems to me to be appropriate. When those occasions come, I’ll do it.

And:

What were you hoping people would take away from what you said?

Well, I was kind of hoping that in some way word of it might reach Tiger. I was hoping that people who were of faith might receive some encouragement from the message. You never know. I also thought it was interesting. I didn’t really sit down and make some kind of calculations on a sheet of lined paper about what were going to be the consequences. We were expressing our views and those were my views on that point.

Now watch this video of Brit Hume explaining why he did it, on the O’Reilly Factor.

My thoughts

First, I am appalled by the reactions of the hard secular left,. They seem to think that it is a horrible crime to recognize one religion over another. Obviously these people are thinking that religion is like a cultural thing you inherit, or a personal preference. I really have trouble understanding how people could be so stupid as to not realize that religions make conflicting claims about an objective reality – claims that can be tested using history, science, the laws of logic, etc.

Second, I think that we Christians need to seriously consider whether we can try to be more like Brit Hume in the places we are. Let me explain.

First, consider this passage, which is, I think, the scariest verse in the New Testament, and has caused me to act bravely more than any other verse, because I just cannot stand being a coward when someone has put their trust in me, in the context of a relationship.

Matthew 10:32-33:

32“Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven.

33But whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven.

And here’s a less scary one, that I also like a lot:

1 Corinthians 4:1-4:

1So then, men ought to regard us as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the secret things of God.

2Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful.

3I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself.

4My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me.

Now there are two kinds of people in the world. The kind of people that don’t mind obligations that are placed on them by someone who loves them, and the kind of people who do mind. And Brit Hume is the first kind – he has the desire to be faithful in his obligation to tell the truth about Christianity in public, regardless of the flak he catches from the secular left. It reminds me of the motto of the Order of the Garter: “Honi Soit qui Mal y Pense” – “Shame on him who thinks ill of it.” Shame on him who thinks ill of it. Shame on the people who defend Roman Polanski but denigrate Brit Hume.

By the way, I also think that we Christians should be striving for excellence so that when we do witness, a lot of people who are already impressed by our credentials will give our message the respect it deserves! So work hard in school and at work! And encourage other Christians to do well in school and at work, too. We need to be thinking about the most effective ways to have an influence. And I think that studying apologetics helps us to believe the things we say we believe, and to explain those things intelligently and confidently to others.

My favorite lecture

Now may be a good time to point you all to the lecture that changed my life: Dr. Walter Bradley’s “Giants in the Land”. You can listen to THREE VERSIONS of it. It will probably make you cry, or at least you will get a lump in your throat.

Dr. Walter L. Bradley

  • Ph.D. in Materials Science, University of Texas at Austin, 1968
  • B.S. in Engineering Science, University of Texas at Austin, 1965

My favorite lecture of all time:

And variations of his “Giants in the Land” lecture that I like:

Other lectures:

I hope these lectures encourage you to be a bit more brave on behalf of our mutual friend!

Mentoring

If a person wanted to become a Christian, what should they do?

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I just got an e-mail from one of our non-Christian readers who has decided to investigate how to become a Christian. He asked me for some advice on how to proceed, and I thought I would throw it out there for my Christian readers (Neil and Drew, please help!) to see if anyone has any good ideas.

In his e-mail, he wanted to know how I became a Christian, how to read the Bible, and how to become a Christian. The reason I am excited is because he seems to be coming at this the right way, starting with the intelligent design DVDs that I always recommend, then William Lane Craig debates, and so on. He’s been investigating for a year and a half! Now, this is the perfect way to become a Christian, in my opinion. Slow, and with an eye for the other side. I am actually very excited about his approach!

OK, so I was going to work on a reply, but the first things I thought of were the following:

Start with some Bible: (NIV translation is easier)

  • John
  • Luke
  • Acts

Then some C.S. Lewis:

Any ideas for a good basic theology book? Here’s a basic one from Wayne Grudem. I like him because even though he’s a Calvinist, he’s politically conservative, complementarian and old-earth. If you just read his books while thinking “grace is resistible, grace is resistible”, then you’ll be fine.

I know a lot of people like Dallas Willard’s “The Divine Conspiracy” and “Renovation of the Heart“, but isn’t he a bit mystical? I haven’t read it. I have it though, and I’ll probably read it then recommend it to him if it isn’t too goofy. I’m suspicious of Dallas Willard, because even though he’s a philosopher at USC and speaks on university campuses, I’ve met lots of goofy Christians who liked Dallas Willard, but who did not like apologetics.

I was thinking that this would give him the idea that the Christian life basically consists of investigating whether God exists, whether Jesus is God stepping into history to talk to us, and then reading about Jesus life and words to find out what Jesus says. And he can read the Bible, and pray about various things (praying is like debating, you reason with God about things he’s done that you like, or why you think he should act in a particular way). He could also listen to sermons in church, and talk to other Christians who like apologetics and theology.

As a new Christian learns more, they think of things that they’d like to try, like changing behaviors and priorities, and making clever plans to give God things he might like. It’s a relationship, but instead of hearing God’s voice out loud, new Christians should be collecting information about God like a detective, then acting accordingly. It’s demanding, and there is sometimes kickback. But I think that the point of Christianity is that you are building a lasting relationship with God by choosing how you spend your time.

Mentoring

What is the meaning of Christmas? Why celebrate Christmas?

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I thought that I would try to write a post to explain Christmas as I understand it to everyone who is foggy on what it is all about. I hope I am not making any theological errors here, after all, I am just a software engineer.

Basically, we know from a variety of scientific arguments that the universe was created and fine-tuned for life by an intelligent agent that existed causally prior to the beginning of the universe, because this agent brought the universe into being. Our purpose as humans is to enter into a two-way loving relationship with this Creator/Designer of the universe. This is the only way that we can ultimately be happy and fulfilled.

The mess we were in

Now, when you look at human experience, none of us is interested in finding out about the character of this Creator/Designer, because we are afraid that if we find out too much about him then we will have our freedom to do as we please constrained by the demands of a relationship with an all-powerful, all-good being. Just knowing that such a person exists and has a character distinct from our own is enough to cause us to flee from him so that we can stay autonomous from the obligations of the moral law that he expects us to follow.

Christians believe that this universal desire to avoid an all-powerful, all-good God who will judge us is a result of bad behaviors inherited by us from the very first rebellion against God by our ancestors. Ever since that rebellion, the capability for relating to God has been lost, because we no longer have the ability to stop our rebellion against God. Christians call the first rebellion of our ancestors “The Fall of Man”.

What does this rebellion look like for us today? Well, we want to do whatever we want, in order to be happy, and to ignore God’s demands. We want to have happy feelings, including security, community and being morally good, all without a relationship with God. We want to acquire and rearrange matter for our selfish ends without acknowledging and honoring the Creator/Designer of that matter. And, of course, we would like other people to affirm, voluntarily or involuntarily, that our rebellion against God is really the height of moral goodness.

Additionally, some people imagine that God, if he exists at all, must desire our happiness. And of course when their needs are not met by this invented God, then they become even more bitter at God, and eventually decide that God could not really exist since their selfish needs are not being met by him. It never seems to occur to us humans that some pain and suffering may be permitted by God in order to turn our attention away from pleasure and security in this life, and back towards a relationship with him.

This is the mess we find ourselves in. This propensity for turning away from God and trying to pursue selfish happiness and security apart from a relationship with God is what the Bible calls “sin”. Every single one of us deserves severe punishment for refusing to pursue a genuine two-way love relationship with the God who is there. That is the mess we are in before Jesus appears to address this problem.

The birth of Jesus

I cannot say much about how Jesus solves the problem of rebellion against God, because that is really the story of Easter, and today we are dealing with the story of Christmas. But I can say that the solution to the problem requires that God step into history to communicate with his creatures and to perform actions in order to be reconciled with them. That is the message of Christmas: God is stepping into history to do something to end our rebellion. Easter is the story of what he does.

This is talked about in the Bible in John 1, for example.

John 1:1-5:

1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

2He was with God in the beginning.

3Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

4In him was life, and that life was the light of men.

5The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

You can substitute the word “Word” there for Logos, which really means logic or reason or wisdom. This is a person with a divine nature, identified with the eternal being of God, who exists causally prior to the creation of the universe, who is going to take on an additional human nature, including a human body. (Christians believe that there is one divine “what” being and three divine “who” persons). Software engineers, you can think of Jesus having two natures as multiple inheritance in C++.

And it continues in John 1:10-14:

10He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.

11He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.

12Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—

13children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

14The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Here the word grace doesn’t mean like a graceful ballet dancer. It means an instance of mercy received from a superior. A person (a “who”) identified with the divine being (a “what”) has decided to make us a top-down offer of mercy.

The same message of God stepping into history is found in the Christmas carols that people sing at Christmas.

Christmas carols

Here’s the best one, “O, Holy Night“, and it says:

O holy night! The stars are brightly shining.
It is the night of the dear Savior’s birth.
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
Till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.

When we were in rebellion, we had lost our most valuable capacity – the capacity of being in a direct relationship with God. And if Jesus can accomplish his mission, then we are going to regain that capacity for a direct relationship with God.

Now look at “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing“, which one of my favorites:

Hark! The herald angels sing,
“Glory to the newborn King!
Peace on earth and mercy mild,
God and sinners reconciled.”

Basically, as I often say, there are only two kinds of people in the world. There are people who are willing to respond to the offer of a relationship with God, with all the little sacrifices and compromises that a relationship entails, and then there are people who are not willing to respond. For the people who are willing to respond, the appearance of Jesus is the best thing that could possibly happen, because now we are finally going to have a chance to deal directly with God, face-to-face, to find out what he is like, and change ourselves to be more like him, with his help.

And that is why people celebrate Christmas. It’s the anniversary of the birth of Jesus. It is the story of God stepping into history to be reconciled with his rebellious creatures. It’s the story of the divine Logos divesting himself of his glory and subjecting himself to the life of a creature in order to rescue us from our sinful, self-destructive rebellion. This love for undeserving creatures is above and beyond the call of duty. We didn’t love him, but instead he loved us first, and he loved us enough to come down here and suffer with us so that we could be reconciled with God.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!