Category Archives: News

William Lane Craig explains the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement

Probably one of the most common questions that you hear from people who don’t fully understand Christianity is this question: “why did Jesus have to die?”. The answer that most Christians seem to hold to is that 1) humans are rebelling against God, 2) Humans deserve punishment for their rebellion, 3) Humans cannot escape the punishment for their rebellion on their own, 4) Jesus was punished in the place of the rebellious humans, 5) Those who accept this sacrifice are forgiven for their rebelling.

Are humans rebellious?

Some people think that humans are not really rebellious at all, but it’s actually easy to see. You can see it just by looking at how people spend their time. Some of us have no time for God at all, and instead try to fill our lives with material possessions and experiences in order to have happy feelings. Some of us embrace just the parts of God that make us feel happy, like church and singing and feelings of comfort, while avoiding the hard parts of that vertical relationship; reading, thinking and disagreeing with people who don’t believe the truth about God. And so on.

This condition of being in rebellion is universal, and all of us are guilty of breaking the law at some point. All of us deserve to be separated from God’s goodness and love. Even if we wanted to stop rebelling, we would not be able to make up for the times where we do rebel by being good at other times, any more than we could get out of a speeding ticket by appealing to the times when we drove at the speed limit, (something that I never do, in any case).

This is not to say that all sinners are punished equally – the degree of punishment is proportional to the sins a person commits. However, the standard is perfection. And worse than that, the most important moral obligation is a vertical moral obligation. You can’t satisfy the demands of the moral law just by making your neighbor happy, while treating God like a pariah. The first commandment is to love God, the second is to love your neighbor. Even loving your neighbor requires you to tell your neighbor the truth – not just to make them feel good. The vertical relationship is more important than the horizontal one, and we’ve all screwed up the vertical relationship. We all don’t want God to be there, telling us what’s best for us, interfering with our fun. We don’t want to relate to a loving God if it means having to care what he thinks about anything that we are doing.

Who is going to pay for our rebellion?

The Christian answer to the problem of our rebellion is that Jesus takes the punishment we deserve in our place.

However, I’ve noticed that on some atheist blogs, they don’t like the idea that someone else can take our punishment for us to exonerate us for crimes that we’ve committed. So I’ll quote from this post by the great William Lane Craig, to respond to that objection.

Excerpt:

The central problem of the Penal Theory is, as you point out, understanding how punishing a person other than the perpetrator of the wrong can meet the demands of justice. Indeed, we might even say that it would be wrong to punish some innocent person for the crimes I commit!

It seems to me, however, that in other aspects of human life we do recognize this practice. I remember once sharing the Gospel with a businessman. When I explained that Christ had died to pay the penalty for our sins, he responded, “Oh, yes, that’s imputation.” I was stunned, as I never expected this theological concept to be familiar to this non-Christian businessman. When I asked him how he came to be familiar with this idea, he replied, “Oh, we use imputation all the time in the insurance business.” He explained to me that certain sorts of insurance policy are written so that, for example, if someone else drives my car and gets in an accident, the responsibility is imputed to me rather than to the driver. Even though the driver behaved recklessly, I am the one held liable; it is just as if I had done it.

Now this is parallel to substitutionary atonement. Normally I would be liable for the misdeeds I have done. But through my faith in Christ, I am, as it were, covered by his divine insurance policy, whereby he assumes the liability for my actions. My sin is imputed to him, and he pays its penalty. The demands of justice are fulfilled, just as they are in mundane affairs in which someone pays the penalty for something imputed to him. This is as literal a transaction as those that transpire regularly in the insurance industry.

So, it turns out that the doctrine of substitutionary atonement is not as mysterious or as objectionable as everyone seems to think it is.

Are modern women building their resumes to attract to marriage-minded men?

I’ve been watching a bunch of episodes of the @whatever podcast, and really enjoying the fact that the Christians are allowed to say what they think about dating and relationships, and that the non-Christians are explaining in their own words what their view of relationships is. And it’s very interesting to see how modern women have a disconnect between “in the moment” and “some day”.

So, I have a couple of clips from a show to show you what I mean. In this clip, the men on the left of the room – Brian Atlas, the host, and Chase, the evangelical Christian – challenge the two non-Christian women on the right side of the room. They ask whether a boyfriend can expect his girlfriend to stop going to bars and night clubs. These are places where alcohol is served, women wear sexy clothes, and men flirt with drunk women and try to take them home for sex. All the non-Christian women on the panel call this demand that they not go to bars and clubs “controlling”. They don’t see why being in a relationship should cause them to have to give up any aspect of their pursuit of pleasure. If they want validation from hot guys, and maybe some extra sex, then they should be able to look for it in bars and night clubs.

Remember, this video has a lot of bad language. It’s not for kids.

So, watch this clip from 1:05:21 to 1:28:45: (23 min and 24 seconds)

So, these young women want to focus on having fun in their early 20s, because that’s what they want to do. And then later on, when they get much older, then they might be ready for a man to marry them and give them children.

A marriage-minded man is looking for a woman who is willing to control her behavior so that she becomes safe to marry. So that she can focus on her husband. So that she can spend time nurturing and raising her children. She can’t spend money on frivolous things. She can’t spend money on vacations and entertainment and alcohol. She can’t smoke while she’s pregnant. She can’t buy expensive hand bags and get cosmetic surgery. But these young women aren’t willing to give up any of these things. They want to have fun. And marriage is seen as “boring”, until they decide in their late 30s that they finally want it. Men who want to focus on marriage early are “controlling”. Men who want women to focus on preparing to build a home and a family are “controlling” men.

The problem with this, as one of the men points out, is that those bar and night club experiences do not make the woman attractive or stable for marriage. Marriage is an enormous financial and legal risk for men. They can be thrown into jail for inability to pay alimony and child support. They can lose custody of their kids in family courts. They can have their parental rights nullified by feminist judges. Women are actually more likely to commit non-reciprocal domestic violence than men, according to this recent study:

Almost 24% of all relationships had some violence, and half (49.7%) of those were reciprocally violent. In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases.

Men have to be extremely careful about marriage. And when young women are taught to be self-centered from 18-35, this is not good preparation for being a wife and mother. “Hoe phases” and “party stages” doesn’t look good on a resume. I would not hire a college grad to write software, if their entire resume was playing video games and memorizing movie scripts. If you want the job, you have to be able to show that you can do the job. Jobs are not meant to entertain you. There is work to do, and results are expected. The same thing is true of marriage. Men are making the hiring decisions, there, and we do look at women’s resumes.

Men are the keepers of commitment. If a woman wants commitment, she has to apply for commitment, and prove she is worth being committed to. Men are looking for marriage-related behaviors and capabilities. Chastity. Sobriety. Conservative political views. Accurate theology. Apologetics. Experience building others up to be useful for God. Spending restraint. Saving and investing. STEM degrees. Cooking ability. The ability to be content at home. Willingness to learn what husbands like, and to play with husbands. Fitness. Nutrition. Respect for male leadership. Etc.

Consider this clip from 2:32:54 to 2:43:24: (10 min, 30 seconds)

Here the Christian co-host Chase explains to the women that if they pick a Christian man, he will be able to lead them to focus on the most important things in life early on. The single mother is excited that some men would want to help to avoid mistakes with bad boys. But again, the two blondes who insisted on hedonism rebel against the leadership of good men. They want to be free to pursue pleasure, and not listen to the leadership of Christian men. They don’t want to focus on marriage. They don’t want to prepare their character for marriage. They don’t want to control their desires, so they can get a long-term result. They want to SAY that they want marriage and children “some day”, but they want to choose what feels good “in the moment”. And they definitely prefer hot bad boys who are permissive. They don’t want good men who want to lead them to get into shape for marriage.

I think the older generation of Christian women has NO IDEA that this is what younger women are like. 70 years ago, women would jump into the arms of men who wanted to step in and lead on moral and spiritual issues. They were not interested in “tingles” caused by physical attraction. They were interested in men who could step in and make marriage and parenting easy for them. Men who were serious about earning. Men who were serious about fighting evil. Men who were involved in the home, and effective at leading the children to have accurate beliefs and good moral character. But those days are long gone.

Today, young women are choosing men based on the feelings they get from being validated by those men. They like men who “don’t judge”. They like men with attractive appearances who are having a lot of sex with other women. They like men who spend their money on displayed wealth, rather than save for a downpayment on a home. Good men are ignored until these women realize that their plan isn’t working, and suddenly they want to “settle down”. But good men know that a woman who makes a good man her “last resort” in her late 30s will never respect him as a leader in the home.

Men don’t HAVE to get married and have kids in order to be happy. We can just work hard, stack our cash high, retire early, and work on our ministry goals. Working for God on evangelism and apologetics is enormously fulfilling for a man. Just ask Paul.

New study: Mental health issues persist after receiving “gender-affirming” treatment

This brand new study is authored by one of the pioneers in “gender-affirming” treatment. It was published in the peer-reviewed “European Psychiatry”. The title of the article is “Have the psychiatric needs of people seeking gender reassignment changed as their numbers increase? A register study in Finland”. Let’s take a look at the findings.

The researchers looked at 3,665 people who received gender identity services between 1996 to 2019. This is a huge study. And we’ll see in a minute that the author used to be in favor of gender-affirming treatment – so she’s not biased against it.

Here’s the results section:

The GD [gender dysphoria] group had received many times more specialist-level psychiatric treatment both before and after contacting specialized GIS [gender identity services] than had their matched controls. A marked increase over time in psychiatric needs was observed. Among the GD group, relative risk for psychiatric needs after contacting GIS increased from 3.3 among those with the first appointment in GIS during 1996–2000 to 4.6 when the first appointment in GIS was in 2016–2019. When index period and psychiatric treatment before contacting GIS were accounted for, GR [gender reassignment] patients who had and who had not proceeded to medical GR had an equal risk compared to controls of needing subsequent psychiatric treatment.

Receiving “many times more specialist-level psychiatric treatments” resulted in “A marked increase over time in psychiatric needs”.

And the conclusion reaffirms that:

Contacting specialized GIS [gender identity services] is on the increase and occurs at ever younger ages and with more psychiatric needs. Manifold psychiatric needs persist regardless of medical GR [gender reassignment].

Psychiatric needs persist REGARDLESS of medical gender reassignment. That means gender reassignment – so-called “gender-affirming care” – makes no difference to the patient’s mental health.

This study got picked up in the news, as you might expect, since it contradicts the narrative of the secular left. What’s the narrative of the secular left? “Right and wrong don’t exist. My feelings are very important. You need to not judge me. You need to affirm me.”

Here’s an article from the UK Daily Mail that talks about the author of the study:

A woman who led European efforts to give puberty blockers to trans children has bared all about U-turning on gender-affirming care, as it is known, and debunks treatments she now calls ‘dangerous.’

Dr Riittakerttu Kaltiala, chief psychiatrist at the Tampere University Hospital Department of Adolescent Psychiatry in Finland, has revealed why she changed her mind about helping minors medically transition.

Writing in The Free Press, Dr Kaltiala says the Western medical establishment has been cowed by trans activists into a ‘dangerous groupthink’ of pushing risky sex-altering drugs on children.

‘Gender transition has gotten out of hand,’ says Dr Kaltiala.

What I’d like to see now is for conservatives to pass laws that allow people who were victimized by the secular leftist butchers to sue those butchers for compensation. It’s very important that the “don’t judge” crowd is punished for the harm caused by their not judging. That’s the only way that they will understand that the people they think are evil (the moral people, the boundary setters) are actually good. And the people they think are good (the feelings people, the don’t judge people) are evil.

Let’s see some money change hands over this controversy, so everyone can be clear about the value of moral leadership and spiritual leadership.