Commentary

What should we think about Obama’s use of the Bible?

20 Comments

Story here on the NewsReal blog. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

Dr. Jeffrey Siker, professor of religion at Loyola University and a liberal Presbyterian minister, was featured in the LA Times yesterday for an academic paper he did on Obama’s use of the Bible in public speeches and writings.  His findings show a candidate and President willing to pick and choose scripture that Obama considers pluralistic and in support of his policies.  Siker presents this fact as positive pragmatism instead of what it really may be – sacrilegious ambition.

[…]Obama uses “brother’s keeper” to convince Americans to support socialist policies.

“This vision of being my brother’s keeper has important political and social consequences when it comes to such issues as healthcare, consumer protection or education reform.” – Siker

The problem with that interpretation is that the “brother’s keeper” passage has nothing to do with supporting welfare policies.  Cain has just killed his brother Abel, and God was condemning Cain for the sin by asking Cain where his brother was.  Cain said he didn’t know where Abel was because he’s not responsible for him.  God does not respond by saying, “Yes you are Cain.  You are responsible to make enough money to pay not only for your healthcare but also Abel’s.”

Quoting the Bible to teach socialism only works on people who haven’t read the Bible. You can’t get socialism from the Bible, because there is no passage that teaches that Jews and Christians should embrace the idea of wealth redistribution by government. The Bible teaches private, voluntary charity.

Related posts

    News

    Jay Richards investigates whether George Soros is funding Jim Wallis

    7 Comments

    In this post on National Review. (H/T ECM)

    Excerpt:

    In World magazine on July 17, Marvin Olasky called on “progressive evangelical” Jim Wallis to come clean and admit that he is not a non-partisan, as he likes to claim, but rather a devoted man of the Left. Olasky reported that Wallis’s organization, Sojourners, had received grants from George Soros’s foundation, the Open Society Institute (OSI), and had lent Sojourners’ mailing list to the Obama campaign.

    […]Among the documents I now have are pages from the OSI website that list two grants to Sojourners — one for $200,000 in 2004, “To support the Messaging and Mobilization Project: Engaging Christians on the Importance of Civic Involvement,” and one for $25,000 in 2006, “To support a branding assessment” for the purpose of merging “Sojourners and Call to Renewal into one organization.” I have physical copies of these pages, which is good, because these pages seem to have disappeared from the OSI website (I’m sure that’s just a coincidence).

    […]But there’s more to it. In two blog posts at Patheos published over the last week, Tim Dalrymple reported that he, too, was looking into Olasky’s charge, and in a thoughtful, unbiased interview published on August 9, he asked Wallis himself about Olasky’s charges.

    Before responding directly, Wallis launched into bizarre invective against Olasky, claiming (among other things) that Olasky believes in a “sinless market.” This caricature is practically surreal to anyone familiar with Olasky’s actual views — actually, it’s beyond surreal, since surreal art has some illuminating connection to the original. Olasky is a Calvinist, which means he places particularly strong emphasis on human depravity in every area of human experience, including the market.

    Wallis continued:

    It’s not hyperbole or overstatement to say that Glenn Beck lies for a living. I’m sad to see Marvin Olasky doing the same thing. No, we don’t receive money from Soros. Given the financial crisis of nonprofits, maybe Marvin should call Soros and ask him to send us money.

    So, no, we don’t receive money from George Soros. Our books are totally open, always have been. Our money comes from Christians who support us and who read Sojourners.

    Well, as I said above, I’ve got physical copies of what appear to be grants to Sojourners from the Open Society Institute website, which have since been taken offline. Dalrymple does, too. In fact, until Wednesday, August 11, Dalrymple’s second blog post at Patheos had accompanying PDFs of the OSI webpages.

    […]According to Sojourners’ 990s (go here and search for “Sojourners” in “DC”), their total assets went from $513,896 in 2002 to $4,615,468 in 2009. Call me skeptical, but I’d be willing to bet that this windfall didn’t all come from humble readers of Sojourners magazine.

    Wallis supports Barack Obama, a radically pro-abortion President. Abortion is the slavery of our age – a political movement based on pure greed, whose aim is to terminate the lives of a weaker class of humans because of the selfishness of a stronger class of humans. And yet Wallis tries to pass himself off as a Christian. So I know exactly who to believe when his testimony contradicts respected Christian scholars like Marvin O’Lasky and Jay Richards.

    Commentary

    Does the book of Acts point to a physical, bodily resurrection?

    10 Comments

    Here’s a great post by Amy of Stand to Reason. She focuses on TWO passages to make a case for Acts teaching a physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus.

    Excerpt:

    The first is the words of Peter’s evangelistic sermon in Acts 2:22-36:

    [Y]ou nailed [Jesus] to the cross by the hands of godless men and put Him to death. But God raised Him up again, putting an end to the agony of death, since it was impossible for Him to be held in its power. For David says of Him, “…You will not abandon my soul to Hades, nor allow Your Holy One to undergo decay.”

    In case they missed the fact that Jesus’ body did not decay, Peter continues:

    Brethren, I may confidently say to you regarding the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. And so, because he was a prophet…, he looked ahead and spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that He was neither abandoned to Hades, nor did His flesh suffer decay. This Jesus God raised up again, to which we are all witnesses.

    In other words, Peter argues that David couldn’t have been speaking of himself when he wrote those words of Scripture because David’s body decayed in a tomb. He then contrasts David’s death with Jesus’ death and physical resurrection to show that the words of the Psalm are describing Jesus, and therefore Jesus is the Messiah they’ve been waiting for.

    This is good, because the early sermon by Peter in Acts 2 is super early. So even if a bad guy argues that Paul’s view of the resurrection in 1 Cor 15:3-7 is non-physical, you can fall back on Acts 2 and the early eyewitness testimony of Peter. But as Amy mentions, there are other arguments as well.

    Further study

    The top 10 links to help you along with your learning.

    1. How every Christian can learn to explain the resurrection of Jesus to others
    2. The earliest source for the minimal facts about the resurrection
    3. The earliest sources for the empty tomb narrative
    4. Who were the first witnesses to the empty tomb?
    5. Did the divinity of Jesus emerge slowly after many years of embellishments?
    6. What about all those other books that the Church left out the Bible?
    7. Assessing Bart Ehrman’s case against the resurrection of Jesus
    8. William Lane Craig debates radical skeptics on the resurrection of Jesus
    9. Did Christianity copy from Buddhism, Mithraism or the myth of Osiris?
    10. Quick overview of N.T. Wright’s case for the resurrection

    Debates are a fun way to learn

    Three debates where you can see this play out:

    Or you can listen to my favorite debate on the resurrection.

    Extra stuff

    A lecture on Bart Ehrman by William Lane Craig.