Many people assume that science and Christianity are mortal enemies (or at least should be separated into distinct realms of knowledge, since one is completely “objective” and the other completely “subjective”). But if all truth is God’s truth, science and Christianity should be perfectly compatible and complementary. That’s what our resident physicist (every church should have one!) Peter Gorham explained in an excellent message a few months ago.

As science discovers more about our world, it should confirm more of what the Bible says. Archaeology is a prime example. A hundred years ago most archaeologists assumed that the Bible was mostly myth and legend because many biblical places and names could not be found anywhere in the historical record outside the Bible. The classic argument from silence. But since then, each new archaeological discovery has only confirmed the history in the Bible, never disproved it.

One of the latest talks from Ted.com shows how other scientific discoveries might be heading along the same path. Geneticist Spencer Wells is building a family tree for all of humanity. His findings show that humans cannot trace their lineage back millions of years, as many researchers had assumed. Instead, we all have one common ancestor who lived less than 60,000 years ago.

We’re getting closer and closer.

My family is really enjoying the Olympics. It’s one of the few things on TV that can enthrall a 3-year-old as much as a 35-year-old (although the 3-year-old was horribly scared by the synchronized swimmers. “Monsters! monsters!”)

We especially love watching the gymnastics together and waiting for someone to fall. That’s why this YouTube clip is one of the best things I’ve seen all year.

I could try to make some kind of forced spiritual metaphor out of it, but I’ll spare you. Just enjoy.

(via Slate)

I was ready to ignore the John Edwards scandal as the delusion of yet another politician who thought he could grasp for the public’s attention while trying to live a different life outside of our view. But then Slate’s Christopher Beam dug up the transcript of an interview with Edwards at a CNN forum on faith last summer:

O’BRIEN: What is the biggest sin you’ve ever committed? Are you willing—are you willing to say? You can take a pass, sir, as you know.

EDWARDS: Just between you and me?

(LAUGHTER)

O’BRIEN: Just between you and me and the 1,300 people in the crowd.

EDWARDS: I’d have a very hard time telling you one thing, one specific sin.

(APPLAUSE)

If I’ve had a day—I turn 54 years old this Sunday—and if I’ve had a day in my 54 years where I haven’t sinned multiple times, I would be amazed. I believe I have. I sin every single day. We are all sinners. We all fall short, which is why we have to ask for forgiveness from the Lord. I can’t—to try to identify one particular sin that was worse or more extreme than the others, the list is too long.

It’s obvious why Edwards didn’t specifically confess the blatant sin of adultery at that time: it would have immediately torpedoed his campaign for the presidency. He didn’t confess it until the rumor was out in the open and it was clear that nobody was going to buy his denial.

Contrast that to the story of a man in New Mexico who heard the gospel while in prison and as a result decided to write a letter of confession, admitting responsibility for an unsolved murder he had committed years before. He has now been charged with first-degree murder:

A prisoner’s letter to a church resulted in murder charges filed against him.

Jeremiah Ordonez, 29, who is serving time in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Albuquerque for another murder, was charged with the November 2005 murder of 25-year-old Daniel Perez, Dona Ana County Sheriff’s officials announced Thursday.

Authorities said Perez was killed shortly after Thanksgiving three years ago at a trailer in the 5800 block of Sorrel.

According to the Perez’s girlfriend, he got out of bed and grabbed a shotgun when he heard a noise at the door.  She heard a gun shot and later found him shot in the upper left chest.  Officials said Perez died moments later.

On Thursday, a secretary from First Family Church in Albuquerque received the confession letter from Ordonez. In the letter, Ordonez said that he wanted to speak with authorities.

A portion of it read, “Daniel Perez was assassinated by Jeremiah Ordonez.  I walked into his house and shot him once in the chest with a shotgun. I know where the shotgun is and who gave the order.”

The letter ended with the phrase “Thou shall not kill.”

Jeremiah Ordonez was willing to repent and endure the consequences for his sin. John Edwards was not.

Which one do you most resemble?

Stephen Curtis Chapman writes for CNN to describe what led up to the adoption and tragic death of his daughter:

My wife and I had always supported the idea of adoption, and as Christians, we understood the importance of loving and caring for others. But what I had not yet grasped was that adoption is a physical picture of what Jesus has done for me. I did nothing to deserve God’s love; in fact, I was living as an orphan, without hope. Yet God chose to pursue a relationship with me, and through the death of his son Jesus, I was adopted into God’s family.

My wife and I began moving toward adoption with fear and trembling and asking all the questions people ask. I remember Mary Beth crying herself to sleep at night saying, “What are we doing? I can’t do this.” However, God kept reassuring us that this was the direction he was leading us. It was a huge journey of faith for us.

Koinonia is a new blog that just launched this week, coauthored by some of the best theologians in the business. Today, an entry by John Walton explores five bad Bible-interpretation mistakes he’s repeatedly seen in children’s curriculum intended to teach kids about the Bible. One example:

Illegitimate extrapolation: The lesson is improperly expanded from a specific situation to all general situations (God helped Moses do a hard thing, so God will help you do a hard thing. But the hard thing Moses was doing was something commanded by God whereas in the lesson the hard thing becomes anything the child wants to achieve)

Here’s the thing: substitute “me” for “child,” and you’ve got the way a lot of Christians approach the Bible. This stuff is mostly written by average people (not theology professors), so it reflects the way many of us think. We’ve grown accustomed to instant gratification (I praised the Lord the day Oceanic Cable added another arrow to the fast-forward speed on the DVR), so we demand instant gratification from the Bible as well. We want quick and easy application that we don’t have to think too hard about.

Read Walton’s five fallacies, and see if any of them are evident in your own approach to Scripture.

A sidenote: children’s Bible curriculum is written (and especially edited) to make life easier on the poor Sunday-school teacher who’s stuck in a classroom for an hour with all these rambunctious kids. I’ve written and published a number of Bible-study lessons for kids and youth. But I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone and wouldn’t even use them myself, because once they made it through the editing process they were very different from what I had originally written. Instead of dumbing down Bible curriculum, maybe we should set higher expectations and offer better training for the people who will be teaching it.

Living in Hawaii, it’s easy to take for granted God’s many blessings: the drop-dead-gorgeous scenery, the perfect weather (at least when the tradewinds are blowing), the endless outdoor activities, and the most friendly people on planet earth.

This story from The Onion Radio News reminded me to appreciate my “workaday grind of windsurfing and luaus.”

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HAWAIIAN FAMILY ENJOYS GREAT VACATION IN DAYTON, OH

 

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We’re coming into a season where many different candidates (from the school board to the White House) will be appealing to our rights, freedoms, and entitlements. When we hear the soaring speeches and watch the balloons fall at the national conventions, we’ll be tempted to get a little teary-eyed at the thought of spreading freedom across the world.

The liberty offered by democracy is a great gift that’s worth celebrating. But the radically individualistic freedom we glorify in America doesn’t always foster the things Christians should be seeking. I’ve been reading Don Carson’s book Christ and Culture Revisited, and last night I stumbled across this call to keep democracy in its proper perspective:

It is the form of government least unaccountable to the people and least likely to brutalize its citizens without some eventual accounting. It is a form of government most likely to foster personal freedoms, including, usually, freedoms for Christians to practice and propagate their faith.

But it has also proved proficient at throwing off a sense of obligation to God the Creator, let alone the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is another way of saying that it is proficient at fostering idolatry.

Its freedoms, so many of which are enormously praiseworthy for political, religious, personal, and artistic reasons, include the freedom to be hedonists, to pursue a life revolving around entertainment, to become inured against responsible family life, communal interaction, and self-denying service in the endless worship of massive egos, passive fads, and this-worldly glitter.

…

The democratic tradition in the West has fostered a great deal of freedom from Scripture, God, tradition, and assorted moral constraints; it encourages freedom toward doing your own thing, hedonism, self-centeredness, and consumerism. By contrast, the Bible encourages freedom from self-centeredness, idolatry, greed, and all sin and freedom toward living our lives as those who bear God’s image and who have been transformed by his grace, such that our greatest joy becomes doing his will.

It’s typical these days for the media, government planners, and some Christian leaders to bash the suburbs in favor of city life. Since I live and work in the first place many Hawaii residents think of when they hear the word “suburb,” I’ve been known to throw a few cheap shots at fat and happy creampuffs like myself who live in the comfortable convenience of a master-planned community. While there are clear dangers to suburban life (like the “pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease” that Ezekiel used to describe Sodom), you have to admit there are unique dangers in any setting. After living in L.A. for three years, I can tell you that the anonymity of the city can lead people to engage in things they’d never dream of in the suburbs.

Hoping to reverse a little of the suburb-stigma, Steve McCoy and Joe Thorn have started a blog called sub-text that’s devoted to bringing the gospel into a suburban context. One of their early posts lists some of the redeeming qualities of suburbia. Here’s one of the most obvious but often overlooked:

At creation man was commanded to “be fruitful and multiply.” Kids are the way dominion happens in the world. And it’s not only that we should have a kid, but the more the merrier. Children are a blessing from the Lord, and while the world’s values have created the strong desire to limit childbearing, God values multiplication. While the world’s values say that more children means more burden, God’s values say that more children means more blessing. I don’t see any biblical mandate on how many children to have, but I think there is a biblical mandate to see children as gifts and that we should desire those gifts from God.

Our cities make having multiple children nearly impossible. There is less living space intended for larger families, at least not larger families who aren’t very rich. Public schools in urban areas are rarely recognized for their academic quality and private schools are typically very expensive. Cities are not good on families, which is why when city-dwellers start having kids they start moving to the suburbs.

Suburbs are known for having good schools and safe neighborhoods. There’s more affordable housing with more space in the house for larger families as well as yards to play in. For what’s wrong in suburbia, it’s a place well-equipped for people who want to “be fruitful and multiply.”

Chad Hall, a pastor in South Carolina, is causing a little bit of a stir with his proclamation that he won’t be listening to Christian radio anymore. Here’s his reasoning:

First, I’ve noticed a growing level of—how shall I say this?—sappiness. Yeah, that’s the word. It’s not so much the music that’s sappy (some of it is); it’s the commentary, news stories, and contests that combine to present Christianity as synonymous with sentimentality. I live in a real world that’s not always positive and encouraging, so Christian radio’s steady diet of sugary spirituality doesn’t promote sustaining faith.

What’s more, I’ve noticed Christian radio becoming, for me, a sort of faith vending machine. Need some encouragement? Just push a button! I suspect that too frequent exposure to otherwise fine music hackneys that music and causes spiritual satisfaction to become one more commodity in my life. This makes real corporate worship feel like an imitation of the canned radio versions of the songs. Plus, it keeps me from developing truly nourishing habits. After all, who needs real corporate worship and challenging formative disciplines when I can just tune my radio dial and get a quick God fix?

As an Evangelical Free Church, Harbor is part of a movement that seeks to “glorify God by multiplying healthy churches among all people.” Sounds nice, but what does it mean to glorify God? And what does a healthy church really look like?

The answer to those questions is called theology. And while theology should remain consistent (in theory, at least) sometimes you need to tweak the way you express it in order to answer those questions better in light of the constantly-changing world around us.

A few weeks ago, I was in St. Louis to attend the EFCA national convention, where we considered the first change to our doctrinal statement in over 50 years. It took the form of a passionate, but loving, family discussion. While there were a few people who tried to manipulate the conversation through emotion or rhetoric (not that I’ve ever done that myself!), I was consistently impressed by the overwhelming spirit of humility and unity that prevailed.

This was only possible because we were considering changes that would stem off in advance the kind of heated arguments that other families are dealing with right now. I’ve been meaning to write a long blog post about this, but then I saw an article this morning at CT that explains it better than I could:

As a denomination, there are a couple surefire ways to get your name in the headlines. You can bow to popular wisdom on a major doctrinal issue, as the Episcopal Church did in 2003 by electing an openly homosexual man as bishop. Or you can weigh in against practices near and dear to some of your fellow Christians, as the Southern Baptist Convention did two years ago.

If you want to make sure no one covers your denominational meeting, here’s what you do: Revise your statement of faith before certain issues become disputed in your churches. And yet here I am writing about the Evangelical Free Church of America’s newly revised statement of faith. Why? Because the time to fix your doctrine is when it isn’t broke.

The rest of the article provides a great overview of the changes to the statement. It’s worth reading the whole thing.

For a couple years, people have been telling me about this sermon on YouTube by Paul Washer. It’s an hour-long message he gave at a youth conference that was shocking and disturbing to thousands of people. Why? Because he told them that even though they prayed the “sinner’s prayer,” they still might not be saved.

I could never find an hour to sit down and watch it (YouTube doesn’t work on an airplane!)… until I found myself on the Superferry today for a 3-hour journey back from Maui, and discovered it had Internet access even in the middle of the Ka Iwi channel.

Here’s my take: basically, Washer is unearthing the old Lordship-salvation debate from a few decades ago. He’s confronting the way most American Christians try to bring people to Jesus: get ‘um to a church service or crusade, have ‘um walk down the aisle, make ‘um recite a certain prayer, then tell ‘um they’re good to go. Even if their lives look exactly the same after that experience as they did before.

To illustrate the difference Christ should make in a person’s life, he gives an example of being late for an appointment, and trying to use an excuse that you were run over by a 30-ton logging truck in the middle of the highway. If you said that, it would make you a liar or a madman. He says, “It is impossible to have an encounter with something as large as a logging truck and not be changed. My question to you is this: what is larger, a logging truck or God?”

It’s a message that will challenge you to examine the basis of your salvation: a magic incantation you recited at one point in your life, or an ongoing relationship with God that brings continual transformation? If you can find a spare hour, watch the YouTube version below.

Or download the MP3 here and toss it on your iPod for the commute.

I’m really looking forward to seeing WALL-E with my kids this weekend. It’s made by the same director who did Finding Nemo, a movie laced with themes of redemption and providence. Now this commentary on his new film makes me want to see it even more:

The earth is deserted because a Wal-Mart-like company called “Buy n’ Large” has filled it up with trash, and the departed humans, expanded to Big Gulp size, are contentedly gorging themselves amid the comforts of a flying Club Med, where they slide around on those carts, on which they watch TV continuously without even having to sit up completely. While some of the better reviewers mention the beglotted humanoid forms, I found it odd that most mainstream reviewers didn’t bother to point out what the film was saying.

I’m no film theorist, but I think what director Andrew Stanton is trying to tell us is that we humans eat so much and limit our movements to such a degree that we will soon become immobile whales unable to focus past the video screens permanently affixed in front of our field of vision.