Hello? Is anyone at home? (or has Bishop Forsyth terminally Disconnected himself in 09?)

Here’s how it played itself out, according to Rob’s recent article in Southern Cross.

Rob is piqued at a documentary maker’s advertisement for virgins and their being paid $20,000 to auction their chastity. Rob appears on radio. The next day the filmmaker telephones Rob and arranges a meeting. The maker wants Rob to appear in his doco. Rob, putting Disconnect 09 principles into action, can’t let such an opportunity slip away and agrees. Rob provides the camera with reasons why he’s a Christian, namely, Jesus rose from the dead. And what was the filmmaker’s response? He wanted to know where he could find God now and that the historical Jesus was irrelevant to his life, now.

Totally unsurprising!

Rob doesn’t record what he said next but he does say that he “probably fluffed” the answer. Again, totally unsurprising given that Rob really doesn’t believe in the miraculous:

(i) He’s on record as being completely incredulous that the parting of the Red Sea was a miracle
(ii) He doesn’t believe that God miraculously created the heavens and the earth
(iii) He believes that God used secondary principles to create and not his Son.
(iv) He believes that death is natural
(v) He believes that death is God’s preferred method of creation
(vi) He believes that time and chance are the means by which things happen in nature
(vii) He doesn’t believe that God used wisdom in the creation
(viii) He believes that God incorporated errors into the creation from the beginning
(ix) He believes that secular science should interpret the Bible
(x) He doesn’t really take God at his word and prefers to make his own story up about how God did it, even mocking those who trust God and take his word as it is.
(xi) Rob parts company with all theologians prior to Darwin on origins, including Paul and the earliest of Christians, preferring to align himself with men like Spong and Dawkins.


It may interest you, Rob, what Jesus had to say. Jesus said that Moses wrote of him, the Creator (you at least in theory do believe Jesus is the Creator, don’t you, Rob?), and stated,

“If you do not believe Moses’ writings, how will you believe my words?” (John 5:47)

and,

“If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rise from the dead.” (Luke 16:31)

Rob, the filmmaker wanted to know what evidence there is now for God. It’s quite easy. The miraculous evidence is all around you:

“God, who made the world and everything in it…From the creation of the world his invisible attributes are CLEARLY SEEN, being UNDERSTOOD by the things which are made.” (Act 17:24 & Romans 1:20)

But what did our good bishop do instead? He gave him a copy of Tim Keller’s The Reason for God. Keller is another pseudo-Christian in a long line of wolves who believe that Exodus 20:8-11 and 31:12-18 is some form of poetic allegorical myth and that God uses death, pain, suffering and imperceptible change to create, if one can aptly even call it that.

Rob, if you paid more attention to your Bible and what Jesus and Moses said you may not have “fluffed” the answer.

‘And Jesus spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the children of Israel, saying: ‘My Sabbaths are a sign between me and you forever…because in 6 days YHWH made the heavens and the earth.” And when Jesus had made an end of speaking with Moses, he gave Moses two tablets of the Testimony, tablets of stone, written with the finger of Jesus.’

USELESS IDIOTS

I almost missed this wonderful blog over at Post-Darwinist on our heterdoxical friends.

Tune in for a boost!

Theological Scallywags

The blogging parsnip sometimes says some great things (well, greatish).

For instance, in his blog on the Centre for Public Christianity he says:

Furthermore, the plethora of scallywag accounts of Jesus' life is allowed to grow because theologians have said 'it doesn't matter'. No - it does matter, theologically, that we can go Israel and see with our own eyes the ground on which Jesus walked. He was not a fantasy, or a principle. He was a man of flesh and blood and bone, and as far as any man of flesh and blood and bone may be traced in history so we should expect and in fact rejoice that traces of Jesus' presence among us are there to be found.

Well, Michael, for the Holy Spirit's revelation of creation as for Jesus (is there a hint that we are backing away from Barth here?). It does matter, theologically, and for the same reasons as it matters for Jesus: the scene is set for the grand covenant between God and his creation in concrete terms, in terms congruent with the manner in which the setting and scene interact and play out. If not, then the God merges with the demiurge, or something worse. See my earlier post, and my comment upon same.

Leupold Genesis part 14

Analogous to the above point is this: when the different aspects of a case are presented, critics quite regularly fail to discern the deeper harmony that prevails in spite of the surface disagreement. So very frequently, after one motive for a deed has been indicated, the mention of a second motive is treated as proof of a divergent approach by a different writer, as though life were always so simple a thing, as to allow for the operation of but one motive at a time, instead of the complex thing that it is, where motives, counter-motives, and subsidiary motives run crisscross through one another.

Of the failings of the critical approach perhaps the greatest of all is the failure to evaluate rightly the attitude and the words of Christ and His apostles in reference to books like those of Moses. As Christ treated Moses' writings so should we. His clear words attributing them to Moses dare not be ignored. This is not treating the Old Testament without regard for the distinction between the Old and the New Testament. This is following the excellent Reformation principle: "Interpret Scripture by Scripture"; and a sounder principle cannot be found. Critics dismiss the Saviour's attitude with a shrug of the shoulder.

Science is Religious!

Over at Duane's mind (one of the blogs we watch) I caught the post: Can Science Disprove God?.

I liked Duane's post that headbutted the very idea, and well done to IMO.

But there's more.

Science depends upon religion. That is, science depends on our initial belief structure, or our 'religion', our religious inclination as to what we think is real and how we understand and respond to what we think is real, and will therefore produce real knowledge.

So Dawkins, whose first belief is a sort of unarticulated and internally contradictory materialism will naturally not find anything outside of his first belief in his take on science. That's not news. What is news is that his first belief will not produce the science he espouses. History has shown us that: it took classic Christian theism to produce a world view that was congenial to the development of modern science. Toss that out and you will eventually toss out the modern science that relies upon it.

Exciting!

Hop over to the ABC-TV science program Catalyst for this program on an aspect of Einstein's general relativity theory.

If you don't find this exciting, then...well, there's no comparison really!

Disbelief

"There is one race of men, one race of gods; both have breath of life from a single mother [Gaia]" Pindar, Nemean 6.

The question of origins is at root a question of belief.

The ancient Greeks, who invented evolution: that is, what is seen was prepared from things which are visible had to, as they saw their gods as also being within their world; within the cosmos.

Theistic evolution borrows this from materialism which starts from the same place as the ancient Greeks: but without the god bit.

The actions that God takes with his people are uniformily presented as immediate actions: Christ's work was accomplished on the cross at the moment of his death; his status as first born the moment he resurrected; we have new life at the moment of belief as a gift from God; the return of Christ will be an event, not a process, as I take it the Bible says of the bringing of the new creation.

Of course, the creation also was done quick smart (in 6 days, which Augustine thought was rather too long!) too. But this is denied widely in SAD in lieu of the position that derives from non-belief. Ultimately, the SAD, on this point, has to set aside belief on a number of grounds: that God is a reliable propositional communicator, that words have meaning, and that as he refers to the creation as his chief credential in relationship with us. Disbelief here is more complex. God represents his creation as coming from his will (and nothing else, no system or operation, no elaborate machine, which reeks of paganism, not the majesty and power of God). And then going back the other way, consideration of the creation (except that which at first denies God, but even this must finally fail to achieve credibility), leads to recognition of the creator.

But if consideration of the creation leads one to think that the creation could reasonably have made itself, we have come, not to the God of Abraham, but the gods of the Greeks: gods within the cosmos, not independent of it!

The key point at which creation is represented as not possibly being confused for the work of the creation itself, and non-god, is that we are told it happened in 6 days. There's the recipe for creating a cosmos: 6 steps not able to be achieved by other than God. This stands directly in the path of materialist-naturalist alternatives. Which alternatives the SAD seems to seriously entertain as being in the stream of the history of salvation! Well, gag me with a spoon!

To set this as naught, which is the habit in SAD, is to disbelieve God: to disbelieve that he can tell us what he did (ref. Numbers 12:8a), that what he tells as and what he did is unimportant in detail, and finally indistiguisable from that done by non-God.

That sounds a lot like rejection of God, to me!