Moderation, in all things.
Moderation is a good thing, but in many ways it seems to me a strange thing. I often hear people defend (justify?) particular behaviors on the basis that as long as they do them in moderation — whatever it is — no one should take issue with them. I’ve heard more than a few people claim that scripture itself says something along the lines of “moderation in all things,” of course, it was probably Paul who said it (and in Corinthians, where according to a lot of people, Paul says everything). It turns out, though, that Scripture doesn’t contain this quaint little proverb, and the equivalent sayings context doesn’t all that much agree with most people’s application of the “proverb”. According to Blue Letter Bible:
The phrase, “Moderation in all things,” is common extrapolation of Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean (as presented in his Nicomachean Ethics). His ethic works … (Read more)
Book Review: On Guard by William Lane Craig
Pages: 286
Publisher: David C. Cook
Year: 2010
Author: William Lane Craig
What an unexpected surprise. This is a book I really wish I could have read when I first became interested in apologetics, as Craig has written an extremely accessible and easy to understand guide to defending and explaining the truthfulness of the Christian faith, as well as the reasons one might have for believing.
The first apologetics book that I ever read was Craig’s Reasonable Faith, and while it is a very good book on its own merits, it isn’t the most accessible book–it initially had me scratching my head at a few places. On Guard serves as not only an introduction to many of the arguments found in Reasonable Faith, but offers a sufficient explanation of these arguments such that one could use them presented as they are. This is not the definitive explanation of … (Read more)
Judgment, made possible by…
Ignorance. Well, not exactly. Since writing my previous post on the “Foundations of Morality” I had a thought. Not a series of thoughts, just one thought. I thought that if we live by the objective moral standard, even in ignorance, we make judgment possible. I would imagine it something like a person on vacation in a certain country, who breaks the laws of that country. This person might appear in court and reply, “but I didn’t know it was the law!” and still be found guilty, because ignorance isn’t an excuse. They were still under the law. My analogy in insufficient in the following way, which I think only makes my original thought that much more potent: the law-breaker did not follow the law, the moral relativist does. Both of these people act in claimed ignorance, but there is still a law to which they answer and must follow … (Read more)
Value in apologetics?
Probably everyone (or mostly everyone) who’s been interested in apologetics for any amount of time has heard the following: people won’t believe in Jesus because of arguments, they are useless! Well, I’ve certainly heard the comment, anyway. What is interesting about it, is that it’s limited in scope. It ignores the fact that there are many ways to do evangelism, and there are many “steps” in evangelism. I’ve been reading William Lane Craig’s On Guard, and he makes a few observations that I think it would be profitable to share (or at least share the main one).
Craig points out (correctly) that there is a “culture war” going on in the West, and that this is relevant to the gospel because the gospel is “never heard in isolation” (p. 17). Apologetics has the ability to make people more receptive to the gospel. Consider the following extract:
A person who has … (Read more)
Moral Foundations #1
Over the past couple of days I had a pleasant conversation with a mathematician (actually, a German mathematician, if that makes any difference) concerning the foundations of morality–what are they? And one thing that was eventually brought up was my theist leanings, and his a-theist leanings. I, of course, was accused of being a moral absolutist and unable to make any meaningful moral statements. I in turn pressured him to provide a justification for the existence of morality apart from our perceptions (does our belief in morality correspond to something in reality). To make matters “worse,” we were approaching the question — and each other — with completely different presuppositions. As near as I could tell, his was a continental philosophy (which would make sense, I suppose).
In having this discussion, two things occurred to me. The first is that there is a lot of common ground in this “moral … (Read more)
Book Review: Bioethics and the Christian Life by David Vandrunen
Pages: 254
Publisher: Crossway
Year: 2009
Author: David Vandrunen
This past semester I had the opportunity to take a course on a subject I’ve been interested in for a long time–bioethics. It was a very interesting course for what it offered, but suffered from the same problem which plagues most contemporary courses on ethics, and that is that an act is only viewed in a certain moral light relative to the perspective of the observer, rather than in and of itself. Bioethics and the Christian Life does not follow this trend, and provides a good introduction to the considerations of bioethics.
The purpose of this book is to “[explore] how ordinary Christians, in the midst of the lives that they are called to live in Christ, may come to a better understanding of how to respond to the bioethical questions that confront them, their families, and their fellow believers in … (Read more)
Belief in… Belief
Belief in belief, and hope in hope… The despair of our generation, and our youth.
What I mean is that there is a sense (at least among the people I’ve encountered) that belief and hope are, in and of themselves, good things, even if these same people consider belief in a certain god, or hope in a certain event (i.e. the resurrection) to themselves be bad (because they are exclusive, or whatever else). The resulting view is that it’s good to believe, and it’s good to have hope, but there’s no object of belief, and no object of hope. So instead of believing and hoping in something outside of themselves, they look into themselves and their idea of “belief” and “hope,” and that’s what they believe and hope towards. But what is the result when you “believe in belief”? Nothing, it’s despairing if you consider it honestly, because you realize that … (Read more)
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