An online survey of issues, events and ideas
Marty Sweeney / 28th February 2007
/ Current events
Be warned. Your next apologetical defense of Christianity may have to come in the form of counting the number of people standing in a football stadium.
On March 4th, The Discovery Channel will air ‘The Lost Tomb of Jesus’. The documentary is on the 1980 discovery of a tomb in Jerusalem. The ossuaries in the tomb had several names inscribed: Jesus, son of Joseph, two Marys, another Joseph, Matthew and Judah. The documentary is supposed to investigate the possibility of this being the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth.
Of course, this is nothing new. The connection was made upon the tomb's discovery over 25 years ago. What is new, according to the documentary, is DNA testing, which will be used to hypothesize the connection between the people in the tomb.
Noted talk show host Larry King invited several interested parties to discuss this on his show (view the transcript). It is quite an interview as secular scholars, journalists and theologians go head to head on the issue.
Thankfully, King called on respected evangelical Al Mohler to represent Protestant Christianity. In an exchange, Mohler and James Tabor—a professor of religion—discuss the statistical probability of more than one Jesus having the same familial names as Jesus of Nazareth:
TABOR: You know, I will tell you, Dr. Mohler, if you had a football stadium with 50,000 people and you had all of the Jesuses stand up, it would be 3,000. So that's somewhat common. If you said, how many of you had a mother named Mary? It would go down to 397. If you said, how many have a father named Joseph? It would go down again. And then if you say, a brother named James or Simon, it gets down to one person with just four questions ... But do you think there would more than one Jesus left standing after four questions would be the question. I don't think there would be, because from what I have been told by the stats, that's the math. A father, mother and a brother is going to take you down to a single person.
[Curiously, as Mohler points out, Tabor has written an entire book arguing that Joseph was not Jesus' father.]
Mohler, among others, believes this is all sensationalism based on pseudo-science, revisionist history and unfounded statistical analysis. Still, it's worth following the science and statistics of this debate because it is an issue on which Christianity stands or falls (1 Cor 15). Further, it's good to have an answer if people start asking, “How many Jesuses are in your stadium?”
[P.S. Historical Jesus scholar Ben Witherington has a good summary of the scientific and statistic problems on this issue.]
Ian Carmichael / 27th February 2007
Michael Portillo, a former Conservative Party MP and Cabinet member, writing in the Sunday Times on the weekend, opened his article with this extraordinary, attention-grabbing paragraph:
When last week David Cameron [the current Conservative leader] revealed that he hopes his daughter will go to a Church of England school, his aides rushed to say that he attends Sunday worship in Kensington not as a ploy to help her chances but out of genuine religious conviction. I would be more reassured to hear that the Tory leader goes to church because that is what it takes to get a child into the best of state schools, not because he is a believer.
As Al Mohler points out in his blog, “Mr. Portillo clearly would prefer Mr. Cameron to be a hypocrite than a believer in God.”
Portillo makes the extraordinary claim that God-fearers (and he cites Blair and Bush as his examples) are dangerous, because they are concerned about God being their guide and their judge. He claims that “[t]hose who look for judgment not from the electorate or parliament or a free press but from God release themselves from the constraints of democracy.”
Such a release will come as something of a surprise to Blair and Bush, who no doubt continue to strongly feel the political consequences of their decision-making. Perhaps any lessening of their anxiety over being judged by the electorate springs more from their imminent retirements from politics.
Portillo shows the paucity of his understanding of religious differences when he says:
Britons should worry that religion and politics could again be bound together. If moderation and secularism have been overturned in parts of the Muslim world, why should not the same thing happen in Christian societies?
The answer is, of course, that Christianity is different at its very core to Islam, even if politicians and the media continue with the nonsense of suggesting that “fundamentalism” of any religion is the danger. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali has said, “the basic tenets of Islam and the basic tenets of Western liberal democracies are incompatible”. That is not the case with Christianity; rather, Christianity has a strong claim to being the source of many of the principles of Western liberal democracy, including the separation of church and state.
Portillo's views need to be challenged and questioned. He puts forward the proposition that “it is fundamental to our society's survival that most people should distinguish good from bad”, without giving any indication of how he proposes to assess what constitutes good and bad.
Portillo goes on to say: “My guess is that historians will look back on the early 21st century in puzzlement. How was it possible, they will ask, that man had such deep scientific understanding but clung so tenaciously to his gods?”
His problem, of course, is that by looking only to science, he will not find help in distinguishing between good and bad. Perhaps that provides a clue for him as to why people cling to their gods.
The Bible rings with the message that true wisdom begins with the “fear of the Lord”. But it doesn't end there. God-fearing politicians worth their salt know that. Such people do not need to be feared. Far more dangerous are the politicians who only fear the electorate and the parliament and the free press; they are the ones, who, given the right conditions, may well corrupt the elections, take a stranglehold on power, ban the free press, and then ravage their own people for their own selfish gain. Do I need to cite names from history?
To demonstrate the point, perhaps just go to see two new movies soon to hit our screens and contrast the one about William Wilberforce (Amazing Grace), with the other about Idi Amin (The Last King of Scotland).
Ian Carmichael / 26th February 2007
Amazing Grace, the movie, opens in the US today, and looks like another promising evangelistic opportunity.
From the movie web site:
Ioan Gruffudd plays William Wilberforce, who, as a Member of Parliament, navigated the world of 18th Century backroom politics to end the slave trade in the British Empire. Albert Finney plays John Newton, a confidante of Wilberforce who inspires him to pursue a life of service to humanity. Benedict Cumberbatch is William Pitt the Younger, England's youngest ever Prime Minister at the age of 24, who encourages his friend Wilberforce to take up the fight to outlaw slavery and supports him in his struggles in Parliament.
As you could guess from the movie's title, the story behind the great hymn Amazing Grace is woven into this political story.
According to one early Christian review I've seen, the movie takes a few artistic licenses in some places, and reading John Piper's new book Amazing Grace in the Life of William Wilberforce would be very worthwhile in conjunction with seeing the movie.
As yet I have not been able to track down an Australian relese date.
Gordon Cheng / 23rd February 2007
Professor Raphael Israeli of Hebrew University recently caused a stir in Australia when he asserted that “When the Muslim population gets to a critical mass you have problems. That is a general rule, so if it applies everywhere it applies in Australia.”
It's an observation based on his own research, so it's worth taking notice. I wrote an opinion piece for The Daily Telegraph, a local Sydney newspaper.
Simon Roberts / 15th February 2007
It's all about me. That seems to be the trend in our churches today. In the quest to win people to Jesus, we somehow feel the need to show how everything is relevant to the individual. How will this help me, the church-goer? How will this help them, the congregation? What is the ‘cash value’ of belief?
This was brought home to me recently when it was pointed out that 25 years ago everyone was reading J.I. Packer's book Knowing God. Today everyone is reading A Purpose Driven Life. Now the problem is not that A Purpose Driven Life is not encouraging people to do good things, but rather that the idea of reading a book which is about God rather than us seems to be anathema. And while there surely is a place in our spiritual diet for books that provide practical encouragement and advice on living as a Christian, have we become so self-absorbed that we forget it's actually all about God and his glory? Have our church gatherings, our small-groups, our fellowships been trained to feed on a diet of self-help rather than Sola Dei (for God's glory alone)?
