Page 100 – CrossExamined

Cancelling Cancel Culture

What comes to your mind when you hear “cancel culture”? Words that come to mind are rash, hostile, judgmental, unforgiving, graceless, and subjective. Join Frank as he unpacks some problems with cancel culture and answers this important question: How are Christians supposed to respond when pressured to agree with ideologies that are unbiblical and harmful?

If you want to send us a question for the show, please email us at Hello@CrossExamined.org.

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May 21, 2021/by Frank Turek

5 Important Books I Read During 1 Year of COVID (That You Should Read Too)

Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Timothy Fox

I’ve always enjoyed reading. And when the COVID lockdowns began in March 2020, there wasn’t much else to do for a long time. I took full advantage of this, though, and over the next year, I read a lot of books over a wide range of topics. For instance, I read the entire Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis with my son (in the correct order), which was wonderful.

But not all of my reading was for fun. I focused mostly on current cultural issues, given all that went down in 2020. I wanted to better understand what was going on, how things got so bad, and maybe get some ideas on how to fix it. Since I’ve recommended many of these books to others, I figured I would just share my list with everyone. Here are the five most important books on culture that I read from March 2020 to March 2021, along with some honorary mentions:

1) Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents by Rod Dreher

If you only read one book on the list, this one should be it. Rod Dreher compares our modern society to totalitarian regimes around the world, and the similarities are scary. He warns of the loss of our religious freedoms as well as the Church’s impending persecution. Dreher discusses many important topics, such as surveillance capitalism (“Alexa, please record all of my conversations.”) and soft totalitarianism (cultural coercion instead of government coercion), as well as what Christians must do to stand firm in the face of increasing hostility. After reading Live Not by Lies, Dreher’s Benedict Option looks more appealing than ever.

2) The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

This book addresses the harm that well-meaning adults have caused young people by sheltering them within a culture of safetyism—absolute safety at all costs. Such coddling has impeded young people’s ability to develop grit and autonomy, making them overly dependent on moral authority and unable to withstand conflict. While this has had the greatest impact on college campuses, we can all see how it has spilled into society at large. The authors seek to expose the three lies of safetyism and teach parents, educators, and everyone else how to raise the next generation to be resilient and independent.

To learn more about The Coddling of the American Mind, visit the book’s website.

3) Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

If you’ve been paying any attention to current events, you’ve likely heard of Critical Theory (CT) or Critical Race Theory. Simply put, CT is a motivating school of thought behind many political and academic movements within our society, an ideology that is capable of destroying any type of open-minded, liberal debate. Cynical Theories is a thoroughly-researched academic (yet accessible) book that teaches the history of CT and how it has influenced the modern Social Justice movement. While some topics may seem outrageous to uninformed readers, such as fat studies (yes, that’s a thing), the authors give all of the content a fair and honest evaluation.

If you wish to seriously study the influence that CT has had on practically every modern field of study, you need to read Cynical Theories. Oh, and did I mention that the authors are atheists? CT isn’t just a Christian boogeyman; it’s a problem for everyone.

To read a more thorough overview, see Neil Shenvi’s review.

4) The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity by Douglas Murray

As the title states, this book examines three of the most divisive issues in our culture today: gender, race, and identity. It focuses on how news media and social media are destroying our society through mob mentality and tribalism. Just be warned: this book is very spicy. If you haven’t been following the cultural narrative regarding gender, race, and identity, prepare to be shocked, and possibly outraged.

Again, for a greater overview, read the review by Neil Shenvi.

5) The Rise of Victimhood Culture by Bradley Keith Campbell and Jason Manning

Canceling. Safe spaces. Trigger warnings. Microaggressions. These are all features of victimhood culture, a moral culture in which victimhood is a sort of social currency—the greater one’s victimhood, the higher one’s social or moral status. This book traces the rise of victimhood within our society, noting how it stems from our general dignity culture, which stresses the dignity for all persons, while adding elements of honor culture, in which even the slightest of insults cannot be tolerated. If you wish to understand how our society has become obsessed with victimhood and offended about practically everything, you need to read this book.

These are 5 of the most important cultural books I read from March 2020 to March 2021, which I highly recommend to you as well. Note that only one of the books criticizing our modern culture is Christian, so it’s good to know that there are people across the religious and political spectrum who are concerned with the current state of our society.

Honorary Mentions

Now, if you’ve already read all five books above, or you’re looking for even more recommendations, here are some honorary mentions:

1) Anything by Thomas Sowell

Not everything I read during the pandemic was good. I saw Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility referenced and recommended far and wide, so I thought I should see for myself what all the fuss was about.

My verdict?

It’s terrible. Stay far away from it. This book is mental poison, filled with gross generalizations and slander of whites, unprovable and unfalsifiable assumptions, cherry-picked anecdotal evidence, and extremely poor reasoning. White Fragility peddles racism and white guilt and it will only fuel greater racial animus and division within our society. Shame on anyone foolish enough to be manipulated by the nonsense DiAngelo spews in this book.

And lest you think this is all just an example of my own fragility, it’s been trashed by plenty of others as well, such as us at FreeThinking Ministries, Samuel Sey, Neil Shenvi, Ben Shapiro, James Lindsay, John McWhorter… just to name a few.

Why do I mention all of this? As a mental detox for torturing myself with White Fragility, I read a few books by Thomas Sowell (thanks to Wintery Knight’s constant recommendations). Now, some accuse Sowell of being too conservative (as if that’s a bad thing), but his work still serves as a counterbalance to many progressive racial and economic talking points.

During the pandemic lockdowns, I read (or listened to – another thanks to WK for turning me on to audiobooks) Disparities and Discrimination, Economic Facts and Fallacies, Charter Schools and their Enemies, and White Liberals and Black Rednecks. They’re all great, and I would recommend any of them based on your individual interest.

But is there one book by Thomas Sowell that I recommend to beginners? Again, it depends. If you want a response specifically to economic claims along racial lines, read Disparities and Discrimination. If you want a general response to progressive economic talking points, read Economic Facts and Fallacies.

2) 1984 by George Orwell

No, this isn’t a joke. The only reason I didn’t include it on the main list was to limit it to non-fiction books about modern cultural issues. However, the events of 1984 are quickly becoming current events. While I vaguely remembered much of the book from past readings, I was alarmed by how many of its events are now happening in our culture, such as blatant doublethink, erasing history down memory holes, and punishing people for thought crimes.

If you haven’t read 1984 since high school, or you’ve never read it before, do yourself a favor and read it. You’ll be shocked by how much the events of this dystopian novel written in the mid-20th century parallel our current society.

3) The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman

This book isn’t on my main recommendation list since it’s a long, tough, academic read. Also, I’m still working through it… slowly. But it’s very important in how it traces the psychological history of how our society has come to value expressive individualism over all else, and how gender and sexuality have become such important aspects of personal identity.

Happy reading!

UK Police Arrest 71-Year-Old Pastor For Defining Marriage The Way Jesus Defined Marriage

Legislating Morality, Culture & Politics, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Wintery Knight

I think it’s important for American Christians to learn lessons about what happens to religious liberty by looking at what happens to Christians in other times and places when Democrats (secular leftists) take power. This time, let’s look at a story from the UK, which has been on a 30-year-run into far-left socialism. They’ve embraced atheism, feminism, and socialism. Here’s the result.

The UK Daily Mail reports:

A Christian pastor who was arrested after he preached from the Bible said yesterday he had been treated ‘shamefully’.

John Sherwood, 71, was led away in handcuffs, questioned in a police station and held overnight after being accused of making homophobic comments outside Uxbridge Station in west London.

The grandfather claimed he was left bruised after police pulled him from a mini-stepladder he was using and cuffed his hands behind his back.

Police said they had received complaints the man had been making ‘allegedly homophobic comments’ and arrested him under the Public Order Act, which can be used under the vague proviso that someone is using ‘abusive or insulting words’ that cause ‘harm’ to someone else.

[…]Mr Sherwood, a pastor for 35 years, said: ‘I wasn’t making any homophobic comments, I was just defining marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman. I was only saying what the Bible says – I wasn’t wanting to hurt anyone or cause offence.

‘I was doing what my job description says, which is to preach the gospel in open air as well as in a church building.

‘When the police approached me, I explained that I was exercising my religious liberty and my conscience. I was forcibly pulled down from the steps and suffered some injury to my wrist and to my elbow. I do believe I was treated shamefully. It should never have happened.’

Mr Sherwood, who preaches at an independent evangelical church in north London, was arrested under the Public Order Act for allegedly causing alarm or distress.

Before we go too far, let’s just settle the question of what Bible-believing Christians should believe about the definition of marriage.

Matthew 19:1-6:

1 Now when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan.

2 And large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.

3 And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?”

4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female,

5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?

6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

To be a Christian, minimally, is to be a follower of Jesus Christ. That means that we accept what Jesus teaches, on whatever he teaches about. We don’t overturn the teachings of Jesus in order to make people who are rebelling against God feel better about their rebellion. It is central to the Christian worldview that Christians care more about what God thinks of them than what non-Christians think of them. In fact, Christians are supposed to be willing to endure suffering rather than side with non-Christians against God’s authority.

Matt Walsh had a fine article about this issue.

He said:

As Christians, our goal is not to avoid being like the big bad “other Christians,” but to strive to be like Christ Himself. This is one of the advantages to having an Incarnate God. He went around acting and speaking and teaching and generally functioning in our realm, thereby giving us a model to follow. This is the model of a loving and merciful man, and also a man of perfect virtue who fought against the forces of evil, condemned sin, defended his Father in Heaven with sometimes violent force, spoke truth, and eventually laid down His life for those He loved (which would be all of us).

[…]This is what it means to believe in Christ. Not just to believe that He existed, but to believe that Christ is Truth itself, and that everything He said and did was totally and absolutely and irreversibly true forever and always. Many Christians today — not only the ones in the video, but millions alongside them — seem to think we can rightly claim to have “faith” in Jesus or a “relationship” with Him while still categorically denying much of His Word. This is a ridiculous proposition. We can’t declare, in one breath, that Christ is Lord, and in the next suggest that maybe God got it wrong on this or that point. Well, we can make that declaration, but we expose our belief as fraudulent and self-serving. We worship a God we either invented in our heads, which is a false idol, or a God who is fallible, which is a false idol.

If you really accept Jesus as God, then you can’t think he is wrong when he explains what marriage is. Period. End of issue. And yet today, so many church-attending Christians are anxious to change the definition of marriage so that non-Christians will like them.

Why are some church-attending Christians so progressive?

So, I have quite a few evangelical Christian acquaintances who think they are Christians because they got married, had kids, and attend church. You know. They’re “Christians” culturally. But instead of thinking about what policies are supported by the Bible, all their policy-deciding is done for them by NPR, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, etc. That’s because they want to appear “smart” to non-Christians. And having to read books on your own by people like Thomas Sowell (economics), Heather Mac Donald (crime), Douglas Murray (immigration), John Lott (self-defense), Christopher Kaczor (abortion), Ryan T. Anderson (marriage), etc. is just TOO MUCH WORK. Reading is hard. It makes churchy Christians feel bad. Much better to watch Star Wars / Ellen and read fantasy/romance novels and buy video games/handbags.

The point of having political views, they say, is to look smart and good to others. Not to promote policies that are consistent with the Bible, or that allow Christians to act consistently with the Bible. So you get church-attending Christians voting against the small government, free speech, religious liberty, the rule of law, private property, school choice, etc. because forming beliefs by consuming secular left radio and TV is easier than reading.

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Original Blog Source: https://cutt.ly/dbYqTMe

May 17, 2021/by Guest

Is God Fading Away?

2. Does God Exist?, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Mia Langford

The “omnis” of theology – omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, etc. – are under increasing attack, and not just from what are recognized as more theologically liberal camps of Christianity. Examples abound – even from within evangelicalism — of various attributes of God being seemingly “picked off” by scholarly fire, or compromised among the laity to the point the meaning of the term is lost, and along with it, the force that would inspire worship and awe.

What is at the root of this “fading away” of a traditional understanding of God? It’s almost as if a lynch pin has been removed that kept these attributes anchored in place.

On this week’s episode of Why Do You Believe? Dr. Richard Howe gives name to that lynch pin: classical theism.

Classical Theism

Classical theism is a theology of God emphasizing His simplicity. The term classical here means grounded along the contours and categories of Western thinking arising from the ancient Greeks, the Christian church fathers, and subsequently the medieval Scholastics.

Under this framework, God is pure actuality, or infinite, unchanging existence, and not a being composed of metaphysical parts like everything in the created order (e.g. angels are composed of form and existence, human beings are composed of form, matter, and existence, etc.).

All God’s attributes, such as the “omnis,” immutability, and more, follow from this metaphysical principle of simplicity (attribute being a characteristic of God’s nature or His actions that can be known from creation [general revelation] and from His word [special revelation]). God’s attributes are entailed and connected in such a way as to imply and support one another, and if one attribute is removed or altered, the others collapse as well.

In other words, the ostensible individuation of God’s attributes is really the attempt of our finite human understanding to break God’s magnitude and majesty into digestible bites, and when we tamper with the cornerstone of divine simplicity, or any individual attribute, the entire house shakes.

Who Pulled the Pin?

So, if simplicity is the grounding for the various attributes of God, why has simplicity largely fallen by the wayside in modernity? Dr. Howe credits this discard largely to a lack of skill in hermeneutics. He demonstrates in this episode that a compromised and erroneous view of the nature and attributes of God will follow the discard of this cherished and enduring principle of theology, which followed an inconsistent and inappropriate interpretation of the text. Where classical theism honors God as being in a class by himself as a necessary and simple being, other systems can often impose human, finite, and compromised characteristics onto God.

Freedom Requires Restraint

Podcast

What does it really mean to be free? Does it mean that you’re free of all restraints? If it does— as many in our culture seem to think— then exercising that kind of freedom will lead to your demise.

Can you really create your own reality, independent of the facts? You’ll be amazed at what some college students think about this. You’ll hear an unforgettable clip of what they say about what should be uncontroversial and obvious truths. During this show, Frank unpacks the critical difference between being free FROM and being free TO. He also shows why the cancel culture is so joyless and hostile, and why you will never get peace without truth.

If you want to send us a question for the show, please email us at Hello@CrossExamined.org.

May 14, 2021/by Frank Turek

Can Jesus’ Story Still Surprise You?

Jesus Christ, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Bob Perry

History shows that prudence and wisdom are rarely on the side of new ways of looking at Scripture. This is especially true of the “progressive” bent toward remaking Jesus in a postmodern image. So, when I first heard about Tom Gilson’s new book, Too Good To Be False, I have to admit I was confused. Gilson is a solid Christian thinker. But the back cover of his book told me that “Christians reading [it] will encounter Jesus in fresh, worshipful new ways.” Had he gone to the dark side? Ten pages in my fears were allayed. It turns out Jesus’ story can still surprise you. Gilson’s book is not a new interpretation of Jesus. It’s a challenge to see ancient words with fresh eyes. And the picture he paints is astonishing.

Would You Hire This Guy?

Imagine receiving a memo from someone you work with. Its purpose is to introduce an individual he wants you to consider for a job opening you have in your office. In the memo, he describes the candidate as someone who never learns from experience, certainly not from his own mistakes. In fact, he’s never admitted to making a mistake. His leadership skills haven’t improved in the least. He shows no sign of character growth. When you ask him questions, he rarely gives you a straight answer. In his view, you can disagree with him, but that would just make you wrong. And he commands those who work with him to do things his way without exception (51-52).

Would you hire him? Or would you ask yourself, “Who does this guy think he is?”

That’s Jesus as you’ve probably never thought of him before.

Fall On Your Face

The insights in Too Good To Be False are not based on rethinking Jesus’ doctrines or deity. Quite the opposite. They are reminders that we are too used to the populist Jesus we’ve all been encouraged to befriend. When you focus on what he actually said and did, there is no temptation to punch Jesus in the shoulder and laugh. Instead, you are overwhelmed with the urge to fall down on your face and worship him. Yet, he invites you into his circle of trust anyway.

The real Jesus is a leader unlike any the world has ever seen. He speaks and acts with authority, confidence, and power. But he never misuses that power. He never even uses it to his own advantage. Instead, he directs that power toward loving others. He commands respect. And he is always the smartest person in the room.

The combination of these character traits describes a man who cannot be of this world. He’s unlike anyone any of us has ever met or even heard about. And while it’s tempting to say that makes him too good to be true, history tells us differently. The facts are more compelling. They make him too good to be false.

A Novel Character

Jesus’ persona is so outrageously superior it demands an explanation. After all, he’s the most memorable character ever created. And that could make it tempting to write him off as the invention of someone’s very fertile imagination. But you don’t have that option. Dismissing the Jesus of the Gospels that way would be tantamount to subscribing to the most outrageous conspiracy theory in human history. A coordinated forgery made by multiple authors all possessed of the same fanciful delusion. But it’s even worse than that.

To hear the skeptics tell it, this Jesus story is some grand version of the Telephone Game. It got invented, embellished, retold, and passed down through multiple storytellers in various locations. Yet, somehow, the legendary character this process created turns out to be exactly the same guy everywhere we look. He lives in all four Gospels (five if you join the ones who invoke ‘Q’). Somehow, this scrambled mess “produced a greater miracle than the resurrection: the greatest story of all time, with the greatest character in all literature, presenting moral teaching that’s changed every civilization it’s touched for the better.” (133)

Quite a miracle indeed.

Confronting The Skeptics

The usual skeptics won’t take this lying down, of course. But Tom Gilson has been engaging them and their ideas on his Thinking Christian blog since 2004. He’s heard all of their arguments hundreds of times. So, when it comes to handling objections to his thesis, he does so with style, grace, and simplicity. They’re all there — Dawkins, Spong, Aslan, Ehrman, Carrier, Price, Armstrong, Hitchens, and others — and Gilson acknowledges their points. But instead of trying to cut down each tree, he focuses on the forest. Jesus of Nazareth is a character no one could make up.

There are ways to respond to the details of the so-called Gospel “contradictions.” But some skeptics just refuse to recognize them as simple differences in point-of-view. It’s tempting to feel compelled to explain why Jesus didn’t talk about today’s hot-button moral and social issues. They don’t care that, throughout history, the solution to every moral dilemma has come through the actions of Jesus’ followers. We’ve heard the bluster about how Jesus “became God” (Ehrman) or how he was simply another rehashed legend (Dawkins, Armstrong). We’ve even been told that he didn’t really exist at all (Carrier). None of these gets to the heart of the problem.

With all the corruption and shenanigans entailed in passing down a made-up legend, how could the Synoptic authors have pulled it off? How could they have each arrived at the same God-man Jesus when the Telephone Game hadn’t had time to invent his deity before they wrote their Gospels?

The Jesus We Take For Granted

Jesus was a media influencer before it was cool. But what made him popular with those who knew him best also made him notorious with the political and religious leaders of his day. Nobody likes a guy who thinks he’s God incarnate. People like that need to be eliminated. But when those same people reappear shortly thereafter, those who tried to eliminate them know they’ve got a real problem on their hands.

It’s only happened once.

Today, the most vehement opponents of Christianity still invoke his name. They do so to try to expose the “hypocrisy” of modern Christians. But when they do, they’re making Tom Gilson’s point. Even they admire the one character in human history who “no author, no poet and no playwright has ever devised … a character of perfect power and perfect love like Jesus” (126).

He is the standard by which every other character is measured. Too loving to be a liar. Too compelling to be a lunatic. He only leaves us one choice. And Too Good To Be False reminds us that it is a choice we have too often taken for granted.

Did Jesus Really Rise From the Dead? A Historian, an Atheist, a Skeptic, a Theologian, and an Ex-Con Weigh In

CrossExamined

By Alisa Childers

It’s that time of year again—the time when Christians come together to celebrate the pinnacle of our faith, the resurrection of Jesus. It’s also the time when news outlets like Time, the Discovery Channel, and Newsweek unleash their skepticism about Christianity, the Bible, and the resurrection. It can be confusing to wade through the various historical evidences, personal beliefs, and opinions floating around in scholarship and the blogosphere. Here are quotes from several sources who all have unique qualifications and an interesting take on the evidence:

1. The Historian

Gary Habermas is an American historian, and the Distinguished Research Professor of Apologetics and Philosophy at Liberty University. He is considered to be one of the foremost scholars on the resurrection of Jesus. While researching the resurrection, he combed through the works of both secular and Christian scholars. He wrote:

I recently completed an overview of more than 1,400 sources on the resurrection of Jesus published since 1975. I studied and catalogued about 650 of these texts in English, German, and French. Some of the results of this study are certainly intriguing. For example, perhaps no fact is more widely recognized than that early Christian believers had real experiences that they thought were appearances of the risen Jesus. A critic may claim that what they saw were hallucinations or visions, but he does not deny that they actually experienced something.[1]

There is a virtual consensus among scholars who study Jesus’ resurrection that, subsequent to Jesus’ death by crucifixion, his disciples really believed that he appeared to them risen from the dead.[2]

2. The Atheist

Gerd Ludemann is a German New Testament scholar, historian, and atheist. He was once a professing Christian, but walked away from his faith when he became convinced that very little of what is contained in the New Testament is historically reliable. Even so, he wrote:

It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’s death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.[3]

3. The Skeptic

Bart Ehrman is the Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is one of the most respected scholars in the field of New Testament studies—and he is agnostic. About the resurrection of Jesus, he wrote:

Historians, of course, have no difficulty speaking about the belief in the resurrection of Jesus, since this is a matter of public record. It is a historical fact that some of Jesus’ followers came to believe that he had been raised from the dead soon after his execution. We know some of these believers by name; one of them, the Apostle Paul, claims quite plainly to have seen Jesus alive after his death. Thus, for the historian, Christianity begins after the death of Jesus, not with the resurrection itself, but with the belief in the resurrection.[4]

In a recent blog post he wrote:

The most important thing to stress is that there are two historical realities that simply cannot be denied. The followers of Jesus did claim that Jesus came back to life. If they had not claimed that, we would not have Christianity. So they did claim it. Moreover, they did claim that they knew he rose precisely because some of them saw him alive again afterward. No one can doubt that.[5]

4. The Theologian

The type of historical evidence above caused leading New Testament scholar, historian, and theologian N.T. Wright to conclude:

As a historian, I cannot explain the rise of early Christianity unless Jesus rose again, leaving an empty tomb behind him.[6]

5. The Ex-con

Charles Colson, who once served as Special Counsel to President Richard Nixon, famously went to prison for his involvement in the Watergate scandal in the early 70’s. He became a Christian in 1973, largely due to the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. One detail regarding Watergate was similar to the resurrection: in both cases, 12 men claimed something that would affect world history. In the case of Watergate, it only took two weeks for them to crack under pressure:

The real cover-up, the lie, could only be held together for two weeks, and then everybody else jumped ship in order to save themselves. Now, the fact is that all that those around the President were facing was embarrassment, maybe prison. Nobody’s life was at stake.

But what about the disciples? Twelve powerless men, peasants really, were facing not just embarrassment or political disgrace, but beatings, stonings, execution. Every single one of the disciples insisted, to their dying breaths, that they had physically seen Jesus bodily raised from the dead. Don’t you think that one of those apostles would have cracked before being beheaded or stoned? That one of them would have made a deal with the authorities? None did.

Jesus is Lord: That’s the thrilling message of Easter. And it’s an historic fact, one convincingly established by the evidence—and one you can bet your life upon. Go ahead researchers—dig up all the old graves you want. You won’t change a thing. He has risen.[7]

Even the atheists and skeptics confirm that Jesus’ disciples claimed and believed that they had seen Jesus risen from the dead. History tells us that they were willing to suffer and die for that belief. It’s reasonable to confidently agree with what the church has affirmed over the centuries—”Christ is risen. He is risen indeed!”[8]

References:

[1] Gary R. Habermas & Michael R. Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Kregel Publications, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2004) p. 60 (Emphasis mine)

[2] Ibid., p. 49

[3] Gerd Lüdemann, What Really Happened to Jesus?, trans. John Bowden (Louisville, Kent.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995) p. 80

[4] Bart Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford, 2004) p. 234 (Emphasis mine)

[5] Bart Ehrman, “Questions on the Resurrection and My Personal Spiritual Experiences: Readers’ Mailbag” www.ehrmanblog.org, March 24, 2017, accessed April 6, 2017

[6] N.T. Wright, “The New Unimproved Jesus,” Christianity Today (September 13, 1993), p. 26 (Cited by William Lane Craig, “The Resurrection of Jesus” www.reasonablefaith.org, accessed April 6, 2017)

[7] Charles Colson, “An Unholy Hoax?” www.epm.org, March 29, 2002, accessed April 6, 2017.

[8] John 11:25-26

What Our Perpetual Fight With Entropy Tells Us

2. Does God Exist?, Atheism, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Al Serrato

Many years ago, when I was younger and much less wise, I decided it would be a good father-son project to invest in an older car that I could restore. (Note to fathers: it’s a much better bonding idea to find something your kids like than the other way around). So, after some searching, and mindful of my meager budget, I ended up finding an ’87 Mustang convertible that was in pretty good shape overall. It wasn’t difficult for me to envision that with a little elbow grease, and a website that specializes in Mustang parts, I could make this car showroom quality in no time.

After the novelty wore off, and my kids’ interest waned from little to none, I found that I had a solitary project on my hands that had this very annoying habit of making negative progress. That’s right. No matter how many items I crossed off the to-do list, more kept getting added. And I found that things always went from good to bad, from working to broken, from clean to dirty. Window switches that were working one day stopped working the next. Motors that keep the windows moving smoothly up and down began to groan and then stopped. Fuses blew, over and over again. Amazingly, the process never worked the other way. No matter how long I waited, broken switches never fixed themselves. Cracked pieces of trim, or a broken taillight, never repaired themselves. Rust in the metal always appeared, where it wasn’t before, and never gave way to clean and shiny metal. Yes, the law of entropy was fully in effect, and the only way to reverse that process was to invest time, energy, and money.

This of course comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever owned anything. Nor is it a surprise to anyone who has considered the way nature operates. Scientists tell us that this law – entropy – is a characteristic of the universe. Entropy is, put simply, a measure of disorder, and it seems that a universal law is in operation moving everything from states of higher to states of lower order. In other words, nature has a particular direction to it, and that direction is down.

Christianity and atheism are competing worldviews. Each one claims to be able to make sense of the world so as to explain the way things really are. And despite the increasing popularity of atheism, and the increasing disdain for historic Christianity, the atheistic worldview is utterly incapable of making sense of the world. As it relates to entropy, atheism must explain why it is that the “evolution” of life has escaped this universal law. How is it that incredibly complex human beings evolved from lower life forms? When DNA is subjected to random change, the result is often lethal – it’s called cancer. But somehow, atheists insist, given enough time, a simple single-celled life form acquired the instructions necessary to produce a complete human life, instructions that must perfectly direct the assembly and interworking of dozens of systems. And if that were not hard enough, how can life have emerged from inert – lifeless – material? Leave a rock alone for a few millennia and you end up with, well, a rock.

The Christian worldview, by contrast, can provide that explanation. The Big Bang event that started this downward slide in progress is the result of a massively powerful and immensely intelligent being, who provided the laws we see in nature, and who wrote the instructions that scientists are beginning to decipher within DNA. The reason life “evolved” on earth is because an Intelligent Designer designed it to and provided the energy source to power the process. Recognizing the need for such a “first cause” is not unscientific. Indeed, modern science began with the presupposition that intelligent minds could untangle the mysteries of nature because these mysteries were not random but were themselves the product of an ordered mind, of intelligence.

Fighting the obvious, as atheists do, is even less successful than fighting entropy. They would be better off using their time in more productive pursuits.

Unbelievable? With Justin Brierley

Podcast

Justin Brierley, host of the wildly successful debate podcast from the UK called Unbelievable? joins Frank to reveal why he’s still a Christian after hearing atheist arguments for the last 15 years. Justin moderates debates and discussions between Christians and atheists or people of other faiths (Frank has been on the program twice). Justin and Frank discuss the best arguments for atheism, the problems with materialism, and the fact that the new atheism is dying as atheists are becoming increasingly more open to Christianity.

Join Justin, N.T. Wright, Josh, and Sean McDowell, and many others online for the 2021 Unbelievable conference on May 15. Details are here.

If you want to send us a question for the show, please email us at Hello@CrossExamined.org.

May 7, 2021/by Frank Turek

Simon of Cyrene, Cleopas, and the Eyewitness Testimony of the Gospels

4. Is the NT True?, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Ryan Leasure

Modern critics doubt that eyewitnesses stand behind the four Gospels. In fact, they argue that the first followers of Jesus told others about Jesus who told others about Jesus who told others about Jesus, and eventually someone wrote all those stories down—much like the game of telephone. According to this theory, anonymous figures wrote the Gospels in places like Turkey, Greece, and Rome.

Biblical scholar Richard Bauckham begs to differ. One of the more brilliant ways Bauckham pushed back against the form criticism of the early twentieth century was to highlight that the names in the Gospels correspond to the names in the broader Palestinian record. In other words, one would expect a slew of unrealistic Palestinian names (like Marcus or Gaius) if someone was merely writing hearsay from across the Roman Empire. This point is especially true when one considers that the Jewish names across the Empire were radically different from the Palestinian Jewish names. The fact that the Gospels give realistic names suggests that the accounts can be traced back to Palestine itself.

But Bauckham also looks at the names from a different angle to provide further support for eyewitness testimony. He argues that the presence of certain names seems highly unusual unless they were the eyewitness sources behind their stories.

Anonymous by Default

Most of the people in the Gospels are anonymous. Besides the disciples, government officials, and a few key figures, just about everyone else remains anonymous. Allow me to give you some samples from Luke:

Luke 5:12 — “While he was in one of the cities, there came a man full of leprosy.”
Luke 6:6 — “On another Sabbath, he entered the synagogue and was teaching, and a man was there whose right hand was withered.”
Luke 7:2 — “Now a centurion had a servant who was sick and at the point of death, who was highly valued by him.”
Luke 8:43 — “And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and though she had spent all her living on physicians, she could not be healed by anyone.”
Luke 10:25 — “And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, ‘Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’”
Luke 13:14 — “But the ruler of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, said to the people, ‘There are six days in which work ought to be done. Come on those days and be healed, and not on the Sabbath day.’”

I could list more. By my count fifty-one anonymous characters appear in Luke. This does not count large groups such as the five thousand or the seventy-two. Nor does this list include generic statements where Jesus heals “many” or interacts with a crowd.

Since obscure characters are usually anonymous, we should take notice when one of them gets mentioned.

Simon of Cyrene

Mark mentions three obscure figures in Mark 15:21. He notes, “And they compelled a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross.” It’s noteworthy that none of these three figures show up anywhere else in the narrative. Moreover, while Matthew and Luke also mention Simon of Cyrene, they leave out his two sons. What best explains this phenomena?

Church tradition suggests that Mark’s Gospel is more or less Peter’s account of things. Yet, Peter wasn’t in all places at all times. In fact, he drops out of the narrative in the previous chapter. He’s presumably in hiding after Jesus’ arrest. So how would Peter or Mark know that Simon carried Jesus’ cross? Who’s testimony stands behind this story?

It most certainly has to be Simon of Cyrene. Furthermore, the mention of his two sons Alexander and Rufus suggests that Mark expected his readers to know who they were. In fact, if Mark wrote his Gospel in Rome (as tradition suggests), it’s reasonable to believe that the church heard this story from Alexander and Rufus themselves. Think about it. Alexander and Rufus must have heard the story dozens of times from their dad. And now as they relayed this same story to the church in Rome, imagine how proud they must have felt. That’s our dad! He carried Jesus’ cross! Since neither Matthew nor Luke mention these two sons, we can assume that their audiences (places other than Rome) would not have been familiar with them.

Cleopas

After his resurrection from the dead, Jesus appears to two individuals on the road to Emmaus — Cleopas and an anonymous figure. Why mention Cleopas and not the other? The story obviously does not require him to be named.

The most reasonable explanation is that Cleopas must be the source for this specific account. Again, none of the disciples were present. Luke himself was not present. But as Luke mentioned in his prologue, he spoke with different eyewitnesses before compiling his Gospel account (Luke 1:1-3). Cleopas was one such eyewitness.

Also worth noting is that Cleopas was probably Jesus’ uncle. Elsewhere, John reports, “but standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene” (John 19:25). While the spelling is different in John, Bauckham argues that “Clopas is a very rare Semitic form of the Greek name Cleopas, so rare that we can be certain this is the Clopas who, according to Hegesippus, was the brother of Jesus’ father Joseph.”[1]

Writing in the early fourth century, church historian Eusebius references Hegesippus’ quote on Clopas. He writes:

After the martyrdom of James and the conquest of Jerusalem which immediately followed, it is said that those of the apostles and disciples of the Lord that were still living came together from all directions with those that were related to the Lord according to the flesh (for the majority of them also were still alive) to take counsel as to who was worthy to succeed James. They all with one consent pronounced Symeon, the son of Clopas, of whom the Gospel also makes mention; to be worthy of the episcopal throne of that parish. He was a cousin, as they say, of the Saviour. For Hegesippus records that Clopas was a brother of Joseph.[2]

According to church tradition, Clopas’ son, Symeon, the cousin of Jesus and James, became the overseer of the church in Jerusalem after James’ martyrdom in AD 62. Thus, we can see why Clopas’ testimony might carry some significant weight in the early church. He was the uncle of Jesus, and his son was a prominent leader in the Jerusalem church.

Names and Eyewitnesses

A few other names also fit this same description (Jairus, Bartimaeus, and Zacchaeus to name a few). By looking at the general pattern in the Gospels, these obscure figures should have remained anonymous. Therefore, their names seem rather significant. I believe Bauckham is correct when he suggests “that many of these named characters were eyewitnesses who not only originated the traditions to which their names are attached but also continued to tell these stories as authoritative guarantors of their traditions.”[3]

Notes

[1] Richard Bauckham, Jesus, and the Eyewitnesses, 47.

[2] Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 3.11.

[3] Richard Bauckham, Jesus, and the Eyewitnesses, 39.

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