Looking for More Like Caleb

The Book of Numbers tells of Israel at a crossroads. God had rescued them from the slavery of Egypt and demonstrated His power by wiping out the Egyptian army. Now, they faced a new challenge. Now, they stood at the edge of the Promised Land, scared to enter due to the giants living there.

It was then that the faithfulness of Caleb shone so brightly. Caleb sought to rally God's people, telling them not to be afraid. With God's help, they could defeat the giants and have the future the Lord desired for them.

We live in a day where Christians fell a lot like those Israelites. We've seen the blessings of God on our land and in our culture. But that past has faded as the giants of secularism, compromise, and immorality have overwhelmed the Christian in the pew. We are standing at a crossroads and God is waiting for his faithful to take up His cause and face those giants with knowledge and compassion.

The reason Come Reason Ministries exists is to equip and strengthen God's people to answer that call. My mission is to provide a thoughtful, attractive articulation of Christ to an increasingly hostile world. As the culture shrinks into darkness, by God's grace I desire to help Christians to confidently engage those seeking to undermine His truth.

Walking in Caleb's Footsteps

I want to see more Christians have the strength of Caleb to face the battles of today. Those who oppose the Gospel are grabbing the limelight and it's time to step up our efforts. We want to use the gifts that God has given, including this ministry, to serve his body and make an impact that cannot be ignored. We need to grow more Calebs for Christ.

Caleb made his mark on both the believer and the unbeliever and he provided a legacy for his descendants. Likewise, Come Reason's specific strategy focuses on three key areas of engagement: strengthening the Christian—especially the youth—in their ability to defend stand for their faith, reaching the lost, and ensuring the next generation of believers have the necessary tools to face their giants with confidence.

Strengthening the Church

The first group of Israelites failed to enter the land of promise God had given them. They failed to reason that the God who delivered them from Pharaoh could also deliver them from the giants. Today, the church has grown soft intellectually. People don't know the reasons why they believe what they believe, making them afraid to share their faith.

We need to strengthen Christians in the pew. This means pastors need to discuss how to better defend one's faith more often from the pulpit. Youth groups need to discuss the hot-button issues and offer a regular Q&A time where students can anonymously ask about things bothering them. Apologetics classes and conferences need to be more prominent. The Church needs to help the Christian who is afraid of the giants in the land by showing them the power of God's word and his equipping.

Reaching the World

Caleb not only encouraged his brothers, he also was a man of action. The Book of Joshua reports that when entering the land Caleb asked for the hill country, some of the most difficult terrain to conquer. Yet, he was wildly successful because he trusted in the Lord.

I want to reach the world with the message of the Gospel. That's why we leverage digital media so much at Come Reason. Our blogs, podcasts and YouTube channels are visited by thousands and thousands of people seeking answers to the big questions of life. I find myself regularly engaged in online debates with atheists and others using Twitter or Facebook. But we do it all in faith, asking the Lord to grow our efforts.

Providing for the Future

Joshua 14:14 declares “Hebron became the inheritance of Caleb the son of Jephunneh the Kenizzite to this day, because he wholly followed the Lord, the God of Israel.” Caleb provided a future for those who followed after him.

It's no secret that the church is hemorrhaging its youth. Without a specific effort to reach kids in junior high and high school, we risk losing them forever. Let's treat our youth not merely as those who seek to be entertained, but as individuals seeking to understand their faith and their world for the first time.

As an organization that has been at the forefront of the struggle for truth since the 1990s, Come Reason is uniquely poised to make a significant impact for the Kingdom. We have a vision to spread convincing Christianity across the globe by stirring the hearts and minds of the lost and the church. We've done this through our teaching, our youth training initiatives, our on-campus engagements, and our publishing efforts, each of which has been very successful given our modest budget and limited resources.

I'd like to ask you to consider supporting Come Reason in our efforts to create more Calebs. All the materials we offer free of charge, but they do cost money. Will you consider partnering with us? To help support this blog as well as out other efforts, click here to give securely. All gifts are fully deductible as allowed by law.

Let's pray for more Christians to be like Caleb. And then let's get to work making it happen.

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Attention Media: What an Evangelical Is Not

Although as I write this the vote is over a year away, we have come into the election cycle once again in the United States. Pundits will be discussing and over-analyzing the various groups and constituencies they believe are key to the race for the presidency. Certainly the terms "Evangelicals," "Fundamentalists," and "Religious Right" will be bandied about quite a bit in debates and opinion pieces, but many in the press are sloppy in their distinctions. In this excerpt from a piece on his Web site, J.P. Moreland offers some points that would define what a Christian evangelical is and isn’t.  He writes:

Frequently, Evangelicals are identified with Fundamentalists and the Religious Right. This identification is false and harmful to the spirit of civil public discourse. Since I am an Evangelical, it may be helpful for me to explain what the term means. Two preliminary points are important. First, Evangelicals, just like anyone of commonsense, reserve the right to define who they are and what they stand for and we Evangelicals resent the media’s superficial and misleading characterization of us. Second, Evangelicalism is not primarily a social, political, or cultural movement. At its core, it is to be defined theologically.

...As Roger Olson has noted, an Evangelical is one who satisfies five characteristics: (1) biblicism (adherence to the supreme authority of the Bible regarding everything it teaches when properly interpreted); (2) conversionism (belief in the essential importance of radical conversion to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior); (3) the centrality of the cross of Jesus and the forgiveness it provides in attempts to grow in character and spirituality; (4) persuasive, respectful evangelism and social action on behalf of the poor, oppressed, and powerless, including the unborn; (5) a respect for but not slavish dependence on the history of Christian tradition and doctrine.1

Moreland goes on to quickly contrast why Evangelicals are different from Fundamentalists and why they cannot be considered the Religious Right. You can read the short article here and be ready to explain the differences before the onslaught of media misrepresentation begins.

References

1. Moreland, J. P. "Defining "Evangelical" in Public Discourse." JPMoreland.com. J.P. Moreland, 3 Mar. 2008. Web. 6 Aug. 2015. http://www.jpmoreland.com/articles/defining-evangelical-in-public-discourse/.

You Can No Longer Separate Apologetics and Evangelism

Yesterday I was interviewed by Mike Spaulding for an upcoming episode of Soaring Eagle radio. During our talk, he asked me about the growing need to incorporate apologetics into our evangelism efforts. Of course, Christians are commanded to study and be prepared to defend the Christian faith. There are many verses in the Bible commanding us to defend our faith. Therefore, we should be ready to do so.

The idea of apologetics as a necessary part of one's faithful walk is new to most Christians. They understand the need to worship God, to live a set apart life, and even the command to evangelize given by Jesus in the Great Commission. However, learning apologetics isn't something preached from most pulpits today. Yet, in the first few centuries, apologetics and evangelism were inter-reliant. In fact, when you look at the writings of the early church fathers, you see how big a role apologetics played in their interaction with the outside world. Here are just a few examples:

Justin Martyr

Justin Martyr lived in the second century AD, just after the apostles. Seeking to be a philosopher by training, he began to look for a satisfying understanding of the world. After seeing Christians bravely stand up to martyrdom, Justin converted and "he acted as an evangelist, taking every opportunity to proclaim the Gospel as the only safe and certain philosophy."1] In his Dialogue with Trypho he explains how Christianity makes sense as a worldview, drawing upon Platonic ideas popular in his day. His First Apology and Second Apology he takes on many false charges circulating about Christians at the time, such as they were offering child sacrifices or cannibals. Part of Justin's goal was to allow Christians to live peacefully instead of being persecuted around the Empire. However, he also knew that evangelism was made more difficult by those lies.

Irenaeus of Lyons

Irenaeus lived in the second century and turned his attention towards the Gnostics, a group that claimed to have secret knowledge about Jesus and the world. In his Against Heresies, Irenaeus argues for God's unity and the reality of his creation, which the Gnostics denied. He reaches out to his reader, telling them "If then, you shall deliver up to Him what is yours, that is, faith towards Him and subjection, you shall receive His handiwork, and shall be a perfect work of God. If, however, you will not believe in Him, and will flee from His hands, the cause of imperfection shall be in you who did not obey, but not in Him who called [you]."2]

Tertullian

Tertullian wrote his Apology to address the injustices and death sentences Christians were facing in Carthage and other areas of the Roman Empire. This famous defense of Christians ends with a bang, as he tells the unjust magistrates that Christians are suffering martyrdom because they are morally upright and that continuing to kill them will only make evangelism efforts grow:

In condemning a Christian woman to the leno rather than to the leo You made confession that a taint on our purity is considered among us something more terrible than any punishment and any death. Nor does your cruelty, however exquisite, avail you; it is rather a temptation to us. The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed .3]

Apologetics in Today's Post-Christian Culture

Just as the Christians in the second century faces a culture hostile to the teachings of Christ, so Christians today find themselves in a post-Christian (and post-pagan) culture. Apologetics is therefore necessary to fulfill our faithfulness to The Great Commission. We see it in the examples of the Church Fathers. We would do well to follow them.

References

1. "Justin Martyr." Roberts, Alexander, James Donaldson, A. Cleveland Coxe, and Allan Menzies. Ante-Nicene Fathers: The Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994. Print. 160.
2. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.39.2-3. Translated by Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut. From Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. Edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103439.htm.
3. Tertullian. Apology 50. Translated by S. Thelwall. From Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 3. Edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0301.htm

Not Watching the PP Videos Doesn't Make You Honest, It Makes You Derelict

Yesterday, Democrats in the United States Senate blocked a bill to defund Planned Parenthood. The bill came about due to increasing public outrage spurred by a series of undercover videos released by the Center for Medical Progress showing how Planned Parenthood executives at the national and affiliate level change their procedures in abortions to extract unborn babies and then divide them up to sell off the organs. Any civilized person shudders at the videos and recognizes the macabre moral gyrations one must make to not simply profit off the body parts of the most defenseless of human beings, but to enjoy a nice lunch while discussing the details.

Yet, the White House sought to defeat the bill, Senate Democrats stood in near unison opposition, and the major media outlets hailed the bill's defeat as being "good." Tellingly, both the White House and several senators who were interviewed claimed to not have actually seen the videos in question. The Weekly Standard reports that several of the Senators who offered a No vote never actually watched the videos. White House press secretary Josh Earnest stated on CNN that that he hadn't looked at them and is instead "relying on news reports of ‘people' who have seen them." Why would this be?

There are two words that explain the reticence on behalf of both the White House and the Democratic Senators to actually watch the videos in question: plausible deniability. Just as Earnest belies his name while dancing around the CNN interviewer's questions, every Senator that claims to not have seen the videos can avoid some hard questions about the details in them. To be clear, I'm not saying the Senators are lying. It's very possible they truly haven't seen the videos—by their own design. However, that doesn't mean they haven't had staffers view them and give them a briefing on each so they know how damning they can be. Therefore, they are avoiding these videos at all costs. To watch them is to be held accountable for them.

Meanwhile, major media organizations like the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have been conspicuous by their silence on each of the videos, but they don't seem bothered to regurgitate the PR of Planned Parenthood in the few editorials they've published. In fact, Sean Davis demonstrates how several media outlets are simply taking their marching orders straight from Planned Parenthood's PR firm SKDKnockerbocker. It is the latest proof demonstrating that the truth is not valued today; only the proper storyline that conforms to a specific agenda.

As an apologist, I spend a lot of time looking up the original sources before I answer an argument or statement. One must read the context in which a quote is given to understand the person's larger point. This is simple intellectual honesty, and I've warned Christians as much as secularists not to build straw men. Therefore, as a service to anyone who wants to speak intelligently about this issue, I've compiled the relevant links to the different sources below:

Center for Medical Progress Videos Released to Date

#1 - Planned Parenthood Uses Partial-Birth Abortions to Sell Baby Parts (released 14-July-2015)

• Shortened Video
• Full Footage

#2 - Second Planned Parenthood Senior Executive Haggles Over Baby Parts Prices, Changes Abortion Methods (released 21-July-2015)

• Shortened Video
• Full Footage

#3 – Human Capital - Episode 1: Planned Parenthood's Black Market in Baby Parts (released 28-July-2015)

•  Documentary episode

#4 – Planned Parenthood VP Says Fetuses May Come Out Intact, Agrees Payments Specific to the Specimen (released 30-July-2015)

•  Shortened Video
•  Full Footage

#5 – Intact Fetuses "Just a Matter of Line Items" for Planned Parenthood TX Mega-Center (released 4-Aug-2015)

• Shortened Video
• Full Footage

#6 – Human Capital - Episode 2: Inside the Planned Parenthood Supply Site

•  Documentary Episode

#7 – Human Capital - Episode 3: Planned Parenthood's Custom Abortions for Superior Product

•  Documentary Episode

#8 – Planned Parenthood Baby Parts Buyer StemExpress Wants "Another 50 Livers/Week"

• Shortened Video
• Full Footage

#9 – Planned Parenthood Baby Parts Vendor ABR Pays Off Clinics, Intact Fetuses "Just Fell Out"

• Shortened Video
• Full Footage (here and here)

#10 – Top Planned Parenthood Exec: Baby Parts Sales “A Valid Exchange,” Can Make "A Fair Amount of Income”

• Shortened Video
• Full Footage:PPCAPS Deb VanDerhei, PPFA Dr. Carolyn Westhoff, PPFA Dr. Vanessa Cullins, and PPCAPS Deb Vanderhei and Anne-Marie Grewer.

Image courtesy User:Colin / Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .

God, Atheists, and the Problem of Suffering Children

I've noticed that for some people commenting on social media is a lot like driving in a car alone. Certain drivers do things like pick their nose they would never do in polite company. It isn't that they don't know their vehicle's windows allow others to see inside as much as they can see outside. They simply feel protected and they haven't given their actions a second thought.

Similarly, people will say things online that are not thought out seeking to prove a point. One such statement was a conversation I witnessed on Twitter yesterday where a couple of atheists were making claims about how God couldn't exist. Their arguments were pretty pedestrian to begin with, but then they devolved to this:

@Playdoughpoem God is certainly silent when starving children ask for help! Quite odd really! @AnArtDecoDiva @8125052 @TSeekerT @comereason

— Jay Von Grime (@VonGrime) July 30, 2015

God is silent...unless you credit him w meds made via evo science, only avail w $$! @VonGrime @AnArtDecoDiva @8125052 @TSeekerT @comereason

— Sandra Edwards (@Playdoughpoem) July 30, 2015

@Playdoughpoem Perhaps we should give more ££ to the churches. They can pray for cures? 😞 @AnArtDecoDiva @8125052 @TSeekerT @comereason

— Jay Von Grime (@VonGrime) July 30, 2015

So, let's take stock of what just happened here. All parties seem to know that children in areas across the globe are suffering. (The tweets seem to conflate children starving with suffering from certain medical maladies, two separate questions.) Given that they are accusing God of being silent, they seem to believe this situation is wrong and it needs to be rectified.

The question of why does God allow suffering is one with a long history. I've written about why God doesn't suppress all evil, Explained why evil must exist if we are to be loving creatures, and gone into longer answers on the problem of evil here and here. Of course when these atheists point out children suffering as wrong, they are themselves appealing to that which points to God's existence. But that isn't what bothered me.

Why Not Applaud the People Reducing Suffering?

What bothered me was the callous way these suffering people were being pointed to and how those pointing seemed to feel that it is God's fault and responsibility to do something about it. I don't think these commenters are really that concerned with the plight of those suffering. In the conversation they distance themselves from what's really going on, using and confusing the starvation of real human beings as a chip in their self-congratulatory position that God does not exist.

For example, when a Christian countered that Christians are actually on the ground feeding thousands starving in the poorest parts of the world, he received these responses:

@8125052 While MILLIONS starve! Aren't xtrians praying enough? @VonGrime @Playdoughpoem @TSeekerT @comereason

— artdecodiva (@AnArtDecoDiva) July 30, 2015

@AnArtDecoDiva Christians are praying that Lord will send workers... Why is Lord not sending?! @8125052 @vongrime @tseekert @comereason

— Sandra Edwards (@Playdoughpoem) August 3, 2015

Really? Instead of applauding that someone is trying to do the right thing, they turn and criticize God for not doing more? Of course wanting God to come in like some cosmic genie and clean up the mess that human beings have made in allowing their fellow man to suffer is a pretty easy out; it requires no work on the part of these Twitter commenters. Such a response is too slick.

What if the Lord is calling people to help but they're refusing to acknowledge him? He isn't going to force people to do what's right. Even much of the "natural" suffering we see isn't natural at all, but merely the ultimate outcome of immoral people doing immoral things, and it's the evil in men's hearts that allows such suffering to continue.

I really don't know if either Sandra or "ArtDeco" have contributed to alleviating the suffering of these children they so easily parade as proof of God's non-existence. But I do know that it's demonstrable that those who are religiously active don't just pray. They do more, give more, and work more at alleviating suffering than any other group. Arthur C. Brooks writes:

Religious people are 25 percentage points more likely than secularists to donate money (91 percent to 66 percent) and 23 points more likely to volunteer time (67 percent to 44 percent). And, consistent with the findings of other writers, these data show that practicing a religion is more important than the actual religion itself in predicting charitable behavior. For example, among those who attend worship services regularly, 92 percent of Protestants give charitably, compared with 91 percent of Catholics, 91 percent of Jews, and 89 percent from other religions.1

Brooks even sought to eliminate religious-compulsory motivations like giving due to social pressure or giving to the church in order to "have rewards in heaven." He looked at giving to nonreligious charities such as schools or civic groups and still found "religious people are 10 points more likely to give to these causes than secularists (71 percent to 61 percent) and 21 points more likely to volunteer (60 percent to 39 percent)."2

It isn't the theists that are the problem in the plight of suffering children; it's the secularists. Thus, an argument could be made that by trying to convince others there is no God, one is actually increasing the inaction of support for alleviating the suffering of children in the world. As to the charge that a God should do something about it, Brooks' article leads with an apropos quote by the American Puritan John Winthrop:

...When there is no other means whereby our Christian brother may be relieved in his distress, we must help him beyond our ability rather than tempt God in putting him upon help by miraculous or extraordinary meanes. (Emphasis added.)

That's the best response to the problem of suffering. Let's each one of us to roll up our sleeves and get to work reducing it rather than acknowledging it then chastising God for not doing his part.

References

1. Brooks, Arthur C. "Religious Faith and Charitable Giving." Hoover Institution. Leland Stanford Junior University, 1 Oct. 2003. Web. 03 Aug. 2015. http://www.hoover.org/research/religious-faith-and-charitable-giving.
2. Brooks, 2003.