Video is interesting, good questions and objections in the comments as well so I’ve noticed.
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Good, I’m glad you liked it. As I was watching and telling a guy at work about it, we had a good laugh that the first question from the audience was whether he saw anything.
For the skeptic, there is never enough second hand evidence, it’s when they begin to experience the work of the Spirit for themselves and are still skeptical, that…
I have come to really appreciate how the “therefore know for certain” of Acts 2:36 follows eyewitness testimony for the resurrection and a self-evident work of the Spirit.
[How do you know your wife’s prayer is what “brought you back to life”? You’d have to first rule out every other possible explanation. Also, it’s odd that you would take this rare occurrence as evidence for god. However, it’s more common for family members to pray for a dead loved one and nothing happens. Why is it that when prayer obviously doesn’t work it’s because “god works in mysterious ways”. And then whenever there’s a rare correlation between prayer and someone getting better, that’s all of a sudden evidence for god. Come on.]
I feel this comment here does raise some good questions and that it should be adressed, of course i am no good in the theology department but the commentor does seem to have a point about how when prayer “works” we attribute it to God nevermind the doctors and nurses and when it doesn’t work we just get told that it’s just apart of Gods plan etc. Personally i cant think of an answer to this.
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This reads as if you think it’s completely unreasonable to believe God answers prayer.
Does a father give his children presents every day, or a mom accede to a child’s every demand for a toy while shopping. God himself is his own best gift.
With lyrics:
Merv, thank you for the recommendation. I just downloaded it from Bookshare. Looking a bit at Rohr’s Wikipedia page and reception by Doug Groothuis and Erwin Lutzer, I understand what you mean about heresy hunters. After having read Groothuis’s Truth Decay 20ish years ago, his response doesn’t surprise me at all.
Being aware of my own mildly allergic responses to Richard Foster’s and Calvin Miller’s books on spiritual practice, I am interested to read Rohr. At the same time, I consider myself an intellectual1-scavenger, taking from whatever place I land. Just haven’t been here before.
1 I am using that term very loosely, and in the sense of development, rather than state.
Kevin, I approach these kinds of testimonies with similar reservations. There are so many charlatans out there, and even an honest person can be misled by subjective interpretations. A girlfriend of mine has deep, beautiful faith in Jesus and a far closer relationship with him than I do. She often ascribes things to answered specific prayer, that I would see as part of the bigger picture in the life of faith. Jesus told us to pray and that prayers uttered in faith would be answered. How it all works, though, is beyond me.
In 1996 my 16 year old cousin died of brain injuries from a car accident she caused. The psychological destruction that this did to her parents, who are Christians, was/is huge and permanent. I know they and everyone they knew prayed. The answer was devastating.
In 2012 my oldest child (then 10) was diagnosed with a massive brain tumor next to her brain stem. Just from the surgery there was a lot of neurological damage, and her main recovery took about 2 years. We have continued to see improvement, though, even since then. She’s about to finish her sophomore year in college, where she’s focusing on neuroscience. Our church and our families prayed and supported us in innumerable ways. Do I claim some sort of victory here? In light of my experience, what would that say about my cousins’? No. I refuse to interpret.
I have heard more than enough sermons on learning from our suffering and praying in faith, etc. I much prefer Michael Horton’s analysis that we CANNOT know what God’s plan is beyond what is explicitly told to us in Scripture, and that that is enough for now. Job wasn’t told to learn from his pain. He was reminded of God’s all powerful abilities to bring order from chaos, even to enforce order into chaos. Job was told he couldn’t understand God’s purposes and reminded of his powerlessness.
While I’m willing to take God at his word, I’m just not always sure about other people.
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Good questions. It used to be more important to me because I was told that it was supposed to be important.
I have evolved (or been progressively created) from a #1 position to a #4 position.
I agree with you that the resurrection is or should be more central than creation. Creation doesn’t necessarily guarantee Jesus—a lot of religions have creation stories but not Jesus. But I also do think that God’s existence is “essential to the story” and that he is not some kind of epiphenomenon of the universe.
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Welcome to the club.
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That is very well said. Right now I am savoring the final chapters of Keener’s book. It has been a great journey for me. Remembering times when I saw God answer prayer in remarkable ways, and as you say that is not always the case. Keener’s analysis of why this sometimes happens and why it doesn’t was refreshingly sincere, as I most often find him, and biblically informed.
What he said about how God’s work can often be a preparation for trials to come, was insightful, and his historical analysis of how great revivals have preceded global conflicts is new to me. I think I will have to research that a little further.
Yeah, i get that, 1 week before my mom died she had unbelievable confidence and an unshakable faith that there is without a doubt a loving God and that she will be with him in heaven. I remember in the closing of her final days she seemed at peace, after fighting all the pain she seemed ready for it to be over with and content as to where she was going. Granted she became christian long before when she quit drinking and said that God is what changed her for the better. I dont know if it was God or not but either way she changed for the better, she was happier, more kind and more positive, all be it she was still hard headed but that runs in the family. What led to her downfall was cancer that she got from smoking cigarettes since she was 12 years old.
This is the note she left me and my brothers with the night before she died, each one was adressed to use by our names but the message was the same:
I personally dont know if there is a God or not for i don’t know but i am not quick to attribute the unknown to God, i imagine that takes time and careful thinking to even consider it, i just haven’t found an answer yet. I hope i do so i can continue living life here while i still have it, if there is one thing i am grateful for it is that mom got to spend her remaining days with us at home.
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It is difficult losing a parent, no matter the circumstances. With time, I reflect on the good times with my Mom, but still the memory of her death is sharp and painful. I think God holds us in judgement only for what we have been revealed, and pray for peace and healing in your loss.
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I’m so sorry about your mom. It’s hard.
Thank you, though for sharing this. It helps me understand a lot better where your questions are coming from.
I do think it’s wonderful that she was able to write notes to you and your siblings, so you still have this token of her love. She was doing what she could to express it as long as she could.
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I suspect your Mom’s assurance in Jesus is the only reason you are wrestling with the faith today.
Obviously it has been counterfeited and weaponized a 1000 fold, but it sounds like your Mom was the real thing. No one special in the world’s eyes, but beloved by God and she knew it and that meant the world to her.
I was once an atheist, and drug use opened doors where I could no longer believe the world was set by absolute physical laws. The drugs took a heavy toll, and put me in state of psychological turmoil, and that’s when I got to know a real Christian for the first time. He answered some of my questions and gave me a copy of Mere Christianity. More than anything I was drawn to the faith, because there was a message of life, and I felt like the walking dead.
Fast forward, the short answer for why I am a Christian today, it’s because I know perfectly well that I am a sinful person. This is the self-evident work of the Spirit for me in my experience. And Jesus is the only figure that I have found that offered his perfect life in place of mine.
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Yeah, i just wish i could of done more such as ease her pain, it was alarming as to how quickly cancer can take over someones body, hers was agressive small cell cancer. I know i did what i could i just wish i could have done more despite the fact i am no doctor nor have any medical knowledge.
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It’s like a firestorm.
You were there. She wasn’t alone, and she was with people she loved and who loved her. Pain killers couldn’t have done that for her.
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Mark, perhaps this article will be of interest, of use. I am nowhere near done with it, but I found the top-down and bottom-up explanations very helpful. I’m quite sure that those are already well-established concepts for you. In any case there are always excellent citations to follow up on, if you ever run out.
Thank you but honestly they’re not. In skimming the entries I feel a little overwhelmed by the range and extent of explanatory schema. The thought of trying to think my way into all of them seems a bit daunting. I also did a search for panentheism but the entries are much less well articulated. I gather pantheism is basically the notion that everything is God while panentheism is the idea that God is in everything. It isn’t clear how the identity of everything with God or the inclusion of God in everything is supposed to clear anything up. I’m familiar with some subset of ‘everything’ but what difference does it make to say “God” is a synonym for everything or it’s secret ingredient?
This way of looking at it doesn’t do much for me by way of fueling interest. It is the ability of something more to manifest in our direct experience that interests me, how it can it be so close to us and yet also so much more. I don’t find I really care whether or how it can make up everything in the cosmos.
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Right there with you, Mark, but moreso.
I did have a few more hooks to use in these articles than the ones I was working with the last few days (Consciousness, Intentionality, Consciousness and Intentionality, and Phenomenology). [I was rather thrilled that I at least recognized “Searle’s” name, although without the article I wouldn’t have remembered why. I had tried to help a classmate work through her paper on Searle, and I realize I couldn’t understand her paper, because she had not understood the book. That was a grueling class (1992) – Intro to Crit Theory – a mind bender by a different author each week, plus novels, a paper and a presentation. The damage it did to my eyes!] The level of abstraction is part of what makes the reading so slow going for me. Behind every term is another book or library, I haven’t read. The ultimate in conceptual short hand.
In this article, I felt again like the level of abstraction, and the attempt to give such a broad but thorough overview (but I had only read a few pages) were hard to make connections with.
I did find it fascinating that Jonathan Edwards had been accused of pantheism. Again, that statement is a Chinese Box, waiting to be unpacked.
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Norman Geisler, once said with regard to pantheism, it is most difficult to prove you are not the eternal necessary being.