Category Archives: Christianity

Jeremiah 17:9 applies even to Ravi Zacharias

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There’s not much I have to say about this. Other than, “it’s best not to have heroes.”

Read it all here:

Ravi Zacharias International Ministries needs to rebuild trust, rebrand and consider reparations for victims of the evangelist and apologist it is named after. A series of allegations about Zacharias has only grown since his death this year, involving his interactions with women employees at a spa company he invested in. Earlier cases involved sexting, with new information coming at the time of his death, and exaggerated credentials.

So writes Dr. Max Baker-Hytch, a senior tutor with RZIM’s OCCA The Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics and a lecturer at Wycliffe Hall – a private hall of the University of Oxford – in a five-page letter in which he outlines a poor response to each of these scandals. The letter, which was first reported by blogger/journalist Julie Roys, details that:

RZIM had a slow response to the credential scandal which he investigated internally. Warren Throckmorton, Psychologist, Professor and blogger uncovered this issue of the inappropriate use of the title Doctor and claims to have lectured at Oxford University According to Baker-Hytch RZIM exhibited “slowness and reluctance to set the public record straight, which finally happened only after a great amount of external pressure was brought to bear on the issue.” He adds the the RZIM foot dragging on this issue was “a source of embarrassment for me as an academic.”.

On the sexting scandal, according to Roys, Baker-Hytch asserts that “RZIM President Michael Ramsden stated in a December 4, 2017, all-staff update that ‘no money had changed hands between Ravi and the Thompsons [the couple involved].’”

“But in September 2020, Baker-Hytch says he learned that Zacharias paid the Thompsons $250,000 as part of the 2017 settlement of the apologist’s lawsuit against the couple.” He recounts other gaps in the RZIM narratives of the issue.

Strike three for Baker-Hytch was the emergence of the ‘spa story’. Steve Baughman, a long time investigator of Zacharias, gave the story to Christianity Today, which did an intensive investigation showing sexual misconduct by Zacharias at the spa. (Eternity gave more details in our earlier story.) Baker-Hytch says that comments by RZIM leaders undermined the credibility of the witnesses including an allegation they had been coached.

The letter inches a plea for RZIM to offer a wholehearted apology to Zacharias’ spa victims should their testimony be confirmed. He calls for  “meaningful reparations” to these women. And says that RZIM should set up a support group that any further victims could come forward to.

R.I.P. J. I. Packer

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James Innell Packer died on Friday, July 17, at age 93.

I first met J. I. Packer in the late 1970’s. He had come to speak at a church local to me, and I went to hear what he had say. I was a new Christian and had just read Knowing God so I joined the queue to meet him and have him sign my book.

The person in front of me made the silly mistake of disagreeing with something Packer had said, so I was treated to the pleasure of a five-minute demolishing of the person’s point. When my turn came, I decided not to disagree with anything. But I had questions. Lots of questions.

Happily for me (not necessarily for Packer), I was seated next to him at lunch so I plied him with my questions. The two answers that stayed with me were to: “why should I stick with the Anglican Church since it is gurgling its way down the toilet?” and “what exactly is the Bible?” (I was new to all this, remember).

The first answer was along the lines of, yes, the Anglican Communion may be on its way to ruin but what can you do personally to contribute to your parish to try and make it better. The second was: The Bible is God’s propositional revelation to man. Both answers appealed to me at the time – and still do. Funnily enough, 30 years later when I met him at an ANiC synod and reminded him of the second answer, he looked at me and said: “hmm, I’m not sure I would put it quite like that now”.

A great honour to have met him and a great loss for the church.

There is a very good article about J. I. Packer in Christianity Today. Read it all here:

James Innell Packer, better known to many as J. I. Packer, was one of the most famous and influential evangelical leaders of our time. He died Friday, July 17, at age 93.
I. Packer was born in a village outside of Gloucester, England, on July 22, 1926. He came from humble stock, being born into a family that he called lower middle class. The religious climate at home and church was that of nominal Anglicanism rather than evangelical belief in Christ as Savior (something that Packer was not taught in his home church).

Packer’s life-changing childhood experience came at the age of seven when he was chased out of the schoolyard by a bully onto the busy London Road in Gloucester, where he was struck by a bread van and sustained a serious head injury. He carried a visible dent in the side of his head for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, Packer was uncomplaining and accepting of what providence brought into his life from childhood on.

Much more important than Packer’s accident was his conversion to Christ, which happened within two weeks of his matriculation as an undergraduate at Oxford University. Packer committed his life to Christ on October 22, 1944, while attending an evangelistic service sponsored by the campus InterVarsity chapter.

Although Packer was a serious student pursuing a classics degree, the heartbeat of his life at Oxford was spiritual. It was at Oxford that Packer first heard lectures from C. S. Lewis, and though they were never personally acquainted, Lewis would exert a powerful influence on Packer’s life and work. When Packer left Oxford with his doctorate on Richard Baxter in 1952, he did not immediately begin his academic career but spent a three-year term as a parish minister in suburban Birmingham.

To be, or to self define, that is the question

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In the continuing assault on objective reality, just as gender is now determined by feelings rather than chromosomes, race is subject to self-declaration rather than ancestry.

Such subjective relativism has even infected otherwise sensible evangelicals who appear to think it is more significant for a bishop to self-define as an evangelical than just be one.

At one end of the spectrum, some will point to the tremendous opportunities for evangelicals: the resources being released for church planting, the numbers of Bishops who self-define as evangelical, new initiatives such as ‘Thy Kingdom Come’, the historic advantages of the parish system and the theologically orthodox formularies.

This is the fruition of Sartre’s contention that since – supposedly – God does not exist, our existence precedes our essence. In other words, we were not in the mind of God before we came to be, so we have no predetermined essential nature other than that which we create subjectively for ourselves. What an odd malady to infest the church.

The folly of being spiritual but not religious

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The author of this article thinks that, contrary to contemporary prejudices, being “spiritual but not religious” “can become a self-centered complacency divorced from the wisdom of a community.” I agree; people who are SBNR, as the acronym has it, can easily fall into the trap of believing any mumbo-jumbo as long as it makes them feel good.

What I don’t agree with is the conclusion the author draws:

If you’re an atheist, I can heartily recommend involvement in religion. It offers a sense of belonging and it offers tradition, which can be reassuring and comforting. It offers discipline, teaching us that there is something outside ourselves to which we should bend our personal will. If we do it right, religion helps us lead better lives, with a commitment to justice and social action. Sociological research shows that involvement in organised religion is good for our health and well being.

None of these reasons is a particularly good one for becoming an adherent of a religion. Only one reason is needed and only one reason is good enough to become a Christian: it has to be true. Nothing else will do.

The soul as quantum information within microtubules

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An interesting new theory on what constitutes the soul.

Read it all here:

A near-death experience happens when quantum substances which form the soul leave the nervous system and enter the universe at large, according to a remarkable theory proposed by two eminent scientists.

According to this idea, consciousness is a program for a quantum computer in the brain which can persist in the universe even after death, explaining the perceptions of those who have near-death experiences.

Dr Stuart Hameroff, Professor Emeritus at the Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology and the Director of the Centre of Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona, has advanced the quasi-religious theory.

It is based on a quantum theory of consciousness he and British physicist Sir Roger Penrose have developed which holds that the essence of our soul is contained inside structures called microtubules within brain cells.

They have argued that our experience of consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in these microtubules, a theory which they dubbed orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR).

Thus it is held that our souls are more than the interaction of neurons in the brain. They are in fact constructed from the very fabric of the universe – and may have existed since the beginning of time.

The ideas of Roger Penrose are not easily trifled with: he is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Oxford, as well as Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, and he wrote The Emperor’s New Mind, a book which effectively dismissed the notion that a computer will ever be “intelligent” in any useful sense of the word.

Nevertheless, from a Christian perspective, while he regards mind or soul as more than mere mechanical brain functions – and, interestingly, consistent with Alvin Plantinga’s modal argument for dualism – his theory still won’t quite do.

According to the creation account in Genesis, man was made in the image of God. Man’s spirit, soul and mind are created by God and, just as he exists independently from the material universe, I would contend, also have their essential being outside of our material universe – even the material universe represented by the quantum gravity effects of microtubules.

According to Penrose, if the universe were to cease existing, all the souls that had dissipated to “the universe at large” would also cease to be, a limiting theory quite inconsistent with the Biblical notion of man dwelling in eternity with God.

Whatever you do, don’t offend non-Christians

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Offending Christians has become a national sport while offending non-Christians has become illegal.

What about equality? Why not offend everyone?

From here:

Police have threatened a Christian cafe owner with arrest –for displaying passages from the Bible on a TV screen.

[…..]

Lancashire Police said they had received a complaint on Saturday afternoon from a female customer who was ‘deeply offended’ by the words she had seen on the screen.

And here:

The BBC has been accused of ‘absurd political correctness’ after dropping the terms BC and AD in case they offend non-Christians.

 

 

Christian counsellors not allowed to pray for those they counsel

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From here:

A Christian organisation has been ditched by a national charity for offering to pray for people with debt problems.

Christians Against Poverty (CAP) has been forced to leave AdviceUK, an umbrella group representing the interests of thousands of advice workers, after it was judged that praying was ‘incompatible’ with membership.

[…..]

Yesterday, Steve Johnson, chief executive of AdviceUK, described the offer of prayer by CAP as an ‘emotional fee’. Asked to explain what he meant, Mr Johnson replied that CAP was effectively expecting clients to ‘pay’ for their advice by agreeing to pray with the counsellors. ‘Advisers must not offer or impose their values,’ he added.

How is a debt counsellor supposed to counsel without imposing at least some  values?

Counsellors wouldn’t be debt counsellors unless they thought being debt free is better than being debt ridden. This is a “value”; if the counsellors give advice on reducing debt they are imposing a value. Going by the rules of AdviceUK, all debt counsellors should be disqualified as counsellors unless they are also willing to counsel people to increase their debt. Absurd? Of course it is, but so is the ban on prayer.

AdviceUK is imposing its values on who can counsel and who can’t: one of the values is anti-Christian bigotry.

Another reason to like Harry Potter: he upsets atheists

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From here:

This month, the final Harry Potter film had the most successful opening weekend of any movie ever. Among the fans who lined up for the opening midnight showing were Christians, many of whom see striking similarities between the story of Jesus — with its sacrificial death, burial and resurrection — and the story of Harry Potter.

But at least one atheist has also noticed these similarities, and he’s written a book about it. In the newly-released (and blasphemously-titled) Jesus Potter Harry Christ, Derek Murphy makes the case that J. K. Rowling — the author of the Harry Potter series — achieved her success by tapping into some of the deepest and most ancient longings of the human heart. These same longings, Murphy argues, compelled first-century pagans to construct what he calls “the Jesus myth.”

Surprising: Jesus Potter, Harry Christ but no Jesus Murphy.

As Chuck Colson notes, both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien recognised that the truth of Jesus’ atoning sacrifice on the cross and subsequent resurrection is so powerful that it permeates the entire universe and ends up finding expression in unexpected places – like Harry Potter:

Well, Murphy is certainly right in recognizing a common thread through pagan religious beliefs. As C. S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity, the heathen religions are full of “…those queer stories…about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men.”

But what Murphy misses — and Lewis got — is the fact that the human longings for sacrifice, resurrection and redemption are stamped on our hearts for a reason: They point us straight to the God who stepped into history to fulfill them!

In a letter to a friend, Lewis recounts a conversation he had with J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings — and a close colleague of Lewis.

“The story of Christ,” said Tolkien, “is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened…The Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things.’”