When I was in England in 2004, the number of Muslims attending a mosque surpassed the number of Brits attending the State Church of England. I asked a friend of mine, who has served for a number of years planting churches in London, if this meant that they now would request parity? To which he responded no, they are demanding preference.
England is now clamoring to make several concessions to Islam, like changing school curriculum to remove facts that are offensive to Islam, which includes how Christianity really influenced the western world.
Europe seems to have an insatiable appetite for ridding itself of every Christian vestige in order to accommodate secularism and Islam. Tragically, they have forgotten that every secular country desired the demise of a free England, e.g. Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, and that Islam is not a religion that accommodates, but one that must, by Koranic mandate, dominate. Islam brings not just religion, but a religion that is inextricably tied to an Islamic state, which, when powerful enough, will displace the present state of affairs.
We found that the Brits we talked with outside of London were very concerned and even outraged at the Islamization of their beloved homeland.
While there I read a book by a British Historian Michael Burleigh, entitled “Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror.” What caused me to buy the book was a statement that I saw while perusing it in the store. Burleigh said, “The Americans are wrong”, and he meant that Americans were wrong to think that Europeans were going to sit idly by while Islam takes over their countries.
He did indeed write a compelling book, and I for one hope he is right, but the last five years have not been encouraging.
David Aikman, initially educated at Oxford, completed a Ph.D. in Russian and Chinese history at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist and a foreign policy consultant based in the Washington, D.C. area. For a time he was the TIME magazine Beijing bureau chief.
In his book, Jesus in Beijing, Aikman recounts the words of an unnamed scholar from one of China’s premier research institutes, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The scholar was speaking to a group of 18 American tourists in Beijing in 2002, and here is what he said:
“One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world,” he said. “We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt.” 1
- David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003), 5-6. [↩]
“On Feb. 24, 1895, The New York Times warned of the next Ice Age, and in 1923, the Chicago Tribune warned that ice would soon make Canada uninhabitable. But by 1933, the same papers were warning of the greatest rise in temperatures since 1776. Reports two decades later also spoke of a spike in global temperatures. Even TIME magazine reported on global warming in 1951, just two decades before [an] article on a new Ice Age.”1
The June 1974 issue of TIME Magazine quoted scientists warning of a new Ice Age. Newsweek, one year later, claimed that the evidence for such catastrophic predictions was massive. The New York Times, in 1975, noted that “a major cooling is widely considered to be inevitable.”
“The global average temperature dropped from its seasonal norm in recent months, and the Northern Hemisphere has had unusually extensive snow,” The Times report claimed. “But many experts have said those developments are almost assuredly a short-term wiggle on the way to more warming and melting from the influence of long-lived greenhouse gases produced mainly by burning fossil fuels and forests.”
“The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a report March 13 that confirmed global temperatures were at their coolest levels since 2001. Pacific storms dumped record snowfalls in the American West, in the Northeast and in Canada. China experienced its harshest winter in a century. Snow cover in Siberia and Mongolia is greater than at any time since the mid-1960s, and even Iraq saw snow this year for the first time in recent memory.”
“One of the most telling signs invalidating the predictions of catastrophic global warming is the expansion of Arctic sea ice. After a supposed record thaw, the ice has returned. A report from the Canadian Ice Service, which has kept records on sea ice since 1972, noted above-average coverage of the Arctic. Gilles Langis, a forecaster with the Ice Service, said the ice also is 10 to 20 cm thicker in most places. The report from the Ice Service was corroborated by the Denmark Meteorological Institute, which said the sea ice between Greenland and Canada was at its most expansive in 15 years.”
“The nice thing about sea ice is that there is no analysis needed,” Stan Goldenberg, a meteorologist with NOAA’s hurricane research division, told Baptist Press in an interview. “This is raw data. You can look at the levels and see that it is colder.”
Now, I think climate change is an interesting topic and we as Christians should be informed and live lives that demonstrate good stewardship of what God has entrusted us with. However, unless your profession is related to climate change in some way, your focus should be on issues where there is no doubt that evil stampedes, e.g. divorce, child abuse, abortion, drug and alcohol abuse, secularizing of the public square, etc., lest, in two or three decades, after having trampled over a morally decaying culture in order to stop man-made global warming, one finds himself with a wasted life and frostbite.
- see http://www.bpnews.net/BPnews.asp?ID=27656 for entire article from which this information was gleaned [↩]
Christians oftentimes seem frightened by prayer. They are either afraid that praying really does not work, that they are doing it wrong, or that they may get what is best for them rather than what they want at that moment.
Once the mercurial Mary Queen of Scots once fretted, “I fear the prayers of John Knox more than an army of 20,000 men.”
Maybe the fecundity of our prayer life is best determined when it causes fear!
Like it or not, the time in which we live demands that we as Christians be able to give some reasons for our belief in the truthfulness of Christianity and the Scripture. For example, Christians must be able to answer questions like are the disciples reliable resources? Are miracles possible? How can we test the reliability of ancient documents? Was Jesus merely a good man or teacher? Is there any evidence for believing in the resurrection?
Evidence for the trustworthiness of the Scripture and the claims of Christ and the Apostles are essential for speaking to our culture.
Richard Carpenter presented a superb paper in The Roundtable in Ideology entitled “The Case for Christ.” It is a succinct treasury of evidence for the trustworthiness of the claims of the Scripture and Christ. If you want to be equipped to answer some of the toughest questions concerning your Christian faith, then read this.
The federal government has a legitimate role of protecting its citizens from threats that seek their destruction, but acting beyond that, it becomes a destructive force.
President Ronald Reagan is remembered for saying “Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Now, what did he mean? Well, he was not against government—an anarchist—which is self-evident since he was the leader of the federal government.
He was a legitimist and therefore recognized the need for limited federal government. Moreover, like the founders, he well understood the potential for the servant of the people to become the master of the people. Therefore, his epigrammatic declaration meant that a burgeoning government is the problem since it ultimately tyrannizes faith, religious freedom, charity, brotherly love, generosity, personal responsibility, family, freedom of choice, ad infinitum.
The fear of a burgeoning federal government resulted in the adoption of the Bill of Rights, which is solely designed to protect the citizens from the intrusion of the federal government in areas not specifically authorized. The tenth amendment speaks specifically to this in no uncertain terms. It says “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Our Founding Fathers included this constitutional guarantee because they knew only too well that a small, limited government works best, and that unless government is specifically limited in size and scope of authority, its insatiable appetite will inevitably produce a tyrannical behemoth.
President Barack Obama’s massive spending and belief that a burgeoning government is the solution is a radical departure not only from Reagan, but our Founder Fathers. Although some of his measures may be rescinded by the next administration, if history is any indicator, many will remain unchanged, thereby forever limiting citizens’ freedoms to what the federal government deems best. When the first answer to problems is government, they mean not best for free citizens created in the image of God, but rather best for perpetuating a burgeoning federal government to provide for children of the state.
The Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
God was at the center of the founding of the United States, and this worldview led to an emphasis upon personal responsibility for one’s actions as a steward of God’s blessings.
However, as the U.S. becomes increasingly secularized, the federal government begins to replace God, and God given institutions like the church and family, as well as community and personal responsibility, are overshadowed by an emphasis upon an ever expanding catalog of rights. A symphony of expressions like blessing, thankfulness, and unworthiness, which expressed gratefulness to God, is displaced by a cacophony of ungrateful humans clamoring about their rights to security and success in every area of life, e.g. education, retirement, healthcare, and a certain standard of living.
Under God, everything is a blessing, but when government replaces God, everything becomes an entitlement with no rational end in sight. For why should government stop with guaranteeing education, retirement, or healthcare? What about transportation, housing, a job, ad infinitum?
Men created in the image of God may have a right to the “Pursuit of Happiness,” but without God, men clamor for happiness to be guaranteed by the government since they are powerless victims of uncontrollable Darwinian forces.
Miss California, Carrie Prejean, 21, competed in the Miss USA pageant, and may have very well lost when she told a nationwide TV audience that she believed marriage should be between a man and a woman. The question was asked by Perez Hilton, who is homosexual, and as one of 12 judges was randomly picked to ask the question.
With regard to the whole situation she told NBC’s “Today” show, “It’s not about being politically correct. For me, it was being biblically correct.” She added, regarding her missed opportunity to win the crown, “It wasn’t what God wanted for my life that night.”
She told Fox News, “By having to answer that question in front of a national audience, God was testing my character and faith…I’m glad I stayed true to myself.”
May pastors and Christians everywhere be so bold to speak the truth of God in such a loving way. She may have forfeited the Miss USA crown, but I see upon her head an eternal crown of faithfulness.
Prejean is a student at San Diego Christian College in El Cajon, just outside San Diego, and a volunteer at Shadow Mountain Community Church’s International Ministry Center, where she helps refugees learn English, the Christian Examiner reported. Shadow Mountain is a Southern Baptist church where popular TV and radio minister David Jeremiah is pastor. The Examiner reported Prejean is studying to become an elementary school special education teacher.
The emergent church proclaims that they are seeking to reach this generation of postmoderns. While I applaud that goal, I am quite concerned with the message of most of the emergent church. I mention four areas that I have noticed being promoted by emergent leaders. Read the rest of this entry »
Billy Wolf has provided me with a chart that succinctly summarizes some of the fundamental differences between a biblical view of scriptural doctrines and the teaching of the postmodern emergent church. Although the emergent church leaders may be good writers, winsome, and quite capable of persuading young men and women who have little knowledge of the Scripture, they are actually communicating some of the same distortions that have been taught by liberalism or neo-orthodoxy in the past, albeit with a little different twist.
These are not stylistic differences or ancillary doctrines; they are distorting the essential truths of the Scripture. They have in many cases become too much like the ones to whom they are seeking to be relevant. Thus, if they reach these postmoderns, many remain lost because too much truth was sacrificed in the quest for relevance.