Ronnie W. Rogers, “Taking every thought captive…”

Like many readers of this current best-selling novel, I was given a copy of The Shack by a colleague at work. She said her husband was teaching it in their Sunday School class. While I had not even heard of this book, I’ve since discovered that it is being given high profile displays in our local bookstores, both secular and Christian, and that it may be made into a feature film.

At first, I thought the author was just using literary license and creativity to help the story’s protagonist come to grips with the age-old question, Why does a loving God allow bad things to happen to good people? But the more I read, the more frequently I began to sense that the author was intentionally distorting scriptural truths. And when I did a Google search of “The Shack and Critics,” I discovered numerous online blogs, critiques and reports by people who had interviewed the author, who were confirming my suspicion that we might be dealing with a false teacher. (more…)

More than 200 scientists and other experts on climate change from Australia, Canada, England, France, Hungary, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Sweden, and of course the United States met to discuss and debunk the claims of Global Warming alarmists at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change 

Al Gore, along with scientists whom he says support him, were invited, and the conference even offered to pay Gore’s $200,000 speaking fee, but he declined.

Speaking at the conference, Joseph L. Bast, President of the Heartland Institute said in his opening remarks, “No scientific theory is true because a majority of scientists say it to be true. Scientific theories are only provisionally true until they are falsified by data that can be better explained by different theory. And it is by falsifying current theories that scientific knowledge advances, not by consensus.  The claim that global warming is a ‘crisis’ is itself a theory.”

George Will, in an October Newsweek column commenting on Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize, wrote that if nations impose the reductions in energy use that Al Gore and the folks at RealClimate call for, they will cause “more preventable death and suffering than was caused in the last century by Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot combined.”

Christians have a responsibility to be good stewards of the earth (Genesis 2:15); however, this must be according to Scripture and God’s wisdom rather than man’s fears and theories.

Anthony Daniels, a self-proclaimed atheist and a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who now writes using the pseudonym “Theodore Dalrymple” takes on the “new atheist misrepresenting the essential role of religious faith in establishing Western civilization and its future survival” in an article  “What the New Atheists Don’t See”.

“The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a deleterious effect upon human character and personality. If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.”

It is common for people to view all sin as equally sinful, but that is not correct. It is true that all sin is sin, and any sin is serious enough to send a person to hell; however, not all sin is equally serious or results in the same judgment.

Sin is made more serious by clear declarations of the Scripture, how much knowledge is rejected, and by how many steps the sin is removed from God’s design. The following examples illustrate how each of these make one sin more sinful than another. 

First, regarding direct declarations, God declares that some parts of the law are weightier than others (Matthew 23:23), and therefore violating the weightier commands results in greater sin.

Second, regarding the truth that the more knowledge rejected results in greater judgment Luke reminds us of this correlation (Luke 12:47-48). 

Third, regarding how many steps an act is removed from God’s plan resulting in increasing the sinfulness of sin can be seen in comparing adultery with homosexuality.  Adultery or fornication is a violation of God’s commands because it involves a sexual relationship outside of marriage, which is God’s created context for sexual relations. In like manner homosexuality is also sin because it involves sex out side of marriage, since by definition marriage describes a relationship that can only be established between a man and a woman (Genesis 2:18-25).

However, homosexuality is a greater sin than adultery or fornication because it is not only outside of marriage, but it is also with the wrong partner—a woman with a woman or a man with a man. Scripture only sanctions heterosexual sex within marriage, and always condemns homosexuality since it is always outside of marriage and contrary to God’s divine plan for partners. Here are a few other scriptures that demonstrate that some sins are more serious and therefore deserve stricter punishment: Matthew 11:21-24; Mark 12:38; and James 3:1.

Recently, Richard Carpenter¹ presented a superb paper to The Roundtable in Ideology at Trinity Baptist Church.  His précis, which he derived from the full paper, was read to and discussed with the group over a period of three weeks.

With his permission, I have posted his three précis.  They briefly and superbly elucidate several critical elements of the present debate regarding Evolution, Intelligent Design, and Creationism.

I encourage you to read all three in order to familiarize yourself with the important clarifications Richard makes regarding these key concepts; however, if you desire to read only one, here is the general content of each:

Part I – The Philosophy of Science, Cosmology, and Cosmogony
Part II – The Origin of Life and Species
Part III – Intelligent Design and Public Education

1. Dr. Carpenter holds a Ph. D. in meteorology from the University of Oklahoma and is currently Vice President for Numerical Weather Prediction at Weather Decision Technologies, Inc. [↩]