Rumours of a Better Country

I was back at the Pastors Academy in Finchley on Monday for the reading group. This current book didn't draw the crowds as the book last time did but there were 9 or 10 of us and we enjoyed talking through the book  Rumours of a better country by veteran traveller and Schaefferite March Moyle. we all agreed that the book is rather quirky and a little hard to get into but felt that a willingness to stick with it bore fruit in time. The book looks at the ten commandments ina fresh and interesting way, as an apologetic directed at the interested unbeliever. Mostyn Roberts (no stranger to things Schaefferian) chaired. Next time we are back to Rosaria Butterfield and her book Five lies of our anti-Christian age. We meet next September.

Catalyst Conference 2021

It was brilliant to be at a live conference this last week. Yes, we still had to wear masks and socially distance and there was no bookstall but there were live speakers and coffee and lollipops and people to talk to. Brilliant! I love being with Presbyterians as despite the few differences we pretty much agree and they have some excellent men who can be so helpful. One can feel an outsider a little but I am well used to that in all the circles I inhabit. The Catalyst conference is organised by IPC (International Presbyterian Church not to be confused with EPCUW or any other bunch) and was at their church in Ealing. Ealing is on our doorstop and my wife works in nearby Hanwell so I was able to get a lift in and out with a little walk between. Perfect. It was also a joy to be there with both my father-in-law and one of my sons. Three generations!

The conference was organised so that all three days replicated themselves which has advantages and disadvantages. The overall title was Apolgetics and there was plenty on that. Mostly I loved it but being out of practice I got rather tired. The heatwave added to that. Each day we began with James Torrans from Inverness gave us Bible readings from John 11, Mark 2, etc. He was followed by James Eglinton, seniot lecturer at Edinburgh University. He introduced us to Gisbertiurs Voetius, Herman Bavinck and J H Bavinck in order to explore our subject. The first paper on categorising sin was most interesting but all good and stimulating stuff.

After lunch Dan Strange, until recently at Oak Hill and now moving to the north east, is a good speaker for the graveyard slot and he kept us awake with his extrapolations from. J H Bavinck on magnetic points. Each day ended with wonderful expositions from Romans by Sinclair Ferguson. Good days.

The conference is planned for the same time next year. Meanwhile look out for this year's conference on video. See here.

Videos now available here 

Liar, Lunatic or Lord

I was in a charity shop the other day and I saw a 2014 pocket edition of C S Lewis's 1950 work The Lion the witch and the wardrobe (see here) and bought it to go in my coat pocket. They say that reading good stuff more than once is a good idea. Having read about 50 pages I am struck by how many things I have missed in the past. I was particulalry struck by the way that when the children go to the professor to ask whether they should believe Lucy's story about Narnia we have this.

“Logic!" said the Professor half to himself. "Why don't they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is
telling the truth. You know she doesn't tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”

This is classic Lewisian apologetics using the trilemma, if you know what you are looking at. In his book C S Lewis - The work of Christ revealed P H Brazier has a diagram based on the text

The whole section before all the children enter Narnia is interesting on the matter of witness, as well as other matters.

God's not dead 2

This new release from Pure Flix directed by Harold Cronk is a very watchable court room drama with high production values and excellent acting. With great skill a number of themes have been woven together in order to provide what is both an enjoyable movie and a thought provoking piece of Christian apologetics.

Reflecting on more than twenty cases against Christians that have gone through the American court system in recent years, it presents us with the fictional case of a state school teacher (Melissa Joan Hart) who runs into trouble when she talks about Jesus in the classroom. The court room provides the opportunity to have the apologists Lee Strobel and former homicide detective J Warner Wallace take the stand as expert witnesses. We also have brief cameos from Gary Habermas and Rice Brooks on a show with Senator Mike Huckabee.

On the matter of cameos and similar elements, older viewers will no doubt appreciate the role played by Pat Boone, now 82 years old, and may be younger viewers will appreciate the presence of rock band Newsboys who perform the song My God's not dead.

As a product of the Arminian decisionistic-tending side of evangelicalism, thoroughly committed to evidentialist apologetics, the film makes as strong a case for Christ as one can imagine.

As for it making a dent in the world it is aimed at, Rotten Tomatoes described it, not entirely unfairly, as “Every bit the proselytizing lecture promised by its title, God's Not Dead 2 preaches ham-fistedly to its paranoid conservative choir” while Bill Zwecker of the Chicago Sun-Times felt that while the underlying issues presented in the film are relevant in today's world, it lacks subtlety and “comes off as a two-hour, jazzed-up movie version of a sermon.”

As for the idea that Christians are not really under pressure in the public square, that is certainly not the case. It may be that this film will do most good in raising awareness among professing Christians of such issues.
This article or something similar is in the current edition of Evangelical Times

Dr Williams @ LTS

Yesterday I joined around 25 others at the LTS to hear Dr P J Williams, warden of Tyndale House, Cambridge, exploring the reliability of the Old Testament. It was good to hear someone with evident scholarly gifts (an a young earth creationist no less) asserting the reliability of what we who believe know is a thoroughly reliable book but that is constantly under attack for one reason or another. We spoke briefly and he seemed to think he had met me. I later realised he must have grown up in Hambleton Evangelical Church in Carlton Minniot, Yorkshire, where we have one or two connections. I would tell you more but the powers that be were keen not to give the material given exposure on the Internet. Perhaps a book is in the offing. It is a pity that more were not present. They can't all be in Bala or getting ready for EMA next week. The LTS is to be commended for putting on these Monday seminars. Christopher Ash next, I think, in the Autumn and a conference before that.

Huxley's motives

I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently I assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption…. We don’t know because we don’t want to know. ... For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever
Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, p. 270, 273, 1946, cited in Can Man Live Without God by Ravi Zacharias

No neutral ground

I was in the car with Rhodri on Sunday evening and we were listening to Bob Dylan's Precious Angel. The lyrics of the first part seem to fit well with some of the things we are looking at here in the classes on apologetics.

Precious angel, under the sun,
How was I to know you'd be the one
To show me I was blinded, to show me I was gone
How weak was the foundation I was standing upon?

Now there's spiritual warfare and flesh and blood breaking down.
Ya either got faith or ya got unbelief and there ain't no neutral ground.
The enemy is subtle, how be it we are so deceived
When the truth's in our hearts and we still don't believe?

Shine your light, shine your light on me
Shine your light, shine your light on me
Shine your light, shine your light on me
Ya know I just couldn't make it by myself.
I'm a little too blind to see.

My so-called friends have fallen under a spell.
They look me squarely in the eye and they say, "All is well."
Can they imagine the darkness that will fall from on high
When men will beg God to kill them and they won't be able to die?

The undercover revolution

This cleverly titled little paperback from Iain Murray is an informative and apologetic piece in the Schaeffer mould in two parts.

The first and main part is fascinating. It looks, after a brief introduction, at Robert Louis Stevenson, then Thomas Hardy and then, more briefly, at more obvious and well known examples of anti-Christian writing in Shaw, Wells and Bertrand Russell. The second brief section is called 'Is Christianity fiction?' and is a more pedestrian attempt to promote the gospel. When a Christian writes about such figures one comes away with quite a different impression to that engendered by a humanist. A number of neglected or downplayed matters are highlighted and certain contradictions are exposed here.

The book is ony 95 pages and can easily be read in one or two sittings. Christians will find it interesting and it may be appropriate for certain unbelievers.