Stand to Reason Blog

Serving Arab Christians in Egypt

I spent half of this past July working in and around Cairo, Egypt. With the exception of a few days of rest and sightseeing (The Great Pyramid is truly “great”), my task was to equip Egyptian Christians in theology and apologetics.

While in Cairo, I was able to rekindle friendships with many Egyptians I met last year while working in Beirut, Lebanon. I also gained insight into the unique challenges our brothers and sisters face in the Middle East.

Egypt recently elected a new President, Mohammed Moursi, after their revolution in 2011. But because he’s backed by the devout Islamic group, the Muslim Brotherhood, many Egyptian believers are bracing for harsher treatment of Christians.

In addition to the political problems, Egyptian believers face challenges commonly found in the United States like relativism, homosexuality, abortion, skepticism about God, and the problem of evil. One of the reasons I was invited to Cairo was to address these concerns.

Of the two weeks I was there, ten days were spent teaching. Some days I taught five sessions. I was extremely busy. But it was a privilege to serve Arab Christians in a country with as rich a history and culture as Egypt.

I want to highlight three events:

1. High school camp: I spoke three days at a camp for high school students and young adults in the outskirts of Cairo. According to church leaders, the revolution in Egypt and destabilization of the country has shaken many Christians. Young believers are questioning God and have grown skeptical of their faith. I was invited to address their questions through open forum discussions and formal lectures on evolution, intelligent design, the trustworthiness of the Bible, the problem of evil, tactics in defending the faith, and biblical interpretation.


2. Homosexuality conference: Although the topic of homosexuality is taboo, homosexual behavior is still prevalent in Egypt. Egyptian church leaders have routinely requested training on the topic. That led Focus on the Family’s Middle East Division to invite me to speak at a one-day conference. Ninety church and youth leaders from the Coptic Orthodox Church, as well as various protestant denominations, were present. Even though homosexuality presents similar challenges both in America and Egypt, the Arab culture presents an additional cause of its expression. Many church leaders I spoke to explained that gender segregation in Egypt leads men to sexually experiment with other males. Some leaders who recently came from Saudi Arabia said homosexual acts are even more prevalent in that country because gender segregation rules are stricter there.


3. Christian Mind Institute: The last four days of my time in Egypt were spent training future church leaders. These college graduates and young adults were enrolled in a 40-day intensive summer institute that’s spent at two locations: Egypt and Lebanon. During the institute, they attend lectures in politics, spiritual formation, theology, and apologetics, and are expected to read selected parts of 18 books. My contribution included training on intelligent design, abortion, homosexuality, witnessing to Muslims, the nature of truth, relativism, and the notions of tolerance and intolerance.

The two weeks in Egypt were strategically significant for two reasons. First, I was able to reconnect and encourage the Egyptian believers I met last year in Lebanon. Second, this was highly leveraged training. I was able to train pastors, priests, and church leaders who will be able to take these principles back to their congregations.

I've assembled a short (less than two minutes) video showing some of the people I spoke to and the sights I saw.

  

Reformation - Good News

Imagine the burden of the guilt from your sin you felt before you were saved, when you realized the depth of your fallenness, unworthiness, and broken relationship with God, your Father.  Imagine the overwhelming realization that you were guilty and you could never please God by your own efforts. That is the burden Martin Luther and many others lived under with no hope.  No Gospel - bad news. 

Then Luther, as a few had before him - John Hus and John Wycliffe, stumbled upon God's Word and the good news that had not been preached to them:  Reconciliation with God was possible through Jesus.  Forgiveness.  A relationship with God.  Gospel - good news.

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8

It's hard to imagine living with the burden of sin and never hearing the Gospel.  That is the significance  of the Reformation that was finally sparked on this day in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenburg hoping to initiate a discussion to reform the church.  And it's the Gospel, the good news, that is the legacy of the Reformation that is our blessing each and every day, to live under the Gospel, the good news.

Here's an excellent description of the significance of the Reformation from Here We Stand by Hermann Sasse (pp. 65-71):

It is not, therefore, the return to the Scriptures in itself which makes the Reformation of the sixteenth century one of the great and unique events of church history. The nature of the Reformation must be sought, rather, in the particular kind of return to the Bible….How often has the church been reformed ‘according to God’s Word’!...[T]he…Reformation, in its essential nature, is nothing else than a rediscovery of the gospel….
 
The rediscovery of the Scriptural truth concerning the justification of the sinner by grace alone, through faith alone, is nothing less than the rediscovery of the Gospel. For, if this truth is forgotten, the Gospel must be interpreted as a system of morals or as a theory of religious metaphysics. Consequently, this discovery constitutes the reformation of the church. It revealed once again that truth by which alone the church lives.
 
For the church does not live by morals, by the knowledge and observance of God’s law. Nor does it live by religion, by lofty experiences of the divine and an awareness of the mysteries of God. It lives solely by the forgiveness of sins. Hence reformation does not consist, as the late Middle Ages believed, and has even been believed in wide circles of the Protestant world, of an ethico-religious correction, of a moral quickening and a spiritual deepening throughout the church. It consists, rather, according to its own peculiar nature, of the revival of the preaching of the Gospel of the forgiveness of sins for Christ’s sake….
 
The [Reformation] understanding of the Scriptures, we say, came as a result of this rediscovery of the Gospel. At all events, it has been the conviction of the [Reformation] that the sola scriptura is conditioned by the sola fide, that a real return to the Scriptures was made possible only by a new understanding of the Gospel. It is in this sense that the Apology to the Augsburg Confession speaks of Justification as “the chief topic of Christian doctrine…which is of especial service for the clear, correct understanding of the entire Holy Scriptures, and alone shows the way to the unspeakable treasure and right knowledge of Christ, and alone opens the door to the entire Bible." This view alone guards against the false, legalistic conception of the Bible as a law-book ….[T]he Reformation was a renovation of the church brought about by the rediscovery and renewed proclamation of the pure doctrine of the Gospel of the forgiveness of sins.

And, thank God, our renovation as well.

Living Biblically

Rachel Held Evans has written a book titled A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband “Master,” and she seems to be making the same mistakes as a similar book: The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (which I discussed here).

Evans “set out to follow all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible for a year to show that no woman, no matter how devout, is actually practicing biblical womanhood all the way.” But in an excellent review of Evans’s book, Kathy Keller explains where Evans’s hermeneutics went wrong:

The best way to accomplish both of your goals would have been to attempt to live by all the commandments the Bible genuinely addresses to Christian women, while discussing the rules of responsible interpretation along the way. I would have been glad to read a book like that, whether I agreed with its conclusions or not. However, that is not the book you wrote. Instead, you began your project by ignoring (actually, by pretending you did not know about) the most basic rules of hermeneutics and biblical interpretation that have been agreed upon for centuries.

Perhaps the most basic rule—agreed upon by all branches of Christianity—is that Jesus’ coming made the Old Testament sacrificial system and ceremonial laws obsolete. Because Jesus taught that “all foods are clean” (Mark 7:19), and God told Peter not to call impure the things God has made pure (Acts 11:9), and because the entire books of Galatians and Hebrews explain this change at length, all Christians have known that observing the “clean laws” of the Old Testament is no longer incumbent on them.

Jesus called himself the final temple (John 2:21) and offered himself as the final sacrifice, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). This is why no Christian anywhere has offered sacrifices since the crucifixion, nor observed the rules of temple worship (cf. Galatians and Hebrews). This most fundamental rule of interpretation is based on the fact that the Bible is the story of God’s salvation coming into the world, climaxing in Jesus, and therefore we can’t read the first part of the Bible as if Jesus never came in the last part.

That last line is exactly right, and it’s the most important point. It’s as if Evans has no idea what the Bible is actually about—no concept of the big picture of how all the parts fit together and why. And without this understanding, there are bound to be abuses of the text. (Read the full review here.)

I’ve noticed that questions about the relationship of Christians to the Old Testament Law have increased quite a bit lately. I suspect this has something to do with the rising pressure to accept same-sex marriage, which is often accompanied by the charge that Christians are picking and choosing Old Testament laws to follow. My theory is that Christians are asking themselves for the first time, “Hey, why aren’t we following all the Old Testament laws?” As a result, I’ve had questions from numerous Christians who are concerned they aren’t acting in a way that pleases God.

It’s crucial that we think through the issue of the Old Testament Law as Christians. In fact, this issue stirred up incredible passion on the part of Paul (see Galatians especially) and dominated much of his writing. If you’re unsure about our relationship to the Law, you could start with the review and this brief article by Arnold Fruchtenbaum: “The Law of Moses and the Law of Christ” (whose view is slightly different from Keller’s). Then just take up Galatians, then Hebrews, then move on to the rest of Paul’s letters. Read the same book over and over several times in a row, and follow the arguments carefully.

This issue is too central to the gospel and the Christian life to not look into it carefully. The freedom of the gospel and the beauty of God’s moral law are intended to bring us joy. If you’re suffering anxiety about your standing before God, I urge you to set aside the time you need to discover what God has said.

[B]efore faith came, we were kept in custody under the law, being shut up to the faith which was later to be revealed. Therefore the Law has become our tutor to lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor. For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3).

It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery…. You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace (Galatians 5).

But whatever things [in my adherence to the Law] were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ, and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings (Philippians 3).

Challenge: Does God Have Free Will?

Two weeks ago, we introduced a new feature to the blog: the biweekly challenge. Here's how it works: We challenge you with an objection to Christianity, you give your best response in the comment section, and then on Thursday, Brett or Alan will post a video response so you can see how you did. It's a chance for you to practice putting your knowledge and tactics to work on objections you could run into while talking to your family and friends.

Ready for this week's challenge? Here's a question we received from a reader:

If morality is in God's nature, then He is omnibenevolent, right? Does that mean that God cannot choose evil? So, if God cannot choose to do evil, does that mean He doesn't have free will?

What do you think? How would you respond to a friend who asked you this? What kind of questions would you ask him? What would he need to clarify? Leave your response, then look for Brett's answer on Thursday. People from different theological traditions will probably respond to this differently, so this should be interesting.

Convince Someone about God's Perfection without the Bible? (Video)

What's the best way to convince somebody that God is perfect in every way if they believe in God but not in the Bible?

Links Mentioned on the Show

The following are links that were either mentioned on this week's show or inspired by it, as posted live on the @STRtweets Twitter feed:

• An Interview with Daniel B. Wallace on the New Testament Manuscripts by Justin Taylor

• The Rap on the Rapture by Greg Koukl

• The Scourge of Group Emails - video of radio commentary by Greg

• Josephus and Jesus by Paul L. Maier

Listen to today's show or download any archived show for free.

Race, Sex, and Marriage

You may have already seen Rev. Dr. Phil Snider’s two-minute speech to the Springfield City Council in support of adding “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the categories of protected people in the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance.

Snider began by giving religious arguments against the ordinance. Then, in a surprising twist, he revealed that all of his comments were quotes from white preachers in the ‘50s and ‘60s; he had merely used the phrase “gay rights” instead of "racial integration." Snider closed by saying, “I hope you will not make the same mistake. I hope you will stand on the right side of history.”

The video has been viewed over two million times and is being used to argue that opposing same-sex marriage is analogous to opposing interracial marriage. Tom Gilson of Thinking Christian had this to say about Snider’s video:

I wish he hadn’t called his skit an argument. It wasn’t one. It was a play, a set piece with a surprise ending that generated emotion where reason is called for; a drama play-acting as reasoned discussion. It had a powerful effect, but that’s a poor substitute for honest communication.

You can see the video of the speech (which Gilson calls “reason steamrolled by emotion”) and read Gilson’s full analysis of Snider’s argument and why it fails over at Thinking Christian.

But what about the charge that traditional marriage supporters are making the same mistake as the racial segregationists? In a Public Discourse article, Francis Beckwith explains why anti-miscegenation laws are not analogous to opposing same-sex marriage. In fact, he says, it’s the opposite. It’s the same-sex marriage advocates who are making the same mistake as the racial segregationists:

The overwhelming consensus among scholars is that the reason for these [anti-miscegenation] laws was to enforce racial purity, an idea that begins its cultural ascendancy with the commencement of race-based slavery of Africans in early 17th-century America and eventually receives the imprimatur of “science” when the eugenics movement comes of age in the late 19th and early 20th centuries….

Anti-miscegenation laws, therefore, were attempts to eradicate the legal status of real marriages by injecting a condition—sameness of race—that had no precedent in common law. For in the common law, a necessary condition for a legitimate marriage was male-female complementarity, a condition on which race has no bearing….

[T]he fact that a man and a woman from different races were biologically and metaphysically capable of marrying each other, building families, and living among the general population is precisely why the race purists wanted to forbid such unions by the force of law. And because this view of marriage and its gender-complementary nature was firmly in place and the only understanding found in common law, the Supreme Court in Loving knew that racial identity was not relevant to what marriage requires of its two opposite-gender members. By injecting race into the equation, anti-miscegenation supporters were very much like contemporary same-sex marriage proponents, for in both cases they introduced a criterion other than male-female complementarity in order to promote the goals of a utopian social movement: race purity or sexual egalitarianism.

This is why, in both cases, the advocates require state coercion to enforce their goals. Without the state’s cooperation and enforcement, there would have been no anti-miscegenation laws and there would be no same-sex marriage. The reason for this, writes libertarian economist Jennifer Roback Morse, is that “marriage between men and women is a pre-political, naturally emerging social institution. Men and women come together to create children, independently of any government.” Hence, this explains its standing as an uncontroversial common law liberty. “By contrast,” Morse goes on to write, “same-sex ‘marriage’ [and same-race-only marriage] is completely a creation of the state…” [emphases mine].

We don't have separate bathrooms for white people and black people. We do have separate bathrooms for men and women. This is because men and women are different in ways that are significant enough for society to acknowledge and take into account when those differences are relevant. And while differences in race are not relevant to marriage, differences in sex are relevant to creating and raising children. The important thing to note here is that the government is merely acknowledging an already-existing institution (one based on biological realities) when it recognizes male–female marriage. The public effect of the male–female union is unique, and therefore, the government is uniquely interested in it.

Who's Waiting for Your Kids?

Who’s waiting for your kids?  In a few short years, they will leave the safety of your home and church and head off to college.  Who will they meet?  What ideas will they encounter?  What moral choices will they face? 

For most adults, it’s been quite a few years since they’ve set foot on a college campus.  Let us bring you up-to-speed on who and what is waiting for your kids: 

• Oakland University psychology professor Todd Shackelford, offers class PSY-315 entitled, “Evolutionary Psychology,” where he provides an evolutionary explanation for how religious individuals come to “hold and to have beliefs for which there is no evidence.”
• Yale, Brown, Harvard, and other U.S. universities sponsor an annual on-campus “Sex Week,” where porn stars and sex workers lead various activities and workshops.
• Zeta Psi frat boys at Yale University hold up signs reading, “We Love Yale Sluts,” while surrounding the Yale Women’s Center on campus.
• In February 2011, Northwestern University professor J. Michael Bailey brings two sex workers onto campus for a “live demonstration” after class.
• According to a 2006 study by sociologists Neil Gross of Harvard University and Solon Simmons of George Mason University, there is a much higher percentage of professing atheists and agnostics (26%) among the ranks of college professors than the general U.S. population.  In addition, 51% of professors described the Bible as “an ancient book of fables, legends, history and moral precepts,” while only 6% of college professors said the Bible is “the actual word of God.”
• According to the Institute for Jewish and Community research, a survey of 1,200 college faculty, more than half have “unfavorable” feelings toward Evangelical Christians.
• Almost half of full-time college students in the U.S. binge drink or abuse drugs at least once-a-month.
• In 2006, the Secular Student Alliance, had 50 student-led atheist clubs on U.S. college campuses, but by 2012, there were more than 300 clubs nationwide.

Welcome to college in the 21^st century.

Clearly, there are enormous intellectual and moral challenges awaiting our Christian students on the university campus.  So here’s the next question you must answer:  Are your kids ready to face these challenges?  Well, if they are the typical Christian student in the U.S., the answer is clearly no.

Since 2001, sociologist Christian Smith has been directing the National Study of Youth and Religion, the most comprehensive research on the religious beliefs and practices of U.S. teens.  Smith published his initial results in a groundbreaking book, Soul Searching:  The Religious & Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers.  What he discovered does not bode well for the faith of our youth. 

According to Smith’s research, American teens:  1) are almost completely inarticulate about their faith and unable to explain its most basic tenets, 2) are largely moral relativists and religious pluralists, and 3) view God as a distant being who exists solely to make them happy, but who is irrelevant to most aspects of their lives.  Furthermore, students who abandoned the religious beliefs they were raised with did so primarily because of intellectual skepticism and doubt.  Teens said things like, “’It didn’t make any sense anymore,’ ‘Some stuff is too far-fetched for me to believe,’ ‘I think scientifically and there is no real proof,’ and ‘Too many questions that can’t be answered.’”

The data presented here can be put in the form of an equation: 

How do you suppose this equation plays out for many of our Christian students over the course of four years at college?  The results are tragic.  Study after study after study confirms that many of our students leave for college and shortly thereafter, leave the church for some period of time.  Some come back, but many do not. Indeed, you most likely know several young people who have walked away from God during their college years.  A close friend’s kid, a student from your church, or even a child within your own family. 

And the hemorrhaging of youth from our churches won’t stop until we get intentional about solving the problem.  On the university campus, secular college professors are very intentional about indoctrinating your kids.  In a candid moment, prominent atheist professor Richard Rorty tells you exactly what college faculty like him plan to do with your kids:  

“...we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own…we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization....So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable..”

Make no mistake, there are plenty Richard Rortys out there, waiting for your kids.  So, what are you going to do prepare them for the serious challenges ahead?

That's why I'm hosting the Stand to Reason RETHINK youth apologetics conference tomorrow in Orange County, California. So, don't have a plan in place yet?  Then start by coming to RETHINK.  There's still time to sign up.  We'll even let you register at the door.  And if you can't come to us, we'll come to you.  

Parents, pastors, youth workers, Christian educators, Sunday School teachers...it's time to get serious about training the next generation.  

Inconsistent Law on the Unborn

Did you know it’s wrong to kill an unborn child according to California state law? You will be prosecuted for murder if you do (e.g. Scott Peterson). There’s only one exception: when a physician kills the child at the request of the mother.

Doesn’t that seem odd? An unborn child is protected under the law like you and me. She is granted full human value. But in a moment’s request by her mother, an unborn child is transformed from a valuable human being into a valueless blob of tissue. She can be killed with impunity.

This is bizarre, inconsistent, and sad.

Imagine a hypothetical situation where a woman is pregnant with identical twin girls. Now suppose one of the twins is prematurely delivered at around the 25^th week of pregnancy (typical pregnancies around last 40 weeks). The born twin is automatically protected under the law. Her sister still inside the womb, however, can be killed at any time during the remainder of her gestation. Although both girls are the same developmental age, one twin is safely protected outside the womb, while her sister is vulnerable inside the womb.

The only difference between the twins is their location. Otherwise they are identical.  But, as Francis Beckwith aptly recognizes, “Where one is has no bearing on who one is.” Our laws should not exclude members of the human community from legal protection simply because of their location. But that’s what is happening.

I realize that some abortion-choice advocates argue that this inconsistency can be resolved by eliminating fetal homicide laws. But that’s the wrong solution because the science of embryology proves the unborn are human beings. Therefore, they should be protected.

The solution would be to eliminate abortion-choice laws. That would protect all human beings, even those inside the womb.

Did Cavemen and Dinosaurs Really Exist? (Video)

Did cavemen and dinosaurs really exist?