The Forerunner Weblog

Personhood Florida expanding and reaching across the state!

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:46:00 +0000

Here is an encouraging note from Bryan Longworth, Director of Personhood Florida ...

The anniversary of Roe v. Wade was a very successful time of reaching out with the Personhood message all across the state of Florida! We are being asked to speak in churches, schools and to come petition in our local Care Net Walk for Life's. Glory to God for the saints working together to build the Kingdom of God and in the words of Florida's state constitution, "...to enjoy and defend life..." and extend that to the pre-born, disabled and elderly.

Soon to be published will be the nine divisions of the state of Florida with Division Contacts for each area. These will be posted on a map of Florida with the counties in each area and the cities in each county. It is now our task to find county liaisons and city liaisons. It is time to step forward and Take Your City! You need no experience -- just a burning desire to see abortion ended and for the right to life to be extended to every person in Florida! We will be posting the maps and the goals in our next email!

Over the last week and a half, Personhood Florida has received approximately 2,000 petitions in 55 large envelopes from churches across the state of Florida and many more smaller envelopes from individuals. The churches were from many denominations, including Missionary Alliance, Assemblies of God, Baptist, Roman Catholic, Nondenominational, Pentecostal and Presbyterian. We now have collected over 15,000 petitions and will be contacting the churches who responded to recruit more Personhood liaisons in cities and regions across Florida. I want to thank all who have worked to make this possible. With your help, we’re going to make history in Florida by defending all innocent human life through the Personhood Amendment.

We are now well on our way to reaching the 10 percent threshold needed for the Florida Supreme Court to review the Personhood Amendment language, but we have much work to do. Our goal is to average 1,500 petitions per day for a period of about two years to reach our 1,000,000 petition goal. (We intend to overshoot the 676,811 signatures needed by a wide margin in order to counter any challenge.) To do this, we will need to have Personhood liaisons in each region, city, and church. We will also need more volunteers for various tasks, including data entry. I look forward to working with you as we build the most comprehensive pro-life network ever assembled across the state of Florida.

- Pastor Bryan Longworth
Director, Personhood Florida

Scott Brown presents a paradox for the pro-life movement

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:23:00 +0000

Imagine for a moment if Senator Orrin Hatch from Mormon dominated Republican Utah said, when asked, "Are you pro-life?"

"Yes, I am pro-life. I'm against partial-birth abortions. I'm against federal funding of abortions. And I believe in a strong parental consent notification law."

Remember that position: Pro-life. That is the position of James Dobson and Focus on the Family, the Roman Catholic Bishops, Phyllis Schlafly and the Eagle Forum, Steve Ertelt and National Right to Life. They have each actively opposed or refused to endorse the Personhood initiative -- a strategy for passing state amendments that would recognize the right to life of all human beings from conception to natural death -- thinking that pushing for an outright ban on abortion would be counter-productive at this point in time. Instead, they choose the pragmatic approach of incrementalism. To be fair (and by that I mean less strident than other Personhood advocates have been) I must point out that these individuals and organizations support Personhood, but only deny that it is the correct strategy at the current time.

Meanwhile, in the current political climate, newly-elected Senator Scott Brown from Roman Catholic dominated Democratic Party Massachusetts says, when asked, "Are you pro-choice?"

"Yes ... The difference between me and maybe others is that I'm very -- I'm against partial-birth abortions. I'm against federal funding of abortions. And I believe in a strong parental consent notification law" (Barbara Walters interview, ABC News, Jan. 31, 2010).

We ought to note this paradox and its obvious solution. Politicians take their positions from their constituents. The vast majority of Americans believe that there should be some restrictions on abortion. Most favor banning late term abortions and favor these incremental restriction measures. Most are "pro-choice," however, when it comes to the various exceptions, especially rape and incest.

Thus a "pro-choice" candidate from a Democratic yet Roman Catholic stronghold may nuance his stance with words such as "strongly" and "very" opposed to certain types of abortion to underscore the exact same incremental approach held by National Right to Life, the Catholic Bishops, Focus on the Family and so on. As long as the strategy is to keep "chipping away at Roe v. Wade," they feel satisfied with the label of "pro-life.” But if a candidate pledges the same thing under the label "pro-choice," doesn't it amount to about the same thing?

I submit that the problem is not with political candidates, but with the position taken by "pro-life" organizations and individuals. The biblical adage, "You have not because you ask not," applies here in full force. For pro-life advocates to criticize Senator-elect Scott Brown misses the forest for the trees. He is not the problem. In fact, he is little different than the so-called "solution" that has thus far been an effete assault on a modern day Goliath.

I take conservative "pro-life" pundits to task for their proposed solution. For example, Fox News’ Sean Hannity is "pro-life," but holds out for the exceptions of rape and incest for the sake of political pragmatism. Ironically, these "pro-life" conservative Christians need to be reminded that is exactly the position of Roe v. Wade. In the decision, the Supreme Court sided with Jane Roe (Norma McCorvey) who argued that she needed to be guaranteed the legal right to an abortion because she was raped and pregnant.*

In the 2000 presidential primaries, John McCain said he thought Roe v. Wade should be overturned, but then said he would support exceptions to a ban on abortion in cases of rape and incest (Boston Globe, A11, Jan 22, 2000). Ironically, these are the very exceptions that Roe v. Wade provided. It was Roe's companion decision, Doe v. Bolton, that gave a legal justification to extend abortion rights through all nine months with no exceptions. To be accurate, these “pro-life” political candidates and pundits ought to call themselves “pro-Roe but anti-Doe.”

So, in effect, when we support the "exceptions," we uphold Roe v. Wade, just like Sean Hannity, John McCain and Scott Brown.

My challenge to politicians to say they are pro-life with the "exceptions" is this. If that is your conviction, then let's get this done now. If the majority of Americans are in favor of certain restrictions on abortion, then put it to a vote each session until it passes. If the majority of Americans are against abortion past the time of viability (20 weeks) then where is the legislation? If the majority of Americans want a ban on all abortions with the exceptions of rape or incest, then why not put that to an up or down vote this month? While I believe that the God-given right to life extends to all human beings without exception, I would support such an effort that would stop over 98 percent of all abortions that currently do not fall under one of the so-called exceptions.

With a Republican congress and president for six full years, there were no such bills and no such up or down votes. The problem is that politicians say what they need to say on the abortion issue to get elected. The problem is that pro-life advocates continue to support weak candidates in the primaries with the view that they are more electable. Then we bemoan the fact that our incremental approach isn't working. What we need to do is to start insisting on a vote on specific pro-life legislation in each session (up or down – win or lose) before we will support any candidate for reelection. If a "pro-life" representative shows no initiative in sponsoring or advocating such legislation, then we should support his or her pro-life opponent in the next primary election. Only then will the Republican Party take us seriously.

____________________
* Note: Miss Norma McCorvey was never raped and had her child given up for adoption. She is today a repentant Christian and proudly pro-life with no exceptions. See her website: http://www.leaderu.com/norma

Was Biblical Law responsible for the Salem Witch Trials?

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:25:00 +0000

Did the Puritans put witches to death in Salem?

Read the complete article at:

http://www.forerunner.com/champion/X0018_Puritans_and_Witches.html

The Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded by the Puritans in the 1630s with Salem being one of its principle port towns. It had become evident by the 1670s, however, that most of the citizens of the colony were not Puritans (or born-again Christians in today's vernacular). By the 1690s, when the Salem Witch hysteria took place, the Puritan era had pretty much waned. By this time, the Puritans were the minority.

The prevailing idea today is that it was the Puritans who killed witches in Salem. Actually, the situation was that some innocent people were accused of witchcraft by people who were not genuinely converted at all. The only real witchcraft going on was practiced by a servant of the town pastor! But because she confessed her sin and repented the townspeople, as a whole, forgave her. The resulting problem of the Salem witch trials was that you had superstitious, unconverted people using extra-biblical, unorthodox criteria by which to judge witches.

A pastor in Salem stirred up the original problem with irresponsible preaching and false accusations. But then he had to deflect guilt, because the witch hysteria was found to be emanating from his own household! The townspeople began accusing others and the hysteria spread. The civil court had plenty of nonsense to draw from, written mainly by Anglican pastors from England. These men argued that traditional, extra-biblical accounts of the occult were acceptable as information on the nature of the occult, and this side won the debate (with an enormous amount of bogus evidence).

It is untrue to say that the Puritans were responsible for the deaths of innocent people. In fact, the Salem witchcraft trials were stopped by a Puritan pastor from Beverly, Massachusetts. He charged that none of the evidence met biblical criteria. So it was a true minister of the gospel who stopped the state from executing witches in Salem. The minister who brought the charges was dismissed from his pastorate due to his role in the affair.

What should be our response to witchcraft today?

As Christians, we have two avenues of resistance to witchcraft: ecclesiastical and civil.

It is the role of the Church to oppose witchcraft with all our might, even to the point of publicly condemning certain witches (if they refuse to repent) through imprecatory prayer proclamations. Sorcery is condemned throughout the Bible [see Ex. 7:11; 8:7,18; Isa. 47:9,12]. Sanctions are imposed on sorcerers who refuse to repent [see Acts 13:6,8; Gal. 5:20; Rev. 9:21;18:23]. As the Church, our correct response is to condemn the practice of witchcraft and to preach salvation to those who would repent.

A more controversial issue is whether or not witchcraft should be made illegal by our civil government. My view is that since the civil government in our country is not a church-state ecclesiocracy, the state should not try witches. Our local community governments would be correct, however, in enforcing ordinances against private house meetings of religious groups in order to stop the undesirable effects of Wiccan rituals on the surrounding community, such as noise, parking violations, and so on.

The Mithra-buster

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 05:37:00 +0000

By J.P. Holding Back in the Roman era, Mithraism was perhaps Christianity's leading competitor for the hearts and minds of others. Today Mithraism is religiously a non-factor, but it still "competes" with Christianity, in another way: It is a leading candidate for the "pagan copycat" thesis crowd as a supposed source for Christianity. Our walking papers are laid out for us by over a dozen things that Jesus supposedly has in common with Mithras and, by extension, Christianity allegedly borrowed to create the Jesus character. In not one instance has a convincing case been made that Christianity borrowed anything from Mithraism. The evidence is either too late, not in line with the conclusions of modern Mithraic scholars, or just plain not there. Brent Hardaway: Mithra Jamie Patrick Holding: the Mithra-buster Jay Rogers: Camera and Editor

The Mount Olivet Discourse and Vaticinium Ex Eventu

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:07:00 +0000

“Vaticinium ex eventu” -- Latin: literally, “prophecy after the event”; or a prediction made after the predicted event is fulfilled.

No one in their right mind writes a false prophecy after the fact. That is, no one writes a verifiably false prediction and then delivers it to a people who are in a position to know with certainty that it is a false prophecy.

And yet this is exactly how the liberal Higher Critics interpret the Mount Olivet Discourse. They assume the Temple Destruction prophecy of Jesus (Matthew 24; Mark 13; Luke 21) is a tradition that developed after the Roman-Jewish War of 67 to 70 AD. The liberal critics assume that this tradition provided the source material for the three so-called “synoptic” Gospels (Mt, Mk, Lk). The synoptic writers then composed a narrative of predictive words that Jesus did not actually say, which nevertheless relate to events that already had happened by the time the accounts were composed.

On one extreme, there are atheist writers, such as Bertrand Russell in Why I Am Not A Christian, who have myopically proposed that the Mount Olivet Discourse is a failed prophecy. This was also the view of the neo-orthodox Albert Schweitzer, that Jesus of Nazareth was an apocalyptic prophet who predicted the end of the world. When Jesus’ prophecies failed to come to pass, His followers formed a new religion. Still others have made the amazingly inconsistent charge that the Mount Olivet Discourse is vaticinium ex eventu and yet contains the prediction of Christ’s near return!

There are several problems with both of these views.

Two Liberal Extremes

First, at one end of the spectrum we find a common method of dealing with New Testament eschatology – to assume that the disciples expected a soon return of Jesus.

The eschatology of liberals since the mid-19th century onward has been hyper-preterist. They interpret the Mount Olivet prophecy as entailing events to be fulfilled in the first century including the Second Coming of Jesus. They assume that the prophecy speaks of the Jewish War with the Romans, the succession of plagues and atrocities that struck the city of Jerusalem from 67 to 70 AD leading up to the destruction of the Temple.

This interpretation is used by liberals to date the first written Gospel (usually thought to be Mark) no earlier than 68 AD by which time the Roman-Jewish War had begun. Most conservatives, on the other hand, date the three synoptics anywhere from 40 to 67 AD. Early dating is the logical position if we assume that Jesus’ predictions had yet to be fulfilled.

They claim that the Temple was destroyed in 70 AD as an example of vaticinium ex eventu. But oddly, many also hold that part of the prophecy dealt with the Second Coming of the Lord as a supposed first century event, and yet the Messiah did not appear in order to redeem his people. If this was a prophecy delivered after 70, then the pseudonymous, non-eyewitness authors of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke delivered a “faked” false prophecy.

The obvious question arises: Why would anyone write such an account in the first place?

Imagine a writer in 2010 forging a book by an early 20th century writer claiming Jesus would return by 1988. We’d expect a false prophet in the 1970s or ‘80s to do that, but not a writer in the 21st century! Even more bizarre would be to find a Christian church in the 21st century that would immediately accept this as an inspired, prophetic book and even allude to it in their own teaching materials.

The vaticinium ex eventu advocates take the entire passage containing the Mount Olivet Discourse out of the context in which it was framed – the disciples’ question pertaining to the timing of the Messiah’s victory over Israel’s oppressors, “Tell us, when will these things be? And what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?” (Matthew 24:3).

Second, at the opposite end of the spectrum there are those who simply call into question the possibility of fulfilled prophecy – especially prophecy as detailed and specific as described in Matthew 24. The writer of the account has Jesus making several predictive claims, “You will see … You will hear … they will deliver you up …” and finally predicting the exact date and manner of the destruction of the Temple, “Do you not see all these things? Assuredly, I say to you, not one stone shall be left here upon another, that shall not be thrown down … this generation will by no means pass away till all these things take place.”

If we assume that Jesus made this prophecy in the spring of 30 AD, then the destruction of the Temple in 70 fits the prophecy. If we take a generation to mean its usual biblical sense of 40 years, then this is remarkable. It indicates a supernatural revelation concerning a future event.

We could compare it to a Southerner in 1825 correctly predicting the general signs of strife between North and South that would lead to a Civil War. That prediction in itself would not be remarkable in that many people predicted that a “house divided against itself shall not stand.” But it would be fascinating to find a prediction of a 40 year time period and specifically that the city of Atlanta would be burned by Northern troops so that no wooden structure would be left standing. Although it is possible that someone could have made such a prediction as a wise individual with an unusual gift for foretelling, most would consider it a supernatural ability to prophesy.

In fact, Jesus in Matthew 24 applies the prophecy of Daniel to first century Judea in no less than four places. He speaks of the abomination of desolation (Mt. 24:17; Dan 9:27; 11:31; 12:11), a great tribulation (Mt. 24:21; Dan. 12:1), the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky (Mt. 24:30; Dan 7:13) and perhaps a few other allusions. That Jesus is quoting Daniel and applying it to first century Judea is not at all unusual. What is notable is that it is the prophecy is applied in such a way as to correctly predict the manner and timing of the Temple’s destruction. What is ironic here is that even if we place Daniel as being written after 167 BC, as nearly all liberals do, the stark fact remains that Jesus and the Gospel writers took the prophecy of Daniel as yet unfulfilled on these points. We cannot simply explain away the prophecy of Daniel as vaticinium ex eventu. Even if we make the argument that it was not the prophet’s intention, it certainly was applied that way by Jesus and the Gospel writers. The writing of Daniel was centuries prior to 70 AD. In fact, four copies of Daniel are found among the Dead Sea scrolls.

When the prophecy of Daniel is applied to the destruction of the Jewish Temple in the Mount Olivet Discourse, we are left with no logical objection for a pre-70 AD writing of the account in any of its three forms. The logical solution to this critical paradox can be found in looking at the shortcomings of each end of the liberal interpretive spectrum.

Two Liberal Paradoxes

Option #1:-- The vaticinium ex eventu position leaves us with the paradox that the Gospels could not have been written too early or too late. Otherwise, one is left to wonder exactly how first century Christians could possibly have accepted a Gospel with the Mount Olivet Discourse that appeared suddenly after 70 AD without any prior knowledge by the hearers.

In other words, they would have to ask: “If Jesus really did say these wondrous things, then why did no one know about it prior to 70 AD?”

One could counter that the versions of the Gospels with the Mount Olivet Discourse appeared in the second century long after the first century witnesses to the ministry of Jesus and the Apostles had passed away. However, that only exacerbates the problem. If this were the case then t is even more unlikely that no one would have noticed the novelty of the passage. Furthermore, by this late date the author would have more clearly separated the Second Coming of Jesus from the events surrounding the calamity that came on Jerusalem in 70 AD.

As JAT Robinson has demonstrated in his masterful book, Redating the New Testament, none of the New Testament books ever once mention the destruction of the Temple in the past tense or as an event that has already occurred. If one wishes to see what a pseudonymous vaticinium ex eventu prophecy really looks like, one should read the Epistle of Barnabas, c. 125 AD, a later work that specifically mentions the destruction of the Temple as the judgment of God that came on the Jews for their rejection of Christ.

Moreover I will tell you likewise concerning the temple, how these wretched men being led astray set their hope on the building, and not on their God that made them, as being a house of God … So it came to pass; for because they went to war it, was pulled down by their enemies (Barnabas 16:1,4).

Option #2:-- The “unfulfilled false prophecy” position claims that the Mount Olivet Discourse was in fact written prior to 70 AD, but it was in error in predicting Christ’s soon return. Bertrand Russell wrote in Why I Am Not A Christian:

For one thing, [Jesus] certainly thought that His second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at that time.

This position ignores a couple of points.

First, it fails to recognize the great detail in which the Mount Olivet prophecy was fulfilled. Jesus predicts the exact time to the Temple’s destruction (40 years); the wars, earthquakes, famines, pestilences, false Christs, riots and persecutions that would increase in intensity just prior to the destruction (as chronicled by the Jewish historian Josephus); the manner in which the Temple would be destroyed (Jerusalem surrounded by armies); the Temple would be desecrated (by the Titus and his Roman legions entering the Holy Place and carrying off the consecrated furniture); and even the thoroughness of the destruction (not one stone would be left upon another as evidenced by the archaeological remains of the Temple).

Second, this view neglects the entire context of the disciples’ question about Jesus’ Second Coming.

Now as He sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will these things be? And what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?” (Matthew 24:3).

The disciples were not asking when Jesus would return after His death, burial, resurrection and ascension. He had not gone anywhere yet! Luke even tells us that after the resurrection the disciples were still concerned over whether Jesus would come “at this time” to Jerusalem to restore the kingdom to Israel by resting it from the Romans.

Therefore, when they had come together, they asked Him, saying, “Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6).

The disciples meant exactly what they said. Even after Jesus rose from the dead as He predicted, they were still not understanding that Jesus was going anywhere. They were still wondering if Jesus was coming in triumph to Jerusalem “at this time.”

The “unfulfilled false prophecy” position has Jesus’ Second Coming predicted in the disciples’ generation even before they understood that Jesus was going anywhere. The paradox here is that the Gospel writer is for some strange reason portraying both a misunderstanding on behalf of the disciples, and then fabricating Jesus’ wrong answers to their questions.

On the contrary, only a genuine misunderstanding on the part of the disciples could have produced a discourse in which Jesus refutes the disciples’ expectation of the Messiah’s soon coming to Jerusalem as a revolutionary deliverer of Jerusalem with the prophecy of the Temple’s destruction within “this generation.” Therefore, the fact that the Second Coming did not occur by 70 AD is not a “failed prophecy.”

Paradox Resolved

Liberals stumble over these two extremes even while my evangelical brethren still get tangled up in yet another paradox – that of dispensationalism. This popular “end-times” theory suggests that Jesus is referring mainly to a rebuilt Temple’s destruction in our own generation even while ignoring that “this generation” in Jesus day meant the generation prior to 70 AD.

Partial Preterism is resolution to each paradox presented here. That is, while the Second Coming did not occur by 70 AD Jesus referred to that event as occurring at a time no one could know. On the other hand the fulfillment of "all these things" was to occur within one generation after the Sermon on the Mount in 30 AD.

The Mount Olivet Discourse is neither prophecy after the event that failed to come to pass – nor is it prophecy prior to the event that failed to come to pass – nor is it a passage that wrenches the plain context of audience relevance to twist the meaning of “this generation” to mean a generation in the far off future “end times.”

Jesus does, in fact, refer to eschatological events, the fulfillment of the Great Commission and His eventual Second Coming in later portions of the Mount Olivet Discourse. However, these “last things” (i.e., matters of eschatology) are not in the same context of “these things” referred to in the disciples questions or in Jesus’ answer, “when you see these things,” all of which occurred in the first century prior to 70 AD.

If the three synoptic Gospels were written prior to 70 AD, one must admit that neither the authors nor the audience at that time fully understood the fulfillment of the passage given here by Jesus. Prior to 70 AD audience relevance is even more stark. The immediate audience of Jesus’ discourse is His disciples who asked a complex question riddled with common view a militant heroic Messiah held by many Jews in 30 AD. The secondary audience is the first century Christian hearing the Gospel preached by one of the early apostles or evangelists. It is possible that many hearers and readers prior to 70 AD still misunderstood the meaning of Jesus’ predictions. However, there is no reason for us, as a tertiary audience, to assume that either Jesus or any of the New Testament writers meant to predict an imminent Second Coming.

In fact, two warnings against predicting the time are specifically given. The destruction of Jerusalem would be attended by numerous signs of the times that Jesus’ hearers would discern. It would occur in a time of strife and war. However, the Second Coming would occur at an hour that no man could know. It would occur in a time of “peace and safety” when the Lord would appear as “a thief in the night.”

In short, whether or not some early Christians believed Jesus would return in their day is irrelevant and immaterial. If they did interpret the passage that way, they were obviously wrong. Understanding that principle, we must interpret the Mount Olivet Discourse today its literary context in view of audience relevance on three different levels: Jesus' hearers, the Gospel writers' audience, and Christians today.

A big change is coming!

Conservatives and liberals alike fail to understand the full importance of the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 AD. Without a historical background of this catastrophic event and what it meant to the worldview of a first century Jew, the New Testament is not properly understood. Entire books of the New Testament are impossible to understand unless we first accept the authors’ warnings to those who would forsake Christ’s sacrifice and cling to the condemned system of Temple worship.

When scholars and students of the New Testament begin to understand the paradigm shift that occurred in 70 AD, our interpretation of these books will be radically altered. Right now, scholars ignore the importance of the seven year tribulation period (64 to 70 AD) that served as a catalyst to accelerate the shift from the shadows and types of bloody sacrifice in an earthly Temple to a right-of-passage through the veil into the Holiest of all which is in heaven.

The key to understanding the Gospels is to accept that they were written before Caesar Nero’s persecution of the Christians in the Roman Empire and prior to the onset of Nero’s military campaign against the Jews. The key to understanding passages contained in 2 Timothy, Jude, 2 Peter and the entire book of Hebrews and Revelation is to accept the idea that they were written with an impending sense of prophetic fulfillment -- not of the Second Coming -- but of the consummation of the New Covenant that would forever change all of human history. This consummation began at Calvary and was underscored with a giant exclamation point by the destruction of the Jewish Temple. This is also the reason why the canon was considered closed to all writings that appeared after this period. When we understand this, our worldview, eschatology and ability to demonstrate the reality of the supernatural Word of God will be revolutionized and greatly energized.

History vs. Theology

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 03:27:00 +0000

I was having a debate with a young Jesus mythicist (who finally admitted that Jesus probably did exist as a historical person) who made the following true remark:

Anyone can write anything they want in a book. It does not make it true.

That is correct. That is why we look to historians who are experts in ancient history to answer questions about what really happened in the first century. We ought to consult someone who knows something about methodology in determining reliable historical records and so on.

However, if we want to know if Jesus is the Son of God, historians cannot help us. That is a question for theologians. Credentialed historians should tell us if Jesus existed. Theologians should tell us if the Bible presents Him as the Son of God. They can explain to us what the scriptures actually say.

The problem, of course, is that liberals use whatever suits their argument. They often use history to comment on His deity and theology to comment on His historicity. That is backwards.

Not only do the Historical Critics deny Jesus was divine, but they deny that the Gospel writers themselves thought of Him as divine. The convolutions they have to go through to get the Gospel writers to say what they want them to say are astounding. If my skeptical friends were simply to study this without an agenda, or without setting out to prove or disprove Christian doctrine, they'd realize how bad liberal theology really is.

To get some background in this, I'd like you to watch two videos we made:

If you like the videos, you might consider ordering The Real Jesus DVD.

Obviously, I haven't read every work by every liberal critic from the Enlightenment onward. I have read a good deal of the Church Fathers who wrote closest to the time of the New Testament to see what they thought about the writings that were penned very close to their own generation.

The skeptical scholars almost ignore the Church Fathers. I would think they would at least say Jesus was an observant rabbi who convinced His followers that He was the Messiah and then Jesus' theology was preserved in the form of Gospels and Epistles.

But they don't even go that far.

Instead they say that the Gospels were written too late to be by people who knew or heard Jesus. That makes no sense. In fact, I consider this to be absurd. It would be like a church group today not being able to personally know their founders who lived in the 1950s and '60s. Obviously, some would be alive still who would remember them well. But the liberals pretend that there is a vast wall of ignorance that can be erected over a 40 to 50 year period.

I simply don't get the logic of this argument.

They treat a few decades as though there were centuries of darkness between the time of Jesus' disciples and the writings of the New Testament that were then delivered to the next generation.

Conservatives have often conceded to dates for New Testament books that are a decade or two later than the traditional view of 20 to 35 years after Jesus, simply because it matters so little to our case. Forty to sixty years later is still fairly close.

But in fact, the liberals offer no shred of evidence against the idea that most of the New Testament could not have been written very early on by the very authors whose identities were known and agreed upon by all who received the writings.

In the 1800s, liberal Historical Criticism emerged with the presupposition that the New Testament was written in the second century -- even the late second century. That view has since been shattered by real documentary evidence. Now the latest they can go and still be taken seriously is a window of 70 to 100 AD -- usually placing the three synoptic Gospels prior to 85 AD.

Unbiased liberals who have looked at the internal, external and documentary evidence have often come to the conclusion that the entire New Testament could have been composed between 40 to 70 AD. There is certainly no evidence against it.

And yet some still act as if those few decades were a wall of silence that denies the possibility of much factual transmission of history.

John Dominic Crossan of the Jesus Seminar, for instance, proposes that Jesus was a nobody who just happened to stumble into Jerusalem one day with the idea of revolution and that He accidently got crucified and had no idea upon His death that He had founded what would become a world religion. The Gospels then developed somehow as a collection of Jesus' sayings -- 80 percent of which He never said -- and Jesus himself would be startled and upset if He knew what His followers had come up with.

I don't claim to be a scholar, but I recognize this as some of the worst and most biased scholarship ever concocted. It is not convincing because there is not a shred of literary evidence for this in any of the New Testament writings and even among the surviving works of the church fathers up until 115 AD, which is fairly voluminous.

In my world, if I read a book that says that Ronald Reagan was shot near the heart early during his presidency and emerged from the ordeal thinking that God had spared his life in order to defeat communism, I would believe the testimony. If this story were to be reported by a PBS special I saw on television, I'd believe it all the more since it has the quality of being "admission against self-interest" since PBS is not known for their pro-Reagan ideology. I might reserve judgment about whether God really spoke to Reagan, but I'd at least believe the external evidence that Reagan fought communism and the Soviet Union fell.

In their world, Ronald Reagan's fight against communism was the imaginary quest of a B-Movie actor in the 1950s, who never really became president. The myth of the fall of communism in the Soviet Union was a symbolic narrative composed by a committee of politicians in the Kremlin in the 1960s who admired American movie stars. The later books and television specials that contain the history of Reagan's presidency were produced and edited by Reaganites who lived after his death. In retelling these fictional romance stories, they developed the myth among their cult.

That in a nutshell is essentially the conservative vs. the liberal view of Jesus.

Further, like those who would want to discredit Ronald Reagan for any positive achievement, the liberals simply hate Jesus.

It would be as if there were a large group of Elizabethan scholars who hate Queen Elizabeth and William Shakespeare and who never write anything except extreme skepticism portraying these legendary figures as fools who somehow got credit for building an empire and penning the greatest dramas ever written.

Occasionally, there is a scholar who still insists Shakespeare never wrote any of his plays or that Elizabeth was an incompetent villain, but these are the minority simply because no one goes into Elizabethan studies with a hatred for the major figures. Despite their obvious flaws, the scholar usually finds quite a few admirable qualities in these personalities.

But there are liberal scholars who detest Jesus of Nazareth. The contempt drips from their writings. I noticed that when I was quite young and I found it odd.

Skepticism serves a purpose in study. However, these people have set out not as scholars, but as fundamentalist atheists with an ax to grind. When I first saw the obvious bias as a college student, it actually served to pique my interest a bit.

Could it actually be that they despise the Son of the Living God, the King of kings, precisely because He is shrouded in the heavens in glory and when they lift their eyes to view His majesty it only exposes their pride-ridden hearts?

I thought it was a distinct possibility. Today I find much of what liberals say either comical or sadly shameful.

It's the reason why I don't usually have conversations with too many young postmodernist Jesus mythicists. Not only are they biased, they are also ignorant. They believe the "scholarship" of hack writers who take positions that are even more extreme than the "uber-liberals" of the Jesus Seminar.

Occasionally I will have an extended conversation with someone who is reasonable and is willing to look into the rich cache of Christian literature, which is uninterrupted and consistent from the time of the first Gospels and Epistles to the time when Christianity took hold of the Roman Empire.

I tell them that I cannot "prove" God to them any more than the Word of God has already proved Him. But I think it would be impossible that Christianity could have become so wildly successful so quickly if the Gospel were not true at the core.

It's an unlikely story, but it is much more unlikely that it did not happen.

The Personhood Movement – A Multi-Pronged Pro-Life Strategy

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:36:00 +0000

The Personhood movement is a pro-life strategy being waged on all fronts throughout the United States. We are advocating for state constitutional amendments that would recognize the personhood of all human beings from the beginning of life to natural death. We are evangelizing, educating and changing hearts. Thus far almost 40 states have begun a Personhood strategy through legislative and voter initiatives.

Georgia Right to Life president, Dan Becker, recently shared with some of us here in Florida the "before and after" data on how the pro-life movement in the whole state has been activated and energized. Since the Personhood initiative began in Georgia ten years ago, every prong of the pro-life movement has been reinvigorated -- from the street activists, to public opinion, state government and every pro-life ministry in between. We won't "fail" if we don't get Personhood initiatives passed on the first try. We will only make forward progress toward an eventual long term victory. As John F. Kennedy said, "A rising tide lifts all boats."

One of the co-sponsors of the Personhood voter initiative in the state of Florida. Patricia McEwen of Life Coalition International (LCI), recently told us a story about her pro-life missionary work in Africa. LCI went to train sidewalk counselors among the Zulu tribe. The problem, of course, is they have no sidewalks in Zulu territory, so they decided they were "Eleventh Hour Counselors." When the time came to bring the volunteers to the clinic, they had to turn people away because there were too many people to fit on the school bus. They crowded into the bus three to a seat for the two hour drive to the abortion clinic with no air conditioning in the African heat. A few months later after returning to Florida, Pat asked them how the counselors at the abortion clinic were doing. She was simply told, “There is no abortion clinic."

Abortion is legal in South Africa. But the Zulu people are warriors. When they become Christians, they understand that this is now spiritual warfare. Now they are being trained to shut down all the abortion clinics in the continent of Africa and beyond by going directly to the gates of hell and confronting the powers of darkness through prayer, acts of compassion and preaching the Gospel.

At the moment, the Catholic Bishops, Steve Ertelt, Phyllis Schlafly – and a few others who are usually solid on the pro-life issue – are engaging in negative publicity claiming that the Personhood initiative would be a setback for the pro-life movement if it fails. They are simply not seeing the forest for the trees.

Eventually, the battle will be won at the clinics on the ground where the killing takes place through imprecatory prayer, evangelism and acts of mercy. More abortion clinics have been closed directly due to street activism than by any other means. The legal battle is a secondary outcome that will be naturally affected by evangelistic efforts toward individual regeneration, ecclesiastical revival and societal reformation. It's not rocket science. A famous Oscar winning director once said, "Eighty percent of success is showing up." When the church community simply shows up and does its job, abortion will stopped in America.

In other words, when we really start seeing that kind of forward motion in the churches, by the time we get a Personhood Amendment or a reversal of Roe v. Wade, most of the abortion mills in America will already have been shut down.

Jesus himself assures us, "The gates of hell shall not prevail against the church." A gate is a defensive weapon that does not attack anyone. The image here is of a militant church knocking down the gates. Yet we have people who are afraid to fight because they fear the gates of hell might go on the offensive. We cannot lose the long term struggle if we understand we are warriors and abortion is a gate of hell. Pro-life street activists closed the clinic in Melbourne, Florida because several church groups led by their pastors each came out to pray one Saturday a month to cover the ground with prayer each week. This went on for several years.

When Aware Woman abortion clinic finally closed (partially due to an eminent domain highway widening that took their property) another clinic bought their business and reopened in another location. The few churches with their small bands of prayer warriors followed and continued to pray, preach and engage in daily sidewalk counseling. Eventually their lease was cancelled. They moved to another location and the church followed. Eventually they were forced to move out again. That was almost ten years ago. Since then there has been no abortion clinic in all of Brevard County. Abortion is a business and clinics can't stay open if they can't make money and if no one will lease to them. No fledgling abortion clinic should ever get to the point where it is profitable enough to buy a building. If the church just did its job, there would not be room for an abortion clinic and a church in the same city.

If the Catholic Bishops of America wanted to stop abortion in our country, they could do it in a short period of time. If the Southern Baptist Convention wanted to stop abortion in America, they could do it. The same goes for the Assemblies of God or any other network of evangelical churches who oppose abortion in word. We know what we believe. Now we simply need to add deeds on a consistent basis.

In Brevard County, Florida, this occurred with limited participation of about 40 people and about four or five pastors who took leadership of prayer gatherings at our only out-patient abortion clinic. If there were hundreds involved -- as there should have been on an ongoing basis -- then it probably would have taken months rather years. We should not be disheartened to know we need to fight in the long term with a “Gideon band.” But we need to be certain of one thing from the outset. This is all-out-war. It's no Sunday school picnic.

We do need to work on all types of strategies -- legal, political, education, sidewalk counseling, CPCs, and so on. There are many battlefronts. However, like any war, the conflict between the church and abortion is going to be won on the ground by our foot soldiers. By the time we get the support we need to pass the Personhood Amendment in Florida, there will likely be no more abortion clinics in Florida -- or very few -- because they will all be shut down by the Church. This is the strength of what a voter initiative can do. The legal solution will follow practical change on the grassroots level. This change must begin in the churches.

Once we have the support to pass Personhood, there won't be a lack of volunteers for other vital ministries.

The advantage of having one individual sign a petition is that it takes almost no sacrifice of time or effort on their part. But in the process, we are identifying some who are dedicated to a greater level of commitment. Every time we circulate petitions, we are meeting potential activists. In 2007, I attempted to call together a "Central Florida Pro-life Network" with the idea that a new wave of pro-life activism was coming. Now it is here. Simply what we need to do is network with other pro-life activists throughout our region and state and harness the energy of this burgeoning move of God. It is revival that we are after, not simply man-made political strategies. Our goal is to see a change of heart on the mass cultural scale through another Great Awakening.

Don Kazimir, coordinator of the diocesan Respect Life Office for the past 14 years, who has been in the pro–life movement since 1976, recently said, "I have never seen so much stuff going on all over the nation. The Obama election has energized the pro–life movement."

There will be many new volunteer "foot soldiers" coming into the Personhood movement. What we need to do now is to set a big net to catch all the new fish. But the church still needs to be evangelized on the abortion issue. That was the number one mistake of the pro-life movement in the 1970s and '80s. We asked people to get involved, but we didn't take the time to make sure that everyone agreed that abortion is legalized murder and therefore the church must act like it is murder.

Who is Scott Brown really?

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:52:00 +0000

The excitement that conservatives felt over newly-elected Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown comes from his pledge to oppose President Obama's government health care, federal deficit spending, runaway economic stimulus expenditures, and backroom earmark deals to Democrats supporting the health care bill.

However, Brown's state record on some of the same issues is not as stellar as conservatives have trumpeted. He supported Mitt Romney's health care bill that requires all workers to carry insurance. He also supported a bill for a regional cap and trade, but has since said he regrets that vote.

Brown opposes "same-sex marriage," but supports civil unions. He says he believes that marriage is "between a man and a woman," the same position taken by President Obama, as he pointed out in the campaign.

On the abortion issue, he supports the various restrictions, such as parental notification and the ban on partial birth abortion, but has said that Roe v. Wade is "settled." In the uncompromising sense of being "pro-life," there is not much to get excited over here. Brown will probably support the Republican platform, while downplaying any support for pro-life measures that would upset the status quo.

Brown's real position on these issues remains to be seen. I am willing to concede that Republican candidates from Massachusetts must often take a "stealth" approach to some conservative issues if they hope to be elected. The leftist supporters of Martha Coakley believe that is the case and have tried to paint Brown as "anti-abortion" and "anti-gay." In fact, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann called Scott Brown, "an irresponsible, sexist, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, tea-bagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees."

You can know a man by his enemies. Since Olbermann hates Brown so much, I wanted to know whether he might secretly be an evangelical Christian.

Is Scott Brown an evangelical Christian?

Technically, yes.

I was surprised by this.

Brown and his family are active members of the New England Chapel, which is part of the Christian Reformed Church in North America. The denomination is Calvinist and evangelical, although NEC has a flavor that reminds me of a "seeker-friendly" Bill Hybels style congregation. In other words, they are soft on preaching the Gospel and instead concentrate on "meeting needs" -- tending toward a warm, pietistic experience of "spiritual formation," rather than boldly calling sinners to salvation and repentance.

On the other hand, NEC is networked with a regional Christian organization called Mission E4 that works solely with evangelical churches. The senior pastor, Chris Mitchell is a graduate of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, which teaches biblical inerrancy and has a Reformed bent. You can hear several of the pastors' sermons on the NEC website if you want to investigate further.

The Brown's also financially support a local Catholic mission called Mt. St. Mary’s Abbey in Wrentham.

Obviously, Scott Brown doesn't wear his faith on his sleeve, but it's also apparent that the family has a commitment to a flavor of Christianity that includes evangelical missions and works of social compassion. Regarding the nude centerfold spread, Cosmopolitan's "sexiest man in America" will get the benefit of the doubt from those of us who also did some stupid things in college.

Brown's family of four have each achieved great personal success. Scott is a real estate lawyer and a champion long-distance runner, bicyclist, and swimmer. He is married to WCVB-TV reporter Gail Huff. They have two daughters, Ayla Brown, an American Idol semi-finalist and star basketball player at Boston College, and Arianna Brown, a competitive equestrian and pre-med student at Syracuse University. The family owns a 3,000-square-foot home in Wrentham, a 2,000-square foot summer home in Rye, New Hampshire, three condos in Boston, and a timeshare in Aruba.

In short, as far as left-wing Massachusetts goes, Scott Brown a political miracle. He's right of center on fiscal issues and a moderate on the so-called social issues. He's far better than anything we could have expected when the deceased Ted Kennedy's seat opened up last August. In this case, we ought to take what we got thankfully.

Frank Schaeffer, will you PLEASE shut up! (part 6)

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 13:47:00 +0000

In a recent blog post, Frank Schaeffer offers a diatribe entitled:

“If America wanted to prosper and compete instead of waiting for Obama to walk on water and fix everything, we would …”

Conservatives will agree with most of the list here. One of the bullet points is:

“Child molesters and rapists would be locked up for life without parole.”

This is what makes Frank Schaeffer so perplexing and infuriating at the same time. Sometimes he makes complete sense. He often stands up for positions that conservative Christians must applaud. I think that many other conservative icons I admire fare about as well when we apply their positions to a rigorous biblical perspective. But here is the difference. Frank often does an about face and contradicts everything he said just weeks before. Each contradiction is yet another example of the existential malaise he celebrates and laments in his writings. Frank is constantly telling “fundamentalists” that they err because they fail to embrace the paradox. The problem is that a “paradox” is a “surface contradiction that reveals a deeper truth when it is examined more closely.” When I examine Frank's contradictions more closely it just makes me more confused as to where he stands. He seems to take any old contradiction and assume there must be an underlying, deeper truth or else he simply denies that truth exists altogether – depending on what week it is.

For example, compare Frank's wise statement above about pedophilia and rape with what he writes a few weeks later:

http://frank-schaeffer.blogspot.com/2009/12/will-rick-warren-go-to-hanging-killing.html

Nothing illustrates the danger we face from our own Taliban better than the way American "Christians" are now tangled up with the homophobic—now potentially gay murdering – Ugandan Christian/political leadership. The Ugandan Parliament is considering a bill that would impose the death penalty on gays.

Note that the Ugandan bill does not call for the death penalty for homosexuals. In fact, the Ugandan bill has since been softened in its call for the death penalty in favor of prison terms. Several well-known American ministries have opposed the UN’s push for special rights for homosexuals in Africa. Other laws are now being considered where the UN has promoted the “gay agenda” in several socially conservative African nations. The bill, which criminalizes homosexual rape, is seen as a backlash against the UN and other such groups seeking to impose social change from the top-down.

Further, the Ugandan bill does not criminalize all homosexual behavior. The bill instead calls for criminal sanctions against those homosexuals who rape and molest young children. It also imposes penalties on known AIDS carriers who engage in homosexual behavior and knowingly infect their victims with a deadly disease.

Now let's compare again Franks’ diatribe against the Ugandan bill to the more recent statement:

“Child molesters and rapists would be locked up for life without parole.”

A contradiction? Yes. But such contradictions don’t bother great minds of renowned “Christian existentialists.” The Ugandan law is all evidence of a hidden world-wide theonomic conspiracy. According to Frank:

Others with ties to violent groups are also striving to turn America into our version of a “Christian” Iran. Reconstructionism, otherwise known as Dominionist Christianity, and the Republican Party are one and the same thing these days….

Rushdoony who [Erik] Prince, [Mike] Huckabee and others follow said the Bible must replace civil laws and constitutions with the Old and New Testaments, including the revival of the death penalty for homosexuality, incest, adultery, losing virginity before marriage and apostasy…. These are core beliefs among several leading figures including Huckabee, Sarah Palin and the inner core of George W Bush’s far right "crusader" religious circle….

George Grant is one of the far right/theocratic mentors. He appeared with Rushdoony in the video, “God’s Law and Society.” Grant was the co-author for Huckabee’s 1998 book, Kids Who Kill: Confronting Our Culture of Violence. That was the book where Huckabee and Grant said homosexuality and pedophilia, sadomasochism and necrophilia were all “institutionally supported aberrations.”

But wait … didn’t Frank just say that pedophilia ought to be criminalized with the sanction of life imprisonment? Again, to this Christian existentialist, “that was so last week!”

R.J. Rushdoony: The Liberals’ “Bogeyman”

In my last post, part 5 of this series, I showed that the charge that Huckabee, Bush, Palin and others are “Dominionists” or “Reconstructionists” is impossible. They simply don’t adhere to any of the major tenets. The insistence that they are nevertheless “secret Rushdoony-ites” shows that Frank Schaeffer either has a huge gap in his understanding of the foundation of Reformed theology (and especially Puritan Covenantal theology) in the Christian Reconstructionist movement, or he is simply lying through his teeth.

The usual ploy of the detractors of theonomy is to emphasize the case laws of the Old Testament that call for capital punishment (as Frank does here) with the idea that these are outmoded, harsh and barbaric. The problem for the Christian making these claims is that this necessarily implies that he believes the God of the Old Testament is outmoded, harsh and barbaric. It puts the detractor in the position of using scriptural truth to attempt to refute scriptural truth. I have always been at a loss to understand how well-intentioned Christians can live with this level of cognitive dissonance. While I myself struggle with the implications of theonomy, I have never been able to accept the arguments against it.

Whenever I see an argument opposing the validity and relevance of biblical law, it has always come off as sounding pagan and anti-Christian. That is why it is of great concern when I see Christians railing against “theonomy,” which is in fact just the idea that the Law of God has abiding validity and relevance in the life of the Christian and the society at large.

Confronting the Detractors of Biblical Law

To be intellectually honest, theonomists should not downplay the specter of capital punishment as described in the Old and New Testament that frightens liberals so much. We need to address this issue head on. A few years back, I wrote a “Frequently Asked Questions on Theonomy” article entitled Theonomy FAQ, in which I dealt with the questions of capital sanctions quite frankly. These questions and answers grew out of numerous debates and discussions I had had on various email discussion groups in the mid- to late-1990s. This dialectical exercise later became the basis for the God’s Law and Society video, which Frank Schaeffer also lambastes, but has probably never seen, although I’ve offered to send him a review copy if he promises to review it. Later I was asked to do an on-line Theonomy Debate sponsored by the Caledonian Fire website.

Theonomy FAQ was written in a few minutes “on-the-fly” although I later revised and expanded it. I don’t consider it to be a definitive or scholarly piece, but more of a polemic. When I posted it on my website back in the 1990s, it quickly got noticed by hundreds of websites – mainly anti-Christian liberal groups – and more importantly by the search engines. Now many years later, if you Google “theonomy,” this is the first web page that comes up (after Wikipedia's entry, that is, the bane of serious researchers!)

Just try it: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=theonomy

Here I want to address what I consider the major points of the theonomic viewpoint. These are important to understand no matter what side of the argument one comes down on.

The Whole Bible is the Law of God

Orthodox Christians don’t believe that the only last one-third of the Bible is the Word of God or that the New Testament causes the Old Testament to become invalid. The Old Testament does need to be interpreted in light of the New, however, so in one sense the revelation of the New Covenant is superior to the Old. Yet this does not make the Old Testament Law invalid or wrong.

In addition, it is important to understand that the Law of God is also revealed in the New Testament. Theonomists are not those who would enforce the Law of Moses in society. A theonomist is one who believes in God’s Law – all the statutes of both the Old and New Testament. We look as well to the numerous case laws and examples of how the Law of God was applied throughout all of scripture.

Covenantal Shift

Jesus himself said, “I have not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it” (Matthew 5:17). However, there has been a “covenantal shift” in the manner in which the Law is fulfilled. For instance, since Jesus died on the cross it is no longer necessary to sacrifice animals for atonement for sin as the Old Covenant required. Since the Gentile nations have been grafted into the covenant people of God, there is no longer any reason to observe the ceremonial law that was in place to distinguish between the clean and the unclean. The law was not abolished in these instances, but fulfilled by Jesus who fulfilled the ceremonial and sacrificial laws in our place.

So when detractors begin to spew this nonsense that theonomists advocate the death penalty for eating lobster or wearing polyester (as Barack Obama once did when he mocked the Old Testament in a campaign speech) we simply need to point them to the book of Hebrews and emphasize that the Law of God includes the filter of the New Covenant.

Now one could apply this principle of “covenantal shift” to the moral law as well and argue that it is no longer necessary to execute those who commit murder, kidnapping, adultery, homosexuality, incest, bestiality and a few other crimes. Whether or not we ought to judge these offenses in the civil sphere under the dispensation of the New Covenant, it is obvious that the moral law has not been rescinded. The just penalty is still the same – death.

In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul lists some of the crimes of the Mosaic law and writes that “those who practice such things deserve death” (Romans 1:32). It is significant too that Paul mentions not only the capital offenses enumerated by Moses, but also lesser sins such as gossip,

So whether or not a court should impose the death penalty on an adulterer or a sodomite, if we accept the New Testament, then we must agree that those who practice such things at the very least deserve death even if we do not impose it by a civil sanction. In other words, a law can be imposed “on the books” to remind us of an eternal truth – that we deserve death every time we disobey even if God is merciful and does not enforce the death penalty through a civil magistrate.

Christians also need to grapple with another logical question that arises from the question of theonomy. If we don’t have God’s Law on the books, then whose law do we have? For instance, if we put man and man’s reason as the all-wise lawgiver, then by what standard do we judge man’s law when it becomes tyrannical. How can we judge a Muslim country that executes “infidels”? How can we judge an atheistic communist nation that seizes land and puts landowners who resist to death? How can we judge a fascist regime that decides that homosexuals, Jews, communists and other” anti-German” minorities can be put to death? How can we judge the nation of Uganda for deciding to execute child molesters?

Frank Schaeffer claims child molesters should be put in prison for life. Christians in Uganda say that death is fitting. Who is right?

Capital sanctions of the Old Testament were rarely enforced

According to the Talmud, which is an ancient Jewish commentary on the law, a death sentence had to be approved unanimously by a panel of 24 judges (or jurors). Death was not a standard penalty, but a maximum one. Further, there had to be “two or more witnesses” in order for case to be heard. In other words, the standards for actually imposing the death penalty were so stringent as to be nearly impossible to achieve in cases when there was no physical evidence. The death penalty for “invisible crimes” – such as sorcery, necromancy, soothsaying, idolatry, and apostasy – was probably rarely if ever imposed. At least there is no record of it in scripture.

In fact, whenever we see a capital case being judged in scripture, we always see a lesser penalty than death imposed. When David was found guilty of adultery, he suffered loss of his rulership, but was not executed. When several of the kings of Israel judged the homosexual temple prostitutes, they did it through banishment, not execution. When the woman caught in adultery was brought to Jesus, the witnesses who sought to try her did not see fit to bring charges against the man as well. As a result, Jesus forgave her and commanded her to “go and sin no more.”

However, we do see God’s sovereign judgment in the book of Acts bringing swift judgment in the form of sudden death against Herod’s idolatry and the false witness of Ananias and Saphira.

We have to take the capital cases in context. Human government is limited in wisdom, scope and power, but God’s government knows no bounds. While it is true that it would be difficult to prove a case of homosexuality “in the closet” without the testimony of two or three witnesses, it is not wrong to remind sex offenders who violate the sanctity of marriage that such behavior is deserving of death, and they could in fact be subject to the sovereign judgment of God himself through some fatal disease or sudden accident. In fact, we see this so often among celebrities whose brazen lifestyles bring them to an untimely end. Sadly, the church rarely speaks of the connection between unrepentant sin and death.

Theonomy is imposed through voluntary self-government

Theonomists believe that all sin is eventually dealt with in some way by God – sometimes through forgiveness provided by Christ’s sacrifice and sometimes through temporal judgments – but we do not believe that all sin must be punished by the civil government. Some sin is dealt with by private institutions, some by churches and some by families. Ultimately we want to see a society where each individual is self-governing under the Law of God. We want the individual to examine himself and to be dealt with directly by the Holy Spirit who is able to lead sinners to repentance. We don’t ever want the civil government to move beyond its role of punishing evil doers described in scripture with specific limits.

In fact, if we followed the Bible, the civil courts would have far less to do than they do today. We create the potential for tyranny whenever we exalt the role of the civil state through man’s law beyond what God's law prescribes.

For instance, everyone agrees that our state and federal prison system is a mess. For years, conservatives and liberals have been calling for the reform of the prison system. If we used the standard of theonomy, we could actually do it. There were no jails or prisons in ancient Israel. Those convicted of non-capital crimes were instead forced to pay double restitution to the victim. Who wants non-violent convicted felons serivng long prison terms at the taxpayers’ expense exposed daily to the example and tutelage of other criminals? Such institutions do little to rehabilitate. But someone who is forced to work to pay for his crime is given the satisfaction of knowing he has satisfied both his victim's restitution and for his own rehabilitation. This is one example of a theonomic reform regarding crime and punishment that most people would agree with if it was ever put on state ballots. It is just one of the numerous examples of how God’s Law is just, merciful and wise all at the same time.

Theonomy is imposed in a covenantal context

Another point that is often overlooked is the voluntary aspect of theonomic community government. God imposed a system of law with potentially fatal consequences on a nation that nevertheless came willingly and embraced the law with all its postive and negative sanctions. In Deuteronomy 28 and 29, Jehovah spoke through Moses all the blessings and curses that came as sanctions on Israel for obeying or disobeying the Law.

While I understand the animosity that non-believers have toward God’s Law, I have always had a difficulty understanding why believers -- who supposedly know Jehovah's goodness, wisdom, mercy and love -- would oppose a civil law system based on God’s Word. Since God knows everything, He certainly knows what is best for us.

Further, we are told in the Bible that if we study the Law and approach it with an attitude of love and submission, then God will bless us. When Israel covenanted with God, they were given also a promise of the blessings they would receive when they kept the Law.

‘If you walk in My statutes and keep My commandments, and perform them, then I will give you rain in its season, the land shall yield its produce, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. Your threshing shall last till the time of vintage, and the vintage shall last till the time of sowing; you shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land safely. I will give peace in the land, and you shall lie down, and none will make you afraid; I will rid the land of evil beasts, and the sword will not go through your land. You will chase your enemies, and they shall fall by the sword before you. Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight; your enemies shall fall by the sword before you. ‘For I will look on you favorably and make you fruitful, multiply you and confirm My covenant with you. You shall eat the old harvest, and clear out the old because of the new. I will set My tabernacle among you, and My soul shall not abhor you. I will walk among you and be your God, and you shall be My people. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that you should not be their slaves; I have broken the bands of your yoke and made you walk upright (Leviticus 26: 3-13).

If we believe that this was the case for Old Covenant Israel, then it is not too big of a stretch to think that New Covenant believers can expect to receive an even greater blessing. In a covenantal context, this is how theonomy works: When we become Christians, we share the Gospel with those around us. Our neighbor might become a Christian. Even our whole neighborhood might become Christian. Even our whole state might become predominantly Christian. Even in fact the whole nation! To take a quote from Frank Schaeffer’s father: “How should we then live? What laws should we then have?”

If we follow the Law prescribed by God himself, then we can expect to have the blessings of God as well. Heathen nations get the law system they deserve, which is man’s law. To the nation of Israel, it was far more attractive to live by God’s law than to live under the yoke of the laws of a pagan nation. Why should we desire to live under laws that are essentially pagan, that not only allow, but encourage and provide subsidies for behaviors that defy God and bring curses on the whole society?

Theonomy is imposed in a postmillennial context

Likewise, theonomists do not expect to impose the whole law of God as it applies to civil sanctions on Americans within the next election cycle. This is the point that fear mongers such as Frank Schaeffer too often miss. True theonomists are necessarily postmillennial in their worldview. That is, we are not expecting the soon return of Jesus Christ in our lifetime. We expect things in our culture to get better and better as we are obedient to God. But this cannot happen overnight. It happens little by little. We don’t seek to seize control of the federal government and impose drastic social change with legal penalties imposed through the courts for non-compliance. That is what liberals do. We believe in peaceful social change that comes voluntarily and progressively over many generations. Although we must self-consciously work for that change to the best of our ability within our own generation, we do that by the pattern of God’s Law-Word -- as individuals, families and local communities progressively come to a better understanding -- not through a top-down imposition of judicial tyranny.

Theonomy is imposed in an eternal context

To so-called “progressive Christians” such as Frank Schaeffer, I ask a simple question. Do you believe there is punishment for sin in the afterlife? Christian orthodoxy teaches that there is an eternal penalty for sin, which is eternal separation from God and all the suffering that hell entails. It is a contradiction to suppose that God imposes a penalty in the afterlife for living a life of disobedience and yet to suppose theonomists are “hateful” or “dangerous” merely because want to stand for God’s moral law and even punish those who disobey.

Currently our political, educational and entertainment culture his teaching an entire generation that living in gross sexual immorality is a normal lifestyle choice. However, the moral law of God codified in civil law and taught through schools and cultural institutions, such as the arts and entertainment, may actually serve to impress on our culture a knowledge of own own sin and in turn lead some toward salvation. In an eternal sense, God’s Law is the "law of love." The Law will serve to lead many to a knowledge of a loving, gracious, merciful and kind God whenever and wherever we properly apply it.

Frank Schaeffer, will you PLEASE shut up! (part 5)

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 23:36:00 +0000

Several months ago, in part 4 of this series, I promised I'd write a part 5 and look at whether Frank Schaeffer ever understood Reformed orthodoxy to begin with.

In a recent blog entry, Frank Schaeffer links R.J. Rushdoony, Rick Warren, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, George Grant and the speakers who appeared in the God's Law and Society video (which was produced by me, by the way) as conspirators who advocate the dismantling of American democracy in favor of a theocracy that would warrant the execution of homosexuals.

Here's the link and a snippet from Frank's blog:

http://frank-schaeffer.blogspot.com/2009/12/will-rick-warren-go-to-hanging-killing.html

Others carried on where Rushdoony left off.

George Grant is one of the far right/theocratic mentors. He appeared with Rushdoony in the video, “God’s Law and Society.” Grant was the co-author for Huckabee’s 1998 book, Kids Who Kill: Confronting Our Culture of Violence. That was the book where Huckabee and Grant said homosexuality and pedophilia, sadomasochism and necrophilia were all “institutionally supported aberrations.”

George Grant wrote The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Principles for Political Action. He called on a “holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ – to have dominion in the civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness.... It is dominion we are after. Not just influence. It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time. It is dominion we are after. World conquest. That’s what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel.”

What is a Christian Reconstructionist?

First, we ought to address the bizarre notion that Huckabee, Warren and Palin are anything close to being followers of R.J. Rushdoony, that is, Christian Reconstructionists. It's a popular tactic of the far left to paint Reconstructionists as the "truly scary ones" and then to weave a theory that places Rushdoony, Francis Schaeffer (Frank's dad) and Cornelius Van Til at the top of a vast right wing conspiracy that includes the Republican Party, all politically active evangelicals, and of course, the Fox News channel.

Frank is taking a page from Jeff Sharlet's playbook, a writer who published an article advancing this conspiracy theory several years ago in an article in Harper's Magazine, "Through a Glass, Darkly: How the Christian Right is Reimagining U.S. History." I critiqued (or rather lampooned) this article here on this blog in an entry called: "That Swiss Hermit Strikes Again." Sharlet has since expanded the article into two books.

Without retreading old ground, I refer you to my review of the article. Here I will only laugh at the naïveté of Sharlet's thesis and quote one of the imprecatory curses of scripture: "The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion" (Proverbs 28:1).

Frank's mantra is to refer to Sharlet's writings and to claim something to the effect of: "Sharlet is right on! I was there and helped found the Christian Right and the Reconstructionist movement. I know all these people and their agenda is exactly what Sharlet describes. Leaders like Warren, Huckabee and Palin won’t admit it, but they are all secret Reconstructionists who would like to execute homosexuals."

I know some of these people too. All I can say is that if Frank Schaeffer was really there at the beginning, he was either:

a. Not paying enough attention.
b. Not intelligent enough to understand the foundation of Reformed theology in Christian Reconstruction.
c. Half understanding; but by now has come to a distorted view due to his self-deceptive years when he resorted to alcoholism, drug abuse and shoplifting (as described in his autobiography).
d. Fully understanding; but is now intentionally distorting the facts and lying.

If I had to guess, I'd be stuck between "c" and "d." It's a clever bait and switch tactic. The Reconstructionist agenda is first caricatured as that of an ugly "hate-group" and then people who could never be mistaken for Reconstructionists on any level are tarred with the "guilt-by-association" brush. Liberals who want to believe this nonsense only have to point to Frank Schaeffer's standing as an expert corroborator.

Just for the record, two of the pillars of Christian Reconstruction as described by some of the real founders of the movement, such as Gary North and R.J. Rushdoony, are Calvinism (Reformed theology) and postmillennialism (victorious eschatology). Warren, Palin and Huckabee are each Arminians and premillennialists. In other words, on two key points, they fall on the opposite end of the spectrum. So they cannot be correctly labelled as Reconstructionists.

The key error of Sharlet and liberals like him is that they understand civil government and social change as being imposed from the top-down. This is the opposite of what Christian Reconstrucion teaches. In fact, this is what they do to enforce social change. Reconstructionists instead believe in law-based liberty and reformation from the bottom-up through redemption and regeneration over a long period of time in history. The best analysis of the factual errors in Sharlet's writings is by Chalcedon's Chris Ortiz, who has also commented on the liaison with Frank Schaeffer. Some of Ortiz's critiques are here, here, here and here.

What is a theonomist?

Second, we need to examine the third pillar of Christian Reconstruction, the one that has liberals most concerned, theonomy.

Here I have to cover some old ground. Theonomy simply means "God's Law." All Calvinists are to a certain extent theonomists because John Calvin taught that one of the uses of God's Law is as a guide for civil law. In other words, we say murder, stealing, and lying under oath are illegal because God's Law says they are illegal. In a broader sense, all Christians, and in fact all people, are theonomists whenever God's Law appeals to them. A true theonomist is simply one who tries to obey God's Law even when he doesn't like it or fully understand it.

One of those caught in the web of conspiracy woven by Frank Schaeffer is George Grant, an orthodox Christian and Calvinist. As a Presbyterian (PCA) pastor, Grant is supposed to hold to the doctrinal standards of the Westminster Confession of Faith. This document teaches the threefold delineation of the Law espoused by Calvin. To anyone who opposes God's Law, or to anyone who opposes Christian orthodoxy in general, Grant is going to appear to embrace an extreme theonomic position even though his view is no more or less than that of historic Reformed theology.

Further, a true theonomist diverges from the likes of Warren, Palin, Huckabee and Schaeffer (both Sr. and Jr.) because we also take seriously the application of the ecclesiastical and civil sanctions of the law. We believe we need to look to the whole Bible as God's Word that addresses every area of life. We see that in many cases the penalty of death is not universally imposed by God on those who committed capital crimes. Mercy is an option both for God and through the ruling of a civil judge. (I'll deal with this idea more in part 6.) However, we see the moral law of God (including the sanctions) as eternal and relevant for today. While we might interpret and apply it differently depending on the context, as Christians we should never be inclined to say that God's Law is evil, barbaric or somehow culturally irrelevant.

To understand the theonomic position espoused by Rushdoony, Ortiz and others is to know that we are not advocating a top-down tyrannical system that seeks to enforce God's Law through capital punishment. The theonomist begins with the idea that the Law brings knowledge of sin, which may then result in the regeneration of the individual by the Holy Spirit in salvation. Then the Christian applies the knowledge of the Law as a useful measure of sanctification in his or her individual life. This extends into the family, church, business, education, civil government and all areas of life. The Law finally gives us a prescription for civil sanctions as it acts as a curb or deterrent to sinful behavior. But the important thing to understand is we must stress regeneration and reformation first. The disciplinary function of the Law is an after effect of spiritual awakening on the societal scale. We do not believe that society can be reformed by executing people we do not agree with. All the sanctions of the Law are to be dispensed with an attitude of mercy and redemption.

But we also stand firm on the inerrancy of scripture. When we see that God in the Old Testament commands the death penalty for violent rape, adultery, acts of homosexuality or bestiality, we must affirm with the Apostle Paul in the New Testament that although the wicked "know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them" (Romans 1:32).

The debate here is not between Frank Schaeffer and the "religious right" or "Christian Reconstructionists." The debate is between Frank Schaeffer and the Lord Jesus, the second Person of the Triune God. All scripture, both the Old and New Testament, is inspired and is the standard for our righteousness in Christ. Yet autonomous man wishes to live in a world in which evil can be accepted as "good" and those who would define sin according the rightful biblical standard are branded as "hate-mongers."

I'll leave the reader with the following comments that were left at Frank Schaeffer's blog by a level-headed Christian:

Yours is simply an untenable position. You claim a system of “hate” so as to draw on the emotions of the readers. However, this emotive type of argument has no bearing upon the truth; it is simply subjective opinion with no foundation or force. God has given His Law, a Law that is an extension of His character and is therefore immutable. Hence, it is still valid to this day and all of those with affection for Christ should attempt to guide the civil magistrate to enact this Law.

We offer love through the God of love. You look for tolerance for your unrighteous actions or the actions of others. We offer an objective ethical system and a God that can both change the individual and save them from their unrighteousness. You ask for special benefits within the church and society. We offer the sure cornerstone of Christ Jesus. You offer the fruits that result in Hell fire.

So Mr. Schaeffer, please either provide for us an exegetical argument that would allow homosexual conduct (an argument that you well know cannot be provided) or simply proclaim that the Law of God is old-fashioned and wrong. The latter of these two propositions is at least honest.

Thoughts on the Manhattan Declaration (Part 2) The Barmen Declaration revisited

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 21:03:00 +0000

Anyone who feels they cannot sign the Manhattan Declaration for reason that it does not go far enough, should not sign it. That being said, I personally think that those who have problems with the language of the document are reading things into it that it does not say. However, my biggest concern is that there are those who would use the controversy as an excuse for inaction. We have been called upon to act on the issue of legalized child-killing again and again and most have continued to slumber. In many ways, we are similar to the German Church in the 1930s who refused to defend the lives of the Jews.

Martin Niemöller was a German U-boat commander in WWI. He later became a Lutheran pastor and used to preach anti-Semitic sermons. He was also virulently anti-Catholic. Later he resisted Hitler and almost lost his life. He used to give speeches in America about the need for civil resistance to tyranny. He would usually end his speeches with one of several variations of the following:

In Germany they first came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.

At the beginning of Hitler's administration in Nazi Germany, there was the Barmen Declaration, or The Theological Declaration of Barmen 1934. It was is a statement of the Confessing Church opposing the Nazi-supported "German-Christian" movement. This was signed by Neo-orthodox Lutheran pastors such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. While I disagree with Barthian theology, I would have signed the Barmen Declaration.

This is the same idea behind the Manhattan Declaration. There is a higher principle at stake here than the admittedly important theological differences that divide us.

If evangelicals do not join with Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and others who do not agree with us, to speak out against encroaching federal tyranny, there may be no one left one day to speak out for us. We must speak out in some form, no matter what our view is on the Manhattan Declaration. We must unite and redouble our efforts to speak out the evil of federal tyranny.

I knew that the Manhattan Declaration was self-consciously patterned after the Barmen Declaration, but I had never read the latter until today. This document was actually written by the neo-orthodox Karl Barth, with whom I have far more serious theological reservations than I do with former Hitlerian and Supreme Roman Pontiff, Herr Joseph Ratzinger. Ironically, I admire both of them on some levels.

Several of the Reformed luminaries, such as Duncan, Sproul, MacArthur, Piper and others, ought to get together and write an amendment to the Manhattan Declaration stating what it says and does not say that is objectionable to the Reformed position (in all the humility that the "Truly Reformed" are able to muster) and state that with these reservations in mind, the core issues of the Manhattan Declaration are agreeable to them.

Or they could write their own declaration. One could literally just rewrite the Barmen Declaration substituting "American Evangelicals" for the Germans.

Theological Declaration of Barmen

Written by Karl Barth and the confessing church in Nazi Germany in response to Hitler’s national church. Its central doctrines concern the sin of idolatry and the lordship of Christ.

I. An Appeal to the Evangelical Congregations and Christians in Germany

8.01 The Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church met in Barmen, May 29-31, 1934. Here representatives from all the German Confessional Churches met with one accord in a confession of the one Lord of the one, holy, apostolic Church. In fidelity to their Confession of Faith, members of Lutheran, Reformed, and United Churches sought a common message for the need and temptation of the Church in our day. With gratitude to God they are convinced that they have been given a common word to utter. It was not their intention to found a new Church or to form a union. For nothing was farther from their minds than the abolition of the confessional status of our Churches. Their intention was, rather, to withstand in faith and unanimity the destruction of the Confession of Faith, and thus of the Evangelical Church in Germany. In opposition to attempts to establish the unity of the German Evangelical Church by means of false doctrine, by the use of force and insincere practices, the Confessional Synod insists that the unity of the Evangelical Churches in Germany can come only from the Word of God in faith through the Holy Spirit. Thus alone is the Church renewed.

8.02 Therefore the Confessional Synod calls upon the congregations to range themselves behind it in prayer, and steadfastly to gather around those pastors and teachers who are loyal to the Confessions.

8.03 Be not deceived by loose talk, as if we meant to oppose the unity of the German nation! Do not listen to the seducers who pervert our intentions, as if we wanted to break up the unity of the German Evangelical Church or to forsake the Confessions of the Fathers!

8.04 Try the spirits whether they are of God! Prove also the words of the Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church to see whether they agree with Holy Scripture and with the Confessions of the Fathers. If you find that we are speaking contrary to Scripture, then do not listen to us! But if you find that we are taking our stand upon Scripture, then let no fear or temptation keep you from treading with us the path of faith and obedience to the Word of God, in order that God’s people be of one mind upon earth and that we in faith experience what he himself has said: “I will never leave you, nor forsake you.” Therefore, “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

II. Theological Declaration Concerning the Present Situation of the German Evangelical Church

8.05 According to the opening words of its constitution of July 11, 1933, the German Evangelical Church is a federation of Confessional Churches that grew our of the Reformation and that enjoy equal rights. The theological basis for the unification of these Churches is laid down in Article 1 and Article 2 of the constitution of the German Evangelical Church that was recognized by the Reich Government on July 14, 1933:

* Article 1. The inviolable foundation of the German Evangelical Church is the gospel of Jesus Christ as it is attested for us in Holy Scripture and brought to light again in the Confessions of the Reformation. The full powers that the Church needs for its mission are hereby determined and limited.

* Article 2. The German Evangelical Church is divided into member Churches (Landeskirchen).

8.06 We, the representatives of Lutheran, Reformed, and United Churches, of free synods, Church assemblies, and parish organizations united in the Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church, declare that we stand together on the ground of the German Evangelical Church as a federation of German Confessional Churches. We are bound together by the confession of the one Lord of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.

8.07 We publicly declare before all evangelical Churches in Germany that what they hold in common in this Confession is grievously imperiled, and with it the unity of the German Evangelical Church. It is threatened by the teaching methods and actions of the ruling Church party of the “German Christians” and of the Church administration carried on by them. These have become more and more apparent during the first year of the existence of the German Evangelical Church. This threat consists in the fact that the theological basis, in which the German Evangelical Church is united, has been continually and systematically thwarted and rendered ineffective by alien principles, on the part of the leaders and spokesmen of the “German Christians” as well as on the part of the Church administration. When these principles are held to be valid, then, according to all the Confessions in force among us, the Church ceases to be the Church and the German Evangelical Church, as a federation of Confessional Churches, becomes intrinsically impossible.

8.08 As members of Lutheran, Reformed, and United Churches we may and must speak with one voice in this matter today. Precisely because we want to be and to remain faithful to our various Confessions, we may not keep silent, since we believe that we have been given a common message to utter in a time of common need and temptation. We commend to God what this may mean for the interrelations of the Confessional Churches.

8.09 In view of the errors of the “German Christians” of the present Reich Church government which are devastating the Church and also therefore breaking up the unity of the German Evangelical Church, we confess the following evangelical truths:

8.10 “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.” (John 14.6). “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door, but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber. . . . I am the door; if anyone enters by me, he will be saved.” (John 10:1, 9.)

8.11 Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.

8.12 We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.

8.13 “Christ Jesus, whom God has made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption.” (1 Cor. 1:30.)

8.14 As Jesus Christ is God’s assurance of the forgiveness of all our sins, so, in the same way and with the same seriousness he is also God’s mighty claim upon our whole life. Through him befalls us a joyful deliverance from the godless fetters of this world for a free, grateful service to his creatures.

8.15 We reject the false doctrine, as though there were areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other lords –- areas in which we would not need justification and sanctification through him.

8.16 “Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body [is] joined and knit together.” (Eph. 4:15,16.)

8.17 The Christian Church is the congregation of the brethren in which Jesus Christ acts presently as the Lord in Word and sacrament through the Holy Spirit. As the Church of pardoned sinners, it has to testify in the midst of a sinful world, with its faith as with its obedience, with its message as with its order, that it is solely his property, and that it lives and wants to live solely from his comfort and from his direction in the expectation of his appearance.

8.18 We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church were permitted to abandon the form of its message and order to its own pleasure or to changes in prevailing ideological and political convictions.

8.19 “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant.” (Matt. 20:25,26.)

8.20 The various offices in the Church do not establish a dominion of some over the others; on the contrary, they are for the exercise of the ministry entrusted to and enjoined upon the whole congregation.

8.21 We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church, apart from this ministry, could and were permitted to give itself, or allow to be given to it, special leaders vested with ruling powers.

8.22 “Fear God. Honor the emperor.” (1 Peter 2:17.) Scripture tells us that, in the as yet unredeemed world in which the Church also exists, the State has by divine appointment the task of providing for justice and peace. [It fulfills this task] by means of the threat and exercise of force, according to the measure of human judgment and human ability. The Church acknowledges the benefit of this divine appointment in gratitude and reverence before him. It calls to mind the Kingdom of God, God’s commandment and righteousness, and thereby the responsibility both of rulers and of the ruled. It trusts and obeys the power of the Word by which God upholds all things.

8.23 We reject the false doctrine, as though the State, over and beyond its special commission, should and could become the single and totalitarian order of human life, thus fulfilling the Church’s vocation as well.

8.24 We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church, over and beyond its special commission, should and could appropriate the characteristics, the tasks, and the dignity of the State, thus itself becoming an organ of the State.

8.25 “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” (Matt. 28:20.) “The word of God is not fettered.” (2 Tim. 2:9.)

8.26 The Church’s commission, upon which its freedom is founded, consists in delivering the message of th free grace of God to all people in Christ’s stead, and therefore in the ministry of his own Word and work through sermon and sacrament.

8.27 We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church in human arrogance could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans.

8.28 The Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church declares that it sees in the acknowledgment of these truths and in the rejection of these errors the indispensable theological basis of the German Evangelical Church as a federation of Confessional Churches. It invites all who are able to accept its declaration to be mindful of these theological principles in their decisions in Church politics. It entreats all whom it concerns to return to the unity of faith, love, and hope.

Using Luke's Time Markers - "What time of the year was Jesus born?"

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:06:00 +0000

Someone responded to my previous post on another forum: Why is Christmas celebrated on December 25th?

Q:-- "The Bible shows that Jesus was 33-1/2 years old when he was crucified in the early spring of the year 33 C.E., at the time of the Jewish Passover. This means, counting backward, that he was born in the early fall of the year."

A:-- If you are referring to Daniel 9:25, your method to discover when Jesus began his ministry is sound. However, it seems that you are combining this idea with the fact that Jewish rabbis did not begin their public ministry until age 30. It doesn't follow that Jesus began his ministry exactly on his 30th birthday.

"Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times" (Daniel 9:25).

From the going forth of the commandment — From the 20th year of King Artaxerxes, in 457 BC, when by his commandment Nehemiah rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem (Nehemiah 2).

Seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks — From the time of 457 BC, according to the best chronology, there were just 69 weeks of years (483 years) to the baptism of Jesus Christ, in AD 27, when he first began to preach and execute the office of the Messiah.

Then Daniel 9:27 says: "And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate."

In the midst of the week, or, in the middle of the week. Christ preached from 27 to 30 AD, to the middle of the 70th week of years, and then by His sacrifice on the cross abolished all the sacrifices of the law.

This does not mean that Jesus was exactly 33-1/2 years old when He was crucified. The anchor date is not Jesus' birthday, but rather Artaxerxes' order to begin the work on the Temple, which was probably counted from the Jewish New Year in September of 457 BC.

In actuality, Jesus' public ministry lasted less than three years, from fall of 27 to the spring of 30 encompasing the three Passovers mentioned in the Gospels in the years 28, 29 and 30 AD. In the Jewish reckoning of years, two years and part of another year are counted as three years. The crucifixion occurred the middle of the 70th week of years, but this does not indicate exactly 3-1/2 years.

However, we can use Luke's time markers to determine the year when Jesus began his ministry. Then we may reconcile that with the date of Jesus' birth and a date given in Daniel 9:25 -- the Jewish New Year in the fall of 27 AD.

Both Matthew and Luke agree that Herod was governor of Judea when Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Since Luke is consistent with Matthew on this marker in the chronology, a birth date earlier than the spring of 4 BC, when Herod died, is necessary. Luke also has some other markers that would preclude any later date as being Jesus' birthday.

"... in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar; Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea; Herod being tetrarch of Galilee; his brother Phillip the tetrarch of Iturea and the region of Trachonitis; and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene (Luke 3:1)."

"And Jesus himself, when he began to teach, was about thirty years of age ..." (Luke 3:23).

John the Baptist begins to preach "in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar" Jesus is seen as entering the ministry when he was "about thirty years of age." If Jesus was born in late 5 BC or early 4 BC, then he would have been about 30 years of age anytime after December or January of 26/27 AD.

A Jewish man customarily would not become a rabbi until after age 30, so Jesus’ ministry probably lasted from the fall of 27 to the Passover in 30 AD, a period covering the three Passovers mentioned in the Gospels and "the middle of the week" of years mentioned in Daniel. A 30th birthday in late 26 AD would put Jesus' birth in late 5 BC at least several months prior to Herod's death in 4 BC. (Remember when going from BC to AD not to count the year zero.)

When is "the fifteenth year of Tiberias Caesar"?

According to Luke's reckoning, the fifteenth year of Tiberias Caesar is about 27 AD. This is when Luke writes that John the Baptist began to preach. If John’s 30th birthday was in the summer of 26, Jesus' 30th birthday would be six months later in the late fall or early winter of 26/27.

Tiberius’ reign began on August 19, AD 14. Luke may have been using any of several methods to define the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar. If we use simple addition (14 plus 15) we end up at 29 AD. But this does not fit the chronology. What then is "the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar"?

In eastern provinces [of the Roman empire] ... years were reckoned from the accession of the reigning emperor, the second beginning on the first New Years day after the accession, and the date on which this occurred varied from one province to another (Encyclopedia Britannica).

If Tiberias was installed before the New Year, which occurred in the late summer in the eastern provinces, it is likely that Luke and his audience of Greek speaking Christians counted the accession year twice. The year 14 AD in our modern reckoning, contained Tiberias' first and second year. The fall of 15 AD was his third year, and so on until the fall of 27 AD, which was his 15th year.

Another way of reckoning the beginning of Tiberias' reign is to predate to 13 AD, the year when Tiberias became "co-princeps" with Augustus, a common arrangement among the Emperors. At this time, the powers held by Tiberius were made equal, rather than second, to Augustus's own powers. In the event of the Emperor's passing the latter would simply continue to rule without any political upheaval. In this case, according to our modern reckoning of years, Tiberias' "fifteenth year" would have been in the fall of 26 AD.

Either one of these two reckonings fits Luke's account. Since both John and Jesus were both 30 years old by 26 AD, they could have entered the ministry anytime from late 26 to late 27. This squares with the other dates offered by Luke.

Pontius Pilate had his rulership over Judea from 26 to 36 AD.
Caiaphas was high priest during the same period, 26 to 35 AD.
Herod Phillip II, tetarch of Ituraea and Trachonitis was born in 4 BC and died in 34 AD.
Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea, was born in 20 BC and died in 40 AD.
Lysanias, tetrarch of Abilene, ruled the province between c.14 to 29 AD.

When Luke numbers the year of Tiberias’ reign as 15 and gives the names of several other rulers, he indicates a time window of about three years for the beginning of Jesus ministry – no earlier than 26 and no later than 29 AD. Having decided on this, it becomes fairly certain that Jesus began His public ministry sometime between late 26 AD to early 28 AD.

How long did John preach?

One problem with placing "the 15th year of Tiberias Caesar" in the fall of 27 AD is that it does not seem to give John enough time to "prepare the way" for Jesus. Many assume John must have preached for several months or even several years prior to Jesus' baptism. Most agree John was arrested a short time after that. In John 5:35, Jesus said, "He was the burning and shining lamp, and you were willing for a time to rejoice in his light." It's interesting to note that the Greek word here is hora. It means literally an "hour," but is translated "season," "time," and "a while." The sense here is that John's ministry was sensational and brief.

It's also possible to interpret Luke 2:1,2: "Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar ... the word of God came to John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness" as meaning that John had already been preaching in the wilderness for a time prior to giving the prophecy about the coming of Jesus. If John's 30th birthday was on June 24th, 26 AD, this gives a window of 18 months prior to this time Jesus appears. However, the sense of John 5:35 is that the Forerunner's ministry may have lasted only a short time, perhaps two or three months prior to Jesus' ministry and continued after Jesus baptism for a small overlapping period of two or three months until his arrest.

A Brief Chronology

For the purpose of this chronology, the beginning of Jesus public ministry is the Jewish New Year, September 20th, 27 AD, which also happens to be the beginning of the last Jubilee year on the Hebrew calendar prior to the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem in 70 AD. This is still several months prior to Jesus' 31st birthday. I want to here stress again that I am not dogmatic about the traditional date of Jesus birth being December 25th. In fact, Luke's time markers give a leeway with a window of about 12 to 18 months for most of these dates if we try to reconcile them with the modern calendar.

September 24th, 6 BC -- John the Baptist conceived
March 25th, 5 BC -- The Annunciation of Jesus
June 24th, 5 BC -- John the Baptist born
December 25th, 5 BC -- Jesus born in Bethlehem
April 5th, 9 AD -- Jesus found in the Temple in Jerusalem
Winter/Spring 26 AD -- Pontius Pilate military governor of Judea
June 24th, 26 AD -- John the Baptist is 30
December 25th, 26 BC -- Jesus is 30 years old
Summer/Fall 27 AD -- "15th year of Tiberius Caesar"
Summer/Fall 27 AD -- John the Baptist begins preaching
Summer/Fall 27 AD -- Wedding feast at Cana
September 20th, 27 AD -- Jubilee Year commences
September 20th, 27 AD -- Jesus "about 30 years of age" is baptized by John
Fall 27 AD - 40 day fast; Jesus begins public ministry
April 7, 30 AD -- Jesus is crucified

The Pilgrim Fathers and the Practice of Human Sacrifice Among the Wampanoag Tribe

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 04:52:00 +0000

Paul Jehle talks about human sacrifice in Plymouth colony in the 1600s.

The following legend is taken from the Scott Corbett's book, Cape Cod's Way: An Informal History of Cape Cod (New York: Thomas Crowell 1955). The information can still be found in the Plymouth archives.

Once upon a time the old village of Monument nestled under the side of a hill near the Manomet River. That hamlet has now become the village of Bourne, and the canal has swallowed up the river as part of its route. The feeling of altitude, unusual on the Cape, remains, and somehow on a black night the spot reminds me of the Catskills in one of their pleasantly spooky moods. The village of Bourne is still a place where, on a murky, whispering evening, it is easy ... to imagine what the frightful scene must have been like the night Richard Bourne called down the wrath of God on the Indians to stop their barbarous human sacrifices.

It was during this time [mid-1600s] that Richard Bourne was doing his good work among the Indians. His efforts met with great success, but apparently he had to cure the heathens of a few bad habits first. The legend of Richard Bourne and the Indian sacrifices involves a large rock north of the Bourne fire tower which was once called Sacrifice Rock, and later Chamber Rock. Tradition says it was here that the Indians offered sacrifices, sometimes human.

On one occasion Bourne chanced upon the scene in the midst of a ritual of torture and death, and gave them a horrified warning to stop. When they would not, he called the wrath of God down upon them. A bolt of lightning instantly split the rock, killing an impressive number of Indians. After a home demonstration of that magnitude, the survivors must have been ready for speedy conversion to Christianity. At any rate, the first meetinghouse built for Indians in Plymouth County stood at the base of Indian Burial Hill in Bournedale and was well attended. Thomas Tupper, one of the "ten men of Saugus" who settled Sandwich, had charge of the meetinghouse. In 1696 he was preaching to one hundred and eighty Indians there.

NOTES:

Reverend Richard Bourne was born in 1610 in Barnstable, County Devonshire, England and died on September 18th, 1682 in Sandwich, Massachusetts. He came to Plymouth Mass about 1635. His ancestry traces back to Sir John Bourne, Secretary of State to Queen Mary (1553-1558). Richard, aged 24, left England, coming by way of St. Kitts & Barbados, arriving in America January 1st, 1635. He stayed with his brother Henry in Scituate Mass. Richard was one of the earliest settlers of Shawmee, Mass, later incorporated in 1637 as Sandwich, Mass. (Part of Sandwich became Bourne, Mass. in 1884.)

Richard Bourne had many interests but his work with the Indians is probably the most outstanding. The continued peace with the Indians was due more to his efforts than to the military forces. He learned the Indian language and began his work about 1658. He was ordained pastor of the Indian Church at Mashpee in 1670. Richard purchased at his own expense 16 square miles as a permanent home for the Mashpee Indians. He translated the Lords Prayer into the Indian language -- copies are available at the Aptucxet Trading Post near Bourne. In 1919 Indians were still living on the land given them by Richard.

Thomas Tupper II was born at Sandwich, Mass., in 1638 and died in 1706. He became a freeman at the age of 20. He served on a jury in 1664, was an Exciseman in 1677 and Town Constable in 1669. He was a Selectman for 14 years, Town Clerk for 10 years, Deputy to General Court at Plymouth for 11 years. A Representative to the Court of Boston and in 1680 was appointed Lieutenant of the Military Company in Sandwich, becoming Captain in 1690. He had strong religious convictions and for many years was a Missionary among the Indians.

Thoughts on The Manhattan Declaration (Part 1) What is "the Church"?

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:58:00 +0000

If you are familiar with the Manhattan Declaration, you may also be familiar with some of the controversies surrounding it. I want to give my brief thoughts to people who are troubled by the controversy or have doubts about the great good that such a document can do.

First, let me state that no document except the Bible, and perhaps statements that directly quote or paraphrase the Bible, is perfect. There are problems with the Manhattan Declaration in that not all the language is clear enough. Yet I signed it wholeheartedly and encourage others to do so.

Some evangelical and Reformed Protestants have chosen not to sign it disagreeing with its definition that Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox are Christians and these bodies are true churches. The pastor of my church, Dr. R.C. Sproul, has written a nice piece on this called: The Manhattan Declaration: Why didn’t you sign it, R.C.? His argument and many of his points are valid. However, I disagree with the premise that signing the Manhattan Declaration signifies that one agrees with the Roman Catholic Church on its definition of the Gospel of salvation.

The Manhattan Declaration mentions "the church" a total of five times. Each time it refers to the church of the New Testament or the patristic and historic church of earlier centuries. Nowhere does it define "the church" as a particular body -- Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic or Evangelical Protestant. Nowhere does the document say that the signer is agreeing with a particular church doctrine. How could it? If Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox sign, then do their signatures imply they reject the teaching of their own churches in favor of Luther's confession or the five points of Calvinism? Of course not!

The Manhattan Declaration does recognize that there are Christians among all these groups and we must work alongside of each other to resist the federal tyranny that is becoming a threat to the sanctity of life, marriage, the family and religious freedom.

Here we must agree. Evangelical Christians who are involved in pro-life activism, for instance, are working alongside many Roman Catholics who dominate the movement. Sadly, Protestants were missing in action when Roe v. Wade was decided. This point is moot. We can try to separate ourselves from the Roman Catholic pro-life movement, but it is simply a reality that we Protestants responded many years too late.

R.C. Sproul writes:

While I would march with the bishop of Rome and an Orthodox prelate to resist the slaughter of innocents in the womb, I could never ground that cobeligerency on the assumption that we share a common faith and a unified understanding of the gospel.

In a similar article, R.C. Sproul, Jr. makes a similar statement saying he would march with a "Muslim" in an attempt to stop legalized child killing.

I agree. It is ironic that someone would state in a position paper that he would march with Catholics, but refuses to sign a document stating the same thing!

Of course, I disagree with their premise. The Manhattan Declaration does not make any statement saying that Protestants share a unified understanding of the Gospel with Roman Catholics. In fact, it says the opposite:

While fully acknowledging the imperfections and shortcomings of Christian institutions and communities in all ages ...

... we sign as individuals, not on behalf of our organizations, but speaking to and from our communities.

We are Christians who have joined together across historic lines of ecclesial differences ...

In short, it recognizes that the "church" as defined here is imperfect; that the signers are not bound to be in unity with anyone other than their own communities; and that the bodies represented have marked differences. It states that we may disagree, but still be united in a pro-active front against societal evil.

That being said, if pro-life, pro-family and pro-liberty activists have a problem with signing the document, then I support them in their decision. My problem is not with those such as Dr. Sproul who refuse to sign who nevertheless are valiantly fighting for truth, but with those arm-chair theologians who refuse to sign and yet do little or nothing to resist evil.

Further, I would love to see R.C. Sproul, Alistair Begg, Michael Horton, John MacArthur, John Piper and other Reformed luminaries revise the Manhattan Declaration to their liking and call Reformed Christians to the militant stance against evil that the Gospel commands. I would like to have seen this happen many years ago. In fact, I have tried to promote this idea for over 15 years. See some of my thinking on this here and here.

We Protestants as a larger group in America ought to dominate the pro-life movement with greater numbers and greater fervency than the Roman Catholics. Sadly, we do not.

Likewise, we ought to have far many more hospitals, grade schools and community charities. Sadly, we do not.

And since we do not excel the Roman Catholics in one of the most basic commandments of the Lord Jesus, "love your neighbor as yourself," we ought to ask ourselves:

What is "the Church"? What is "the Gospel"?

In Acts 15:1-21, the Apostles agreed to reduce the standard for orthodox soteriology to the following: "We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are."

I decided a long time ago that I can't peer into everyone's heart and decide who is truly born-again and who is not. I also can't decide who God accepts as a "true church." At least I can't decide this according to my own standards. It's a good thing for me that this was all settled in the first 300 years of Christian history.

According to the church fathers, a true believer and a true church is one that holds to the Apostles and Nicene Creeds and one that accepts the definition of the Trinity as stated in the Athanasian Creed. A true church enforces discipline by teaching their members to repent from sin and is involved in active evangelism and works of mercy. In addition, a church must affirm salvation by grace alone as stated in Acts 15:11.

But here is a point many people miss. It is possible to be saved by grace alone and not fully understand the implications of that. Roman Catholics may be born-again and they are therefore saved by grace alone. However, they probably do not fully understand the doctrines of grace. Likewise, Protestants who don't accept the doctrines of sovereign grace (unconditional election, limited atonement and irresistible grace) don't fully understand their salvation. Further, the modern evangelical movement is riddled with a postmodernist form of pietism or primitivism that eschews doctrine altogether. These are "Protestants in name only" whose doctrine would hardly be recognizable to Christians of past centuries. Eastern Orthodox soteriology denies original sin and the substitutionary atonement, but agrees with salvation by grace alone. Some Calvinists view these Primitivist, Arminian, Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic views on soteriology as "another Gospel."

How should we evaluate them?

Simply put: "We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are."

In other words, when we speak of Christians in these bodies, we are speaking of those saved by grace, just as we are. There is only one body and only one Gospel.

However, one can never be too narrow for some people's liking. I can point you to entire blogs and vlogs on the internet that question whether R.C. Sproul is preaching the Gospel based on the fact that he understands the theology of Thomas Aquinas as approximating Reformed theology. Ironically, Sproul, who frequently and affectionately boasts of his admiration of "Thomas," says his heart sank when he saw his Protestant friends’ names on the Manhattan Declaration. Thankfully, he condescends to agree not to break fellowship with the signers "at this time" preferring to believe they were simply misled. Dr. Sproul holds out hope they will withdraw their signatures.

The pitfall we must avoid is narrower and narrower thinking until we are straight-jacketed into a position where there are virtually no Christians left. So we can easily fall into the trap of thinking that only we or only our church understands the Gospel correctly. A few years ago, I heard R.J. Rushdoony answer someone who asked the question:

What should be the limits on how much the Reformed will cooperate with other groups who don't preach the Gospel or preach another Gospel? Are we to view Arminians, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox as Christians and should we cooperate with them in attempts toward social reform?

I loved his answer:

When we are Christians, to the extent to any degree we are faithful to the Gospel, we are bigger than ourselves. And that is why whether they are Arminian, Roman Catholic, or Calvinist, people who are truly serving the Lord are bigger than their own thinking, bigger than their own faith. We transcend ourselves. And that is the glory of the Gospel. It enables us to do more than we can do. It is the grace of God working through us. It is not that we teach different Gospels; we are trying to teach the same Gospel even though at times our emphasis will be a warped one, a limited one, a partial one. All the same, God can use it.

I don't view R.C. Sproul and John McArthur as "preaching the Gospel," while Arminians, Pietists, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox are "not preaching the Gospel." These other groups are preaching a limited Gospel riddled with several key misunderstandings. While Reformed doctrine formed the foundation of Protestantism in the 1500s, the evangelical movement prior to that time and up until today has not shared all of its distinctives. Do we say that unless one is fully Protestant (à la the doctrines of Luther, Calvin and Knox) then one is not a Christian or a true Church?

"No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are."

To disagree with Acts 15:11 and make an additional requirement of deep fidelity to Reformed doctrine is to automatically exclude well over 90 percent of all professing Christians in history. If a church publicly reads and expounds on scripture, it is preaching the Gospel. Even with a warped interpretation, people who hear the Word of God can be saved due to the dynamic nature of the inspired scriptures.

On an individual level, we can know a tree by its fruit. A person who lives a Godly life, who affirms they are saved by Christ's eternal sacrifice, and affirms the basic tenets of the Gospel as formulated in the ecumenical creeds we ought to accept as a Christian despite their church affiliation.

In part 2, I will examine the objections of those who are opposed to the Manhattan Declaration because it is not "pro-life enough."

A Nativity Timeline (part 2)

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:51:00 +0000

Countering the "Impossible Movements" Argument

The visitation of the shepherds at Jesus birth on December 25th, 5 BC speaks of a rural environment (Luke 2:8-20). The scene is a small village of no more than 100 buildings. The next events that occurred were the circumcision of Jesus eight days later on January 2nd, 4 BC and the presentation of Jesus in the Temple 41 days later on February 2nd.

And when eight days were completed for the circumcision of the Child, His name was called JESUS, the name given by the angel before He was conceived in the womb. Now when the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were completed, they brought Him to Jerusalem to present Him to the Lord (as it is written in the law of the Lord, “Every male who opens the womb shall be called holy to the LORD”), and to offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the law of the Lord, “A pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons” (Luke 2:21-24).

Note that rhere are three significant time gaps in Luke's record in chapter 2.

Time Gap #1

Although verses 21 and 22 appear to speak of the same event, there is over a month separating the two. According to the law of Moses, a woman is unclean for seven days after the birth of a male child. On the eighth day the child is circumcised and the mother continues her purification for thirty-three additional days, or forty days total. On the forty-first day the child is to be presented at the Temple with a sin offering.

Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the children of Israel, saying: ‘If a woman has conceived, and borne a male child, then she shall be unclean seven days; as in the days of her customary impurity she shall be unclean. And on the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised. She shall then continue in the blood of her purification thirty-three days. She shall not touch any hallowed thing, nor come into the sanctuary until the days of her purification are fulfilled’” (Leviticus 12:1-4).

Did Joseph and Mary travel back to Nazareth after the birth of Jesus only to return 33 days later? During Mary's 40 days of ceremonial uncleanness, this would not have been likely. They would have stayed in Bethlehem. At this point, King Herod was not aware of the birth of a "King of the Jews" in Bethlehem. However, there were messianic prophecies given about Jesus in the Temple by Anna and Simeon (Luke 2:25-38). This occurred in a public setting and it is likely that the news of the birth of the messiah quickly spread. This was just a part of a larger atmosphere of expectation among the Jews that resulted in several messianic insurrections against King Herod and the Roman occupation of Judea during these early months of 4 BC, which are also recounted by the Jewish historian Josephus.

Time Gap #2

Then Luke has his second gap in the chronology. This time it is several months. If we read Luke's account in isolation from Matthew, it is easy to get the impression that the family returned immediately to Nazareth.

So when they had performed all things according to the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own city, Nazareth. And the Child grew and became strong in spirit, filled with wisdom; and the grace of God was upon Him. (Luke 2:39,40).

At this point, the Bible cynics see a contradiction in the accounts. The Gospel of Matthew has the family returning to Nazareth after the death of Herod. But nowhere does Luke say that the family returned immediately to Nazareth.

Time Gap #3

The structure of this passage has yet another gap right after this with an account unique to Luke's Gospel. Jesus is found after the Passover Feast in the Temple at age 12 (vv. 41-51). This would have been in 9 AD. Luke is not attempting to give a strict chronology of each event, but is concerned that his audience understands that the events he describes at Jesus' birth occurred in accordance with the Law of Moses.

It may seem odd to modern readers to see Luke overly concerned that his mainly Gentile audience understand the nuances of Hebrew Law. However, Luke also understands the skepticism of the Greek mindset and culture, which incidently is similar to our skeptical culture of today. He understands that this is an audience who would want to hear from one who had investigated carefully in order to have "perfect understanding of all things from the very first ... that you may know the certainty of those things" (Luke 1:3).

Luke therefore wanted his audience to believe and understand his account, not only because he had spoken to eyewitnesses, but also because Joseph and Mary were required to do these things in fulfillment of the Hebrew Law. Not only did Joseph and Mary do these things, but they absolutely must have done them. If we will investigate the Law further, we will see that Luke's account is true.

According to the Law, a man could not work for an entire year after marriage. Jewish men were usually 30 years old by the time they had saved enough money to pay for this sabbatical. Understanding this, it becomes clear that after the marriage of Joseph and Mary in the summer of 5 BC, Joseph probably planned to spend six months to a year in Bethlehem, where both he and Mary likely had relatives. They would have used the savings to enjoy their first year of marriage among family and friends. They would have participated in the required feasts and returned home after Pentecost had they not been interrupted by a visit from several "wise men from the East." In short, Joseph is on a one-year sabbatical and Passover is little more than two months away. Therefore, we can conclude that their stay in Bethlehem continued until the visit from the wise men or "magi." This is borne out by Matthew 2:11.

And when they had come into the house, they saw the young Child with Mary His mother, and fell down and worshiped Him. And when they had opened their treasures, they presented gifts to Him: gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Contrary to popular conception, this event took place several months after Jesus was born. Note that the passage says the wise men, or magi, came to a "house" and not a "manger." Luke and Matthew are relating different events taking place several months apart.

If we were to pinpoint the exact date of the magi visitation, two astronomical events occurring in the winter and spring of 4 BC are notable. The first is a partial lunar eclipse that Joseph records in connection with Herod's slaughter of some Jewish rebels who were burned alive.

But Herod deprived this Matthias of the high priesthood, and burnt the other Matthias, who had raised the sedition, with his companions, alive. And that very night there was an eclipse of the moon (Antiquities 17:6:4).

This is the only eclipse of the moon or sun recorded in all of Josephus' writings. It is extremely useful because Josephus writes that the eclipse occurred shortly before Passover and Herod dies shortly after this time. It is also implied that this was a bad omen for Herod since his death occurs in the next chapter. In Hebrew cosmology, a comet, an eclipse of the sun or moon, falling of the stars from heaven, or the appearance of a new star in the heavens symbolizes the overthrow of a king or a kingdom. The partial lunar eclipse that preceded Herod's death is thought to be the one that occurred on March 13th, 4 BC.

The "star" (Greek: aster) the magi saw was almost certainly not the lunar eclipse. However, ancient Chinese astronomers recorded that a supernova occurred later that month on March 25th. Some have suggested that this was the star seen by the magi. There are many different hypotheses about the "Star of Bethlehem" so named because according to Matthew 2:9:

... the star which they had seen in the East went before them, till it came and stood over where the young Child was.

This movement to stand directly over the place where Jesus was seems to denote a supernatural element. I personally don't think the Star of Bethlehem was a supernova, planetary conjunction or a comet. Those explanations satisfy the naturalistic investigator, but they violate the intent of the author, which is to point to a supernatural miracle. In any case, people will continue to speculate about this for years to come.

Matthew, unlike Luke, is writing to a Jewish audience. His primary concern is that they understand that Jesus' birth is a miraculous event and that it fulfills several messianic prophecies from the Law, Prophets and Writings -- or the Tanakh.

At some point after the magi arrived in Bethlehem, Joseph was warned in a dream to escape to Egypt. It is likely that this refers to the Sinai desert. It's possible that the family stayed again in tents camping out once again for a few weeks or a month until the death of Herod.

Now when Herod was dead, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, “Arise, take the young Child and His mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the young Child’s life are dead.” Then he arose, took the young Child and His mother, and came into the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea instead of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. And being warned by God in a dream, he turned aside into the region of Galilee. And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, “He shall be called a Nazarene” (Matthew 2:19-23).

This was probably in the summer of 4 BC at which time Joseph resumed work after his one year Sabbatical.

A Nativity Timeline

Here is the timeline for the nativity based on the historical data above:

Fall 6 BC -- John the Baptist is conceived a few days after the Day of Atonement.

Spring 5 BC -- Jesus is conceived six months later in Nazareth.

Spring to Summer of 5 BC -- Mary, newly pregnant with Jesus, travels to the hill country of Judea to visit Elizabeth who is six months pregnant, and stays with her for three months.

Summer 5 BC -- John the Baptist is born.

Summer 5 BC -- Mary leaves Elizabeth and goes back to Nazareth.

Summer 5 BC -- Mary is in Nazareth for at least two months; Joseph is told in a dream about Jesus and marries her.

September 10-29, 5 BC -- Joseph and Mary are in Jerusalem for the autumn feasts -- the Feast of Tabernacles and the Day of Atonement -- a requirement for all Jews.

Fall 5 BC -- According to Josephus, various tumults against Herod occur among the sect of the Pharisees; the census for Augustus’ upcoming Silver Jubilee begins; over 6000 Pharisees refuse to swear the oath of allegiance to Augustus; insurrections against Herod continue into the spring of 4 BC.

Joseph and Mary go to Bethlehem to register in the census as required by law.

Late 5 or early 4 BC -- Jesus is born in Bethlehem in a "manger."

Early 5 BC -- Jesus is presented in the Temple at Jerusalem 41 days after his birth as required by the Law of Moses.

Joseph, Mary and Jesus return to Bethlehem this time staying at a "house."

Herod hears the news of the birth of the messiah from the Magi.

The visitation of the Magi in Bethlehem.

Joseph, Mary and Jesus escape to Egypt.

The Massacre of the Innocents.

Spring 4 BC -- Herod dies.

Quintilius Varus of Syria takes over the jurisdiction of Judea.

He quells an uprising around the time of the feast of Pentecost crucifying 2000 Jews in the process.

Quintilius Varus’ jurisdiction over Syria ends in 4 BC when he is recalled to Rome.

Herod Archaelus takes rulership of Judea.

Quirinius remains in the east as a military governor over Galatia, Cilicia, Syria.

Joseph, Mary and Jesus return to Nazareth.

Fall 3 BC -- Men in Spain, Paphlagonia, Armenia and other regions are required to swear an oath of allegiance to Augustus.

Former governors of Syria, Saturnius and Varus, are in Rome for the Jubilee in 3 BC.

February 5th, 2 BC -- The Silver Jubilee ceremony honoring Augustus Caesar's 25th year in office.

Thus the oath of allegiance is completed during the administration of Quirinius as Luke writes:

This first registration took place while Quirinius was governing Syria (Luke 2:2).

Some skeptics doubt that Quirinius could have been a governor of Syria around the time of Jesus birth. There is the need to explain who was governing Syria during Augustus' Jubilee since no historian except Luke records this. We know only that Qurinius was a military governor in Cilicia, the province next to Syria. Varus handled the Jewish revolt poorly. This makes it plausible that Quirinius assumed military jurisdiction of Syria as the only capable commander in the region after Varus was recalled to Rome.

We should also note that Luke does not write specifically that Jesus was born when Quirinius was governing Syria, but merely that the registration took place then. If the registration ended in 4 BC, then Luke may have chosen Quirinius over Varus as a time marker. Luke's primary audience in Asia Minor would have known Quirinius as a famous military hero who put down revolts in the eastern provinces of Asia Minor in Cilicia, a region on the border of Syria. Varus was a comparitively minor figure among the Greeks of Asia Minor and therefore Luke chose not to mention him.

Logical Fallacies of the Cynics and Skeptics

The difference between a skeptic and a cynic is the ability to consider plausible answers to questions critically. A skeptic eventually draws conclusions with proofs based on likelihood and plausibility. However, a cynic continues to question all likelihood and plausibility attacking every case that can be made. All people, including Christians, ought to look at popular Bible interpretations critically and skeptically. But we should not fall prey to unyielding cynicism. As Oscar Wilde once wrote, "A cynic is one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."

The easiest short cut to becoming known as an intellectual is to question everything and appear to be an iconoclast. The problem is that cynics do little real thinking of their own and have little to offer true intellectual advancement. Further, they are often the most uncritical of thinkers, which is ironic because they assume that casting doubt on everything is the same thing as being a critical thinker.

There are many logical fallacies that Bible cynics often engage in. Apparently, they are blind to them. I list a few examples here for the benefit of those who are able to think critically. Hopefully, those with their eyes wide open will be able to identify these fallacies when they crop up:

1. The argument from silence – Assuming that if a biblical writer is the only historian to mention an event, then it could never have happened.

2. Prejudice favoring pagan history – Assuming that if a pagan historian contradicts a biblical writer, then the biblical writer is always wrong and the pagan is right.

3. Generalizing in modern terms – Assuming that ancient chronologies and histories are uniform with each other and with our modern calendar system.

4. The bandwagon fallacy – This fallacy is easily identifiable as beginning with the phrase, “Almost all modern scholars agree …” with something that contradicts the view of historic orthodox Christianity.

5. Prejudice against the simplest answer – Assuming the most difficult interpretation of a biblical text out of several possible solutions that would result the most egregious attack on the traditional Christian viewpoint.

6. Condescension and ad hominem – Assuming that the "uneducated" Christian simply needs to become as enlightened as the cynic who doubts everything.

Cynics have a difficulty with the chronology of Jesus birth. However, their difficulty is not with biblical texts contradicting each other. Rather it is a difficulty caused by their own logical fallacies. Luke's account and Matthew's account were most likely written independently, and yet one account can be harmonized with the other account filling in the gaps and answering questions of the modern reader. As we reconcile two Nativity Gospels with Old Testament Law requirement and other historical accounts, we find they have the credibility and realism of true historical accounts.

A Nativity Timeline (part 1)

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 16:13:00 +0000

How could Joseph and Mary have traveled in so short a time between Nazareth, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Egypt?

Another supposedly problematic question posed by Bible skeptics is how to reconcile all the "impossible movements" of Joseph and Mary between the accounts of Matthew and Luke. Matthew's account includes the story about the Magi and the flight into Egypt. Luke's account has the family returning to Nazareth after Jesus is presented in the Temple. If these two accounts are reconciled, the amount of time needed for all this to take place would be over several months. First, Joseph and Mary would need to travel to Bethlehem. They would register in census at the time Jesus was born. They then had to travel to Jerusalem to present Jesus in the Temple. Then they would travel back to Bethlehem again and encounter the visitors from the east, the Magi. Joseph is then warned in a dream soon after to escape Herod's wrath by fleeing to Egypt, returning to Nazareth after Herod's death.

Let's begin with the question of why Joseph and Mary would be in Bethlehem in the first place. Several records of a worldwide census from 5 to 3 BC tell us only that men were to be registered in their own city where they lived and worked. The Roman businessmen in Paphlagonia did not need to return to their ancestral cities. So the question becomes: Why did Joseph need to take Mary to Bethlehem at an inopportune time in her pregnancy all the way to Bethlehem to register in a census?

First, we don't know for a fact that Joseph was a resident of Nazareth. We know only from Luke that he was betrothed to Mary who was a resident of Nazareth. It is likely that Joseph was also from Nazareth, but it is also possible that he could have lived and worked in Judea at some time in his life. According to the law of Moses, Jews were to marry within their tribe to preserve inheritance rights. The exception to this was the tribe of Levi who had no land rights. The Gospels have Joseph and Mary both being of the tribe of Judah. We see in Matthew that Joseph returns with Mary to live in Nazareth only because he fears King Herod's son Archelaus who had become the governor of Judea. This implies that Joseph had intended to settle in Judea and perhaps once had lived there. So Joseph's marriage to Mary could have been arranged through tribal ties with Judean family members living in Galilee.

Now Mary arose in those days and went into the hill country with haste, to a city of Judah, and entered the house of Zacharias and greeted Elizabeth ... And Mary remained with her about three months, and returned to her house (Luke 2:39,40,56).

After Mary became pregnant with Jesus, she stayed with her cousin Elizabeth who was six months pregnant. "With haste" means that she went as soon as she knew she was pregnant. This part of the narrative shows that it wasn't unusual for first century families to spend months at each other's houses. Shortly before John was born to Elizabeth, Mary returned to Nazareth now three months pregnant herself.

When did Joseph's dream occur?

If Mary conceived on March 25th and returned to Nazareth after the birth of John on June 24th, then the marriage of Joseph and Mary occurred sometime after that.

Now the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows: After His mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Spirit. Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not wanting to make her a public example, was minded to put her away secretly. But while he thought about these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take to you Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. And she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name JESUS, for He will save His people from their sins.” So all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying: “Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which is translated, “God with us.” Then Joseph, being aroused from sleep, did as the angel of the Lord commanded him and took to him his wife, and did not know her till she had brought forth her firstborn Son. And he called His name JESUS. (Matthew 1:19-25).

Luke concurs that Joseph and Mary were married, but had not consummated the marriage relationship yet when they came to Bethlehem, by indicating that he was "betrothed" to Mary:

Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed wife, who was with child (Luke 2:4,5).

Joseph's dream and his marriage to Mary occurred sometime in July or August prior to the fall feast days when they were obligated by law to travel to Jerusalem.

Why did Joseph and Mary need to travel to Bethlehem to register in the census?

There are several ideas given to explain why Joseph and Mary traveled to Bethlehem instead of registering in the census in Nazareth. There are several different facts that could support Luke's account.

In Old Testament times, a census would take place by tribe. We see this in the book of Numbers for instance. It is plausible that from a simply cultural perspective, Jews would not register in any other way. Even the Herodian family, although Idumeans, had converted to Judaism and were obliged to follow the tradition. Since Joseph was of the tribe of Judah, he would need to go to his own city in Judea to register.

Later Roman records indicate that men were required to return to their homelands to register. A census oath inscription was uncovered from 48 AD, which also records a return of the people to their native land for the census. It reads as follows:

I Thermoutharion along with Apollonius, my guardian, pledge an oath to Tiberius Claudius Caesar that the preceding document gives an accurate account of those returning, who live in my household, and that there is no one else living with me, neither a foreigner, nor an Alexandrian, nor a freedman, nor a Roman citizen, nor an Egyptian. If I am telling the truth, may it be well with me, but if falsely, the reverse. In the ninth year of the reign of Tiberius Claudius Augustus Germanicus Emperor.

The following is a record of a census taken in the year 104 A.D. which contains similar wording to that found in the Gospel:

From the Prefect of Egypt, Gaius Vibius Maximus. Being that the time has come for the house to house census, it is mandatory that all men who are living outside of their districts return to their own homelands, that the census may be carried out.

Why did Mary need to travel with Joseph if women were not counted in the ancient Roman census?

First, Matthew gives no indication as to the whereabouts of Joseph and Mary prior to the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. He writes only that they chose to go to Nazareth after he learned that Herod's son had taken over the governorship of Judea.

But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea instead of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. And being warned by God in a dream, he turned aside into the region of Galilee. And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, “He shall be called a Nazarene” (Matthew 2:22,23).

It is Luke who gives us the reason for the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem.

Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed wife, who was with child.

A few things are implied here. Being of the "house and lineage of David" meant that Joseph (Matthew 1) and Mary (Luke 3:23-38) were in fact the heirs of kings. Herod had a history of antagonism toward the Davidian line and that may have been one reason that Mary was required to register as well. If Mary had no brothers and she was the oldest daughter, then by the Law of Moses, she would be the heir to her father and the line of David would pass directly through her. In fact, Salome, the sister of Mary, is mentioned a few times in the Gospels (Matthew 4:21;27:56; Mark 15:40; John 19:25). Elizabeth is mentioned as her cousin, but Mary had no brothers.

Joseph came to Bethlehem to register after the fall feast days, when he was required to be in Jerusalem. He also took a year long sabbatical from all work probably planning to stay among family members in Bethlehem. One tenet of the Law of Moses was that men were also obligated to take one year after marriage in which no work could be done.

When a man has taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war or be charged with any business; he shall be free at home one year, and bring happiness to his wife whom he has taken (Deuteronomy 24:5).

Luke explains to his Gentile audience these obscure Jewish laws including why Jesus' parents were in Jerusalem each year during the feasts.

His parents went to Jerusalem every year at the Feast of the Passover (Luke 2:45).

A recurring them of Luke is that Joseph and Mary "performed all things according to the law." All Jews were required to appear before the Lord at the Temple in Jerusalem on the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16:29-34). Jews were required to appear for three more feasts: Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles (Exodus 23:14-17; 34:18-23; Deuteronomy 16:16). There were different requirements for men and women, but according to Luke the whole family of Jesus traveled to the feasts each year.

The Law of Moses also made provision for saving money to bring to the feasts. This was a second tithe in addition to what the Jews were required to pay to the Levites for the maintenance of the Temple. But while the Day of Atonement was a day of fasting and humility in remembrance of sin, the Feast of Tabernacles was a celebration that God himself commanded.

And you shall spend that money for whatever your heart desires: for oxen or sheep, for wine or similar drink, for whatever your heart desires; you shall eat there before the LORD your God, and you shall rejoice, you and your household (Deuteronomy 14:26).

The Feast of Tabernacles commemorated the time when the Jews sojourned in the wilderness with Moses living in tents for forty years before entering the promised land. All Jewish men were commanded to appear in Jerusalem and dwell in tents for eight days. So it is logical that if Joseph was required to register in a census in Jerusalem in 5 BC -- the same census under Herod mentioned by Josephus in Antiquities -- that he would use the time after the feast to come to Bethlehem to register. It also stands to reason that Joseph took time to remain in Bethlehem until Mary's delivery.

It is also unlikely that the census took place only during the exact week of Jesus birth. More likely Joseph had already planned on staying in Bethlehem for three to six months after the Autumn Feast Days as part of Joseph's sabbatical and the census was around that time too.

Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem (Luke 2:4).

Note that the text tells the starting point and the final destination, but doesn't necessarily exclude time in between. Many have imagined a Nativity story with Joseph traveling straight from Nazareth to Bethlehem to register in a census with Mary in her ninth month of pregnancy under duress literally feeling the labor pangs as they entered the village finding "no room at the inn" (Luke 2:7). We get this impression not from what the Gospel literally says, but from Christmas carols, artwork and other stories. Jesus is portrayed as an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes in a rustic barn surrounded by farm animals, shepherds and wise men all at once.

The reality of the texts is quite different. Without going into exhaustive detail, the word translated "manger" refers probably not to a barn for animals, but a small addition built directly onto the outside of a house. If Bethlehem was a small village of about 1000 people, then it's not hard to imagine that there was no room available for travelers in late December, which just happened to be the week of Hanukkah, or the Festival of Lights, in 5 BC. This was a minor feast day on the Jewish calendar, but one that would have brought many visitors to Jerusalem and its surrounding villages.

It's not hard to imagine that when Joseph, although he had saved enough money for a year's sabbatical, found no lodging place for rent, that he simply set up the "tabernacle" or the tent he had used a few months earlier next to the house of the closest family member of the "House of David" still living in Bethlehem. In fact, some scholars think that John 1:14 may be a veiled reference to the Nativity speaking of the tent-like "manger" in which Jesus was born, "And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us." The word for usually translated "dwelt" is literally the verb form for tabernacle or tent.

Why is Christmas celebrated on December 25th?

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:30:00 +0000

The usual answer to this question is that it was adjusted, like many Church feast days, to coincide with the pagan feast days, this one being the winter solstice. This is a convenient explanation, but the exact date of December 25th is for another reason entirely. It was proposed by several of the church fathers beginning in the second century, far too early for the "pagan copycat" thesis to be valid. To explain how the church fathers arrived at this date, we need to examine first the date of John the Baptist's conception as told in Luke.

There was in the days of Herod, the king of Judea, a certain priest named Zacharias, of the division of Abijah (Luke 1:5).

According to 1 Chronicles 24:7-19, King David had divided the priests into 24 divisions who took turns serving in the Temple. During their service they lived in the Temple and were separated from their wives and children. Each order served for a period of eight days twice a year. The priests of the course of Abijah served during the 10th and 24th weeks of the Jewish year. Luke goes on to recount how the angel Gabriel appeared to Zecharias while he was serving in the Temple.

So it was, that while he was serving as priest before God in the order of his division, according to the custom of the priesthood, his lot fell to burn incense when he went into the temple of the Lord. And the whole multitude of the people was praying outside at the hour of incense. Then an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing on the right side of the altar of incense. And when Zacharias saw him, he was troubled, and fear fell upon him.

But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zacharias, for your prayer is heard; and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John. And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth. For he will be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink. He will also be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb. And he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God. He will also go before Him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord (Luke 1:8-15).

Note here that "the whole multitude of the people" (i.e., the whole nation of Israel) was present outside the Temple. Some have attempted to reconstruct the weeks of service according to Josephus' account in Antiquities 7:14:7, which relates that the first division, the division of Jehoiarib, was on duty when Jerusalem was destroyed on August 5, AD 70. Using this date as an anchor, the eighth division of Abijah would serve two times in the year, one of them being in late September. However, it is uncertain if these allotments began on exactly the same day of the year, since there would be four extra weeks to account for at the end of the year. But there were only two times in the year when the "whole multitude of the people" of Israel was required to be in Jerusalem worshiping at the Temple. These were the fall and spring feast days. John's vision apparently occurred on one of the high feast days, the church fathers thought it was the Day of Atonement, and then John returned to his home immediately after that.

So it was, as soon as the days of his service were completed, that he departed to his own house. Now after those days his wife Elizabeth conceived (Luke 1:23,24).

Since "the hill country of Judea," where Elizabeth lived according to Luke 1:39;65, is no more than a day's journey from Jerusalem, the conception of John the Baptist must have occurred soon after that. Several of the Church fathers noticed this correspondence and made the inference that John must have been conceived shortly after the Day of Atonement, which usually falls in September. In fact, the church father John Chrysostom thought that Zecharias was actually the Jewish High Priest because he was in the Holy Place on the Day of Atonement, which in 6 BC fell on September 22nd. So September 24th was calculated as the date of John's conception. The birth of John occurred exactly nine months later on June 24th. Since Jesus was conceived six months after John, various dates around this time, December 25th, January 2nd and 6th were given by various church fathers and each of these have been celebrated as the Nativity of Jesus. In fact, the Eastern Orthodox Church has always used January 6th as the date of Christmas.

If John was conceived during one of the spring feasts -- Passover or Pentecost, which were the other two times in the year when the "whole multitude of the people" of Israel was required to be in Jerusalem -- then we would have winter birth for John and a summer birth for Jesus.

Notwithstanding, the Day of Atonement fits well as an anchor date because it points to a winter birthday for Christ. Josephus notes that Herod died shortly before the Passover in 4 BC, which began on April 11th of that year. This gives several months for the events surrounding the Nativity and fits the narrative accounts of both Matthew and Luke.

We should not be dogmatic about the exact day. However, we can use December 25th as the anchor date. This date helps explain several events recorded in the Nativity accounts and is important for establishing a timeline that supports the historicity of the Gospels.

Personhood Florida: Outlining the Strategy, Clearing the Liberal Media Smokescreens

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:04:00 +0000

In September of 2009, I began as a volunteer in Personhood Florida -- a grassroots effort to get a Constitutional Amendment passed that would declare a human being to be legal “person” from the “beginning of biological development.” I knew even then we were going to encounter lies, distortions and fallacies concerning the initiative. Recently, I have read several horrible articles by liberal pro-abortion media outlets and websites.

Two of the fallacies now being floated:

1. Personhood Florida has already died a quiet death because they cannot meet the signature deadline.

2. No other pro-life groups are supporting Personhood.

Here I will address these fallacies.

The following is not an official position of Personhood Florida, Inc., but my personal observations as a liaison working among the volunteers in Orlando area.

Fallacy #1: Personhood Florida cannot possibly collect over 600,000 valid signatures before the deadline.

Here is the state law:

“Initiative petitions can be circulated indefinitely. However, signatures are no longer valid four years after they are signed, which means that initiative supporters must obtain the required number of signatures within a four-year period.”

The first Personhood petition was collected in late September 2009. Therefore, the deadline is September 2013 to submit petitions. This could even effectively be pushed back later considering the low number of petitions collected in the early months. The Personhood Amendment may be on the ballot in 2012 or 2014 – or even later.

The initial goal with ballot initiatives in the state of Florida to first to get to the 10 percent threshold of about 70,000 signed petitions. After reaching that point, the amendment advocates are required to submit the collected petitions. This results in a Florida Supreme Court ruling that determines if the ballot initiative language violates the “single-subject rule.” If the ballot language is deemed to be valid, then the remaining signatures must be gathered to get an amendment proposition on the November ballot.

Getting over 600,000 valid signatures is a huge task. Since Personhood Florida is a grassroots, volunteer effort, this is a long term goal.

To accomplish this goal in a two-year period, it would require the collection of 30,000 petitions per month, or 1200 petitions per month in each of the 25 US Congressional districts. That is a realistic goal even though a great deal of organization at the district level needs to be in place first.

It this possible to achieve with an all-volunteer grassroots organization?

The Marriage Protection Amendment (Proposition 2) was supported and passed in the state of Florida in 2008 by a grassroots organization. As the campaign progressed, there were paid staff, but it was largely volunteers who made it successful. The Personhood advocates do not need to reinvent the wheel because they are able to tap into the groundwork that was laid for Proposition 2.

In addition, there are already thousands of pro-life activists throughout the state who volunteer as sidewalk counselors, peaceful demonstrators, workers at crisis pregnancy centers and other outreach ministries. This has already proved to be an effective strategy in Colorado and Mississippi where hundreds of thousands signatures have been gathered by an all-volunteer movement in a relatively short period of time.

The number of people involved in the Personhood effort in Florida was at first small, but it is steadily increasing each week to the point now where thousands of petitions can be gathered each month. For example, I estimate that over 1000 petitions were gathered by volunteers in Orlando in just the past month or so.

How do I know?

I am staring at a stack of several hundred we collected in the last two weeks even as I write this. This is not hubris. It is just a sober assessment of a huge job that will take some time to accomplish.

To collect over 600,000 valid signatures, each of Florida’s 15 congressional districts needs at least 30 volunteer workers who could work about five hours a month to get 100 petitions each. The usual strategy is to have groups of two or more people at churches, sporting events, and public places where hundreds or even thousands of people circulate. At larger events, several people work together to collect hundreds at a time. Over a two year period, over one million signatures could be gathered this way.

Fallacy #2: No other pro-life groups are supporting this.

On the contrary, many pro-life organizations, state and national political leaders, churches and pastors throughout the country are supporting Personhood. The list in Florida includes a former US Senator, several state and national congressional candidates, as well as many pro-lfie groups, ministry leaders, pastors and churches. See a partial list at <www.personhood.net/personhood-advocates/all>.

A few organizations have objected saying that although they support Personhood, it is the wrong timing for this ballot initiative because it would result in a Supreme Court challenge that could not possibly overturn Roe v. Wade given the Court's current make-up. Some have gone as far as to say that a state constitutional amendment can never challenge Roe. The founder of the Liberty Counsel, Matthew Staver, who has argued before the US Supreme Court, disagrees and has written a letter describing his thinking on the subject. Staver, by the way, is one of the Personhood Florida endorsers.

Fallacy #2 is therefore refuted by the answer to fallacy #1.

In the next 11 months, the conservative resurgence will begin to defuse the argument that this is bad timing. As a result of this, the make-up of the US Supreme Court, the state courts and appellate courts may change after 2012, 2014 and 2016. If current trends continue, there could be strong political support for a US Constitutional Amendment to define Personhood in the next four to six years. This is not a short term strategy, but an idea that will work synergistically with a conservative political resurgence over the long term.

In the meantime, there are Personhood initiatives that have begun in many other states. Some will fail to get on the ballot, but some will succeed. Only one need pass and this will galvanize and energize the Personhood movement. While it is possible and even likely that with the current make-up of the Supreme Court, a Personhood Amendment might be struck down, one court decision is not the end of the story. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 was a setback for the cause of liberty in our nation. This Supreme Court decision that declared that African slaves were not legal “persons” was never overturned. However, the perseverance of those who stood against slavery eventually won out.

With the conservative resurgence and protest against socialism, we are on the downward crest of a huge wave that will be rolling in for several years. We are resolved not to give up until we can end abortion on demand in all 50 states.

All that is needed now is for you to join with us in this effort!

Please contact http://www.personhoodfl.com/ or http://www.personhoodusa.com/ for more information on how you can get involved.

Thoughts on the Manhattan Declaration: What's Next?

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 17:21:00 +0000

If you signed the Manhattan Declaration, you already received the following email. I am thankful for this message from the leaders because they state that the one million or so Christians who will eventually sign the document will actually be called upon to do something in response to their declaration of agreement.

In the next few days, I am going to write my thoughts on the various sections of the Declaration. I thought that all of my conservative activist friends would throw their hands up toward the sky annd shout, "Hallelujah! This is the breaking point we have been praying for!" I was surprised that so many conservative Christians have criticized this document, not for what it says, but for not going far enough without compromise on certain points. Or so they think.

At the outset, let me say that I am sympathetic to that point of view. If you are a politically or socially active Christian, there is no need to sign the document. Your actions speak louder than any symbolic gesture. This Declaration is meant to awaken a slumbering giant. However imperfect the language or philosophy of such a document may be, at the least we ought to agree with the purpose, and that is to reengage an evangelical church that has become increasingly irrelevant for the past 151 years and is threatened with becoming a persecuted minority if the culture is not confronted and reformed according to biblical laws and principles.

- JCR

To all signers of the Manhattan Declaration:

Thank you for signing. We are now over 200,000 strong-and counting, for which we give thanks to God.

We have received thousands of e-mails asking what's next - a good question. The goal of those of us who drafted and signed the document is not just to get a lot of names on a manifesto, gratifying though that is. We are seeking to build a movement - hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Catholic, Evangelical, and Eastern Orthodox Christians who will stand together alongside other men and women of goodwill in defense of foundational principles of justice and the common good. These are people who could expose the lie which so many in our culture have embraced about self being the center of life; and then winsomely present, in the words of St. Paul, "a more excellent way."

We are looking for people who will work in every possible arena to advance the sanctity of life, rebuild and revitalize the marriage culture, and protect religious liberty.

So what's next for you? Let us offer some specific suggestions. More will undoubtedly follow in the weeks ahead.

Pray. We can do nothing apart from God. So lay this before the Lord every chance you have, and ask your friends and prayer chains to do the same thing.
Study and learn about these issues. We see the Manhattan Declaration as a great teaching and reference source. Share it with others. Only after you have tried to teach it to someone else will you have really learned it. And go deeper in your own study. There are many organizations that offer excellent resources in support of these foundational truths. If you can't find resources, you can visit http://www.colsoncenter.org and look at the Worldview Resource Directory we've assembled.
Come back to http://www.manhattandeclaration.org if you want help in answering questions others pose to you. We've posted a FAQ (frequently asked questions) tab on the home page, but most people signed the statement before this was added. So revisit http://www.manhattandeclaration.org - and watch for other resources we will be posting.
Invite all of the friends on your e-mail lists to go to http://www.manhattandeclaration.org, read the Declaration (that's most important) and sign it.
Talk to your pastor or small group leader in church. We have heard from a number of pastors who are already referring to this document in their sermons and using it in their teaching. We've also heard from bishops and other church leaders who are planning ecumenical gatherings in their areas of responsibility. Some are talking about campaigns to equip the faithful. Other pastors are asking their congregations to sign the document, and become informed. Go to your pastor; urge him to do this. You can really help in this area. Suggest it, and then volunteer to be a part of it. Step forward as a leader.
If you belong to a civic group like Kiwanis or Rotary, and you have regular meetings, that's a great forum in which to share information about the Manhattan Declaration. Explain to people what you've signed and why you've signed it. A lot of people are asking about this statement, its meaning and purpose. Educate them.
Letters to the Editor can be a very effective way to spread information about important issues. According to some sources, more people read the Letters to the Editor columns than the editorials.
Watch the issues being debated in the public arena, particularly as the health reform bill is moving through Congress. As a citizen you have a duty to let your representatives know what you think about the issues, particularly on profoundly important moral questions like those being raised now.
Get on Facebook or any other chat rooms or blogs that you have access to. Social networking, as we are learning, can have a powerful impact.
Finally, talk to your neighbors. Robert Naisbitt wrote that fads begin from the top down, movements from the bottom up. We are convinced that societies are changed over the backyard fence, standing around the barbeque grill, and sitting in the barber shop or hair salon. Learn to be an advocate in any environment.

In conclusion, in asking you to sign we were not just asking you to raise your hand, but to raise your voice. Great changes in society have often come about when Christian people unite in this way - think of the Wesley awakening, the Celtic revival, or movements for social justice and civil rights in our own country. We believe God is looking for good men and women who will pledge (as you have done in signing the Manhattan Declaration), never to compromise the gospel, and to become well-informed, effective advocates true and godly principles.

This is a message of hope for every area of human life and endeavor, and a call to discipleship for every believer.

God bless you.

Dr. Robert George
Dr. Timothy George
Chuck Colson

Realized Postmillennialism: The world is getting better not worse

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 17:43:00 +0000

In the 1800s, most history textbooks stressed the idea of progress, that the world was improving due to advances in learning. Most Christians believed this was due to the advancement of the Gospel. As more and more people were converted to Christ, individual lives would reform and the world would become a better place.

According to the U.S. Center for World Missions, Christian evangelism in the last 100 years has reached a growth curve which is now increasing exponentially. Comparing the ratio of Christians per unconverted people in the world, the following statistics have been noted:

* In the year 100 A.D. (70 years after Jesus Christ's ministry began), there was a total of one believer for every 360 unbelievers on the planet Earth (or .27% of the world's population).

* In the year 1000, the ratio became 1 to 220 (or .45% of the population).

* In 1900, the ratio became 1 to 27 (or 3.7%).

* In 1980, the ratio became 1 to 11 (or 9.1%).

* In 1990, the ratio was 1 to 7 (or 14.3%).

Has this resulted in the world becoming a better place? While people might differ as the the definition of "better," there are some real, measurable indicators of material and physical prosperity. Although material wealth is not an indicator of God's blessing, the Bible teaches that the person who obeys the Law of God will have a longer life and material prosperity.

However, this is a paradox. Evangelical Christians have become generally more pessimistic in the last 100 years. There used to be more postmillennialists who thought the world was becoming a better place due to the great missionary thrust of churches in the 1800s. Ironically, now that Christianity is the largest religion in the world, most evangelicals are premillennialists who think the world is predestined to get worse and worse until the end.

Below are some statistics for you to consider from the book by Greg Easterbrook called, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse

Here are 61 indicators that the world is getting better and better, not worse and worse:

In 1890, less than 1 percent of American households earned the equivalent of $75,000 in today’s dollars; now nearly a quarter of households are at that favored point.

The typical person now commands twice the real buying power of his father or mother in the year 1960.

Cars, furniture, clothing, and other common goods have shown a steady, ongoing decline in the number of work-hours required for the typical American to purchase them.

Today a third of America’s families own three cars or more.

Today the typical American place home has 5.3 rooms for its average of 2.6 people. This means that a longstanding metric of comfortable living, “a room of one’s own,” has been gone one better; on average, Americans of today have two rooms of their own.

The average child or teenager has his or her own bedroom—surely the first time in history this has been achieved for an entire large society.

In the 2000 Census, the fraction of American dwellings without indoor plumbing dropped below 1 percent for the first time in history.

The typical new home now built in the United States is 2,349 square feet, including . three bedrooms and two and a half baths… compared to 1,100 square feet in 1950.

Ninety-five percent of American homes are now centrally heated, versus about 15 percent in our grandparents’ generation; 78 percent have air conditioning, versus essentially zero then.

Almost 70 percent of Americans own their own home, versus less than 20 percent a century ago, when most Americans were tenants.

Four-fifths of American adults are now high school graduates, compared to one-third in 1947.
One-quarter of Americans hold college degrees, compared to about 6% in 1947; today Americans average 15.2 years of education.

Two-thirds of high school graduates go on to at least some college, while fewer than 10 percent drop out of high school.

The United States is on the short path to becoming the first society in history with more adults who are college graduates than are not.

84 percent of Americans have medical insurance and most of those who don’t have it receive medical attention in an emergency room situation. Medical insurance was practically non-existent after World War I, and only the elite wealthy were protected against ruinous medical expenses.

Americans collectively take twenty-five million overseas vacations per year.

Americans took 612 million airline trips in 2002. Approximately 200 million Americans, 70 percent of the nation, are members of the “jet set.” Just 105 years ago airplanes did not exist.

The typical American eats four restaurant meals per week and spend 49 percent of their food dollars in restaurants compared to just 25% in 1955.

58 percent of American men work in white-collar occupations which require no physical toil, along with 52 percent of women. This means there are now more white-collar Americans than blue-collar.

In 1850, the typical American man’s workweek was sixty-six hours; in 1900, fifty-three hours; today it is forty-two hours.

A century ago, 90 percent of women spent at least four hours per day doing primary housework: cooking, cleaning; But only 14 percent in the year 2000 spent four or more hours per day at this task.

Compared to 1880, the typical adult male has forty MORE hours per week available for relaxation; the typical American woman now has about thirty MORE relaxation hours per week.

You can spend your leisure time watching movies that cost $100 million to make for $8 at the cinema, for $15 on your DVD player or computer, or for free on one of your four televisions.

In the mid 1800’s, the typical person spent 50 percent of his or her waking hours engaged in some form of imposed labor (ie, working). Today it is a little under 20 percent of a person’s lifetime.

During the 1990s, homicides fell by 75 percent in San Diego, 70 percent I New York City, by big margins in Baltimore, Boston, Los Angeles, and other cities.

Domestic violence against women fell 21 percent in the 1990s. Robbery and burglary declined; car theft declined. Rape declined by 40 percent . Gun use declined.

By 2001, the figures for the Forty-first Precinct in the Bronx had fallen to 12 homicides from 130 homicides per year in the 70s, to 225 burglaries from 6,433, and to 239 robberies from 2,632—in total, roughly a 95 percent decline.

Twenty-five years ago, only one-third of America’s lakes and rivers were safe for fishing and swimming; today two-thirds are. (Leading Index of Environmental Indicators, EPA)

Since 1970 smog has declined by a third, even as the number of cars has nearly doubled; acid rain has declined by 67 percent, even though the United States now burns twice as much coal; even airborne lead, a poison, is down 97 percent.

During the 1980s, Los Angeles averaged about 150 ozone “health advisory” days per year, and about fifty “stage one” ozone alerts. By 2000, the number of advisory days had fallen to about twenty per year, and in 2003, Los Angeles has had no stage-one ozone alert for four years running. (www.aqmd.gov)

Toxic emissions by industry declined 51 percent from 1988 to 2002.

Total American water consumption has declined 9 percent in the past fifteen years, even as the population has expanded in the arid Southwest. The wooded acreage of the United States has been expanding for more than a decade.

Deer populations have expanded, and once-periled species such as the bald eagle, gray whale, brown pelican, and peregrine falcon have recovered in numbers and been “delisted” from emergency protection.

Prices of most primary commodities, specially metals, coals, and ores, have been falling for two decades.

Credible estimates put the world’s proven reserve of petroleum at about one trillion barrels, a forty-year supply at current rates, while . . . an additional trillion barrels . . . will become recoverable with improved technology, such as drilling in the deep ocean.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the average American life expectancy was forty-one years, but by the twenty-first century it had risen to seventy-seven years.

The average life expectancy for the entire world is sixty-six years.

Heart disease and stroke have been declining for decades. By the year 2000, U.S. incidence of heart disease death was 60 percent lower, adjusted for population increase, than in 1950; incidence of stroke deaths fell 70 percent in the same period.

Most cancers, including breast cancer are in retreat for the first time since increasing average age made cancer a general concern. Most studies by the National Cancer Institute show cancer mortality declining at about 1 percent per year since 1993, again despite overall aging.(Annual report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer)

Infant mortality has declined 45 percent since 1980, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and is now down to 0.7 percent of live births, the lowest figure ever for the United States.

The rate of suicide in the U.S. rate has fallen 18% since 1950.

Most forms of accidental deaths are in long-term decline, as are workplace fatalities. Deaths by fire, especially, have declined, down by 50 percent

Traffic deaths have been hitting new lows on an almost annual basis. For example, 42,850 Americans died in automobile crashes in 2002 versus 52,627 in 1970, though the population rose and auto miles traveled increased about 75 percent through that period. www.nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/nrd-30/NCSA/Rpts/2003/Assess01.pdf

Use of most illegal drugs has been declining for two decades. Alcohol consumption per capita has been declining for a generation, including among the young. Cigarette use continues to decline. Today just 10 percent of Americans tenth-graders smoke, believed to be the lowest number for this age group since packaged cigarettes became common in the 1920s. (America’s Children: Indicators of Well-Being 2002)

The divorce rate, which had been climbing seemingly inexorably since the 1950s, flattened out in the 1990s and at present is in shallow decline. It is no longer true that, when you attend a wedding, there is a fifty-fifty chance you are watching people swear vows that will not last.

The rate of children born out of marriage, climbing seemingly inexorably since the 1950s, like the divorce rate flattened in 1990s and at present is in shallow decline.

During the 1990s, the segment of children who lived with both parents rose from 51 percent to 56 percent.

Teen pregnancy and births to teens fell, by 22 percent and by 15 percent, respectively, during the 1990s.

Most public-school test scores are either slightly up (math proficiency) or flat (reading proficiency). (Thomas Loveless of the Brooking Institution)

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, overall IQ scores have risen about 20 percent.

Women and minority-group members continue to assume roles once restricted to white males.

The gap between women’s and men’s wages has been shrinking for a generation, and today is the smallest ever. In 1982, women as a group earned 62.5 percent as much as men, and by 2002 that share had risen to 77.5 percent.

Through the last generation, the portion of African-Americans living in middle-class circumstances has more than doubled. By the end of the twentieth century, black poverty had dropped to the lowest rate ever recorded. (2002 study National Urban League)

The percentage of U.S. children living in poverty declined from a peak of 22 percent in 1993, just before reforms were enacted, to 16 percent, the lowest figure of a generation.

In the United States there continue to be jobs, including plenty of desirable jobs, and an almost unlimited supply of goods and services at reasonable prices.

Food, housing, clothing, and other essentials cost less in real-dollar terms than a generation ago, despite being higher in quality, while prices of some categories of consumer goods, notably electronics, fall steadily.

The Cold War never became a hot war, and ended with democracy routing tyranny. Nuclear-bomb factories in the United States and the former Soviet Union once turned out doomsday weapons in hideous numbers; today they run in reverse, disassembling warheads in the largest and most important arms-reduction in history. In 2002, the U.S. and the Russian Federation agreed to reduce the number of strategic nuclear warheads . . . to no more than 2,200 per nation. Once accomplished, 90 percent of the Armageddon arsenal will be gone.

Twenty-five years ago, only about a third of the globe’s nations held true free elections; today, two-thirds do.

That democratic governments now outnumber autocratic governments two to one is a situation unprecedented in world history.

The number of armed conflicts in the world has declined. There were twenty-eight declared wars and forty-five armed conflicts globally in 2002, for example, versus forty-eight declared wars and sixty-five armed conflicts in 1993.

In 2000, four times as many people globally died in traffic accidents than in any form of combat—1.3 million traffic deaths versus 300,000 deaths from war. That car crashes currently pose a greater threat to the citizens of the earth than combat is surely progress in the right direction. (World Health Organization 2000)

Annual global military spending peaked in the year 1985, at $1.3 trillion, and has been declining since, to $840 billion in 2002. (World Military Spending, 2003)

Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 06:27:00 +0000

You have got to like a 4,732-word manifesto that calls Christians to civil disobedience on pro-life and pro-family issues and gives a brief history of biblically-based resistance to tyranny throughout the ages. It even quotes the second century Epistle to Diognetus (one of my new favorite patristic texts) as a bonus. Go to the Manhattan Declaration website and sign it. I did.

Here is the full text:

October 20, 2009

Preamble

Christians are heirs of a 2,000-year tradition of proclaiming God’s word, seeking justice in our societies, resisting tyranny, and reaching out with compassion to the poor, oppressed and suffering.

While fully acknowledging the imperfections and shortcomings of Christian institutions and communities in all ages, we claim the heritage of those Christians who defended innocent life by rescuing discarded babies from trash heaps in Roman cities and publicly denouncing the Empire’s sanctioning of infanticide. We remember with reverence those believers who sacrificed their lives by remaining in Roman cities to tend the sick and dying during the plagues, and who died bravely in the coliseums rather than deny their Lord.

After the barbarian tribes overran Europe, Christian monasteries preserved not only the Bible but also the literature and art of Western culture. It was Christians who combated the evil of slavery: Papal edicts in the 16th and 17th centuries decried the practice of slavery and first excommunicated anyone involved in the slave trade; evangelical Christians in England, led by John Wesley and William Wilberforce, put an end to the slave trade in that country. Christians under Wilberforce’s leadership also formed hundreds of societies for helping the poor, the imprisoned, and child laborers chained to machines.

In Europe, Christians challenged the divine claims of kings and successfully fought to establish the rule of law and balance of governmental powers, which made modern democracy possible. And in America, Christian women stood at the vanguard of the suffrage movement. The great civil rights crusades of the 1950s and 60s were led by Christians claiming the Scriptures and asserting the glory of the image of God in every human being regardless of race, religion, age or class.

This same devotion to human dignity has led Christians in the last decade to work to end the dehumanizing scourge of human trafficking and sexual slavery, bring compassionate care to AIDS sufferers in Africa, and assist in a myriad of other human rights causes – from providing clean water in developing nations to providing homes for tens of thousands of children orphaned by war, disease and gender discrimination.

Like those who have gone before us in the faith, Christians today are called to proclaim the Gospel of costly grace, to protect the intrinsic dignity of the human person and to stand for the common good. In being true to its own calling, the call to discipleship, the church through service to others can make a profound contribution to the public good.

Declaration

We, as Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christians, have gathered, beginning in New York on September 28, 2009, to make the following declaration, which we sign as individuals, not on behalf of our organizations, but speaking to and from our communities. We act together in obedience to the one true God, the triune God of holiness and love, who has laid total claim on our lives and by that claim calls us with believers in all ages and all nations to seek and defend the good of all who bear his image. We set forth this declaration in light of the truth that is grounded in Holy Scripture, in natural human reason (which is itself, in our view, the gift of a beneficent God), and in the very nature of the human person. We call upon all people of goodwill, believers and non-believers alike, to consider carefully and reflect critically on the issues we here address as we, with St. Paul, commend this appeal to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.

While the whole scope of Christian moral concern, including a special concern for the poor and vulnerable, claims our attention, we are especially troubled that in our nation today the lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions.

Because the sanctity of human life, the dignity of marriage as a union of husband and wife, and the freedom of conscience and religion are foundational principles of justice and the common good, we are compelled by our Christian faith to speak and act in their defense. In this declaration we affirm: 1) the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of every human being as a creature fashioned in the very image of God, possessing inherent rights of equal dignity and life; 2) marriage as a conjugal union of man and woman, ordained by God from the creation, and historically understood by believers and non-believers alike, to be the most basic institution in society and; 3) religious liberty, which is grounded in the character of God, the example of Christ, and the inherent freedom and dignity of human beings created in the divine image.

We are Christians who have joined together across historic lines of ecclesial differences to affirm our right—and, more importantly, to embrace our obligation—to speak and act in defense of these truths. We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence. It is our duty to proclaim the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in its fullness, both in season and out of season. May God help us not to fail in that duty.

Life

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. - Genesis 1:27

I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. - John 10:10

Although public sentiment has moved in a pro-life direction, we note with sadness that pro-abortion ideology prevails today in our government. The present administration is led and staffed by those who want to make abortions legal at any stage of fetal development, and who want to provide abortions at taxpayer expense. Majorities in both houses of Congress hold pro-abortion views. The Supreme Court, whose infamous 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade stripped the unborn of legal protection, continues to treat elective abortion as a fundamental constitutional right, though it has upheld as constitutionally permissible some limited restrictions on abortion.

The President says that he wants to reduce the “need” for abortion—a commendable goal. But he has also pledged to make abortion more easily and widely available by eliminating laws prohibiting government funding, requiring waiting periods for women seeking abortions, and parental notification for abortions performed on minors. The elimination of these important and effective pro-life laws cannot reasonably be expected to do other than significantly increase the number of elective abortions by which the lives of countless children are snuffed out prior to birth. Our commitment to the sanctity of life is not a matter of partisan loyalty, for we recognize that in the thirty-six years since Roe v. Wade, elected officials and appointees of both major political parties have been complicit in giving legal sanction to what Pope John Paul II described as “the culture of death.” We call on all officials in our country, elected and appointed, to protect and serve every member of our society, including the most marginalized, voiceless, and vulnerable among us.

A culture of death inevitably cheapens life in all its stages and conditions by promoting the belief that lives that are imperfect, immature or inconvenient are discardable. As predicted by many prescient persons, the cheapening of life that began with abortion has now metastasized. For example, human embryo-destructive research and its public funding are promoted in the name of science and in the cause of developing treatments and cures for diseases and injuries. The President and many in Congress favor the expansion of embryo-research to include the taxpayer funding of so-called “therapeutic cloning.”

This would result in the industrial mass production of human embryos to be killed for the purpose of producing genetically customized stem cell lines and tissues. At the other end of life, an increasingly powerful movement to promote assisted suicide and “voluntary” euthanasia threatens the lives of vulnerable elderly and disabled persons. Eugenic notions such as the doctrine of lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”) were first advanced in the 1920s by intellectuals in the elite salons of America and Europe. Long buried in ignominy after the horrors of the mid-20century, they have returned from the grave. The only difference is that now the doctrines of the eugenicists are dressed up in the language of “liberty,” “autonomy,” and “choice.”

We will be united and untiring in our efforts to roll back the license to kill that began with the abandonment of the unborn to abortion. We will work, as we have always worked, to bring assistance, comfort, and care to pregnant women in need and to those who have been victimized by abortion, even as we stand resolutely against the corrupt and degrading notion that it can somehow be in the best interests of women to submit to the deliberate killing of their unborn children. Our message is, and ever shall be, that the just, humane, and truly Christian answer to problem pregnancies is for all of us to love and care for mother and child alike.

A truly prophetic Christian witness will insistently call on those who have been entrusted with temporal power to fulfill the first responsibility of government: to protect the weak and vulnerable against violent attack, and to do so with no favoritism, partiality, or discrimination. The Bible enjoins us to defend those who cannot defend themselves, to speak for those who cannot themselves speak. And so we defend and speak for the unborn, the disabled, and the dependent. What the Bible and the light of reason make clear, we must make clear. We must be willing to defend, even at risk and cost to ourselves and our institutions, the lives of our brothers and sisters at every stage of development and in every condition.

Our concern is not confined to our own nation. Around the globe, we are witnessing cases of genocide and “ethnic cleansing,” the failure to assist those who are suffering as innocent victims of war, the neglect and abuse of children, the exploitation of vulnerable laborers, the sexual trafficking of girls and young women, the abandonment of the aged, racial oppression and discrimination, the persecution of believers of all faiths, and the failure to take steps necessary to halt the spread of preventable diseases like AIDS. We see these travesties as flowing from the same loss of the sense of the dignity of the human person and the sanctity of human life that drives the abortion industry and the movements for assisted suicide, euthanasia, and human cloning for biomedical research. And so ours is, as it must be, a truly consistent ethic of love and life for all humans in all circumstances.

Marriage

The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man." For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. - Genesis 2:23-24

This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. - Ephesians 5:32-33

In Scripture, the creation of man and woman, and their one-flesh union as husband and wife, is the crowning achievement of God’s creation. In the transmission of life and the nurturing of children, men and women joined as spouses are given the great honor of being partners with God Himself. Marriage then, is the first institution of human society—indeed it is the institution on which all other human institutions have their foundation. In the Christian tradition we refer to marriage as “holy matrimony” to signal the fact that it is an institution ordained by God, and blessed by Christ in his participation at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. In the Bible, God Himself blesses and holds marriage in the highest esteem.

Vast human experience confirms that marriage is the original and most important institution for sustaining the health, education, and welfare of all persons in a society. Where marriage is honored, and where there is a flourishing marriage culture, everyone benefits—the spouses themselves, their children, the communities and societies in which they live. Where the marriage culture begins to erode, social pathologies of every sort quickly manifest themselves. Unfortunately, we have witnessed over the course of the past several decades a serious erosion of the marriage culture in our own country. Perhaps the most telling—and alarming—indicator is the out-of-wedlock birth rate. Less than fifty years ago, it was under 5 percent. Today it is over 40 percent. Our society—and particularly its poorest and most vulnerable sectors, where the out-of-wedlock birth rate is much higher even than the national average—is paying a huge price in delinquency, drug abuse, crime, incarceration, hopelessness, and despair. Other indicators are widespread non-marital sexual cohabitation and a devastatingly high rate of divorce.

We confess with sadness that Christians and our institutions have too often scandalously failed to uphold the institution of marriage and to model for the world the true meaning of marriage. Insofar as we have too easily embraced the culture of divorce and remained silent about social practices that undermine the dignity of marriage we repent, and call upon all Christians to do the same.

To strengthen families, we must stop glamorizing promiscuity and infidelity and restore among our people a sense of the profound beauty, mystery, and holiness of faithful marital love. We must reform ill-advised policies that contribute to the weakening of the institution of marriage, including the discredited idea of unilateral divorce. We must work in the legal, cultural, and religious domains to instill in young people a sound understanding of what marriage is, what it requires, and why it is worth the commitment and sacrifices that faithful spouses make.

The impulse to redefine marriage in order to recognize same-sex and multiple partner relationships is a symptom, rather than the cause, of the erosion of the marriage culture. It reflects a loss of understanding of the meaning of marriage as embodied in our civil and religious law and in the philosophical tradition that contributed to shaping the law. Yet it is critical that the impulse be resisted, for yielding to it would mean abandoning the possibility of restoring a sound understanding of marriage and, with it, the hope of rebuilding a healthy marriage culture. It would lock into place the false and destructive belief that marriage is all about romance and other adult satisfactions, and not, in any intrinsic way, about procreation and the unique character and value of acts and relationships whose meaning is shaped by their aptness for the generation, promotion and protection of life. In spousal communion and the rearing of children (who, as gifts of God, are the fruit of their parents’ marital love), we discover the profound reasons for and benefits of the marriage covenant.

We acknowledge that there are those who are disposed towards homosexual and polyamorous conduct and relationships, just as there are those who are disposed towards other forms of immoral conduct. We have compassion for those so disposed; we respect them as human beings possessing profound, inherent, and equal dignity; and we pay tribute to the men and women who strive, often with little assistance, to resist the temptation to yield to desires that they, no less than we, regard as wayward. We stand with them, even when they falter. We, no less than they, are sinners who have fallen short of God’s intention for our lives. We, no less than they, are in constant need of God’s patience, love and forgiveness. We call on the entire Christian community to resist sexual immorality, and at the same time refrain from disdainful condemnation of those who yield to it. Our rejection of sin, though resolute, must never become the rejection of sinners. For every sinner, regardless of the sin, is loved by God, who seeks not our destruction but rather the conversion of our hearts. Jesus calls all who wander from the path of virtue to “a more excellent way.” As his disciples we will reach out in love to assist all who hear the call and wish to answer it.

We further acknowledge that there are sincere people who disagree with us, and with the teaching of the Bible and Christian tradition, on questions of sexual morality and the nature of marriage. Some who enter into same-sex and polyamorous relationships no doubt regard their unions as truly marital. They fail to understand, however, that marriage is made possible by the sexual complementarity of man and woman, and that the comprehensive, multi-level sharing of life that marriage is includes bodily unity of the sort that unites husband and wife biologically as a reproductive unit. This is because the body is no mere extrinsic instrument of the human person, but truly part of the personal reality of the human being. Human beings are not merely centers of consciousness or emotion, or minds, or spirits, inhabiting non-personal bodies. The human person is a dynamic unity of body, mind, and spirit. Marriage is what one man and one woman establish when, forsaking all others and pledging lifelong commitment, they found a sharing of life at every level of being—the biological, the emotional, the dispositional, the rational, the spiritual—on a commitment that is sealed, completed and actualized by loving sexual intercourse in which the spouses become one flesh, not in some merely metaphorical sense, but by fulfilling together the behavioral conditions of procreation. That is why in the Christian tradition, and historically in Western law, consummated marriages are not dissoluble or annullable on the ground of infertility, even though the nature of the marital relationship is shaped and structured by its intrinsic orientation to the great good of procreation.

We understand that many of our fellow citizens, including some Christians, believe that the historic definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman is a denial of equality or civil rights. They wonder what to say in reply to the argument that asserts that no harm would be done to them or to anyone if the law of the community were to confer upon two men or two women who are living together in a sexual partnership the status of being “married.” It would not, after all, affect their own marriages, would it? On inspection, however, the argument that laws governing one kind of marriage will not affect another cannot stand. Were it to prove anything, it would prove far too much: the assumption that the legal status of one set of marriage relationships affects no other would not only argue for same sex partnerships; it could be asserted with equal validity for polyamorous partnerships, polygamous households, even adult brothers, sisters, or brothers and sisters living in incestuous relationships. Should these, as a matter of equality or civil rights, be recognized as lawful marriages, and would they have no effects on other relationships? No. The truth is that marriage is not something abstract or neutral that the law may legitimately define and re-define to please those who are powerful and influential.

No one has a civil right to have a non-marital relationship treated as a marriage. Marriage is an objective reality—a covenantal union of husband and wife—that it is the duty of the law to recognize and support for the sake of justice and the common good. If it fails to do so, genuine social harms follow. First, the religious liberty of those for whom this is a matter of conscience is jeopardized. Second, the rights of parents are abused as family life and sex education programs in schools are used to teach children that an enlightened understanding recognizes as “marriages” sexual partnerships that many parents believe are intrinsically non-marital and immoral. Third, the common good of civil society is damaged when the law itself, in its critical pedagogical function, becomes a tool for eroding a sound understanding of marriage on which the flourishing of the marriage culture in any society vitally depends. Sadly, we are today far from having a thriving marriage culture. But if we are to begin the critically important process of reforming our laws and mores to rebuild such a culture, the last thing we can afford to do is to re-define marriage in such a way as to embody in our laws a false proclamation about what marriage is.

And so it is out of love (not “animus”) and prudent concern for the common good (not “prejudice”), that we pledge to labor ceaselessly to preserve the legal definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman and to rebuild the marriage culture. How could we, as Christians, do otherwise? The Bible teaches us that marriage is a central part of God’s creation covenant. Indeed, the union of husband and wife mirrors the bond between Christ and his church. And so just as Christ was willing, out of love, to give Himself up for the church in a complete sacrifice, we are willing, lovingly, to make whatever sacrifices are required of us for the sake of the inestimable treasure that is marriage.

Religious Liberty

The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners. - Isaiah 61:1

Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's. - Matthew 22:21

The struggle for religious liberty across the centuries has been long and arduous, but it is not a novel idea or recent development. The nature of religious liberty is grounded in the character of God Himself, the God who is most fully known in the life and work of Jesus Christ. Determined to follow Jesus faithfully in life and death, the early Christians appealed to the manner in which the Incarnation had taken place: “Did God send Christ, as some suppose, as a tyrant brandishing fear and terror? Not so, but in gentleness and meekness..., for compulsion is no attribute of God” (Epistle to Diognetus 7.3-4). Thus the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the example of Christ Himself and in the very dignity of the human person created in the image of God—a dignity, as our founders proclaimed, inherent in every human, and knowable by all in the exercise of right reason.

Christians confess that God alone is Lord of the conscience. Immunity from religious coercion is the cornerstone of an unconstrained conscience. No one should be compelled to embrace any religion against his will, nor should persons of faith be forbidden to worship God according to the dictates of conscience or to express freely and publicly their deeply held religious convictions. What is true for individuals applies to religious communities as well.

It is ironic that those who today assert a right to kill the unborn, aged and disabled and also a right to engage in immoral sexual practices, and even a right to have relationships integrated around these practices be recognized and blessed by law—such persons claiming these “rights” are very often in the vanguard of those who would trample upon the freedom of others to express their religious and moral commitments to the sanctity of life and to the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife.

We see this, for example, in the effort to weaken or eliminate conscience clauses, and therefore to compel pro-life institutions (including religiously affiliated hospitals and clinics), and pro-life physicians, surgeons, nurses, and other health care professionals, to refer for abortions and, in certain cases, even to perform or participate in abortions. We see it in the use of anti-discrimination statutes to force religious institutions, businesses, and service providers of various sorts to comply with activities they judge to be deeply immoral or go out of business. After the judicial imposition of “same-sex marriage” in Massachusetts, for example, Catholic Charities chose with great reluctance to end its century-long work of helping to place orphaned children in good homes rather than comply with a legal mandate that it place children in same-sex households in violation of Catholic moral teaching. In New Jersey, after the establishment of a quasi-marital “civil unions” scheme, a Methodist institution was stripped of its tax exempt status when it declined, as a matter of religious conscience, to permit a facility it owned and operated to be used for ceremonies blessing homosexual unions. In Canada and some European nations, Christian clergy have been prosecuted for preaching Biblical norms against the practice of homosexuality. New hate-crime laws in America raise the specter of the same practice here.

In recent decades a growing body of case law has paralleled the decline in respect for religious values in the media, the academy and political leadership, resulting in restrictions on the free exercise of religion. We view this as an ominous development, not only because of its threat to the individual liberty guaranteed to every person, regardless of his or her faith, but because the trend also threatens the common welfare and the culture of freedom on which our system of republican government is founded. Restrictions on the freedom of conscience or the ability to hire people of one’s own faith or conscientious moral convictions for religious institutions, for example, undermines the viability of the intermediate structures of society, the essential buffer against the overweening authority of the state, resulting in the soft despotism Tocqueville so prophetically warned of.[1] Disintegration of civil society is a prelude to tyranny.

As Christians, we take seriously the Biblical admonition to respect and obey those in authority. We believe in law and in the rule of law. We recognize the duty to comply with laws whether we happen to like them or not, unless the laws are gravely unjust or require those subject to them to do something unjust or otherwise immoral. The biblical purpose of law is to preserve order and serve justice and the common good; yet laws that are unjust—and especially laws that purport to compel citizens to do what is unjust—undermine the common good, rather than serve it.

Going back to the earliest days of the church, Christians have refused to compromise their proclamation of the gospel. In Acts 4, Peter and John were ordered to stop preaching. Their answer was, “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God's sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” Through the centuries, Christianity has taught that civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes required. There is no more eloquent defense of the rights and duties of religious conscience than the one offered by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Writing from an explicitly Christian perspective, and citing Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas, King taught that just laws elevate and ennoble human beings because they are rooted in the moral law whose ultimate source is God Himself. Unjust laws degrade human beings. Inasmuch as they can claim no authority beyond sheer human will, they lack any power to bind in conscience. King’s willingness to go to jail, rather than comply with legal injustice, was exemplary and inspiring.

Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family. We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God’s.

[1] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Pray for Obama - Psalm 109:8

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:18:00 +0000

Psalm 109:8 - "Let his days be few; let another take his office."

So reads a popular bumpersticker. Interestingly, "Psalm 109:8" was a top Google search term yesterday. When millions of people are Googling the imprecatory Psalms, let the enemies of God be very afraid!

The 109th Psalm concerns the time when King Saul was seeking to kill David, whom Samuel had prophesied would take Saul's place. In those days, taking a king's place meant that the king would die. In case there is any doubt that David is imploring God to take Saul's life, verse 9 reads: "Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow."

No, this bumpersticker is not imploring God for a 2012 election day defeat, but for an untimely death due to the curse of God on a covenant-breaker.

Of course, right away the liberal elite and many Christian leaders are decrying this "unloving" use of the imprecatory Psalms to pray for our president.

The question they ask rhetorically is, "When is it ever right to pray for the death of a president?"

The answer: "Always!"

There is a common misconception about prayer. Many people believe that prayer is a form of magic. We pray and God supernaturally answers us according to our whims. Without going into a deep theological treatise on all the reasons why this is wrong, I will quote Bob Dylan here from the 1979 album Slow Train Coming:

Do you ever wonder just what God requires?
You think He's just an errand boy to satisfy your wandering desires.

When you gonna wake up, when you gonna wake up
When you gonna wake up and strengthen the things that remain?

Likewise, Ray Davies of The Kinks recently produced a solo work, Working Man's Cafe, which contains a reference criticizing the popular antinomian view of prayer. While "A Hymn for a New Age" is lacking a positive affirmation of Christian orthodoxy, Davies is correct about one thing:

I don't believe that God is a man with white hair
Sitting in a big chair
Judging the world and its morals
Forgiving today so we can sin again tomorrow

But I believe
I need something to look up to
I believe
I wanna pray but don't know what to

Indeed. Prayer does not move God. God is already moved. Prayer puts us in the position to receive the blessings and promises of God given before the foundation of the earth. We pray according to the model of scripture to know the will of God so that we might obey Him.

Further, all professing believers are in a covenant with God. When we were baptized, the covenant was initiated. This covenant is confirmed by the sacrament of Holy Communion each time we partake of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

In the Christian church, sacraments are covenant-making and covenant-renewing oaths. The Apostle Paul went as far as to say that those who partake of the sacrament in a state of unrepentant sin are knowingly entering into judgment (1 Corinthians 11:26-32).

Even the pagan Roman officials could see this connection in 112 AD. Pliny the Younger, making a report to the Emperor Trajan wrote:

They were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, and they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god, and bound themselves by a solemn oath (sacramentum), not to any wicked deeds, but never to commit any fraud, theft or adultery, never to falsify their word, nor deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up. Afterward, it was their custom to ... partake of food, but food of an ordinary and innocent kind.

To be a Christian is to be a covenant-keeper. But what happens when the covenant is broken?

Throughout scripture we see the covenant of God and the corresponding blessings and curses that come when we keep or break the covenant.

Barack Obama is a professing Christian. He was a member of a church that holds to the Apostles and Nicene Creeds and the Heidelberg Catechism. Among his greatest sins, Barack Obama is also pro-abortion. He has fought hard to keep abortion legal through all nine months of pregnancy, by any method, for any reason. Obama even opposed the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act in his home state -- a bill that even Planned Parenthood and NARAL refused to oppose because it essentially outlawed the infanticide of children born-alive after botched abortions.

When not only liberal commentators, but also squeamish preachers condemn those who condemn Obama, they are reaching the height of hypocrisy. They cite a so-called "Christian love" that includes looking the other way rather than oppose our president's open support of child murder.

Those who would pray Psalm 109:8 for Barack Obama need to understand that imprecatory prayer is not a magical formula. If God blesses us, who can curse us? For how can our enemies curse whom God has not cursed? We may curse those whom God has already cursed, but in the next breath, we need to also bless those whom God has blessed. The focus must always be God's sovereign glory and the honor of His name.

However wrong the intentions might be, it is no more of a sin to pray the covenantal curses of God on President Obama than it is to remain silent about his sin. Scripture assures us that if Barack Obama, one of God's covenant people, is graced with the gift of repentance, then God will surely bless him.

In short, don't pray Psalm 109:8 for President Obama. We are not to judge or curse our enemies. We are to pray and proclaim what God himself has already decreed before the foundation of the world toward both His friends and His enemies. Pray all of Psalm 109. Pray all of the blessings and curses found in the Law-Word of God.

For reference, here is a list of articles on imprecatory prayer from The Forerunner.

An Imprecatory Prayer Proclamation: Barack Obama

What is Imprecatory Prayer?

The Attitude of the Godly Toward God's Enemies

Imprecatory Prayer: Enforcing the Covenant of God

Imprecatory Prayer! - The Church's Duty Against Her Enemies

Psalm 109 (KJV)

1 Hold not thy peace, O God of my praise;
2 For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful are opened against me: they have spoken against me with a lying tongue.
3 They compassed me about also with words of hatred; and fought against me without a cause.
4 For my love they are my adversaries: but I give myself unto prayer.
5 And they have rewarded me evil for good, and hatred for my love.
6 Set thou a wicked man over him: and let Satan stand at his right hand.
7 When he shall be judged, let him be condemned: and let his prayer become sin.
8 Let his days be few; and let another take his office.
9 Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.
10 Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.
11 Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labour.
12 Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favour his fatherless children.
13 Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out.
14 Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with the LORD; and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out.
15 Let them be before the LORD continually, that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth.
16 Because that he remembered not to shew mercy, but persecuted the poor and needy man, that he might even slay the broken in heart.
17 As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him: as he delighted not in blessing, so let it be far from him.
18 As he clothed himself with cursing like as with his garment, so let it come into his bowels like water, and like oil into his bones.
19 Let it be unto him as the garment which covereth him, and for a girdle wherewith he is girded continually.
20 Let this be the reward of mine adversaries from the LORD, and of them that speak evil against my soul.
21 But do thou for me, O GOD the Lord, for thy name's sake: because thy mercy is good, deliver thou me.
22 For I am poor and needy, and my heart is wounded within me.
23 I am gone like the shadow when it declineth: I am tossed up and down as the locust.
24 My knees are weak through fasting; and my flesh faileth of fatness.
25 I became also a reproach unto them: when they looked upon me they shaked their heads.
26 Help me, O LORD my God: O save me according to thy mercy:
27 That they may know that this is thy hand; that thou, LORD, hast done it.
28 Let them curse, but bless thou: when they arise, let them be ashamed; but let thy servant rejoice.
29 Let mine adversaries be clothed with shame, and let them cover themselves with their own confusion, as with a mantle.
30 I will greatly praise the LORD with my mouth; yea, I will praise him among the multitude.
31 For he shall stand at the right hand of the poor, to save him from those that condemn his soul.

NBC's Law & Order "Dignity" episode takes script material from pro-life website

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 01:25:00 +0000

"Two weeks ago, my son had less rights than a dog or a cat."
- Gaulberto Garcia Jones, Director, Personhood Colorado
Press Conference, July 2, 2009

Speaking to District Attorney Jack McCoy, Michael Cutter (Linus Roache) says, "My God, cats and dogs have more rights than the unborn. Roe v. Wade wasn't written in stone. It could stand another look."
- Law & Order, "Dignity," air date: October 23. 2009

"The timing is perfect because the polls show now that more people are pro-life then pro-death."
- Leslie Hanks, Vice President, Colorado Right to Life
Press Conference, July 2, 2009

"Its time to face the facts, the tide has turned. Most Americans are pro-life now."
- Law & Order, "Dignity," air date: October 23. 2009

Pierre Renelique: Hialeah abortion doctor on the run!

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:13:00 +0000

I especially like the part in this video report where the abortionist starts running from the reporter even while he continues giving the interview. Finally, not being able to keep from incriminating himself by running his mouth even while he is literally on the run, he does the logical thing and attacks the microphone.

The irony is that this is essentially what we tried to do in the 1990s with Jay's Killer Web Page, to expose abortionists' evil deeds to the public. Of course, we were sued (unsuccessfully) and labelled terrorists for giving out much the same information on a website. That was back in the days prior to Fox News.

MYFOXNY.COM - The case made national headlines: A botched abortion in Florida and an elaborate cover-up. The physician involved -- Dr. Pierre Renelique -- was banned from practicing medicine there. But nine months after Florida revoked his license, he is seeing patients in the Bronx. Fox 5's Arnold Diaz tracked him down for an exclusive report.

WARNING: Some information in this report is graphic.

MORE INFORMATION ON DR. PIERRE JEAN JACQUES RENELIQUE:

• NEW YORK DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH DECISION
• FLORIDA BOARD OF MEDICINE

View MyFox Tampa Bay's February 6, 2009, report on Dr. Renelique's Florida license revocation hearing:

Baby Rowan Revisited

jrogers@forerunner.com (Jay Rogers) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 06:17:00 +0000

Can a pro-life video save unborn children? A friend of mine, Patte Smith, has been using this video at Dr. Pendergraft's abortion clinic, where she stands for the unborn as a sidewalk counselor and evangelist. I've been blessed to hear a few people changed their mind on abortion by viewing these videos I have put together in the past few years. Many have been convicted that abortion on demand through all nine months of pregnancy is a heartless policy. Below is one such testimony Patte received by email. Dr. Pendergraft owns the clinic where little baby Rowan was born alive and left to die.

My name is KC and I’ve been pro-choice as long as I can remember. Yesterday, I took my dear friend to Orlando Women’s Health Center for an abortion. To my surprise, you and a few other demonstrators were there. Of course, my friend and I ignored your calls out to us and went inside. But, then I needed a cigarette. When I went outside to smoke, I was listening to your pleas, just taking it all in. After four hours of waiting @ OWHC, the staff told my friend that they couldn’t do the procedure there. We were instructed to go home and get $300 more and meet the Dr. @ EPOC. We did as instructed. The doctor started the procedure and then told my friend to be back @ 9am the next day (today). They sent her home in the middle of an abortion. So while we were getting the runaround by Dr. Pendergraft’s employees, I couldn’t get your pleas out of my head. After a long and trying day, I came home and tried to get some sleep. Instead, I tossed and turned as your cries nagged at me.

So I gave up and went to youtube.com as you instructed. I typed “baby rowan 911” into the search bar but couldn’t find the courage to press to search button. What was I so afraid of? I’m pro choice. There is nothing anybody can say that will change that, right? So after this little battle with myself, I pressed search. I listened to the horrific 911 call and cried. I couldn’t believe it, so I did more research. I couldn’t believe to horror stories that I found. I was mortified when I found that it is not uncommon for aborted babies to be born alive and the staff just leaves them alone to die. I guess I just figured when babies are aborted they don’t even look like babies yet. I always figured they just kind of looked like a blob of tissue and cells. As I did a little research, my heart broke and my opinion changed. So I wanted to thank you. Thank you for being the voice of these dead babies. Because of you my views are changing. You made me more aware. Keep doing what your doing and try not to get discouraged. Even if people don’t let you know it, you are touching lives. Again, thank you.