4 Reasons Video Games are NOT Worth Playing

Before all you gamers write an insipid hateful comment about how I know nothing about gaming and how it is not inherently evil, read my previous post, 4 Reasons Why Video Games Are Worth Playing.  I titled this article this way as a shameless plug to get people to read it because I do think that video games present dangers to the Christian that are worth thinking about.  By no means, do I think the medium is worthless and altogether evil–read my previous article and I think that will become clear (P.S. for those of you who don’t know, I am a gamer).

So given that I have outlined 4 reasons why video games ARE worth playing, I now give you 4 reasons why video games are NOT worth playing (which should really be titled 4 reasons video games present dangers to the Christian–but that just isn’t very catchy!):

1.  Many video games are designed to consume your time and energy.  “Reply value” is a huge selling point to many of the industry’s best selling games.  Apparently gamers want games that will last a while, that can be played for many hours without the gamer becoming disinterested.  Thus, sports games now have “dynasty” or “career” modes in which you can play numerous seasons with your favorite sports team–needless to say this can consume inordinate hours of our time and energy that could be better spent in more productive ways.  I am not saying it is wrong to play a “dynasty” mode, I am just saying that it is probably hard to do so without consuming an inordinate amount of time and energy on a video game.  Another example that comes to mind are many online role playing games (or MMORPGs as they are called–MMO stands for Massively Multiplayer Online).  World of Warcraft (WoW) is probably the most popular.  I haven’t played WoW but I have played other similar online RPGs and have found that they can really consume your time and tempt you to detach from the real world.  If you want to be good at WoW (and many other similar games) you have to spend a lot time playing it and leveling up your character.  Some people even pay to have expert gamers “level up” their character while they are at work!

In addition, its not just sports games and RPGs, even first person shooters are designed to consume inordinate amounts of time.  Think about the design for most online multiplayer games–they all have rankings and tournaments that are designed to get you to play more and more and more.  And if you want to improve your ranking and climb the charts, you MUST play a great deal (unless you just have sick dexterity and hand-eye coordination).

2.  Video games can foster isolation from community.  In my previous article, I argued that video games can build community and I think that is more true today than it ever has been.  However, I would venture to guess that most gamers still do the majority of their gaming in isolation.  Is it wrong to play a video game by yourself?  No, its not, but it could be if you do it all the time and at the expense of cultivating relationships with real people in the real world.  I think gamers need to think hard about striking a healthy balance here.

3.  Sexually explicit content is becoming a commonality in the many of the most popular games.  Many video games today possess sexual content that is inappropriate for most boys let alone most men.  We all know that sex sells in the movies but if you didn’t know, sex also sells in video games.  Think Laura Croft of Tomb Raider (which is now actually pretty tame compared to the kind of content being implemented into many games today)–Tomb Raider was a great idea for a game about treasure hunting and exploring, but as Laura Croft began to be drawn at higher and higher resolutions, she started a revolution of drawing female video game characters in incredibly unrealistic ways.  This is not only unhealthy for Christian young men, but also discriminatory toward women.  And as I said, Tomb Raider is now actually pretty tame by comparison with other games like Grand Theft Auto or The Saboteur.  Parents, please look at ratings, read reviews, know what kind of games your kids are getting into–don’t buy them games that you know are not going to help their sanctification.

4.  Postmodern ethics are becoming more and more common in video games today.  I mentioned in my previous article that many games today draw clear lines between good and evil and that is true, however, its is becoming more and more common for games to be pretty unclear on good and evil and instead present a world of moral grays rather than moral absolutes.  Please don’t hear this as an argument to boycott video games–we need to learn how to constructively engage our postmodern world for the sake of Christ.  Nonetheless, the prevalence of postmodern ethics in video games is something for Christians to be aware of, especially when it comes to determining what kind of games we will allow our children to play.

Probably the most recent example is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which contains a scene where you are undercover pretending to be a terrorist and are charged with opening fire on innocent civilians at an airport in order to maintain your cover and take down the terrorists (I have not played it, but supposedly the game gives you the option of skipping this scenario).  Other examples include the Grand Theft Auto series in which you are criminal and commit crimes to progress the plot.  Call of Duty: World at War is rather post-modern in its message–instead of focusing on toppling an evil dictatorship (i.e. the Nazis), CoD:WaW seems to function to illustrate the ills of war and the sins committed on all sides (there is certainly a realistic element here that adds some value to the game).  Some of these games have almost no redemptive qualities (i.e. Grand Theft Auto), others are worth playing for the challenges and questions they bring up which mature Christians will engage in thoughtfully (i.e. Fallout 3 or perhaps Fable).  In fact, it seems the anti-hero is more common than the hero in today’s most popular games (Call of Duty, The Saboteur, God of War, Assassin’s Creed)!  This trend is something to be aware of and it certainly presents its dangers, because as Christians we realize that there are absolute truths worth living for and dieing for.  Although the gaming world is not the real world, it is an expression of it and one that we would do well to engage thoughtfully as Christians and carefully as Christian parents.

4 Reasons Video Games are Worth Playing

To understand fully where I am coming from, this article should be read alongside its companion article, 4 Reasons Video Games Are Not Worth Playing.   I am not being intentionally wishy-washy on my stance on videogames, I really think there are sound arguments for why Christians should be wary of video games as well as sound arguments for why video games are a worthwhile activity for Christians to engage in.

Let me say at the outset, that despite what you have heard, video games are not evil.  This is a common fundamentalist misunderstanding of art.  Simply put, video games do not have souls and therefore are neither good nor evil.  Human beings as the creators of video games are the ones that infuse them with either positive or negative qualities.  Thus to label all video games as evil, connotes a misunderstanding of art–video games just like any other art form can communicate many different messages.  I think that video games, therefore, can sometimes possess worthwhile messages.  Certainly many video games are not worth playing because of the message they convey but that doesn’t mean that there are not worthwhile games out there.  However, the video game  industry does tend to make games which lend themselves to abuse (or more pointedly to addiction)–I discuss this in the companion article.

4 Reasons Why Video Games are Worth Playing:

1.  Video games can foster community – I experienced this recently playing Beatles Rock Band with 6 students from my church–all at once!  It was a lot of fun–we laughed at each other at how terrible each of us sing and we helped those who had never played before learn how to play the drums and the guitar.  It was a lot of fun and I think some community was built.  Certainly there are more worthy ways to build community, but that doesn’t rule out video games altogether.  Having fun laughing and working together can help to build community.  Games like Little Big Planet and Super Mario Brothers Wii encourage team work and are just plain fun to play in group settings.  If you have never played it, I recommend next time you have several people over to your house (if you have a Wii), trying WarioWare: Smooth Moves and tell me if its not fun!  Furthermore, many sports games are fun to play with friends and having fun with friends is generally a good thing.

2. Video games are fun.  I basically made this argument already so I won’t say much here.  Simply put, video games are fun to play.  Entertainment is not evil in and of itself.  If we elevate entertainment to “god” status, we have certainly erred and made video games an idol. But again the error lies in us and not the medium itself.  It is possible to play video games for fun in healthy doses and in such a way that we are not making an idol out of it.  Everyone does things for entertainment and everything we do for entertainment can be engaged in healthy and unhealthy ways.  A basic rule of thumb is to check yourself before blaming the medium itself.  Sin comes out of the heart of man not from outside (Mark 7:18-22).

Furthermore, video games are an art form.  We don’t often think of them that way, but nonetheless they are art and people created in the image of God are capable of creating beautiful art worth experiencing–sometimes this actually happens in video games (i.e. Shadow of the Colossus).  I would even say that the way in which FIFA 10 displays “the beautiful game” is well, beautiful.

3.  Video games can people develop critical thinking skills and challenge us in moral decision making.  I discussed this briefly in a previous post.  Video games have changed dramatically over the years and some of them are now very complex in the world they present.  Many video games today offer the player a great deal of freedom in the choices they make and the way in which they accomplish their quest (think Fallout 3, Infamous, or Fable).  Many video game developers are working to make games more like real life–such that the player decides what kind of person he or she will be in the game.  This, can be a healthy exercise.  Certainly, some will posit that gamers will choose to be hedonists in such games (and perhaps less like real life because video games aren’t real), and certainly that temptation is present.  I would say, however, that that temptation is present everywhere in and everything we do.

4.  Many games still operate on the traditional good vs. evil scheme.  This is changing as postmodern ethics begin to make their way into the medium of video games, but nonetheless, I would say a great number of video games are still made with a traditional understanding of good vs. evil (think Mario games, many role playing games like Final Fantasy, and most superhero games).

So there you have it, though not a comprehensive list, I hope this gives you some perspective on why the medium of video games is not inherently evil and in fact can be engaged in such a way that positive results follow.  As with any form of entertainment or any art form, it can be abused.  That possibility should not discourage Christians from thinking about ways to engage video games redemptively.

Posts will come in future…

Hey all, I haven’t died . . . just almost, =).

I will respond briefly to a few points of secularist10 as I promised, life has just been far too busy for me to do anything on this ephemeral mode of discourse that we call a blog.

I really don’t have the time to devote to a full-fledged continuing debate with secularist10, so I plan on posting some revised notes from a lecture I gave this summer on epistemology, naturalism, and the resurrection . . . and likely calling at that.  This lecture deals with the issues at the heart of the disagreement between secularism (or any other thought-program) and Christianity.  I might also point to some pertinent resources for those who desire to investigate these issues more.

I’m just not a “blogger” for a reason: I don’t have time!

Ethics, Christianity, and Video Games

A while back I promised to write some posts about Christianity and video games and I never did. Given the recent media controversy about the airport terrorist scene in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,  this week I started feeling guilty about not having done what I promised, so here is one such attempt at such a post.  I don’t own Modern Warfare, so I cannot comment on that too much, but I do want to talk about video games and the ethical decisions that we are sometimes asked to make in them.

Video games have changed drastically over the years.  They have gone from being relatively simple (i.e. Pong–hitting a ball back and forth, which surprisingly can still provide some entertainment), to being quite complex–not just in how difficult they are to play but also in the complexity world they create.  Though there are still many mind numbingly simple games out there (most of which can be bought for Nintendo Wii), there a number of new and innovative games being released every year.

Some games are worth playing simply for aesthetic reasons, these are rare, but games like ICO and Shadow of the Colossus are worth picking up just to experience the beauty of the world found therein.  However, there is another trend in video games (not that new, it can be traced back to the first role playing games) to make games in which players are presented with moral choices.  They can choose to make righteous decisions or they can choose to make selfish, evil decisions and face the consequences of either.  Probably the most popular recent game where this is the case is Fallout 3, though the Fable series is well known for incorporating this dynamic (I think Infamous follows this trend).  I don’t have Fallout 3 or Fable II (though I do still have Fable for the original Xbox), so I won’t discuss either of those games, but instead I will address how this plays out in my favorite spy game, Splinter Cell.
I recently bought Splinter Cell Double Agent for Playstation 3 (Its been out for a while now, so now you can get it cheap!).  The game posses a great number of difficult moral choices.  In the game you go undercover to bring down a terrorist organization that is trying to overthrow the U.S. government in some malicious ways.  You have to accomplish missions for the terrorist cell while reporting information to the NSA and in the process, the game gives you freedom to determine how much you will sabotage the terrorist’s evil ends. Every decision you make affects how much the NSA and the terrorist organization trust you.  If either of them lose too much faith in you–game over.
I found this incredibly compelling as I first began to play the game.  In the first several missions you are able to please both the NSA and the terrorists without too much trouble.  But recently I had to put the game down because I was presented with a terribly difficult moral decision to make and I just decided to put the game down cause I couldn’t decide the right thing to do.  Let me explain.

In the mission I am currently on, I had to go and plant a bomb on a cruise ship.  Fortunately you are able to fake a fire on the ship so that most of the passengers evacuate.  However, the Mexican Coast Guard is privy to a terrorist threat, so many of them remain on board.  As you plant the bomb, you also record the disarming code so that you can disarm the bomb before it goes off.

At the end of this mission you are given 3 options–(1) disarm the bomb and take a HUGE hit in how much the terrorist organization trusts you or (2) disarm the bomb and blame it on another member of the terrorist organization who will then be killed or (3) let the bomb go off as it would not kill any Americans, only members of the Mexican Coast Guard.  Very interesting question.

1.  You disarm the bomb and face the consequences–this will make the next mission incredibly difficult as you will be on very shaky ground with the terrorist organization–it is not “game over” but its close.

2.  You disarm the bomb and blame it on someone else.  Interestingly enough though, the person you can blame it on is the only terrorist with redeeming qualities–she is the one person who was opposed to planting the bomb and one that perhaps could be turned away from terrorism and perhaps even help you take the organization down!  On the other hand she is a member of a terrorist organization and blaming it on her would save you from losing an incredible amount of trust and blowing your cover.

3.  You do not disarm the bomb, let it go off and kill several Coast Guard soldiers.  This is after all just a game and not real life, why not do the thing that will make the game easier for you?  (not advocating this, just asking the question).

This moral conundrum surprised me, I didn’t expect to be so conflicted about a choice in a video game, so I just quit playing–it is a game, it is not real, so I have that option.  In life, however, though we will probably never face a moral dilemma on this level, we will face difficult moral decisions and we cannot quit, we will have to make a decision of some sort and face the consequences whatever they may be.

I have decided to pick the game back up, I now know what I am going to do.  I have settled in  my mind what the right course of action is.  What would you do?  I want to see if this generates any discussion first, but later, I will post in the comment meta what I am going to do.  This whole situation, I think was actually an interesting exercise for me in moral decision making.  So feel free to share your thoughts about ethics, video games, etc. in the comment meta.

In short there are some games out there (few though they may be) that make us think about difficult issues.  As a family pastor, I would would be careful about letting your children play games like Splinter Cell: Double Agent, but nonetheless it presents us with some interesting questions that are worth asking and worth thinking through.

The Danger of Living on Sand Mountain

I live on Sand Mountain.  Some of you who read this will have no idea what I am talking about.  Sand Mountain is a sandstone plateau in Northeast Alabama on which a number of cities lie, including my own, Albertville, AL.  It is really not a mountain at all, at least not in my understanding of mountains having grown up further West where the Rocky Mountains were within driving distance.  There is nothing physically frightening about Sand Mountain, but it is, nonetheless, a dangerous place for a “Christian” to live.  Let me explain.

²¹ “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. ²² On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ ²³ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ (Matthew 7:21-23)

Despite what you have heard, it is not easy to follow Christ in Albertville, AL.  Sure, there are tons of churches here and thousands of people who claim to be Christians and even attend church, but it is not easy to follow Christ here.  No doubt it would be difficult to live as a Christian in Salt Lake City where the vast majority of people are Mormons or Seattle or Maine where the vast majority of people are secular.  However, I think we face a danger just as great and just as grievous as the false gospel of Mormonism or secularism—we here in the Bible-belt face the false gospel of religion or “churchianity” as some call it.

We are surrounded by churches, para-church ministries, Christian radio, prayer at football games, revivals services, ministry conferences, Bible studies, and on and on.  Living in such a church-saturated culture, there is a great danger to attach ourselves to these things such that our hope is in our connection to a church, a connection to a Bible study, or a connection to any other religious activity we participate in rather than our connection to the Lord Jesus Christ by grace alone through faith alone.

The opportunities to plug into religion in Marshall County are bountiful, but how many are genuinely plugging into a single-minded passionate pursuit of the Lord Jesus Christ?  I don’t know the answer to that, but I fear that many more are plugging into religion.  It is this fear that drove me back to the Bible-belt.  I grew up in Amarillo, TX which is very much a part of the Bible belt and I lived there until I went to seminary after graduating college.  I lived in Louisville, KY, a city that in my estimation is not part of the Bible-belt.  Living there was interesting and challenging.  The last two years that I lived there, I lived downtown near the University of Louisville—I could share many stories of how I tried to preach the gospel to very secular-driven people on the campus of U of L and how difficult it was and yet how much joy it brought me, but it seems the Lord has brought me back into the Bible-belt and yet the challenges seem equally great.

I fear that much like these people that Jesus speaks of in Matthew 7:21-23, that many in Marshall County will say on the day of the Lord, “did we not go to church and did we not pray at our football games and before meals and did we not attend revivals and prayer breakfasts and did we not join a church and attend on occasion and did we not go to Bible studies and give to missions?” and the Lord will say, “depart from me I never knew you.”  Let me be clear, the above list of activities are all good things and I wouldn’t condemn anyone for participating in them, but anyone, including myself who puts their hope in their connection to these things is in big trouble.

The connection that we must put our hope in is our connection to Christ who suffered “once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18).  And this connection to Christ inevitably and powerfully changes us.  “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.  The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).  This is the community the Lord has called our church to, not just a connection to religion but a relationship with Christ that transforms us and invites us to a community that fosters real, biblical, Christ-like transformation.

New Covenant Baptist Church (the church the Lord has graced me to serve in) is the most wonderful church I have ever been a part of.  I am continually reminded of how blessed I am to work with the wonderful people here, but it is my prayer for our church that we fight the temptation to put our hope in our good works, our church membership, or our religious activities.  It is my prayer that we would progressively grow into a community of believers whose hope is in the Lord Jesus Christ  where we are learning to be transparent about sin, engaging in ministry in our workplaces, and fostering relationships that point people to Christ and not religion.  In short, my prayer is that we would be a church that seeks the substance and not the form.  My prayer is that we would seek Christ himself.  Will you pray with me?

 

“The New Atheism and Morality”

Click here and here to watch two excellent lectures by Oxford scholar, Dr. John Lennox, on the new atheism and morality. The lectures were delivered at SEBTS in March 2008, so I don’t know how long the videos will be available.

If you’re sitting there wondering whether you should take the time to watch, my favorite professor at Southeastern, Dr. John Hammett, says these are the best lectures he has heard in the 13 years he has been teaching there.

Leithart on Just War Theory

Peter Leithart is one of my favorite authors.  He has recently written an outstanding book on hermeneutics, called Deep Exegesis.  I heartily recommend it to you if you’re interested in issues related to Biblical interpretation in the 21st Century.  It’s one of the best books to date on what’s known in the academy as “theological interpretation.”  Another great book of his is A House for My Name, which is an introduction to the Old Testament from a Christian perspective.  Too often in evangelicalism, people read the OT from a “history of religions” approach where we curiously gaze upon the peculiar Israelites and remind ourselves of how cool it is that we don’t have to kill sheep all the time.  That’s not the point of the OT.  The point of the OT is Jesus, and Leithart does a good job of bringing that out.

Leithart is also an avid blogger, and he has a series of recent posts where he notes some of the harsher aspects of Just War Theory in practice, Jus in Bello?, Jus in Bello? 2, Jus in Bello Continued.   If you’re interested in ethics and what it means to be a Christian in a world at war, he uses good illustrations that point us toward good questions we need to be wrestling with.

Faith in the dark or faith amidst the dark?

I have been extremely busy the past two weeks – our semester is quickly winding down and the deadline for my PhD applications are drawing close. Needless to say, I’ve neglected responding to secularist10 to focus on research papers and GRE prep! For that, I’m sorry. I’d love to offer a more thorough response, but a brief one will have to suffice for the moment. I’m just going to touch on a few issues that drive to the heart of what’s really going on here.

Secularist10 offers the following account of epistemology and the verifiability of an argument:

As human beings, we have questions. How do we answer these questions? By using (1) evidence and (2) arguments based on that evidence. Whichever argument or position or idea or philosophy has more evidence supporting it is the winner. It’s that simple. A corollary of this approach to understanding is that ideas or beliefs for which there is minimal evidence are to be looked upon with heavy skepticism and doubt, and, in the same way, claims for which there is no evidence are not to be accepted at all.

God is one idea for which there is no evidence.

This is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. For example, no one would argue that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Furthermore, the evidence could be out of reach. You might be in a closed room with no windows when the lights go out. You cannot see everything, or occupy every space at that moment, so there might indeed be evidence somewhere that a ladybug is in the room with you. The fact that you could not prove this would not suddenly call into question the reality of the presence of that ladybug, it would merely be an epistemological hurdle for someone in a dark room.

On a second note, what’s admissible as evidence? Whose evidence? What courtroom? All of this assumes one’s own foundations for sweeping issues such as what constitutes knowledge, how we know things, how we can trust what we know, etc. So while the issue ultimately does become fundamental, it’s not really “that simple.” To say that we have no evidence for God is an amazing claim in and of itself. Such a declaration would presuppose access to all  knowledge, which under the approach of secularist10 doesn’t make sense.

The approach as outlined above by secularist10 (whether they actually hold to it or not) assumes that only what we can see, taste, touch, smell, etc. should be admissible as evidence. But this assumption needs to be substantiated. Anyone who claims objective knowledge of the world based upon empirical verification through a scientific method or whatever it is needs to demonstrate how that method is substantiated by something other than itself which can give it such weight. For Christians, this “something other” is God who has revealed himself not just in a set of canonical books we call Scripture, but definitively has drawn near to us in Jesus of Nazareth. Thus, any claims that humans cannot comprehend God have been eradicated by Yhwh, who himself has taken on our lowly condition by dwelling amongst us. He has given us the “hermeneutical key” (or more crudely, the “decoder ring”) of all of life: Jesus Christ.

All religions begin with a few underlying assumptions that are not supported by any proof, and which therefore require faith to accept.

Well, if we’re being honest, everyone does this. If that makes everyone “religious,” then ok. Everyone has a certain understanding, developed or not, of the perennial issues of “life, the universe, and everything,” to quote Douglas Adams. Each and every one of these understandings, or perspectives, eventually boils down to underlying assumptions that require faith to accept. This is unavoidable. Ultimately, what you have to do is look at those underlying assumptions and ask what they’re based on. Where do they come from? How do they make sense of everything?

Ideas are totalizing, so you cannot talk about something without at the same time talking about everything. Therefore, unless you can account for everything, you cannot account for anything. The burden for anyone rejecting Jesus Christ as God is to demonstrate how their own ideas make better sense of the world and do so without borrowing assumptions from the view they are rejecting. I believe this task is impossible for a naturalist, a mere “deist,” or what have you.

But let me be clear: that’s not why I am a Christian. I didn’t somehow gather together all of the various arguments, weigh them against one another, and then come to the enlightened conclusion that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, buried, and raised again on the third day to ascend to heaven and sit at the right hand of God, etc.

It is faith. But that’s hardly a reason to look askance upon that confession. Because, as I hope we can all agree upon by now, everyone has faith. But there’s substance behind my faith. The view of “life, the universe, and everything” that I get from Jesus Christ and the Scriptures that attest to him (Luke 24) makes sense of everything. No, I don’t “have it all figured out.” But God does, and he has revealed enough to me to trust that I don’t need to have it all figured out.

What I do know is that we are here for a very specific reason.  Because of our inherent pride, we fail to see that everyday and we’ve gone astray from the purposes for which we were created.  As a result, everything has suffered and we find ourselves separated from God.  Jesus Christ is the answer to this dilemma, the God who approaches man, and the only man who can approach God.  He has reconciled us through his death, resurrection, and ascension.  He is making all things new, and will one day eradicate every last sliver of pain and suffering we see.  That I cannot attempt to explain.  Hope baffles me.

For further reading, I encourage anyone interested in these issues to read N. T. Wright’s magisterial (and meaty) study on the resurrection: The Resurrection of the Son of God.

Jesus is the Son of God

Words matter, especially in the Bible.  Every word has the potential to be of massive significance.  This is pretty clear all over the New Testament, and the very theologically-loaded Gospel accounts are no exception.

"The Last Judgment" by Michelangelo

In Matthew 25, Jesus refers to himself as the Son of Man (ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου) who will come on the clouds (24:30), in his glory, with all his angels, and sit on his glorious throne (25:31).  The Son of Man language, in conjunction with the cloud imagery in 24:30, alludes to Dan 7:13.

This is significant, because in Ps 104:3 we are told that Yhwh “makes the clouds his chariot.”  Dan 7:13 says the same thing of this Son of Man, who is also given “dominion and glory and a kingdom,” one that “shall not be destroyed” (Dan 7:13-14).  This picks up on 2 Sam 7, a passage where God is making his covenant with David.  God tells David that He will establish the kingdom of David’s offspring, and its throne will be established forever (2 Sam 7:13).  “And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me.  Your throne shall be established forever” (2 Sam 7:16).

Isaiah picked this up when he spoke of the child that would be born, whose named would be “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace,” who would be “on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and forevermore” (Isa 9:6-7).  Interestingly, Matthew has already used Isa 9:1-2 in the fulfillment quotation of 4:12-16. Isaiah 9:1-2 says, “In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he has made glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations [ed: or "Gentiles"].  The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined.”  In the original context, this passage “concerns a broken people who have suffered Assyrian attack and deportation (cf. 2 Kgs 15.29; 1 Chr 5.26); to them is promised deliverance: a son from the house of David will bring salvation (9.6-7)” (Davies and Allison, Matthew. ICC, 1:380).

Matthew paraphrases the original Hebrew with noticeable influence from its Greek translation (the Septuagint, or LXX), a typical move in 1st Century Jewish exegesis, in Matt 4:12-16, “Now when he [Jesus] heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee.  And leaving Nazareth he went and lived in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, so that what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled: ‘The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles–the people dwelling in darkness have seen a great light, and for those dwelling in the region and shadow of death, on them a light has dawned.‘”

Canonically, the picture of Jesus building up to this point in Matthew,”The Christ, the Son of the Living God” (ὁ χριστὸς ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ ζῶντος – 16:16),”The Son of Man” (ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου – 24:30; 25:31), “The Son of David” (τῷ υἱῷ Δαυίδ – 21:15), “The King” (ὁ βασιλεὺς – 25:34), is fairly clear (just go back and read the genealogy in Matt 1).  This is the Messianic Son of David, Yhwh himself, who will establish his kingdom forever.

Coming Soon: Tackling Aristotle’s Fish

Secularist10, who blogs over at 100 Treatises, has just responded to my post from last week on the uniqueness and indispensability of Christ with “Why I am a Secularist.”

I will respond to (her? him?) sometime this week as time allows. As any reader of this blog is aware, I’m a very rare author here in the first place!  I think Drew (and sometimes Kevin) are more the driving force of this thing.  But Secularist10 raises some points that are commonly leveled against Christians and I want to be sure we know what’s at stake with these claims, and perhaps reveal a few blindspots for Secularist10 and for most Christian attempts to defend the faith that can help move such discussions forward rather than backward.