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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I posted yesterday about Christopher Hitchens’ thoughts on Christians that he’s debated and one reader responded with a different, secularist perspective (which we welcome here!).  I was going to respond to them in the comments section, but I found my response becoming a bit too long and figured I would put it up in a separate post since it had some serious thoughts on what makes Christianity unique.  This is by no means exhaustive, but only a surface-level introduction to ‘why Christianity’ rather than Islam, or Buddhism, etc.

Here we go….

1.  The existence of God cannot and does not need to be demonstrated.  It is evident and is no more subject to “proof” than “disproof.” This is not similar to anything else, no matter how hard we try to draw correlations to spaghetti monsters (cf. Bertrand Russell), etc.  Such elusive arguments actually fail to consider the definition of what they’re arguing about.  I’m not interested in arguing for the existence of “deity” in and of itself.  I’m an atheist in many respects:  I don’t believe in “Allah” or the god of Judaism or the gods of Mormonism, et al.  I believe in the one God revealed in Jesus Christ.  He has been seen and we have eye-witness testimony to this event and his deity. 

Rational proofs for/against the existence of some otiose deity dangling before our eyes are rather vain projections of our own minds onto a blank canvas (thank you Cornelius Van Til).  They are thus fruitless.  I can understand why a “secularist” would want to go down this road, but we share different presuppositions and thus have no neutral ground from which to argue.  Someone might retort and say, “Reason is the only neutral ground, why not simply agree to the dictates of logic and reason and then go from there?”  Ok, fine, but whose reason?  Reason is not an abstract, independent reality floating outside of actual people, outside of time and space.  Reason is built upon the foundations of beliefs that people assume without argumentation (“presuppositions).  Thus, reason is anything but neutral.  I might just as well say that your perspective assumes the non-existence of something you call “god,” for which there is no evidence.  I hope I’m being concrete enough with what I’m saying. 

Furthermore, we cannot speak of the “non-existence” of the God revealed in Jesus Christ because existence is part of his very definition.  To say otherwise would be to separate the signifier from signified.  Most people haven’t made the proper correlation between the two such that they posit the non-existence of something they claim is the Christian God, when in fact they have something wholly different in their sights.  This is what makes Richard Dawkins such an amateur in this respect and why no philosopher or theologian has yet to take him seriously.  Yhwh is self-existing (‘a se‘ in Latin), thus requiring no cause for himself, etc.

2.  SO, if we start from the fact of Jesus Christ, then we actually have something to work with.  We know about him through Scripture, which then leads to all sorts of questions as to how that’s interpreted, etc.  I don’t have time to get too far into this (I’m not going to convince anyone anyway), but the gospel - the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ alone from our sinful separation from God – is the basis for racial and sexual equality, for nonviolence, for the inherent value of human life.  Other religions might profess to hold to similar beliefs, but they are actually radically different. 

If you cannot see this, it is because you are not a follower of Christ.  So you can’t see the ways in which the value of human life is bound up with the fact that God has shared our time and space with us by assuming flesh, and in that same act, redeemed us.  You don’t understand what it means to be made in the image of Yhwh, rather than to made in the image of “god.”  You can’t see the intricacies of the many ways that the gospel breaks down social divisions and makes everyone equal beggars at the foot of the cross.  You don’t understand how race is a sinful human taxonomy that finds little basis in our ontology.  According to Scripture, you are either “in Christ” or “in Adam;” redeemed or not.  You don’t see how Grace removes privilege.  Neither can you see how the creating activity of a TRIUNE God (as opposed to any other “god”) ontologically grounds proper relations between the sexes and proper sexual relations.  You cannot grasp the depth with which Christ’s death on the cross puts an end to coercive force and violence.

My point is this:  I cannot show you all these things because you would not believe them, but Christian answers are just as hostile to other religions’ answers as your own brand of secularism is.  They are not the same, not even close.  Why do we all find an inherent need for racial equality, sexual equality, nonviolence, etc?  It cannot point to a condition prior to God’s creating activity.  If you posit that, then you have to explain how it is human life can have any inherent (read: not culturally or socially assigned) value in a secular system. 

Instead, the answer is that all of these things – these values and longings – are built into the fabric of who we were created to image.  Christians say that image is Christ.  When you begin to understand the colossal implications of that view, then you begin to understand how Christianity is not one religion amongst many.  Instead, it stands opposed to all forms of human religion.  It stands opposed to all human ideologies.  When it stands properly, it stands alone in this world as the consequence of a summons to discipleship; to humbly, obediently, and faithfully follow Christ, our creator and the only true image of God.

So, why not Islam?  Why not Judaism?  Why not Buddhism?  Why not secularism?  Why not any other “peaceful” religion?  Because they cannot explain everything and thus cannot explain anything.  That is a dogmatic claim, I realize.  But it gets back to my point in yesterday’s post about being sincere.  I’m not trying to convince, only clarify….

Over at Slate.com, Christopher Hitchens (probably the smartest and funnest of the “pop-atheists”) offers us a few reflections on what he’s learned debating Christians.  He’s had plenty of practice since the publication of his 2007 bestseller, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.  Most recently, he was involved in a number of exchanges with Doug Wilson, senior fellow over at New St. Andrews College (if I could do college over again, I might go there!).  What started as a series of emails between the two men (published here) became a full-fledged “tour” of sorts that has been developed into the recently released sort-of documentary Collision.

Wilson, who is a thoroughly Reformed, conservative theologian, served as a stark contrast to others that Hitchens debated.  Hitchens had the following to say:

Wilson isn’t one of those evasive Christians who mumble apologetically about how some of the Bible stories are really just “metaphors.” He is willing to maintain very staunchly that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and that his sacrifice redeems our state of sin, which in turn is the outcome of our rebellion against God. He doesn’t waffle when asked why God allows so much evil and suffering—of course he “allows” it since it is the inescapable state of rebellious sinners. I much prefer this sincerity to the vague and Python-esque witterings of the interfaith and ecumenical groups who barely respect their own traditions and who look upon faith as just another word for community organizing. (Incidentally, just when is President Barack Obama going to decide which church he attends?)

He also notes how what he understands as Southern hospitality confronts the brutal truth of there actually being a price to sin.  He wonders if the staunch “Calvinists” he’s running into really believe what they profess about hell and eternal punishment,

Usually, when I ask some Calvinist whether he is really a Calvinist (in the sense, say, of believing that I will end up in hell), there is a slight reluctance to say yes, and a slight wince from his congregation. I have come to the conclusion that this has something to do with the justly famed tradition of Southern hospitality: You can’t very easily invite somebody to your church and then to supper and inform him that he’s marked for perdition. More to the point, though, you soon discover that many of those attending are not so sure about all the doctrines, either, just as you very swiftly find out that a vast number of Catholics don’t truly believe more than about half of what their church instructs them to think.

Mr. Hitchens is a very intelligent man, and while he’s being very generous with his words towards Mr. Wilson, perhaps he’s yet to understand his ‘opponents’ fully.  Is it that they’re not sure about hell or is that they’re uncomfortable with people actually going there?  We all should be.  Unless you’re one of those creepy Calvinists who think we should rejoice that people are burning in hell because it glorifies God or something, when you explain eternal torment to someone, you feel some of the same pain that Jesus felt when he lamented over Jerusalem’s failure to repent (Matt 23:37-39).  Perhaps Hitchens mistook genuine love and compassion for embarassment.  Perhaps he mistook humility for doubt.  Let’s hope so.

What I really appreciate about this piece is similar to the only redeeming aspect of Sam Harris’ throwaway Letter to a Christian Nation, where he opined that moderates and liberals had more in common with atheists than Christians.  As he observed, the God of Scripture is quite conservative (though, in all honesty, Harris’ reading of Scripture is so unforgivably ignorant that this conclusion is more of a lucky strike than a well-reasoned conclusion).  God’s serious about there being no other gods, about idolatry, about sin, about his love expressed in Christ alone for the sins of the world.  He’s not babbling about metaphors, mythology, and the unity of all religions.

There’s always going to be the temptation to acquiesce to the world, to get cred with the elites in Cambridge, New Haven, et al.  Hitchens, like Harris, is proof that unbelievers recognize that brand of accomodationism and waffling for what it is: pathetic.  Be sincere, be upfront, be honest about what you believe.  And preach the whole gospel.  Hitchens recognizes the historic confession of the church in Wilson’s belief.  He doesn’t shy away from the harder truths.  Fudging the gospel may gather crowds, but it won’t gather followers of Christ.

In the end, Hitchens finds nothing compelling about Christianity.  Doesn’t matter what you believe or how you work out that belief; he’s not on board.  But he recognizes what too few Christians know: if you can’t find the confessional element of Christianity in something called “Christian,” no need to take it seriously.

If you haven’t heard this story, you really have to see it to believe it. Check out this link–this cartoon is shocking to say the least–even if this cartoon were free from homosexual elements, I would still find it creepy.  This brings up the question, who should be teaching kids about sex and sexual orientation?  Schools in California are planning to teach on these issues and it seems clear that their agenda is not one that many evangelical parents will support!

If you get a chance to watch the video on Fox News, let me know what you think.