Tag Archives: Christianity

Parenthood

What Movies Should Our Kids be Watching? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

As a parent, one of the perennial battles we fight with our children is over movies.  Our son, in particular, started pushing us to watch every movie under the sun when he was about 7 years old, and he has not let up since that day.

My wife and I had to make a choice.  Either we let him watch whatever he wants, which is the approach some parents take, or we restrict his movie selection.  But restricting movies is easier said than done.  There are a couple approaches I have seen.

The ad hoc approach is the parent who decides what their kids can watch based primarily on the movie rating and their gut feeling about a movie from what they see in a TV commercial or some other advertisement.  Many parents I know follow this approach.  They argue that they don’t have time to study every movie and so they just make their decision based on the rating and their parental instincts.

I thought this approach might work until I started seeing that movie ratings and instincts were often wrong.  Some movies that looked benign were not, once we saw them.  And some movies that I thought would be objectionable just were not, once we saw them.  My conclusion was that if I was going to decide what movies the kids could watch, I needed more than movie ratings and instincts.

I should mention this is especially true about movies rated PG before the PG-13 rating was introduced in 1984.  Some of the movies from the 1970’s and 1980’s that were rated PG contain really bad language and even nudity!  If you, as a parent, are counting on the PG rating to ensure the movie is appropriate, think again.  In fact, you might want to read this Wikipedia article on the MPAA ratings system for more information.  The standards that have been applied to rate movies have changed often throughout the years.

So, if I can’t trust the ratings and my own instincts, what can I do?  I can’t see every movie first before I allow my kids to see it (kudos to the parents that do this, but it’s totally unrealistic for most parents).  What we decided to do was use Internet movie ratings sites to get more information on a movie before letting the kids see it.  We have used many sites over the years, but our present favorite is Commonsense Media.  This site provides a lot of details about each movie with the goal of helping parents decide whether it is appropriate.  We review this site before we allow the kids to watch any movie.

Using a web site is fine, but the hard part is determining what is appropriate and what is inappropriate.  The web site only gives you information about a movie.  It cannot tell you whether it is appropriate for your kids (although Commonsense Media does recommend minimum ages for each movie).

In part 2 of this post, I will discuss the issue of appropriateness.  See you then.

Bible Interpretation, General Apologetics, New Testament Reliability, Textual Criticism

How Do Textual Critics Choose Among New Testament Manuscript Variants?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Textual critics are the scholars who study the manuscript evidence for the New Testament and determine which readings among the various manuscripts are likely to be the original (see previous post for background).  Although the vast majority of the variants are simple spelling or word order errors made by copyists, there are some variants in the manuscripts that are more significant.

Textual critics use some basic criteria to help determine which readings are most likely the original and which variants were added or modified by copyists.

The first category of criteria is external.  External evidence has to do with the kinds of manuscripts that support a reading.

The first criteria is the age of a manuscript.  Generally, the older the manuscript, the more likely it contains the original text.

Second, the number of manuscripts that support a reading must be taken into consideration.  If we only have a variant reading in a single manuscript, it probably was not in the original text.

Third, the geographical range of a textual variant must be considered.  If a variant reading can be found in manuscripts from many different locations, it is more likely original.  A reading found in manuscripts from only one geographical region is more suspect.

Fourth, many, but not all, textual critics favor the readings from the Alexandrian family of manuscripts, as opposed to the Byzantine and Western families of manuscripts.  Why?  They argue that the Christian scribes in Egypt were more careful copyists.

The second category of criteria is internal.  Internal evidence has to do with the actual words of the text.

The first criteria has to do with intrinsic probabilities, probabilities based on what the author of the text most likely would have written.  Textual critics study the vocabulary, writing style, and theology of an author and see if the textual variant is something that author would have written.  If the text in question is completely different in style, vocabulary, and theology, it renders the reading somewhat suspect.  The opposite is, of course, true.

The second internal criteria is called transcriptional probability.  This criteria asks whether a textual variant is more or less likely to have been created by a scribe or copyist.  Copyists generally tended to harmonize texts that appeared contradictory and expanded upon shorter texts.  So when there are two variants to be compared, the shorter one which does not attempt to harmonize is to be preferred.  Another way to state this is that readings which are more difficult to explain and which are shorter in length are usually preferred.

None of these criteria can be applied in isolation, but these are the kinds of questions that textual critics ask.  It is obviously not an exact science, but most of the time these kinds of questions can lead scholars to the most likely reading of a text.  In fact, no essential doctrines of Christianity are in question because of textual variants.  There is almost no question that we have the words of the original authors in 99+% of the text of the New Testament.

If you’re interested in some of these variants, many of them are found in the footnotes of most English Bible translations.  Check them out for yourself!

Bible Interpretation, Theology, Will of God

Did God Tell You?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

I was once having an impassioned discussion with a fellow Christian about the curriculum of the upcoming discipleship classes to be held at our church.  This Christian brother wanted to focus the curriculum on the subject of prayer, while I was adamant that we should teach a class on the attributes of God, which did not strictly align with the topic of prayer.

During our conversation, my friend made a statement to me which he believed should have ended the conversation, a statement which I sometimes hear other Christians make.  He said, in effect, “I’ve been praying about this and God has told me that the curriculum on prayer is what He wants us to teach.”

My response to him, which admittedly was a bit contentious, was, “God told me to teach about His attributes, so it looks we have a stalemate!”  I knew that a contest between the two of us about which idea God really preferred, based on our own subjective feelings, was pointless, but I wanted my friend to see where his comment would logically lead us.

The truth is that God speaks to us, foremost, from His word in the Bible.  The Bible speaks about both the subject of prayer and the subject of God’s attributes.  Nowhere, however, do you find a verse in the Bible telling our specific church which topic should be taught in the upcoming semester!  Given that we are limited in space, we cannot teach everything and choices have to be made, but those choices will have to be made without pointing to any one Bible verse.

It concerns me when Christians claim God told them something that cannot be found in the Bible, and especially when they are using this claim to shut off debate.  There are many subjects that the Bible covers which are not up for debate, but there are many subjects which the Bible does not cover which are up for debate (e.g., choosing a discipleship curriculum).  For those topics, we should have the debate and pray for wisdom to come to a reasonable answer, but we should not play the “God told me” card.

I am personally very uncomfortable claiming God told me things which I cannot point to in Scripture.  Who am I to represent new revelation from God?  If you are one of these Christians who find yourself saying this kind of thing frequently, ask yourself why.  If it is to cut off debate where debate is perfectly acceptable, then stop!  Argue your point of view, but don’t claim that God is somehow on your side when you have no objective way of knowing that.

New Testament Reliability, Resurrection

Is There Evidence for the Empty Tomb?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

I have been having an interesting discussion with a gentleman on the issue of the empty tomb.  We’ve touched on some of the evidence, but I decided to present a brief synopsis of William Lane Craig’s arguments for the empty tomb (from Jesus Under Fire).  Here goes!

  1. The historical credibility of the burial story supports the empty tomb.  If the burial story is accurate, the site of Jesus’ tomb would have been known to Jew and Christian alike.  Anyone could have, and would have, just marched to the tomb and produced the body.  In fact, the burial story is widely recognized as a historically credible narrative.
  2. Paul’s testimony implies the fact of the empty tomb.  The sequence in 1 Cor 15 is death- burial – resurrection.  Surely this sequence implies a tomb, or else where would Jesus be buried?
  3. The presence of the empty tomb narrative in the pre-Markan Passion story supports its historical credibility.  Scholars believe that Mark’s sources from which he wrote his Gospel contained the Passion story of Jesus.  Therefore, this source material would have been very old and date back to right after Jesus’ death (about A.D. 37).
  4. The use of the “first day of the week” (Mark 16:2) instead of  “on the third day” points to the primitiveness of the tradition of the empty tomb.  Scholars believe that the “third day” motif found in the New Testament developed later in Christian preaching.  The fact that Mark leaves those words out speaks to a very early date for the material in Mark.
  5. The nature of the narrative itself is theologically unadorned and nonapologetic.  Mark’s account of the empty tomb is simple and straightforward.
  6. The empty tomb was discovered by women.  Given the low status of women in 1st century Jewish society and their inability to serve as legal witnesses, it would be nonsensical for the New Testament writers to fabricate the story of the women finding the empty tomb.  The most reasonable explanation is that they really did.
  7. The investigation of the tomb by Peter and John is historically probable.  The visit of the disciples to the tomb is attested both in tradition (Luke 24:12, 24; John 20:3) and by John himself.
  8. It would have been virtually impossible for the disciples to proclaim the resurrection in Jerusalem had the tomb not been empty.  When the disciples began to preach the resurrection in Jerusalem and people responded, and when the religious authorities stood helplessly by, the tomb must have been empty.
  9. The earliest Jewish polemic presupposes the empty tomb.  Matthew tells us in Matt. 28:15 that the Jewish opponents of Christianity did not deny that the tomb was empty.  They claimed the disciples stole the body.
  10. The fact that Jesus’ tomb was not venerated as a shrine indicates that the tomb was empty.  It was customary in Judaism for the tomb of a prophet or holy man to be preserved or venerated as a shrine because the bones of the prophet lay in the tomb.  The only reason Jesus’ followers would not have venerated his tomb is because it was empty.

Aside from those 10 reasons, there is very little evidence.  🙂

Bible Interpretation, General Apologetics

Should We Read the Bible Literally?

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Post Author:  Bill Pratt

My seminary professor, Norm Geisler, used to say, “Everything the Bible affirms is literally true, but not true, literally.”  What he meant by this is that we cannot read the Bible in a wooden, “literal” way when it is clearly using figurative language.

A good Catholic friend of mine once asked me how I interpreted Bible passages.  I answered, “I try to understand what the author’s intended meaning was in the historical context in which he wrote.”  She answered, “Oh, well that’s exactly how I interpret the Bible.  I thought that evangelicals interpreted everything literally.”

Clearly we have a failure to communicate!  There seem to be at least two ways that the word literal is used.  First, literal can mean interpreting language in a way that does not allow for any symbolism or figures of speech.  If someone said, “I have traveled to the four corners of the earth,” a literalist in this sense would assume that the earth must be a flat, four sided shape, and that I actually did travel to each corner of this geometric shape.

Second, literal can mean interpreting language in the exact way it was intended by the author without unduly introducing symbolism or figurative language where it was never intended.  This is what most evangelicals mean when we say that you should interpret the Bible “literally.”  We do not mean that there is no use of figurative language in the Bible.  There obviously is.  As Bill Foster says in his book, Meet the Skeptic, “Informed Christians recognize that the Bible is full of literary devices and figurative language such as metaphor, simile, metonymy, typology, allegory, personification, and so forth.”

The reason conservative Christians tend to emphasize reading the Bible literally is because some readers do tend to interpret passages in the Bible that seem to be written in a non-figurative way as figurative.  There are those that claim that the resurrection of Jesus should be taken figuratively, for example.  Traditional Christians point out that the authors of the New Testament clearly meant the resurrection accounts to be taken literally, not figuratively.  Jesus Christ actually rose from the dead in a physical body.

So, yes, we should read the Bible literally, as long as we agree on what literal means.

Existence of God

What is the Cause of the Universe?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

See if you can follow this argument, which is one form of the cosmological argument.

  1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
  2. The universe began to exist.
  3. Therefore the universe has a cause.

The first premise should be uncontroversial.  If something begins to exist, it needs a cause of its existence.

The second premise draws upon the findings of science in the last century.  We have Einstein’s theory of relativity dictating a beginning to space, time, and matter.  We have enormous evidence for the Big Bang, which is the moment the universe exploded into existence about 13. 7 billion years ago.  We also have the second law of thermodynamics, which says that the amount of energy available for work is decreasing in the universe – a universe that is decaying cannot be infinitely old because it would have run out of usable energy by now.

To sum up the last paragraph, science seems to have shown that the universe did indeed have a beginning.  All of time, space, and matter came into existence 13.7 billion years ago.  If that is the case, then the universe needs a cause, and that cause cannot be a part of the universe, because nothing can cause itself to exist.

So what kind of cause are we talking about?  Based on the cosmological argument, we can deduce that this cause of the universe has the following properties: self-existence, timelessness, nonspatiality, immateriality, unimaginable power, and personhood.

Self-existence because whatever is the cause of the universe must ultimately be uncaused.  If it is not, then the argument just moves back one step.  There has to be a first uncaused cause.

This cause cannot exist in the time/space/material universe because then it would exist within the very universe it created.  That is impossible.

The cause must be incredibly powerful to have created the entire universe and all of its physical laws.

The cause must be personal because an impersonal force would be deterministic and mechanistic, not possessing free will.  A mechanistic being only operates according to the programming it received from something else.  But if the cause of the universe received programming from something else, then we have again not provided the answer to the cause of the universe.  We have just found a middle-man.  The cause had to make a choice to create and only beings who are personal can make choices.

All of these are attributes of the God of Christianity.  That is not to say we have proven the exact God of Christianity exists, but we have certainly made a persuasive argument that a being with some of his qualities exists.

Now that’s something to think about.

General Apologetics, New Testament Reliability, Skeptics

Is Historical Evidence Convincing to Skeptics of Christianity?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Only if the skeptic is open to the existence of a God who can intervene in the affairs of the world.

I have discussed the historical reliability of the New Testament with many skeptics over the years.  The skeptics I typically speak to inevitably dismiss or downplay much of the historical evidence that I present.  They argue that ancient writers didn’t understand the difference between history and myth, that mythical stories of gods were rampant in the ancient world, that ancients were credulous and unsophisticated, and so on.

As soon as I respond to one of these arguments, they have another one along the same line.  It turns out, however, that the reason most of them don’t believe the Bible is historically reliable is because they don’t believe the miracles included in the Bible could possibly have occurred.  They don’t believe the miracles could have occurred because they don’t believe a God exists who can perform miracles.

Obviously, if no God exists who can perform miracles, then miracles cannot occur!

On the contrary, those who are open to the God of Christianity existing often find the historical evidence to be quite impressive.  Why?  Because they believe that a God who can perform miracles might exist.  They may not be totally convinced, but they don’t dismiss it out of hand.

My advice to any Christian who is discussing the historical reliability of the Bible with a skeptic is to pause and ask the skeptic if they believe in the real possibility of a God who can intervene miraculously in the world.  If they don’t, you need to drop back and discuss that issue first.  Otherwise, you may very well be wasting your time.

Salvation

Once Saved, Always Saved?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Once a person is justified (saved), can they lose their salvation?  This seems like an important question, but there are differing views within Christendom.

Calvinists, both moderate and 5-point, affirm eternal security.  Eternal security is the idea that once a person is truly saved, he can never lose his salvation.  Calvinists point to many verses that seem to teach eternal security, such as 1 John 5:13, John 6:37, John 6:39-40, and John 10:27-28.

Arminians, both classical and Wesleyan, believe that a person can lose his salvation.  Classical Arminians believe that a person who apostasizes (denies that Jesus is the Son of God) loses his salvation.  Wesleyans believe that there are several (the number varies) serious sins, that if willfully committed, cause a person to lose his salvation.  This position is similar to the Roman Catholic view.

I happen to agree with the Calvinists on this issue, that once a person is truly saved, it is forever.

But there is another question to consider.  How does a person know he was ever saved in the first place?  According to Norman Geisler, a person can know they were saved if they “manifest the fruit of the Spirit (cf. Gal. 5:22-23).  He adds,

Throughout his first epistle John lists ways we can know that we are one of God’s elect:

(1) if we keep His commandments (2:3);
(2) if we keep His Word (2:4);
(3) if we walk in love (2:5);
(4) if we love the brethren (3:14);
(5) if we love in deed, not only in word (3:19);
(6) if we have the Holy Spirit within us (3:24);
(7) if we love one another (4:13); and
(8) if we don’t continue in sin (5:18; cf. 3:9).

I’ve discussed this issue with my Catholic friends and they always point out that when someone apostasizes or appears to be living in egregious sin, Calvinists like to say, “He was never saved in the first place.”  This seems like a convenient way to never allow a person to lose his salvation!  They have a point.  We truly do not know about other people’s salvation and we shouldn’t be making judgments about that.  We can judge their fruit, but never their salvation.  God just does not give us that information.

However, with regard to our own salvation, I think we can be sure if we examine ourselves, as suggested above.  I can’t imagine going through my Christian walk, wondering every day if I was really saved.  I settled that issue a long time ago.  Have you?