Prosperity Gospel

Last updated on: May 28, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In Signs and Wonders (65–66), Paul Alexander recounts a conversation with Nigerian theologian Lawrence Nwankwo. Nwankwo expressed the opinion that God wants all Christians to be prosperous. Alexander offered a corrective: “Food, clothing, shelter, health care, and education—these things are necessary and important, but prosperity for all is impossible. It’s not true, I said, that God wants everybody to be wealthy.” As the conversation continued, it became clear that the two were using “prosperous” in different ways, each defined by context.... Read more

The World’s Most Interesting Man

Last updated on: May 28, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Philip Zimbardo and Nikita D. Coulombe (Man (Dis)connected, 226) claim that the average American male teen plays video games 676 hours each year. With that time, he could. . . . Learn the rudiments of French on Rosetta Stone (205 hours); Learn to play the guitar (260 hours); Play a sport (32 hours); Learn salsa dancing (40 hours). He could, in short, become the most interesting man in the world. And if all the gamers devoted just one percent of... Read more

Eyeing Evolution

Last updated on: May 28, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

No “sequence of fossils by itself” can “demonstrate whether Darwinian mutation and natural selection can and did evolve genuine biological novelties (new structures or body plans),” argues Leonard Brand (Faith, Reason, & Earth History, 281). Some other sort of evidence is needed. Brand doesn’t find such evidence in standard biology textbooks: “There is abundant evidence supporting the reality of microevolution and speciation. They also discuss patterns of the fossil record, biological adaptations, and a large amount of other material they... Read more

Arousal Addiction

Last updated on: May 27, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Philip Zimbardo (Man (Dis)connected) claims that young American men have become habituated to “regularly experience stimulus” by excessive exposure to porn and video games. He calls is “arousal addiction,” and explains that “in order to get the same amount of stimulation, you need new material, seeing the same images over and over again becomes uninteresting after a short time. The key is novelty of visual experience” (xix). Obsessive gaming is one factor: “Because of the new difficulties facing young men... Read more

Why Is There Something?

Last updated on: May 27, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Why is there something rather than nothing? is usually posed as a philosophical question, the ontological question. Kurt Wise (Faith, Form, and Time) poses it as a scientific question. According to current models of the history of the cosmos, “organisms have been in existence hundreds of thousands of times longer than suggested by young-age creationism. They claim that hundreds of thousands of times more mutations have occurred in the history of life than is suggested by young-age creationism. But in... Read more

Deceptive God?

Last updated on: May 27, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Like many young earth creationists, Kurt Wise (Faith, Form, and Time) argues that the world is created with the appearance of age. He creates stars whose light already reaches the earth, even though they are only an hour old; trees, not merely seeds, with tree rings. Isn’t this a form of deception? Wise argues that it is not, and point to the analogy with miracle of the feeding of the four and five thousand: “Once the fish and loaves had... Read more

Seven

Last updated on: May 27, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Jeff Cook’s Seven matches Jesus’ beatitudes with the seven deadly sins. The beatitudes, he says, “are a picture of the voids created by sin being filled in with the life of heaven.” They provide “eight pictures of resurrection” (26). So, being poor in Spirit is set against pride, envy against genuine mourning, lust against purity of heart, wrath against peacemaking. The match is pretty good, though, as Cook realizes, the numbers don’t match, and even though the seven deadlies didn’t exist... Read more

Cosmic Ark

Last updated on: May 26, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Psalm 104 celebrates the glories of creation, both the events of the original creation when Yahweh stretched out heaven like a tent curtain and made the clouds His chariot (vv. 2-3) and the continuous glory of the world that we know – the mountains and the sea, the springs that flow into the valleys, the thunder that roars. The Psalm spends a lot of time on the animal kingdom. It’s a sung menagerie: cattle, birds, storks, wild goats, rock badgers,... Read more

Privation and the City

Last updated on: May 26, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Augustine famously presented a “privation” view of evil., Evil is not a substance but a privation of being. This does not mean that evil has no reality of any sort. It is simply not a created substance. This account helps Augustine to locate the core of the corruption of the city of man. He traces civic evil to to ill will because it cannot be nature. And it cannot be nature because God is the author of nature and cannot... Read more

Time, Change, Permanence

Last updated on: May 26, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Augustine spends a lot of time in various treatises, especially in City of God, Book 12, explaining the nature of time as a created reality and distinguishing the Christian view of creation from Greek, especially Platonic, views of eternal matter and an eternal world. He believes the Platonic view of time to be philosophically untenable, and spiritually disastrous. On the one hand, if the soul is an eternal substance, how can it change? Yet Augustine thinks souls do change. A... Read more