Tim Tebow: virgin Heisman winner

The celebrated, Heisman-winning college football quarterback is gracing the cover of the latest Sports Illustrated. He talks about his football and his faith, and his father talked about his beginnings:

Watching Tebow zip passes into the seams of opposing defenses, lower his shoulder in short yardage and exhort his teammates like King Henry V on St. Crispin's Day, one might think that he was put on this earth just to run coach Urban Meyer's spread offense. Watching him pace the floor of a gymnasium packed with 660 wayward men hanging on his every syllable is to realize that regardless of what position Tebow eventually plays in the NFL, and for how long, the football phase of his life is merely a means to a greater end.

The man on the other end of the line is calling from the Philippines. He has taken time from his missionary work to reply to a reporter's e-mailed questions. Now Bob Tebow has a question of his own: "Have you heard the story of Timmy's birth?"

Even if you have, it's worth hearing from the mouth of his father: "When I was out in the mountains in Mindanao, back in '86, I was showing a film and preaching that night. I was weeping over the millions of babies being [aborted] in America, and I prayed, 'God, if you give me a son, if you give me Timmy, I'll raise him to be a preacher.'" Not long after, Bob and Pam Tebow conceived their fifth child. It was a very difficult pregnancy. "The placenta was never properly attached, and there was bleeding from the get-go," Bob recalls. "We thought we'd lost him several times." Early in the pregnancy Pam contracted amebic dysentery, which briefly put her in a coma. Her doctors, fearful that medications they had given her had damaged the fetus, advised her to abort it. She refused, and on Aug. 14, 1987, Pam delivered a healthy if somewhat scrawny Timothy Richard Tebow.

"All his life, from the moment he could understand, I told him, 'You're a miracle baby,'" Bob recalls. "'God's got a purpose for you, and at some point I think He's going to call you to preach.'

"I asked God for a preacher, and he gave me a quarterback."

Tebow's also answering questions about his sexuality, questions that aren't usually asked of college - or even professional - players:

Better that one man perish...

Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what he did, believed in him, but some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. So the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the Council and said, “What are we to do? For this man performs many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.”

But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all. Nor do you understand that it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.”

He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad. So from that day on they made plans to put him to death.


John 11:45-52

Craig v. Hitchens

Doug Geivett has a report on the recent debate, on the existence of God, between Christopher Hitchens and William Lane Craig. Craig is the author of "God is Not Dead Yet," an article that appeared in Christianity Today last July.

"The End of Christian America"

That's the cover story for the latest edition of Newsweek, which usually has a Christian-themed article for Easter time.

While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith, our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing—good for our political culture, which, as the American Founders saw, is complex and charged enough without attempting to compel or coerce religious belief or observance. It is good for Christianity, too, in that many Christians are rediscovering the virtues of a separation of church and state that protects what Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island as a haven for religious dissenters, called "the garden of the church" from "the wilderness of the world." As crucial as religion has been and is to the life of the nation, America's unifying force has never been a specific faith, but a commitment to freedom—not least freedom of conscience. At our best, we single religion out for neither particular help nor particular harm; we have historically treated faith-based arguments as one element among many in the republican sphere of debate and decision. The decline and fall of the modern religious right's notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and, for many believers, may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life.

Al Mohler, who was quoted for the article, writes about his reaction to it here.

I appreciate the care, respect, and insight that mark this essay by Jon Meacham. I also appreciated our conversation about an issue that concerns us both. Still, I hope I did not reflect too much gloom in my analysis. This much I know -- Jesus Christ is Lord, and His kingdom is forever. Our proper Christian response to this new challenge is not gloom, but concern. And our first concern must be to see that the Gospel is preached as Good News to the perishing -- including all those in post-Christian America.

Dan Kimball, pastor of Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, CA, offers his thoughts here.

So I think maybe there is a decline of a certain shape and sub-culture(s) of "Christian America" as the article states. But at the same time, there is a rising and surging of missional church leaders, church planters, and Christians who have already recognized that we are in a "post-Christian" America as the article states. But that recognition has simply fueled creativity, prayer and passion for mission and because God is God, people are coming to a saving faith in Jesus. So it is ironically quite an exciting time period in the midst of this gloomy title and cover. It feels as though some expressions of church and Christianity maybe is fading out. But
at the same time there is excitement and energy and hope as churches who have already recognized what this article says about being in a "post-Christian" country - and have made changes to become churches on mission.

I am so optimistic for the future and have great hope. Yes, there is a "decline and fall" as the article states of certain types of "Christianity" and church perhaps. But there is also a rising and resurgence of missional churches and missional Christians. Churches and Christians who are rethinking what it means to be "be the church" and to be the church on mission. It may mean rethinking how we go about things since we do live in a "post-Christian" world. It may not be as easy or routine as it has in the past. It may shake up some of our ecclesiological catagories that we have constructed. But it should only spur us onward in adventure, not get us depressed looking at a spooky black cover with red letters.

"The Coming Evangelical Collapse"

Michael Spencer, the Internet Monk, has recently had an essay published in the current Christian Science Monitor - "The coming evangelical collapse." If the title grabbed your attention, just wait until you read the article itself.

I believe that we are on the verge- within 10 years- of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity; a collapse that will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and that will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West. I believe this evangelical collapse will happen with astonishing statistical speed; that within two generations of where we are now evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its current occupants, leaving in its wake nothing that can revitalize evangelicals to their former “glory.”

There has been much discussion about this essay, as expected, and from a variety of sources. It's rather fun to jump around and see who has been talking about it, what points they emphasize and/or criticize, and where the discussion goes. I mean, iMonk has everybody talking! See?

• American Power
• Andrew Sullivan
• Atheist Nexus
• Caffeinated Thoughts (Shane Vander Hart)
• Crunchy Con
• Jim West
• Joshua Claybourn
• League of Ordinary Gentlemen
• Macsmind
• Outside the Beltway
• Pharyngula (PZ Myers)
• Pyromaniacs (Phil Johnson)
• Reformation21
• Slice of Laodicea (Ingrid Schleuter)
• The Other McCain
• The Pocket Mardis

I honestly don't think you could find two more different blogs out there than Ingrid's and PZ's, and they're both talking about the same thing.

And, yes, iMonk does have something to say about the ARIS study.

The Christian Hipster

Are you one?

Christian hipsters like music, movies, and books that are well-respected by their respective artistic communities—Christian or not. They love books like Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by Ron Sider, God’s Politics by Jim Wallis, and The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. They tend to be fans of any number of the following authors: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton, John Howard Yoder, Walter Brueggemann, N.T. Wright, Brennan Manning, Eugene Peterson, Anne Lamott, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Henri Nouwen, Soren Kierkegaard, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robison, Chuck Klosterman, David Sedaris, or anything ancient and/or philosophically important.

Christian hipsters love thinking and acting Catholic, even if they are thoroughly Protestant. They love the Pope, liturgy, incense, lectio divina, Lent, and timeless phrases like “Thanks be to God” or “Peace of Christ be with you.” They enjoy Eastern Orthodox churches and mysterious iconography, and they love the elaborate cathedrals of Europe (even if they are too museum-like for hipster tastes). Christian hipsters also love taking communion with real Port, and they don’t mind common cups. They love poetry readings, worshipping with candles, and smoking pipes while talking about God. Some of them like smoking a lot of different things.

Don't forget the piercings. Or the tats. Or the T-shirts with skulls on them.

the Christian, mental illness, and iMonk

Michael Spencer, or the Internet Monk if you prefer, has written several articles on the Christian and mental illness, which you can find links to here.

Christian Counseling & Educational Foundation

They have a newly updated website. Check it out.

Willimon vs. Ehrman

William Willimon discusses Bart Ehrman's God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer over at Christian Century.

Bart Ehrman has written another book that is probably destined to be a best seller. God's Problem is a lively, though thoroughly conventional and utterly predictable, dismissal of Jewish and Christian views of God. It is a real page-turner, quickly written by an author who assumes a position of moral and intellectual superiority to just about everyone who is unlucky enough not to be a tenured professor in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

God's Problem begins not with God but with Ehrman, and with antitheology as autobiography. We learn that suffering has "haunted" Ehrman "for a very long time" and that it is the reason he lost his faith. The faith he lost was Christian evangelical fundamentalism, which, as we are told, crumbled under "critical scrutiny." Ehrman told NPR's Terry Gross that for a while he tried the Episcopal Church, finding its rituals aesthetically pleasing, but that he eventually left because "even in the Episcopal church they say the creed." Even Episcopalians were too gullible and credulous for the agnostic Ehrman.

Being subjected to the puerile theodicy of undergraduates while he was teaching courses in religion at Rutgers was the coup de grâce for what was left of Ehrman's faith. So the professor ventured forth on the journey that he apparently considers heroic, even though it has been made by millions in the West before him: the journey of taking God less seriously and himself more so. While this is now an old story, Ehrman seems invigorated by the telling of it—I presume because it his own story. The radical subjectivity and narcissism of evangelical pietism must be tough to shake.

While reading God's Problem, I kept asking myself, why bother?

What kind of Christian are you?

Janet Cosgrove isn't "one of those wacko 'love your neighbor as yourself ' types." She's one of those regular Christians.

My faith in the Lord is about the pure, simple values: raising children right, saying grace at the table, strictly forbidding those who are Methodists or Presbyterians from receiving communion because their beliefs are heresies, and curing homosexuals. That's all. Just the core beliefs. You won't see me going on some frothy-mouthed tirade about being a comfort to the downtrodden.

the irrationality of Bill Maher

Looks like the main star of Religulous isn't all that "rational" himself.

On Oct. 3, Mr. Maher debuts "Religulous," his documentary that attacks religious belief. He talks to Hasidic scholars, Jews for Jesus, Muslims, polygamists, Satanists, creationists, and even Rael -- prophet of the Raelians -- before telling viewers: "The plain fact is religion must die for man to live."

But it turns out that the late-night comic is no icon of rationality himself. In fact, he is a fervent advocate of pseudoscience. The night before his performance on Conan O'Brien, Mr. Maher told David Letterman -- a quintuple bypass survivor -- to stop taking the pills that his doctor had prescribed for him. He proudly stated that he didn't accept Western medicine. On his HBO show in 2005, Mr. Maher said: "I don't believe in vaccination. . . . Another theory that I think is flawed, that we go by the Louis Pasteur [germ] theory." He has told CNN's Larry King that he won't take aspirin because he believes it is lethal and that he doesn't even believe the Salk vaccine eradicated polio.

Anti-religionists such as Mr. Maher bring to mind the assertion of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown character that all atheists, secularists, humanists and rationalists are susceptible to superstition: "It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense, and can't see things as they are."

the hope of the evangelical on Election Day

Scot McKnight has an absolutely excellent piece about the eschatology of politics.

Where is our hope? To be sure, I hope our country solves its international conflicts and I hope we resolve poverty and dissolve our educational problems and racism. But where does my hope turn when I think of war or poverty or education or racism? Does it focus on November 4? Does it gain its energy from thinking that if we get the right candidate elected our problems will be dissolved? If so, I submit that our eschatology has become empire-shaped, Constantinian, and political. And it doesn’t matter to me if it is a right-wing evangelical wringing her fingers in hope that a Republican wins, or a left-wing evangelical wringing her fingers in hope that a Democrat wins. Each has a misguided eschatology.

As they say, read the whole thing.

AND THE WHOLE WORLD HAS TO ANSWER RIGHT NOW, JUST TO TELL YOU ONCE AGAIN...: What's BADD?

Is Jesus Enough?

That's the question Brant Hansen has had on his mind.

My name is Brant, and I'm on mind-altering drugs. And that is both the best first line, ever, on this blog, and -- distressingly --it's also quite true.

Read the rest, please.

"you don't win any apologetic merit badges by demanding a 7-day creation when the point of that story has nothing to do with a calendar week."

You in fact should take at least one demerit for doing so -- and you will, from those you are seeking to evangelize."yeah, but!" comes the response for many, if not all, of you loyal readers. "Yeah but what about the word 'day'? Don't we need to get very interested in how the word 'yom' is used in Genesis 1 so we can finally put to bed how old the universe is?"

Frank on the point on Genesis 3. He started here.

a thought about McCain and this "Country First" business

During the Republican National Convention last week, many people raised signs that read "Country First." McCain talked about it during his speech last Thursday, how he puts America first because America "saved" him. (Did America actually "save" his immortal soul, or merely prolong his mortal life on Earth until the inevitable comes?) McCain said that he refused to leave the Hanoi Hilton before others who had been there longer than him, simply because they were fellow Americans. The audience clapped and cheered as he talked about how he has - and will - always put his country first.

I have to ask: Is "Country First" something that should be not only shouted from arena floors, but also practiced in public and private lives? Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world." If we are to live as citizens of Jesus' kingdom, is it permissible to say, "Country first?"

I don't need to ask Obama into my heart. I just need to ask America.

God as a woman

A feminine view of God.

(HT: BHT)

an interview with Joe Carter

Justin Taylor interviewed Joe Carter about the current state of Evangelical Outpost and his new venture at Culture 11.

James Dobson vs. Barack Obama

On his radio program yesterday, James Dobson of Focus on the Family discussed Senator Barack Obama's comments from June 2006 about Christianity, religious pluralism, and the Bible. Dobson believes that Obama has distorted the Bible and endorsed a "fruitcake interpretation" of the U.S. Constitution (AP story here).

Dobson believes that Obama "equated" him with Rev. Al Sharpton. You can listen to Obama's speech and Dobson's response here. You can also read the text of Obama's speech here.

Naturally, voices from the blogosphere aren't united when it comes to Dobson and Obama:

• Denny Burke thinks Dobson's statements were correct.
• Scot McKnight writes that Dobson misunderstood and distorted Obama's statements.
• LaShawn Barber (who stopped being a political blogger some time ago but seems to be slowly creeping back into it) believes Obama interprets Scripture just like John Kerry.
• Jim Wallis thinks Dobson uses inappropriate language. Of course, Wallis isn't always so charitable with his own language. He has said Vice President Cheney is a liar and President Bush is too stupid to be president. What did the pot say to the kettle?
• Mark Byron says Dobson acts like it's December 25.
• Peter Wehner writes that Obama was "respectful and authentic."

what are your chances of burning in Hell?

Virgil Vaduva, a fellow Cedarville alum, has the calculations.