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Time Magazine and Abortion
The cover story for this week’s Time Magazine, by Kate Pickering, begins this way: “Abortion-rights activists won an an epic victory in Roe v. Wade. They’ve been losing ever since.”
Aside from the fact that the whole premise of the article, that the abortion-rights cause is losing, is very questionable (as others have written), there were a few passages that I thought illustrated some important things for us to think through. For instance, this paragraph:
Young abortion-rights activists have a strategy to modernize the cause, which includes expanding it. They often don’t even mention the term pro-choice, which they say is limiting and outdated. Instead these young leaders have embraced a cause known as reproductive justice – a broader, more diffuse agenda that addresses abortion access but also contraception, child care, gay rights, health insurance and economic opportunity. “It’s a more holistic frame,” says Matson. “And you see younger people connecting with that.”
Here I just think we should note the use of this term–reproductive justice. The word “justice” is very popular among young adults in the church today, and like all words that get used as banners to rally around, we need to always ask people to explain the content of the words they’re using to motivate us. As you can see here, the word could be used to promote things that Christians would consider very unjust, and thus, not wish to support. (As an aside, we should always ask things like–“Justice for whom?” For the baby in the belly? What is justice for that person?”)
This next paragraph is what triggered me to call attention to all this:
When her name is called, a surgical-abortion patient descends a set of stairs and steps into a room where a technician performs an ultrasound. Afterward she enters an exam room and is met by the physician on duty. On this Wednesday it’s Dr. Kathryn Eggleston, who informs the woman that she’s reviewed her chart and asks, “Are you confident in your decision to have an abortion today?” If the woman says yes, the abortion begins; the whirring of the vacuum aspirator used to extract the fetus can be heard in the hallway. Within 15 minutes, Eggleston emerges from the room and enters another where the removed contents are examined and photographed for the medical record. In the recovery room where patients rest in overstuffed leather recliners, Kromenaker chats with a 20-something woman who declined Eggleston’s offer to go on birth control. “Do you have a boyfriend?” Kromenaker asks. No. Kromenaker runs through a few ancillary health benefits of birth control anyway, hands the woman some condoms and pats her shoulder.
Did you catch this language? “Vacuum aspirator used to extract the fetus…” And the most chilling phrase in the whole article: “…the removed contents are examined.” If you stop and think through what is being described, you have to keep your mind from reeling. What did it take for Kate Pickering to pick those words for what she’s describing? What happens in someone’s soul that they can think thoughts like this? The unfortunate fact is (and this is where it’s relevant for us), we read words like this all the time. They’re the common way of talking about these things, in everything from medical journals to classrooms to mass media. The challenge for us is to not grow so calloused that we start to adopt this way of thinking or speaking. We should think something more like: What does God call that room, and what’s being examined in it? How does he feel about it?
This next paragraph is a window into the soul of modern young adult America, so it’s key for us to check ourselves against:
A 24-year-old patient who drove 80 miles (130 km) alone to reach the clinic says she and her boyfriend decided together not to continue her pregnancy, which was six weeks along. “Neither of us is anywhere near baby time right now. We argue over who will take the dog out some days, so I don’t thing the diaper changing would go much better.”
We need the word of God and the presence of His spirit in our lives to make sure this kind of thinking isn’t shaping ours. See what kind of disastrous effects can follow from minds not shaped by God’s thoughts? What seems like just lazy immaturity can actually end up deadly.
Finally, this paragraph highlights the contradiction at the root of so much of this: a culture obsessed with what it calls science, willing to oppress and ignore the science and evidence behind research into the personhood and humanity of babies in the womb:
The antiabortion cause has been aided by scientific advances that have complicated American attitudes about abortion. Prenatal ultrasound, which has allowed the general public to see fetuses inside the womb and understand that they have a human shape beginning around eight weeks into pregnancy, became widespread in the 1980s, and some babies born as early as 24 weeks can now survive.
As we always want to stress, there is mercy for anyone who has gone through abortion–whether as a mother or a father. God is in the business of restoring all of our lives from the sin we have committed. He loves you and there is forgiveness and healing in Christ. But in terms of thinking through the issue, articles like this help us see the lines that are being drawn–as long as we’re willing to let God use our minds to think and feel in accordance with what He thinks and feels.
How to Pray Using Scripture
A new year is always a great time to take stock of how the Lord might lead us to grow in our personal habits of bible reading and prayer. Last year around this time I posted a bunch of thoughts and helps for planning and growing in these areas. (In fact, you can download it all by clicking here.) Here’s some more great advice from Kevin DeYoung on how to use scripture to enrich our prayer time:
Sometimes it’s the simplest things that make the biggest difference. For many years I’ve used the 3 R’s I learned from Ben Patterson to pray through Scripture. This simple tool has helped me pray the Bible more than any other single strategy. I’ve used in my devotional times and have employed it often in leading others in prayer.
1. Rejoice
2. Repent
3. Request
With every verse in the Bible we can do one (or more likely, all three) of these things. We can rejoice and thank God for his character and blessings. We can repent of our mistakes and sins. We can request new mercies and help.
Right now I just flipped opened my Bible and landed at Psalm 104. Verse 1 says “Bless the Lord, O my soul! O Lord my God, you are very great! You are clothed with splendor and majesty.” How might you pray through this verse? Well, at first blush you might see nothing more to do than praise God. “Dear Lord, you are very great. You are clothed with splendor and majesty. Amen.” But try that again with the 3 R’s.
Rejoice – O Lord, you have richly blessed me more than I deserve. What a privilege that I can call you my God. Thank you for making me a little lower than the angels and crowing me with glory and honor too.
Repent – Forgive me for being blind to your splendor and majesty. Though you are very great, my circumstances and disappointments often feel greater. I’m sorry for being so ungrateful and taking your blessings for granted.
Request – Give me eyes to see as you are. Tune my heart to sing your praise. Help me see your glory in the world you’ve created, in the people around me, and in the face of Christ.
Obviously, some verse lend themselves to prayer more easily than others. The Psalms are particularly prayer-worthy. But with the simple strategy of Rejoice, Repent, Request there shouldn’t be a verse in the Bible that can’t be used as a prompt to pray.
Audio from the Forum on the New Testament Canon
So, the last set of links I put up to download the audio from the Forum a couple weeks ago were bad. I think the issue has been resolved, so now:
Click the title below to download the audio of the Forum on the formation of the New Testament.
The Young Adults Forum: How the New Testament was Made (mp3)
This is the whole night, in one file. Sorry for the delay.
This Friday Night: Praise and Prayer for the New Year
I know this is short notice, but…
How about we get together this Friday night (1/4) for a night of praise and prayer? We can thank God for the year past and seek Him for the year ahead of us. I figured we could have a time to share scriptures that God is using to work in us as well. And we” hang out afterwards. Think, a little “coffeehouse night”, with lots of focus up front.
We’ll start at 7:00 pm and go for a couple hours, and then hang out afterwards. (And we’ll be in the Auditorium, our usual Monday night meeting place.)
Hope to see you there.
“That every knee to Thee should bow.”
A hymn by Josiah Conder:
Thou art the everlasting Word,
The Father’s only Son;
God manifest, God seen and heard, The heaven’s beloved One;
Worthy, O Lamb of God, art Thou,
That every knee to Thee should bow!
In Thee, most perfectly expressed,
The Father’s self doth shine;
Fulness of Godhead, too:
the Blest, Eternally Divine;
Worthy, O Lamb of God, art Thou,
That every knee to Thee should bow!
Image of the Infinite Unseen,
Whose being none can know; Brightness of light no eye hath seen,
God’s love revealed below;
Worthy, O Lamb of God, art Thou,
That every knee to Thee should bow!
The higher mysteries of Thy fame
The creature’s grasp transcend;
The Father only Thy blest name
Of Son can comprehend.
Worthy, O Lamb of God, art Thou,
That every knee to Thee should bow!
Yet loving Thee, on whom His love
Ineffable doth rest,
The worshippers, O Lord, above,
As one with Thee, are blest;
Worthy, O Lamb of God, art Thou,
That every knee to Thee should bow!
Of the vast universe of bliss,
The centre Thou, and Sun;
The eternal theme of praise is this,
To Heaven’s beloved One,
Worthy, O Lamb of God, art Thou,
That every knee to Thee should bow!
Why wasn’t the Trinity clearly revealed in the Old Testament?
Ever wonder why there’s not a verse in the Bible, like, right up front in Genesis or something, that says: “God is a Trinity, three in One,” or something like that? Why didn’t He just come out and say it?
Here’s a take on this question from Gregory Nazianzen, the 4th century Christian leader:
“The Old Testament proclaimed the Father openly, and the Son more obscurely.
The New manifested the Son, and suggested the deity of the Spirit.
Now the Spirit himself dwells among us, and supplies us with a clearer demonstration of himself. For it was not safe, when the Godhead of the Father was not yet acknowledged, plainly to proclaim the Son; nor when that of the Son was not yet received to burden us further…with the Holy Spirit…
[I]t was necessary that, increasing little by little, and, as David says, by ascensions from glory to glory, the full splendor of the Trinity should gradually shine forth.”
So maybe it was our fallenness, our issues, that prompted God to reveal Himself slowly, over time? It’s an interesting thought…
(Quote taken from The Holy Trinity by Robert Letham)
Sharing the gospel with gay people
I saw this the other day and thought it was helpful. It’s by Michael McKinley.
To be honest, sharing the gospel with gay people* can be intimidating. There is an increasing social stigma that comes with believing that homosexuality is a sin. Frankly, you risk being treated like a racist bigot when you tell a homosexual that they have offended God and should repent.
But here are three questions that I have found useful in these types of conversations. They can help clear some of the brush out of the way so that you can talk about Jesus (which is, after all, the point!). One caveat: people are not evangelistic projects. You need to communicate genuine, personal care for them as a person or else you might do more harm than good when you share Christ with them.
1. Can you still be friends with me even if I think homosexuality is a sin? This question helps to take the temperature down a little and put the “intolerance” shoe on the other foot. It makes it clear that you’re willing to be their friend, but you’re not sure if they are able to accept you as you are. If Christians are going to be a persecuted minority, we might as well take advantage of it!
2. Hypothetically, if you knew that God disapproved of homosexual behavior, would you stop and obey him? This gets at a key issue. It’s not usually fruitful to argue about the meaning of Hebrew words and the context of Romans 1. The bigger issue is whether we are willing to conform our lives to God’s will no matter what we want personally. Follow up questions can include:
- How do you think we can know what God approves of and disapproves of?
- Knowing what you do about yourself, do you think you are qualified to be the final judge of what is right and what is wrong?
- Are all of the desires that spring up unbidden in you good and right? How do you know which ones you should act on and which ones you shouldn’t?
3. Are you happy? This isn’t a foolproof question, but can be quite useful. People in rebellion against God are often miserable. But there’s a certain insanity that keeps us from realizing that following our desires has not paid off at all in terms of personal peace, joy, and happiness. So it can be helpful simply to point out that their philosophy of happiness (do what feels right to me) hasn’t paid off (just as God said it wouldn’t). This opens a door to talk about Jesus who came to give us abundant life.
Ultimately, that is the key. It doesn’t do a person ensnared in sin a lot of good for you to win an argument about homosexuality in the Bible or wider society. They need to be convinced that when God calls them to obey him, he is not taking away the cookies — he’s taking away the poison. When Jesus calls us to lose everything, he’s giving us a far greater treasure in himself.
(*I don’t particularly care for the term “gay people” or “homosexual” because it transfers the conversation from behavior and inclination to identity. I use it here for the sake of brevity.)
A Wider Reality
This is an amazing blog post by a Christian missionary in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. She relates the tragedy in Connecticut to current tragedy in the Congo and other places in Africa. She observes:
Like every other American (and much of the world), I have been thinking and praying and mourning over the terrible tragedy of 20 lost little lives in Connecticut.
But what has struck me about the situation and how it is being presented is that this tragedy is somehow unusual for our world.
Did you know that in the past couple of weeks, 700,000 refugees have fled Congo? That they are fleeing a militia that has been bombing and burning down their villages, raping and shooting indiscriminately? Ironically, they are fleeing into Rwanda, country where only 10 years ago, the majority tribe massacred one million of their fellow countrymen/women/children, neighbor against neighbor, and usually with machetes?
She goes on…
A thrill of hope; a weary world rejoices. For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!
Introducing: the Codex!
(Pictured above: A modern re-creation of what a first century Gospel of John codex may have looked like. Notice the nice leather binding!)
So last night I spent a lot of time mentioning “the codex,” and only briefly explained its significance. So what is it?
Here’s a bit of info from the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts:
Christians and the Codex
It might surprise you to know that New Testament manuscripts were not written on scrolls. Most people think that the form of the modern book, known as the codex, was not invented until the Middle Ages. A codex is a book written on both sides of the page, with cut pages, bound on one side. In other words, a book! The roll or scroll was written only on one side as a rule, and it had columns with continuous pages stitched together. The codex was invented in the late first century AD. Christians may not have invented it, but they were the first ones to popularize it. For the first five centuries AD, eighty percent of all Christian books were on a codex while only twenty percent of all non-Christian books were written on a codex. For the first time in Christian history, followers of Christ were ahead of the technological curve!
Here’s a breakdown I found online:
- A “codex” is a fancy word for “book format” with a binding, as opposed to a scroll format.
- Codices were used in the ancient world in the first century for secular purposes. Scrolls on the other hand were almost the exclusive format used for the Old Testament.
- It seems that Christians broke with Jewish tradition and began using the codex format from the very earliest time. This is quite striking. After this point scripture began to be copied in the codex format.
The point of knowing all of this is that the very form Christian texts we’ve discovered from the first couple centuries after Christ can gives us some great information on how the New Testament was formed. For instance, here’s the info on the slides from last night which I skipped over:
1. We’ve discovered many more “canonical” books then those which are not in the canon. The manuscripts that were copied and preserved are overwhelmingly the New Testament books, not other books. This shows us what early Christians thought were the most valuable, what they read, copied, and preserved. For example: We have 40 fragments of the four canonical Gospels vs. 9 fragments of non-canonical Gospels (late 2nd or 3rd Century)
2. There is a pattern in the physical form of the writings that have been preserved, which seems to run like this:
Codex = Scripture
Scroll = Not Scripture
Of our 40 Canonical Gospels Fragments: 39 are in a Codex and 1 is on an opisthograph (a previously used scroll written on the outside for personal use)
But of the 9 non-canonical Gospel fragments, 4 are in a Codex and 5 are Scrolls. We have discovered no canonical gospels written on a new, unused scroll. Findings like this prompt New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado to say: “It is reasonable to judge that the use of a roll to copy a text signals that the copyist and/or user for whom the copy was made did not regard that text (or at least that copy of that text) as having scriptural status.”
3. There are standard features in these collections. There’s regularly four to the set: 1. The Gospels; 2. Paul’s letters; 3. The Catholic epistles; 4. Revelation. There tends to be a standard order within each collection: Generally it’s Matthew, Mark Luke and John within the gospel collection. Although there were exceptions to the ordering of the books, they were often very similar. There’s a standard number of writings within each collection: 4 gospels, 13 or 14 of Paul’s letters etc., 7 Catholic epistles, Revelation.
So the use of the codex by early Christians allowed us to read the archaeological evidence to see things like–did the people who made this document think it was scriptural or not?
And then there’s the fact that the codex was often made by binding together separate documents to make one book. This was a physical way to create a canon, and to say which books were “in” and which were “out” of the group. So when Early Christians wanted to create the authoritative edition of the Gospel, all they had to do was bind together the four apostolic accounts, and exclude all others. Which is, in fact, what we have discovered in the evidence. This quote from last night is huge:
“There are no manuscripts that contain say, Matthew, Luke, and Peter, or John, Mark, and Thomas. Only the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were considered as scriptural and then as canonical. It could be that the reason why the Christians adopted the codex long before anyone else was to safeguard the four Gospels from either addition or subtraction.” (J.K. Elliott, “Manuscripts, Codex and Canon”)
These articles by Michael Kruger get into some more detail:
Did Paul Himself Create the Very First New Testament Canon? : “If [the] “parchments” in 2 Tim 4:13 contained copies of Paul’s letters in a codex, then this opens up fresh insights the development of the New Testament canon. Such a scenario might begin to answer the question of why early Christians preferred the codex over the scroll. Since Paul had already begun to use the codex to contain his letters it is not difficult to imagine that early Christians would have retained that format when it became desirable to circulate a defined Pauline letter collection more broadly to the churches. Moreover, this scenario provides a compelling explanation for why some letters of Paul were preserved for the church and some letters were ultimately lost (1 Cor 5:9).”
Apocryphal Books in Early Christian Codices: Evidence for their Canonical Status?
Finally, these articles (which are included on the CD I handed out last night) contain more info on all this.
The Power Point for Tonight, and a great Website
I’m looking forward to seeing everyone tonight.
I’ll be handing out a resource CD with tons of stuff for you to have if you want to do more research yourself. But i have an older version of the Power Point on it, so here is the final presentation which I’ll use tonight, in case you wanted to get any of the notes.
Click on the title to download: YA Forum: How The New Testament was Made
Also, here is an excellent website, which has relevant pages on almost everything to do with the forming of the New Testament, and all kinds of quotes from original sources:
Enjoy.