Restitutio

Last week we examined what the bible teaches about heaven. This week we’ll see what it says about hell. John Cortright explains there are three meanings of hell in scripture, including tartarus where fallen angels are temporarily imprisoned, hades/sheol where the dead remain until resurrection, and gehenna where the wicked are destroyed in the final judgment.

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What is heaven? Throughout the bible we find different layers of meaning, including (1) heaven as sky, (2) heaven as God’s throne, and (3) heaven as God’s realm or dimension. Although heaven is a reality, it is not where we go when we die. Rather the bible teaches that the dead are asleep until the resurrection when they inherit the earth, renewed and restored.

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Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald famously sang about heaven:

Heaven, I’m in heaven

2 Samuel 18.9

he was between heaven and earth

Heaven as Sky (Realm of the Birds)

Genesis 1.14-20

Genesis 1.28

Matthew 6.26

Heaven as God’s Throne

Isaiah 66.1-2

N. T. Wright:

“What then do the New Testament writers mean when they speak of an inheritance waiting for us in heaven? This has been much misunderstood…The point of such passages, as in 1 Peter 1.4, 2 Corinthians 5.1, Philippians 3.20, and so forth, is not that one must ‘go to heaven’, as in much-popular imagination, in o

Robin Todd has faithfully served as the director of the Worldwide Scattered Brethren Network for the last 10 years.  He helps biblical unitarians find each other all over the United States as well as some other countries.  In this interview, we talk about how he got started, what it takes to get on his list, and how he sees the future of the network.

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In this concluding teaching of our apologetics conference, John Truitt gleans from Christ’s example key ways that we can imitate him in our own evangelistic efforts today.  He begins by looking how Jesus was completely obedient to God and how he prepared himself (both in knowledge and experience).  Next Truitt urges us to get moving, expecting God to direct us as we are obedient.  Lastly, he emphasizes the importance of radical love to our neighbors and the need for community.

Here now is podcast 148 Evangelism, Jesus’ Way with John Truitt

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Have you ever been in a corn maze?  The reason they work is because you can only see right in front of you.  If you had a live drone feed, you could easily orient yourself and find the way out.  This is the benefit of history.  We live in a postmodern culture, but it’s hard to see or understand what that means since we’re surrounded with it.  In this exceptional presentation, Kegan Chandler guides us through the history of premodernism, modernism, and postmodernism so that we can orient ourselves to how many people in our world think and approach life.  Not only will this give you a drones-eye perspective of our current situation, but it also will help you understand how to better share your faith with postmodern people.

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Metanarratives and Postmodernism (Kegan Chandler)

Postmodernism is a worldview based on French philosophers, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard w/ these four characteristics:

meta-narrative: overarching account that provides a pattern or structure for ppls beliefs and experiences

postmodernist mission: deconstruction

if everything is deconstructed, what do we fill it with?

First Star Wars w/ Luke vs. last star wars w/ Luke, deconstructs everything

premodernism

premodernism crumbles

modernism

postmodernism

pomo is good for Christianity b/c

problems w/ postmodernism

a post-postmodernism worldview

How should we think through the different major religions of our time? Are they all the same? What are their differences? In this presentation, philosopher of religion, Dale Tuggy, works through key questions that can help us differentiate and distinguish religions from each other. In the second half of his talk, he invites the audience to diagnose various quasi-religious perspectives popular in our culture, before offering comments on each.

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aspects of religion

religious diversity vs. religious pluralism

on moral questions, major religions have a lot of common-sense overlap

four core claims

Christianity is more focused on truth than any other religion

there’s one theology/teaching per religion

Christianity on the four core claims

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How do you know the difference between what's right and wrong?  Do morals have an absolute source or does society determine them?  In this talk, Kenny Willenburg explains the classic moral argument as well as how we can use this approach to "turn the tables" when people object to Christianity on moral grounds.  I've also left in a fair amount of discussion following Willenburg's presentation.

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1. if morals are objective then they are obligatory
2. there must be a source for morals
3. the most reasonable source is God

if there is no God, there couldn't be objective morality

Richard Dawkins (God Delusion)- God of the OT is jealous, petty, control freak, etc.

three problems

1. saying God is immoral doesn't disprove God's existence○ Hitler didn't exist b/c the things he did were too bad
2. saying the creator is evil is arrogant○ if there is a creator then he would have the right to interact w/ creation however he wanted
3. can't claim God is immoral b/c w/o God's existence there's no standard by which to judge God

relativism is taught in our culture as the only absolute truth

• tolerant of anything but intolerance
• can't push religious ideas on others, but that is pushing secularism on us
• no one is allowed to criticize anyone's actions

sources for morality

• morality can't be individually determined
• morality can't be socially constructed○ actually, our culture got its ideas from a Judea-Christian background○ thus, this proves what the non-theist is trying to disprove
• morality comes from nature (i.e. Darwinian evolution)○ how is self-sacrificial care of the weak/unproductive helpful to the herd?○ morals are simply evolutionary hold overs○ not clear how this is obligatory

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• Check out the other talks in this Apologetics Conference
• For more, here’s an entire Apologetics Class
• Intro music: Jazzy Frenchy by bensound.com. Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.

In the second presentation of this Apologetics Conference, we delve into a comparison of three major time periods: (1) the age of authority, (2) the age of reason, and (3) the age of authenticity.  We look at how people practiced their faith in each as well as what criticisms apologists answered.  For our post-modern time, I recommend the strategy of discussing a social issue, showing how our society is failing to address it, and how Christianity can offer a solution.  Last of all we try out this strategy on a number of controversial issues, including gun violence, sexual harassment, and  technology use.

Here is the handout I used:

—— Links ——

• Check out the other talks in this Apologetics Conference
• For more, here's an entire Apologetics Class
• Intro music: Jazzy Frenchy by bensound.com. Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.

Today we are starting something new. I’m very excited to present to you in its entirety, the apologetics conference held in Paducah, KY last June. We’ve got a great line up of speakers for you including Jerry Wierwille, myself, Kenny Willenburg, Dale Tuggy, Kegan Chandler, and John Truitt.

It was a wonderful time of meeting people and working together to figure out ways of reaching the millennial generation with the gospel. As it turned out, a great majority of the presentations focused on understanding the post-modern worldview. This was so helpful, because it’s nearly impossible to discuss important issues if both people are unaware of the fact that they are each coming from incompatible worldviews. Although, for many of us, our natural inclination is to show someone why their underlying assumptions are invalid, a better starting point for evangelism is to work within their post-modern outlook to show how attractive and awesome the gospel is.

In this first presentation, Jerry Wierwille covers a brief history of how major philosophers initiated a movement that led to sequestering away of faith as something personal and private.  Then he shares how to broach spiritual topics with secular people around us. His talk is relatively short, only 34 minutes long, but I also included the questions and comments, which went for another half hour.

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Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

John Locke (1632-1704)

David Hume (1711-1776)

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Georg Hegel (1770-1831)

value/fact divide

humanism

private life (values)

you can have beliefs, but they are private

How much does truth matter to you?  In particular, how should we think about Christians who hold very different views on key subjects?  For example, I’m a biblical unitarian, someone who believes that we should take Jesus literally when he called his Father “the only true God.”  Of course I believe Jesus is God’s only begotten son, the anointed Messiah who died for our sins, but I don’t affirm the fourth century doctrine of the Trinity.  Some Christians would call me a heretic beyond the pale of fellowship or even salvation (even if I do believe the gospel message with all my heart).  Others would say I’m deceived but would have no problem working together in various areas.  Chuck Whitlock, a bible student, husband, and father of five has been wrestling with precisely these questions over the last 5 or so years.  Having grown up in strong evangelical denominations his whole life, he had to rethink his relationship with mainstream Christianity when he began changing several of his key beliefs.  In this interview, we discuss various ways to think about this issue, based on Whitlock’s paper (see below).  He steaks out a balanced position between writing everyone off who disagrees with him and accepting everyone as brothers and sisters without regard for their beliefs.

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Truth matters!

… but how much?

Introduction:

There is a significant distance between the Biblical Unitarian faith and ‘orthodoxy’ in its various forms.

If you haven’t come to this conclusion, just try to advance the idea that Jesus is not God and see what kind of reception this gets:)  Even less divisive topics, such as resurrection or the gospel of the kingdom, meet with great opposition.

The apparent incompatibility between Biblical Unitarianism and ‘orthodoxy’ causes one to wonder what it means that other Christians don’t seem to be interested in the truths we’ve discovered.

Both parties reference the same book and so there is something very familiar in ‘orthodoxy’.

A little scholarship shows us how ‘orthodoxy’ represents the Hellenization of the original Jewish Christian faith.  Most of the terms and characters are retained but the meanings are either co-opted or obscured such that, today, in very real terms, they have a different Jesus, a different God, and a different Gospel. 

How much does that matter?

What does it mean?

Who is saved?:

I recognize that this bumps into the impossible question of who is truly saved.  That s