JANUARY 2018

Romans Commentary

We are writing an ongoing, verse-by-verse commentary on the book of Romans. You can see all of our articles on Romans here in our “Eclectic Archive.” 

 If you believe that man is inherently good, then you will gravitate toward a variety of naïve positions on social and political policies.

The downside of the prequel trilogy, aside from Jar-Jar, was that there was too much politics. The superfluous characters that litter this latest trilogy is surely its greatest downside. 

Do You Really Like Movies?

Well, so do we! Check out our articles about Movies and TV shows in our “Eclectic Archive.”

    I will credit one of our local Atlanta radio personalities, Eric von Haessler on WSB, with an insight that helps me articulate the problem here. Today, people conflate and confuse different concepts, specifically, racism on one hand and prejudice and bigotry on the other. These are not the same thing. 

    Prejudice is making superficial evaluations of someone or something that may be confirmed or invalidated with further investigation. We may see a young man in his mid-20s with tattoos, ripped jeans, and disheveled hair, and subsequently make certain assumptions about his intellectual stature and vocational achievements. Those initial judgments (as in “pre-judge,” the root of the word “prejudice”), may turn out to be correct, but they may also prove to be unfair; we would find out through further investigation, and test our prejudgments against reality.

    Bigotry, then, is the next step. It is clinging to those evaluations, which, again, upon further inspection, may or may not have been correct, yet we adhere to them anyway. And, by the way, we all engage in prejudice and bigotry to one extent or another.

    These are very different from being a racist, which is someone who believes that their ethnicity is inherently and fundamentally superior to all others. The words “inherently” and “fundamentally” are important here. I may like some ethnicities and dislike others, but this attitude, at it’s worst, is nothing more than bigotry. This mindset toward certain people may be justifiable to that individual, and it may be purely ignorant, but ultimately, it is only bigotry. Many people exhibit prejudice and bigotry, but few people believe that their own race is actually and inherently better than all other kinds of people. In fact, the term racism is itself a misnomer since there are not many human races, but just one.

    There are other ways to describe prejudice and bigotry without accusing someone of being a racist. If someone doesn’t like white people or black people for one crazy reason or another, that is not racism, but preference. To point to statistics about poverty, or the percent of people in prison, or to break down the single-parent-household epidemic by race is not racist, but merely math and objective statistics.

    Consider this: I have an incurable Eurocentrism in my worldview, because in my opinion, I think that these cultures, especially those of France, Germany, and England have created the greatest art, literature, and music that the world has ever produced. I believe that these artistic expressions are superior to others, and I think that there are even certain individuals within these cultures that stand out above the rest (Milton and Mozart spring immediately to mind!). 

    Such assessments are unpopular today because people think that this is racist. But seeing the virtues of European culture does not mean in any way that Germans or British people are fundamentally superior to people in Africa or Asia (thought, admittedly, some Germans and British people may have thought in times past that they were). It is simply an evaluation, and furthermore, it is my opinion about the products that these cultures yielded. The people who produced this culture were talented and, in some instances, may have had some educational advantages, but they were not fundamentally better than other people.

    Unfortunately, the specter of faux racism and its power of intimidation is a permanent fixture of folly that sensible people in our society have to endure; just like governmental over-intrusion, rampant attention to homosexuality, and environmentolotry, race-mania now has become a cultural norm.

    But the left, especially, needs to understand the distinctions between racism on one hand and prejudice, preference, and bigotry on the other. Once liberals see these distinctions, they will appreciate that the right is less racist than they think, and that leftists themselves are far more bigoted that they realize.

    The sooner liberals get these distinctions correct, the sooner we can start actually having productive conversations about race across the aisle. Those on the right have a difficult time in these conversations because we’re too busy cleaning off all the mud that is being unnecessarily slung at us from the other side.

DISTANCE AND DENIAL: Putting Christ Above Crisis

        The following article is originally from the November 2014 edition of The Eclectic Kasper.

    Do Christians regularly deny association with Christ and routinely marginalize our faith in moments of crisis, social pressure, and temptation?

    Recently, I had the opportunity to teach through Luke 22:54-62, which records one of the best-known and also most heartbreaking stories in the Bible. It vividly portrays Peter’s denial of association with or knowledge of Christ while Jesus endured mock trials, beatings and insults. 

    Though initially unsure of what “new” information I could present about such a familiar story, I soon found myself plummeting into layers of emotions, culture, and struggles the more I investigated Luke’s account of Peter’s denial of Jesus. 

    Having done so much work on this episode, or pericope, I decided to turn this message into a series of articles, simply called, “Distance and Denial.” I don’t expect this to be the happiest and most uplifting series that you will read in The Eclectic Kasper, but I can guarantee that you will see this story in far greater depth than you probably ever have. Hopefully it will challenge your own thinking about how frequently many believers today deny their faith in even small ways by failing to apply truth and doctrine in their life and relationships.

    On the Friday morning before I was to preach these messages I received some bad news; it wasn’t horrible, just a car repair bill that was higher – far higher – than I had anticipated. We’ve all been there; there is denial, panic, anger, and then more panic, whole layers emotions that flash through our consciousness in mere moments. 

    Of course, this was not a situation where I audibly or publicly denied my faith in Christ. I did not raise an angry fist to the heavens or cry out dramatically “Why, Lord, why?” This repair bill did not tempt me to throw my faith out the window.    However, in a far more subtle, and thus, more dangerous, way, I found myself tempted to deny my theological presuppositions even for a moment; to deny the sovereignty of God, the gracious provision of Christ, and the strengthening of the Holy Spirit in times of crisis and difficulty.  I was tempted to react based not on truth, but based on emotions, in fear, anxiety, anger, or, in short, in ways that were more reflective of a pre-conversion mindset than of the mindset of one trying to follow and serve Christ. 

    While I did not publicly deny my Lord or in any way abandon my faith, I found myself tempted to deny the Lordship of Christ in my actions, in my speech, and in my mentality.

    But I didn’t. Perhaps since I had been living under the shadow of this passage in Luke 22:54-62 for several weeks, I thought about Peter’s temptation to deny his association with Christ, and I considered my own temptation to deny Christ’s Lordship even for a moment. I contemplated how denial begins in the mind, the decision to put self before God, or to put crisis above Christ. This passage tempered my carnal mentality and caused me to bring my need before God sooner than I may have otherwise.  For all the times I have denied Christ’s Lordship in my mind, I found myself turning to Him in this particular instance, and putting Christ above my crisis.

    Peter’s denial stands forever as a sobering reminder that any of us could deny the Savior, and disavow our knowledge of Him in a given situation. We all can – and do – slip into pre-conversion or pre-discipleship ways of thinking rather than immediately turning to the Savior for aid, guidance and provision.

    The danger, however, is not just the one slip, but the threat that one instance of slipping away from Christ’s Lordship in our lives becomes a pattern, and that pattern becomes a habit, and that habit of denial and distancing ourselves from the Savior becomes a lifestyle. 

    We are always one circumstance away from minimizing our loyalty to Christ. We would like to think that we are better than the disciples, but the truth is, I see a lot of my own foolish disciple-hood in these foolish disciples. 

    With that in mind, I want to spend a few articles investigating this episode of Peter’s denial in great depth, beginning with “The Importance of Proximity.” I want us to approach the text with fresh eyes; our familiarity with the story should not lull us into a stupor where we miss important details and applications for our own lives. Hopefully, as a result we can recognize and renounce our own subtle devices for denying God’s sovereignty, and be more intentional in putting Christ above crisis.

OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD: Slowly Abandoning Sense

    A few years ago, I was studying through the OT prophet Micah with a group of people. We mentioned the lack of sense among those in civic and religious leadership in our country. This parallels Micah’s rebuke of leaders when he asserts, “Is it not for you to know justice?” (3:1). The use of the word “justice” here means sound thinking for making right decisions (a form of this word is used also in Micah 3:8, 9 and 11). Unfortunately, the leaders of Micah’s day, and our own, abhorred such sound judgment (v. 9).

    To illustrate the principle, we referred to a quote by Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation from a 2013 article he wrote for the Huffington Post: “Today, we face incredibly well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces. . . . C’mon, really, you pitiable unconstitutional carpetbaggers?”

    Aside from how misguided and ignorant these statements are, it is a quote from the end of that article that really demonstrates how some have abandoned simple reason and logic for the purpose of forwarding their particular agenda. 

    Weinstein quotes from Elie Wiesel, a Holocost survivor and current political activist. I know the quote below sounds nice, and can whip people into a frenzy, but does it really make sense? As reproduced in Weinstein’s article, Wiesel’s quote goes like this: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”

    I appreciate Wiesel’s focus on the problem of indifference. In fact, I have made the point many times that the silence of American Christianity equals complicity with society’s decline. But this quote demonstrates the sheer abandonment of simple reason by those who claim to speak on reason’s behalf! The opposite of love is hate! I would rather someone be indifferent to me than hateful to me! And how could he suggest that the opposite of faith is not heresy? There are many people who genuinely adhere to a certain faith, but exhibit too much complacency or indifference to it (again, one of the biggest problems in American Christianity), but I wouldn’t call them heretics. And, by the way, try convincing many Muslims that the opposite of faith isn’t heresy! 

    And the opposite of life is not death, but indifference? I would love to ask Mr. Wiesel if he would rather be indifferent or dead. They throw out the laws of contradiction, the laws of logic, and any attempt to be sensible.

    And why do they do this? Because it sounds cool. Seriously! Though the quote itself doesn’t make any sense, the rhetorical effect in a classroom, in a crowd, or at the end of an article has powerful emotional resonance. It can whip a mob into a tizzy, it can muster activists to greater levels of devotion. But they do not stop to think about and judge whether the statement even reflects reality or not.

    Our politics continue to pulsate with assertions that demonstrate the abandonment of sense. As we reported in the December 2017 edition, Nancy Pelosi not only disagreed with the GOP tax plan, but asserted on Monday, December 4 that the GOP tax plan would inaugurate the apocalypse: “This is the end of the world. The debate on health care is live/death, this is armageddon.” The senselessness of this is matched by the gaffe that the media ignored made by Barack Obama during a campaign stop in Beaverton, Oregon, on May 9, 2008: “I’ve now been in 57 states – I think one left to go.”

    Liberals celebrated the senseless sentiments of Madonna when she talked about revolution at the January 21, 2017 “Women’s March on Washington” and when she admitted that she “thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.” Of course, there are those on the left complain about some of Donald Trump’s statements. Admittedly, it’s hard to defend many of them. We could spend all day using examples from both sides of the aisle. Either way, it seems more and more that we are sliding toward the complete abandonment of logic, facts, and reason.

    Those who oppose Biblical Christianity and right thinking in our country will do so not with truth, but with eloquence; not with wise assertions, but with slick words. Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Wiesel epitomize 2 Timothy 4:3: “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires.” We often assume that these verses only apply religious false teachers, but why shouldn’t it apply to slick, but false, politicians, as well. All the more reason why we must be grounded in truth and why we must strive to be discerning amidst the plethora of falseness in our day. 

    As Micah said in 3:8, because of the Spirit of God working through him, he had power, courage, conviction and right thinking (“justice”). We also, need sound thinking and judgment to see past the logic-less leaps and rhetorical gymnastics of many in our day.

PUTTING THE “ME” IN MEDIA: Eclectic Series

    If you’re relatively new to this eclectic extravaganza that we call The Eclectic Kasper, then you will love to know how you can access our older articles, as well. Our “Eclectic Archive” categorizes the hundreds of articles that we have written from over sixty editions of The Eclectic Kasper.

    In our Eclectic Archive, you can really appreciate the diversity of this web journal. Many of our articles fall under the “Bible Studies” and “Theology” categories. Highlights from our series of articles under the “Bible Studies” category include “Explaining the Intertestamental Period,” “You Are Mark 17!,” “Developing a Passion For God” (a study of Psalm 42), and “Distance and Denial,” a careful study of Peter’s denials of Christ (we featured the first article of that series above, called “Putting Christ Above Crisis.” 

    Some of our best “Theology” series are “The Essentials of the Faith,” “Emergent Concerns,” a survey of the emergent church movement, “Dimensions of Worship,” and “Arguments for the Existence of God.” We also deal with important theological topics such as refuting the charismatic movement and we champion the critical doctrine of the deity of Christ.

    But we’re not all just theology and Bible study. In our Eclectic Archive, we showcase articles regarding politics, history, movies, music, and more. Some great series within all of the categories of topics include:

        * A series about Martin Luther called, “Why Marburg Matters” 

        * Articles about Utopian Literature

        * Any Browncoats in the audience will enjoy “Great Firefly Moments”

        * With all of the unrest in the middle east, it’s helpful to glance through our “Insights on Islam”

        * Those who love the plethora of superhero films will enjoy some of our articles in “American Pantheon”

        * If you teach and preach, you’ll find some fun illustrations on our “Quote for Contemplation” page.

        * Music lovers will like our articles about “Soundtrack Reviews” and “Fun Music Groups” on our music page.

        * And check out the index of our audio sermons and Bible studies available on our related “Soundcloud page”

    And, as always, we invite your comments, criticism and input on any of our articles. Send your thoughts to feedback@eclectickasper.com and we’ll print good feedback anonymously in an upcoming edition.