Dying One Day at a Time, Living for God, Not for Me

Chuck Colson
Chuck Colson

by Chuck Colson – One of the most powerful lines of Christian writing I’ve ever read was in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s magnificent classic The Cost of Discipleship. “When Christ calls a man,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “He bids him to come and die.”

Sobering words. Its’ just the opposite of the therapeutic gospel we hear all too often in some churches these days.

Yet the Apostle Paul said the same thing. “I die daily,” he wrote in 1 Corinthians 15. What did he mean?

Paul was a proud, strong man; well-educated, a Pharisee, a Jew, a Roman citizen. He had it all together; Until, that is, Christ knocked him down on the road to Damascus and appeared to him personally.

Once Paul regained his sight, his view of the world and reality was dramatically changed. But I doubt Paul’s personality changed all that much. Throughout his letters, we see the mark of a strong, assured, powerful, bright, and intelligent individual. He remained all of those things—but I imagine he wrestled with the pride that those traits can bring. I imagine he struggled to use those traits to God’s glory instead of his own. [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Can a Catholic Accept Evolutionary Theory Uncritically?

God Creation Christian Belief against Evolution 10/24/2010 – Msgr. Charles Pope –
Sobriety about Evolutionary Theory – It is common to experience a rather simplistic notion among Catholics that the Theory of Evolution can be reconciled easily with the Biblical accounts and with our faith. Many will say something like this: “I have no problem with God setting things up so that we started as one-celled organisms and slowly evolved into being human beings. God could do this and perhaps the Genesis account is just simplifying evolution and telling us the same thing as what Evolution does.”

There are elements of the truth in this sort of a statement. Surely God could have set things up to evolve and directed the process so that human beings evolved and then, at some time he gave us souls. God could have done that.

The problem with the statement above is less theological than scientific because there is a word in that sentence that is “obnoxious” to evolutionary theory: “God.” The fact is that most Catholics who speak like this over-simplify evolutionary theory and hold a version of it that most Evolutionary Theorists do not hold. They accept the Theory of Evolution uncritically. [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Making the Creator in Our Image

Chuck Colson
Chuck Colson
9/22/2010 – Chuck Colson –

The debate about the origins of the universe just got a lot weirder. I can safely say, “Now I’ve heard it all.”

Yesterday on BreakPoint, I told you that Stephen Hawking, the great scientist, believes that the universe and life itself can be explained without referring to God; that God is, in Hawking’s words, “unnecessary.”

But there are some scientists who do believe there was a creator. The problem is that some of their ideas about the “creator” and his “creation” are straight out of a comic-book convention.

According to a recent article written by a university astronomer in the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper, it’s possible that the “universe around us was created by people very much like ourselves, using devices not too dissimilar to those available to scientists today.”[Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Become Like a Little Child

BreakPoint | by Paul Miller | Sep. 16, 2009

On more than one occasion, Jesus tells his disciples to become like little children.

The most famous is when the young mothers try to get near Jesus so he can bless their infants. When the disciples block them, Jesus rebukes his disciples sharply. “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it” (Mark 10:14-15). Jesus’ rebuke would have surprised the disciples. It would have seemed odd. Children in the first century weren’t considered cute or innocent. Only since the nineteenth-century Romantic era have we idolized children. [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Radical, Moderate God

BreakPoint | Stephen Reed | Aug. 25, 2009

So often in Christian teaching, we learn that God, oftentimes a radical in His dealings with human beings, is also essentially a “moderate” when it comes to figuring out His will. By that, I mean that His procedure is moderate, even while His approach may be radical. Few can doubt Jesus’ radical love, proven in His dealings with His disciples or perfect strangers in the gospel accounts.

But many times you will hear learned Christian teachers stress in their lessons on theology that the path of a Christian lies not in being a total libertine, nor as a complete ascetic. Instead, as Jesus said so eloquently, we are to be both “in the world, yet not of the world.” Or when it comes to our mindset here on earth, Jesus tells us to be “as innocent as doves but as wise as serpents.” [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

God and Science Do Mix

BreakPoint | Tom Gilson | Aug. 21, 2009

If God kept arbitrarily interfering in nature as Haldane and Krauss imagine, we could never distinguish His message, the signal, from the noise of nature’s irregularities. To reveal Himself to humans—to communicate—He must break into nature sometimes, but He must do so rarely. There must be an ordinary course of events, so that we can discern what is out of the ordinary. If miracles happened everywhere every day, they would not be miracles at all. They would communicate nothing, and thus they would not serve God’s relational purposes. [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

So Help Me, God

BreakPoint | T.M. Moore | July 21, 2009

The old saw makes an all-too-true point: How can you tell when a politician is lying? Are his lips moving? Americans have become increasingly cynical about their leaders.

We want to trust them, and we hope they’ll tell us the truth and keep their word. But it seems that, when push comes to shove, politicians are only interested in their own agendas. [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Helping Students ‘Get It’

BreakPoint | John Stonestreet | May 15, 2009

A major project for those of us who work with students is to help them “get” Christianity. While a significant number of Christian students reject Christianity during their university years, far more struggle to embrace a faith that is not really authentic or orthodox. Theirs is a “moralistic therapeutic deism,” as Christian Smith put it—a tame faith that is privatized and perhaps personally meaningful but which is not publicly true, culturally significant, or fundamentally informative to the rest of their lives.

Rather than trying to make Christianity as attractive and entertaining as possible, we ought instead to be sure that what we are communicating to them is actually Christianity. As I noted, this is very challenging in a culture of information overload, where students are bombarded daily with a multitude of messages, most of which, encourage them toward a mentality of adolescence.

Still, there is good news. Adolescently minded cultures like ours inevitably have a leadership vacuum. So, there remains a terrific opportunity for influence for those who produce the leaders, especially if they produce networks of leaders who can think deeply and contribute broadly to a wide variety of cultural institutions.

How can we do this? [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

One Word of Truth Outweighs the Whole World

Alexander Solzhenitsyn Word of TruthOrthodoxyToday.org | Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse | Mar. 28, 2009

When Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave his Nobel Lecture in 1970, he quoted this Russian proverb: “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.”

We know Solzhenitsyn’s story. In WWII Solzhenitsyn was a Soviet Army officer who was arrested and sentenced to eight years in the Gulags under Stalin. In prison Christ captures him. The encounter changes him, so much so that he clandestinely wrote the three volume “Gulag Archipelago” that laid bare the moral bankruptcy of Marxism. His work caused the collapse of the Marxist establishment in Western Europe and tilled the intellectual ground that led to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Helping Us Pull Our Ox Cart

BreakPoint | Stephen Reed | March 19, 2009

The idea that someone else can vicariously take responsibility for your sin and, additionally, impute their righteousness to you, runs counter to their form of reason. After all, isn’t human responsibility for our actions what makes us higher than the animals? If you have someone taking care of your sins for you, well, where’s the penalty? Moreover, where’s the credit for doing good? [Read more…]

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail