If you believe that God has allowed you access to a college education then you would want to be a good steward of that which is provided by that education. Yet, it never ceases to amaze me how many students, many very well intentioned, lose focus on the stewardship of their education and don’t nearly receive the return that they should on it. Invariably it is accountability that determines the return on your education.

Personal Financial Stewardship, Ed C. Anthony, p. 16

I would be extremely hesitant to quote anything pithy or witty sounding from M. Muggeridge without pages of context around why it was necessary to do so. Perhaps even tricking a man on the street into reading the desired MM quote and then quoting the M.O.T.S. instead of MM would be preferable.

From the virgin birth

Seeing Through The Eye, page 207

To the resurrection

Seeing Through The Eye, page 22

The poison behind the nice sounding witticisms is laid bare.

I have read several of Dr. Craig’s books before and have enjoyed them, especially on Jesus Resurrection, Fact or Figment?, a debate in book form with Gerd Ludemann.

We appreciated many of the points made during the debate on both sides. One can particularly sympathize with Mr. Hitchens comments on the banality of man-made religion and the damage, heart-break, and destruction it has caused. It is sad that so many have done so much evil in the name of Christianity. The earthly church attempting to gain political power and be able to “tell people what to do in the name of God” we find a particularly repugnant form of man-made addition to true Christianity. But as Dr. Craig concludes, we ultimately believe Christianity and that there is a God because it is true, not because of the potential or actual benefits to society from holding this world-view.

Debate video highly recommended.

Dr. Lennox knows a lot about a broad range of subjects. I think he knows more than I do about every area, even those that I consider my professional specialties. His sections on information conservation in algorithmic design were very insightful and clear.

I have been looking for some time now to see what ever became of the line of reasoning that A. E. Wilder-Smith brought out some years back regarding the shortcomings of the Miller/Urey experiments on spontaneous creation of amino acids from chemical stew triggered by the application of high voltages. If you have only had the standard text-book understanding of Miller’s experiment, Wilder-Smith’s explanation of the requirement that all amino acids that go into making life-as-we-know-it take the L-form simply devastates the Miller results. I have wondered for some time why no one seems to make more of this? Who would carry on Wilder-Smith’s intellectual legacy? I’ve found it in Dr. Lennox’s fine book. He applies further statistical analysis to the generation of amino acid chains, showing that in addition to the L-form requirement all of the bonds must be peptide bonds. This reduces the likelihood, not that further help was needed, by another factor of 2^100 (for chains 100 amino acids in length), that Miller-type amino acid chains would be suitable for life.

One of the things I enjoyed most about the book was the precision with which Dr. Lennox put forward the dichotomies between religion and science. In fact, in contrast to how we most often tend to phrase the debate, Dr. Lennox argued forcefully that the real debate is between theism and atheism, not between science and religion. His arguments on this were backed up with examples from Galileo to Dawkins and will be very helpful in reframing the debate in the coming months.

Highly recommend this book to anyone interested in keeping up with the current wave of thought on this subject.

Full Bibliographic entry:
God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?, John C. Lennox, Lion Hudson plc, Oxford England 2007.
ISBN: 978 0 7459 5303 8

But when Christ had accomplished the work of atonement, glorifying God in all that He is, having been made sin for us, the veil behind which God had dwelt, and which had concealed Him from His people, was rent in twain from the top to the bottom, and God could righteously gratify His own heard in coming out into the full display of what He is as revealed in Christ on the ground of redemption.

While your English lit teacher might have a fit over the Pauline structure of that sentence, and I readily admit that they don’t write them that way any more, there is a lot packed in there that is worth unpacking.

First that the primary aspect of Christ’s work of atonement was Godward, not manward. God was the one who prepared a body for Him (Heb 10:5) and it was God himself who was propitiated by the sacrifice of that body. This is consistent with the purpose of the propitiatory, i.e. the mercy seat, in the O.T.:

And there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims which [are] upon the ark of the testimony, of all [things] which I will give thee in commandment unto the children of Israel. – Exodus 25:22

This is a good topic of study for those who mock the Lord’s atonement by insisting that He did not die for the sins of all mankind (as He said He did, cf John 3:16), but insist that the sufficiency of the atonement is limited. The propitiatory aspect of the atonement, as prefigured in the mercy seat, was to set up a “trysting place where Heaven’s love and Heaven’s justice meet”. That is, where God could righteously meet with mankind and be able to supply the forgiveness of sins that we so desperately need.

Second, God’s own desire was to commune with man. He had it this way from the beginning. He would walk and talk with them “in the cool of the day”. How having been rejected by His own creatures for thousands of years, having watched us worship in the vanity of our own minds and mock Him, He could still desire this communion again is a marvel of His grace. Our New Testament calls this the “times of the restoration of all things” (Acts 3:21, ASV), and all things must include some aspects of God’s original relationship desires with mankind.

Third, that Christ glorified God as the perfectly obedient servant and God also glorified Christ by both raising Him up from the dead and exalting Him to a place at his right-hand side and giving Him a name which is above every name (Phil. 2).

Which is the point of this little book, after all. So that covers pages 1 and 2. A nice little book, 114 pages to go. The book seems to be still in print.

This book isn’t something I would normally have read, but it was loaned to me
by a friend. It was written in an interesting manner and held my attention while
covering a topic that I knew very little about. It was intriguing to read about
some of the machinations of Vatican politics, the promotion of men up the
hierarchical structure the Roman Catholic church has devised, the selection
of popes by the college of cardinals, and the sometimes nebulous, often
nefarious intertwining relationships between the Vatican, Pope, and the nation
states of Europe.

The book came across to me as fairly pro-Roman Catholic. Someone more
inclined to the Roman Catholic way of thinking probably wouldn’t have taken
it that way, however. In the first chapter, Mr. Cahill comments:

Vatican propaganda notwithstanding, Peter was never “bishop of Rome.”

He goes on to give a brief history of the development of the various “sees”, the consolidation
of religious power in Rome, and the development of the situation as we find it today, including
some passing references to the pertinent Scriptural passages.

Born Angelo Roncalli, in Sotto il Monte Italy, he is shown to be a humble, God-fearing
man who seems to have truly desired to do good for others in whatever circumstances
he found himself. He apparently helped a great many Jewish people get out of
Europe through Turkey during the early years of Hitler’s rise to power. He claimed
God’s grace and mercy often, seems to have been a man of prayer, and was loved
by people where ever he was. Yet, it cannot be forgotten, that he was thoroughly
Catholic, believed in and trusted the rites and rituals of the Romish church, and
was steeped in Mariology.

John XXIII is given a fairly favorable treatment and is supposed, if not by the auther, then
by many of his sources, as a true Christian man among all of the others in the Romish
church hierarchy who are, well, less so. It is striking that even as such, he is seen in some of
his more diplomatic posts, especially in France, attending parties where he would often
be found with a glass of champagne in one hand and a cigarette in the other. We would
differ with the author in our interpretation of what kind of testimony this would be for
a true Christian man, and how the seriousness of it would reflect on the testimony of
our Lord Jesus Christ.

The book contains in a very few places some quite objectionable language. This
seems to be a deliberate attempt at shock on the part of Mr. Cahill as it was not
in the context of a quotation but merely one of his interpretations and could have
been avoided rather easily.

The writing has made me eager to read Mr. Cahill’s more well known work,
How the Irish Saved Civilization.