Ignore the Stumbling Blocks: Paul Did

Preaching By Faith

Preaching a crucified Jesus to be the Lord of glory was indeed a stumbling block.  Paul was right on point when he declared, 

For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.  [I Corinthians 1: 22-25]

When the Jews demanded signs, they wanted miraculous confirmation that the claimant was indeed the Messiah.  They were given plenty of such confirmations, but chose to  "explain" them away.  For them--when they heard the Gospel preached- by the church-all that was left was the horror and humiliation of a public crucifixion.  It was a stumbling block because they had believed that Messiah would deliver them powerfully from Gentile oppression--even as David had delivered them from the Philistines centuries before.   A crucified Messiah was a mockery, a blasphemy.

For the Gentiles, following a crucified saviour was similarly the acme of foolishness.  Why?  Because the "rite" of crucifixion was the archetype of degradation.  Sarah Ruden carefully re-situates crucifixion in its ancient Greco-Roman setting.

Lenten Meditation

Grinding Axes in the Dark

The late Christopher Hitchens liked to frighten little children with horror stories about the evils of religion.  Often times he was more narrowly referring to the religion of Islam, but he did not hold back from the "evils" of Christianity, either.  Of all the things that offended him, the offence of the Cross of Christ was the most acute.  He wrote:

The idea of a vicarious atonement, of the sort that so much troubled even C.S. Lewis, is a further refinement of the ancient superstition [of atoning sacrifice]. Once again we have a father demonstrating love by subjecting a son to death by torture, but this time the father is not trying to impress god. He is god, and he is trying to impress humans. Ask yourself the question: how moral is the following? I am told of a human sacrifice that took place two thousand years ago, without my wishing it and in circumstances so ghastly that, had I been present and in possession of any influence, I would have been duty-bound to try and stop it. In consequence of this murder, my own manifold sins are forgiven me, and I may hope to enjoy everlasting life. [Cited by Tim Challies, quoting from Hitchen's God Is Not Great.]

Against this, the Apostle Paul provides the counterpoint:

Lenten Meditations

True Truth and Real History

As we approach the season of Passover and the once-for-all-delivered-to-the-saints Atonement, here is an interesting piece on the actual date of Messiah's crucifixion.

Justin Taylor refers us to an article recently published in First Things, which discussed the evidence for the exact date of Jesus' death. 

April 3, AD 33

In our new book, The Final Days of Jesus: The Most Important Week of the Most Important Person Who Ever Lived, we assume but do not argue for a precise date of Jesus’s crucifixion. Virtually all scholars believe, for various reasons, that Jesus was crucified in the spring of either a.d. 30 or a.d. 33, with the majority opting for the former. (The evidence from astronomy narrows the possibilities to a.d. 27, 30, 33, or 34). However, we want to set forth our case for the date of Friday, April 3, a.d. 33 as the exact day that Christ died for our sins.

To be clear, the Bible does not explicitly specify the precise date of Jesus’s crucifixion and it is not an essential salvation truth. But that does not make it unknowable or unimportant. Because Christianity is a historical religion and the events of Christ’s life did take place in human history alongside other known events, it is helpful to locate Jesus’s death—as precisely as the available evidence allows—within the larger context of human history.

Among the Gospel writers, no one makes this point more strongly than Luke, the Gentile physician turned historian and inspired chronicler of early Christianity.

Islam's Cultural Fruit

Saudi Arabian Enlightenment

At the root of all cultures is a religion--a shared belief in ultimate realities (of one kind or another).  All human beings are religious.  All have beliefs in the ultimate.  Even those who insist that everything is relative and there are no ultimates or universals governing all of life are espousing their particular ultimate belief.

When a religion becomes widely shared, it produces a dominant culture which in its turn governs the law, the state, the family, education, relationships between the sexes, between parents and children and so forth.

In Arabia, Islam has been the dominant religion for 1500 years.  It has produced a certain culture.  The prevailing wisdom amongst the Commentariat in the West is that Arabia is economically primitive and therefore is peopled by the ignorant, the barbarian, and savages.  The subtle sub-text is that Arabians are Islamic because of their ignorance.  That is, if they had the "privileges" of a Western education and the benefits of a Western standard of living they would evolve to hold Islam in a nominal sense only.  This is the same perspective the West holds upon the Christian religion--it is part of our tradition, but a fairy story, a myth.  No more, no less.  Wise men gave up on long ago. 

The notion that ignorance begets adherence to Islam in Arabia paternalistically reverses history's cause and effect.  If Islam had been a recent innovation in Arabia, the case may be arguable.  But not when the religion of Islam has controlled Arabia for one and a half millennia.