Christian Living, Biblical Studies, Religion, Spiritual Growth, Theology
John Beeson
The Faith of Unbelief

Bart Ehrman has perhaps done more to undermine the credibility of the Bible than anyone else in my lifetime. But his story didn’t begin that way. Ehrman is a New Testament scholar and skeptic. Ehrman grew up in a Christian home, attended a conservative Bible school, and then found his way to a liberal seminary where his faith in the God of the Bible unraveled. That seminary happens to be the seminary I would attend a couple of decades later.

For Ehrman, everywhere he looks he sees holes in the biblical story. The inconsistencies that he sees have led him to determine that he cannot trust in the God of the Bible.

The Faith of Unbelief
Christian Living, Culture, Spiritual Growth
John Beeson
Don't Numb Your Feelings

“Don’t listen to your feelings; remember what Jesus did for you!”

“Don’t be guided by your feelings; listen to what God commands you to do!”

In just the past week, I heard both of these warnings. Two very different Christian speakers urged their audiences to shut down their feelings. These admonitions resonate. They contain truth. It is correct that our feelings don’t override truth, nor do our emotions negate what God has done. Neither do our feelings give us an out for what God commands us to do.

Don't Numb Your Feelings
History, Spiritual Growth, Suffering, Wisdom
John Beeson
Lord, Reach Your Justice Down

I had outsized emotions as a child. Games, especially, would get the best of me, whether cards or boardgames or sports. In response to a stroke of bad luck, a hot surge of anger would erupt, followed quickly by tears and then embarrassment.

Emotions are God’s gift to us in many ways. They are one of his kind ways of showing us where our deep attachments lie.

Our son started his freshman year at the University of Arizona this fall. It’s been a great experience for him, but not without its adjustments. The climate of a secular school is quite different than the Christian school he graduated from

Lord, Reach Your Justice Down
Culture, Generosity, Nature, Relationships
John Beeson
Marshmallows and Friends

Most have heard of the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment. In 1970, psychologist Walter Mischel invited kids into his lab. A child was offered a marshmallow that they could eat, or, if they waited until the researcher returned, they were given a second marshmallow. About one-third of the kids waited approximately fifteen minutes for the additional reward.

The study then tracked those children over time and found that children who waited for the second reward tended to have higher SAT scores and lower body mass indexes. Later tests have challenged those outcomes, but it hasn’t stopped parents everywhere from running the experiment on their kids, often with humorous results.

Marshmallows and Friends
Christian Living, Culture, Politics
John Beeson
Uprooting Our Political Identity

Happy election day!

In 2016, data scientists Eitan Hersh and Yair Ghitza analyzed data among registered voters to determine how often Democrats and Republicans married. They learned that 9% of marriages had the spouses registered in the two parties. Over the next four years that meager number would drop precipitously, down to 4%.

 As Jonathan Haidt and others have successfully argued, the ideological disparity between FOX News and CNBC are child’s play compared to the engineered social media algorithms that create hermetically sealed echo chambers for our political views.

Uprooting Our Political Identity

self-defense

Nonviolence and the Christian: Self-Defense

Nonviolence and the Christian: Self-Defense

While ideas can be clean, life is messy. We have begun wrestling with what the Bible says about violence. I have made the case that God calls us to nonviolence. While we can all agree on that admonition to nonviolence in most circumstances, what do we do in the midst of all sorts of situations that it appears that violence is necessary?

Arguing along with Preston Sprinkle and his book, Fight, I believe that while there are circumstances that physical restraint is appropriate, even physical restraint that might injure someone, we are never given biblical permission to use violent force that ends in death.

That is a position I come to tentatively and is an issue of conscience, not law. It is, in fact, a topic that Pastor Greg and I have respectful disagreement on.

I recognize from the outset that the positions I will be setting forth here are not only unpopular positions, they are minority positions. I respect those who come to different conclusions. I only recently changed my mind on what I believe is biblical. I hope you read charitably and with an understanding that I have no desire to stoke the flames of discord here, but rather to earnestly seek what God calls us to. If you haven’t read my first two posts that builds the case for nonviolence from the Old Testament and Jesus’ life, I would encourage you to do so.

So, let’s deal with the more difficult situations: self-defense or defense of someone else, or the use of violence while serving in the military. We will deal with the first question in this post and the question of the use of violence in the context of military service next week.

Let me begin with the fact that I believe that it is acceptable to use non-lethal force to neutralize aggression. So, I am not encouraging that a Christian be completely passive, but rather that there are restraints on what we can do.

An armed man enters your home. You wake up and hear footsteps in the living room. What is appropriate action? Everyone can agree the best first step is to call 911. But what if the situation escalates before the police arrive? Let’s raise it to the highest stakes: the gunman enters your room and, at gunpoint, threatens violence against your family.

There are two questions to ask: first, what is the ethical response for a Christian? And, second, what response will prove most successful?

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